Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (22 page)

Beyond the mandate to not get a girl pregnant, parents communicate very different messages to boys. Some parents, like Michael’s, leave the matter unspoken. But some boys receive encouragement to pursue their desires from their fathers, especially fathers who are divorced. Patrick says, “Most fathers, if their sons tell them [about sex], they’re proud.” Adam be- lieves that single fathers are an important source of sex education: “Single parents talk about it, like especially dads brag about it.” Steve’s father was excited when Steve told him about his first date: “He goes, ‘Alright, good job!’ because I was pretty young.” But his father does not give unqualified encouragement. As an interviewee, Steve’s father explained that he wanted to see his son preserve his virginity for marriage. However, Steve recalls his father telling him:

If you’re with a girl a long time and you feel comfortable around her. If you’re almost positive you’re not going to have a baby or something and you have a condom or something, then it would be all right. But if it’s a one-nighter [or a] two-week thing then you don’t even want to do it.

A few boys whose parents are strongly opposed to premarital sex have been told not to have sex before they marry. Isaac says, “My parents were really strict [about the whole abstinence thing], shaking their fist at me about that.” Colin’s parents have also made it clear that “they don’t want me having sex.” There was no talk of contraception: “No. They just said, ‘Don’t have sex.’” A girlfriend sleeping over is out of the question: “Not in my mom’s house.” Colin explains: “She doesn’t want us having sex until we get married. . . . She knows my brother [has sex], but she doesn’t want to know about it. She doesn’t want [his girlfriend staying over], like she doesn’t want to know like for sure.”

But boys, unlike their female counterparts, rarely report being given rules against dating or being alone with girls. Sometimes, however, they inadvertently bump up against unarticulated prohibitions. Marc’s mother told him, “I don’t want you to do it, but you’re probably going to do it because you don’t listen anyways.” Marc’s interpretation of those conversa- tions was, “She’s not against it, but she’s not for it either. She wants me to be ready . . . doesn’t want me to get in over my head.” Hence he was taken aback when his mother became extremely angry when she found him half- sitting, half-lying on his bed with his girlfriend, his best friend, and the friend’s girlfriend watching television: “She just said, ‘No way. Don’t you ever do that again or I will kick your butt.’ I was like, ‘All right. . . . Oh crap.’ I was scared for a little while.” Marc figures that a sleepover is out of the question:

I never asked her if my girlfriend could spend the night and I don’t think that I would in the future if I want to live. . . . I might try it one of these days just to see her reaction, but probably not. Even at eighteen, she would be like, “Nooooo.” She would just shake her head and say, “Hell, no.”

For many boys, however, eighteen
is
a turning point, at least in their own minds. This is true both for boys with little and for those with a great deal of supervision. Already relatively free to do as he pleased, once Mi- chael turned eighteen all rules fell away: “Everything was just, ‘Do what- ever you want.’ Right when you turn eighteen, because you’re an adult. It’s basically, if you get into trouble, you’re getting yourself in trouble.” Isaac, by contrast, has parents who keep strong tabs on his comings and goings. Isaac’s parents had forbidden him to attend a sleepover party after his se- nior prom because there would be girls at the party. But Isaac would be turning eighteen before prom, and he pushed through a rare confrontation with his parents, saying, “This is my senior prom and I’m making this deci-

sion as an adult.” Isaac is also relishing the prospect of an unsupervised va- cation to Hawaii which he has planned for the day that he turns eighteen.

Asked about the sleepover, many boys think eighteen might be the mag- ical age. Adam says, “I’m going to go with just like eighteen because that’s when people say you’re legally an adult, like on paper and able to make these decisions.” Before then, they would not permit it, “Just because it’s been so long that that is not okay, that boys and girls are going to jump on top of each other as soon as they can.” If Phillip were to have a girlfriend sleep over, his parents would also “be afraid we would do something that we aren’t ready to do, just because it seemed like a good opportunity.” Phil- lip says he is not ready for sex, but he seconds their concern: “I only have one bed, so I am sure that both [sleeping in the same room and having sex] would come in one for the most part.” Phillip thinks that his parents might shift their position when he is over eighteen:

If I was over eighteen and that was something that I felt like doing, my par- ents would say, “It’s your choice, it’s your life.” That’s basically my parents’ feeling. After I’m eighteen, “
anything you want is up to you
. . . . We’re not re- sponsible for you, so if you get into trouble, it’s your responsibility. We’re not going to call anybody and say, ‘Oh can you please just let him off, just this once.’” It’s on me.

Two boys—both Corona residents—say it would not be their age but the quality of their relationship that would determine whether a girlfriend could spend the night. Randy lives with his mother and her boyfriend. Randy de- scribes himself as “abstinent and everything,” and hopes that it is something he’ll “still have” when he gets married. But he believes that even before then, his parents would let a girlfriend spend the night, depending on “who the girl was. . . . Really, it would depend on how well they know her and how our relationship was. . . . They would have to look at the relationship first. They would have to know us. It would be after we’d gone out for a while.” Dean lives with his father, who is gay and divorced from his mother. A girl- friend would be allowed to sleep over “if it wasn’t like a girl I just brought over one night and said, ‘Hey, she’s going to spend the night.’ . . . If I brought her to the house, if he met her, had dinner with her, not like dinner once, but like you know, brought her around just to hang out, you know.”

In most families, however, the sexuality of sons, and the question of how to respond to it as a parent, is assessed in terms of boys’ capacity for self-reliance. While they are in their teens, boys’ sexuality both foreshadows
and
threatens their impending autonomy. Boys are expected, sometimes

encouraged, to pursue their sexual desires. But few boys expect to be given permission to spend the night with a girlfriend before being able to fully live as their “own person,” independent from their parents, capable, if need be, of supporting a child. When boys are eighteen or close to that turning point, parents may grant tacit permission for a sleepover. More often, par- ents feel as Jesse’s do. Jesse would “love” to hold his girlfriend with whom he is “totally in love” all night long, but his mother and father, he explains, need “me to break off from them, to be doing my own thing before they can handle . . . that I would be staying with my girlfriend like that.”

Sex and the psychology that it requires from American middle-class girls and boys are emblematic for their coming of age process more generally. That process typically starts with a certain degree of closeness between teenagers and their parents. Especially for girls in the more conservative families, this closeness is predicated on “following the rules.” But even boys with relatively liberal parents report that to maintain the peace they have to follow their parents’ rules.
3
Yet the fun that lies outside those boundar- ies entices most to, sooner or later, start sneaking around. Many teenagers report a lengthy period during which their parents had very little idea of what they were up to—a furtiveness that was thrilling, isolating, and occa- sionally very dangerous. Hence, the relief some express in “getting caught.” Indeed, it is quite striking how several boys in particular wholeheartedly endorse a strong show of authority as necessary for order.

Many of the Tremont girls and a few of the Corona girls I interviewed de- scribe themselves as very good and their relationships with their parents, especially their mothers, as genuinely close. Ashley, for instance, has a “re- ally good relationship” with her parents: “I tell them everything usually, unless I forget and it’s not a big deal. But I am really close with my mom. If I said anyone was my best friend, I would say it was my mom.” However, closeness between a very good girl and her parents typically requires her obedience to their authority. Ashley’s parents are “really big on respect to your elders, adults and things like that.” She explains that respecting them means “that you don’t talk back and things like that, like you would not talk back to your parents.”

Jill also has a good relationship with her parents: “We can talk about things and express our feelings and not be afraid to feel judged around

them. It is more like a friend than a parent.” What makes her parents happy is when she is “getting good grades, making the right choices, listen- ing to them, obeying what they say, and just generally not misbehaving.” And when Jill and her parents disagree, she says, “usually I get a punish- ment, like being grounded or they talk to me about what I did wrong and I apologize. That’s basically every disagreement we’ve ever had, that’s how we solve it. That works for me and I know not to do it again.” Jill is content with the state of affairs. Yet as she contemplates life after high school, Jill says, she is in no hurry to get married:

I’d just like to try being my own person for once and just having new experi- ences and having fun and seeing different things. . . . Because it’s always been my parents who have helped me and told me what to do and I how I should do it. So maybe I could get some personal experience and then have my own life without anyone else’s help or anything.

Jill has friends who have “chosen to do wrong things,” including sex, drinking, and drugs. Some friends have decided to mend their ways be- cause of the “way people look at them . . . think[ing] that they are some dumb bad teenager.” The process of regaining social esteem is difficult, more so even for boys than for girls, Jill believes: “I know some girls that have done some bad things and they are disrespected pretty bad. But for boys, I think it is a lot worse because boys get . . . criticized more often.” Jill explains: “Most people will say, ‘How can you do that with a girl when the risks for her are so much higher than they are for you?’” Recovering from mistakes is easier for girls:

Girls are portrayed as good and they make mistakes and people just forgive those mistakes more easily than boys because boys are known as bad and they do things without their parents telling them to. . . . [Sex is seen as some- thing that] was more the boy’s influence on the girl than that it was the girl’s choice.

That “boys are known as bad,” explains perhaps why some of the most supervised and apparently “good” teenagers I interviewed are not girls but boys presumed to be bad. There are families where the icon of the “bad boy” does not legitimate “bad boy” behavior, as it does in Michael’s family, as much as inspire “preemptive discipline.” Isaac’s father is a policeman whose “wrath” Isaac fears. He believes it is a lot worse for him than for his younger sister. When she came home drunk one night, “she got into

trouble, but I’ve gotten in worse trouble for doing less. I’m a guy and I think she’s daddy’s little girl.” And his dad’s strictness has had its intended effect: “I can’t honestly say that I would not have tried alcohol or tried drugs hadn’t my dad been who he is and been as strict as he is because my dad is really, really strict.” Isaac says, “I’m thankful for it.” At the same time, “It is weird because I kind of have a shadow over me all the time.”

Adam is not one to give his parents much trouble. He keeps to the cur- few his parents give him, and, when he and his parents disagree, Adam says, “I usually go ahead and favor whatever they say.” Adam describes his relationship with his parents as “closer than a lot of my friends. I’ll talk to them about just about anything because I am home more.” Lacking an ac- tive social life, Adam has few opportunities to engage in “bad boy” behav- ior. Instead, he spends a lot of time with his parents. Still, when he does go out with friends, Adam must “check in” every two hours by phone. His parents “want to know like where I am, what I’m doing. . . . [They fear] I might start hanging out with the wrong guys or doing pot or go driving with someone who’s a really irresponsible driver and get in an accident or just like get into trouble or get in a fight or something like that.”

Phillip takes honors classes in school and works over twenty hours a week at a paid job. But although he has a full plate of responsibilities, which he seems to take very seriously, his parents expect Phillip home at ten o’clock, including on weekend nights. They don’t allow him to go “driving around, looking for something to do with my friends” because they “just don’t want me out there getting into trouble, for the most part.” In cases of conflict, “It usually ends up that they end up winning it and I end up doing whatever they ask. Just because, as they put it, they’re older, and until I’m eighteen, they have control over me no matter what.” Phillip is generally quite positive about his parents’ strictness: “I’m sure I’ll be nice and tight on my children when I’m older, and I’ll expect them to do this and to do that and be home when I say.” But as a teenager, he finds it dif- ficult to be on the receiving end of his parents’ rules and authority: