Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (37 page)

The cultural processes this book reveals are snapshots of a decade—1991 to 2000. But in the decade since then, several notable shifts have taken place in the Netherlands: the growth of women’s participation in the labor force, especially among the middle- and upper-middle class, to “normal” European and North American percentages; the expansion of the govern- ing powers of the European Union and the introduction of the euro; strong

cutbacks in spending on social welfare; a more restrictive approach to alco- hol and drugs and a more punitive approach to crime—in part a response to “drug tourism” and the increase in organized international crime; growth in the numbers of first- and second-generation immigrants from non-Western countries; and two high-profile assassinations, one of which brought to the fore the conflict between Dutch secularist institutions and culture and Muslim fundamentalism.
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At the same time, there has been much continuity: while the majority of Dutch mothers now work, unlike their European and American peers they continue to do so part time.
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And despite having shrunk the percentage of gross domestic product spent on social programs from one of the largest in Europe to around average, the Netherlands still has a health care system that ranks among the top among industrialized countries in access and pro- vision of equitable care, and it still has some of the lowest poverty rates in the European Union.
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Dutch poverty rates remain significantly lower than those in the United States.
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Dutch children remain among those most likely in Europe to grow up in two-parent families, and are far less likely to live in single-parent families than their peers in the United States.
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Finally, in spite of a more punitive climate, the use and sale of “soft drugs” are still tolerated, though under more restrictive conditions, and prostitution, un- der certain conditions, is still legal.
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Still, if the Dutch middle-class family and state seemed to sail smoothly through the new cultural currents of the 1960s and 1970s, adapting old customs to new needs—maintaining social cohesion and significantly reducing inequality in both the intimate and public sphere—the early twenty-first century appears to have led the country into rougher wa- ters. Some of the challenges are what sociologists call endogenous—they come from within the culture. Dutch youth are proving not always as self- regulating as parents and policymakers of earlier decades expected, for in- stance with regard to alcohol consumption. And efforts to bolster girls’ and boys’ capacity to recognize and communicate their readiness and to form mutually respectful relationships have not necessarily, as recent research shows, protected Dutch girls from sexual violation.
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Attention in research, media, and policy to these personal and interpersonal transgressions, sex- ual and otherwise, has challenged the premises and optimism of interde- pendent individualism.
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But perhaps the greatest challenges to that interdependent individualism have come from outside the country. Unlike the “emancipated” groups that preceded them, many first- and second-generation immigrants have not cooperated with the culture of consultation and consensus, instead form-

ing bastions of difference and, in instances, of hostility.
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The responses to problems around immigration, or to what the Dutch call “the question of integration,” have exposed internal fissures—including those based on class inequalities—and have contributed to more confrontational and pu- nitive methods of behavior control. They have also illuminated the current of control that runs through normalization. Confronted with groups that do not share the aims or methods of “regulated love,” policymakers have tried to impose ideas about love as a form of regulation and exclusion, and for a period required prospective immigrants to view a film with two gay men kissing.
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In short, the strains of the early twenty-first century have exposed as- sumptions and contradictions in the ideal of
gezelligheid
, namely, that some behavior and conflicts do not lend themselves to accommodation and that in the course of creating togetherness in a collectivity, the less powerful parties—youth, women, workers, and ethnic minorities—are often expected to make greater sacrifices than the more powerful parties. Almost half a century after the start of the 1960s, the country is—with people, governing bodies, and cultures that originate from outside its borders—more inter- nally diverse and divided, and less self-governing. How the challenges and opportunities that characterize the current period of societal upheaval and cultural conflict will ultimately shape the family and polity is unclear. But clearly, the present time is a fruitful one to study the interplay of cultural continuity, confrontation, and change, as well as to investigate the different experiences of the relationship between teenage sexuality, self-formation, and the state.

CONCLUSION

Beyond the Drama

As an adolescent in the Netherlands in the 1980s—where my family had moved from the United States—I never heard of teenagers becoming preg- nant during high school. I took for granted the playful public health cam- paigns on billboards across town, advocating safe sex, and I watched with fascination, though not fear, a three-hour television production about HIV/ AIDS, how it was transmitted, and how to protect against it, which was broadcast simultaneously across all Dutch television channels. I noticed the apparent equanimity with which the mother of one of my Dutch friends responded when her youngest daughter announced one evening that she and her steady boyfriend were retiring to her tiny bedroom. Mrs. de Wit would not have left a breadcrumb on the floor of her immaculate, modest middle-class home, which was adorned with signs of her Catholic faith. Yet, she did not blink an eye when her sixteen-year-old daughter made clear that she was taking her boyfriend to her bedroom where sexual rela- tions might occur.

When I visited the United States over the summer and returned to study as a young adult, I learned that unintended pregnancies among teenag- ers were far from the relics of a past before reliable contraception became widely available, as I had been taught in the Netherlands. I discovered that even among the well-educated, politically liberal friends of my parents, teenagers rarely confided in their parents the state of their sexual affairs. I found myself inadvertently in the role of sex educator when I wrote a long letter to one of my American friends, explaining when during her menstrual cycle she would be most fertile and urging her to talk to her mother about going on the pill. Listening to the radio and reading news- papers in the United States in the early 1990s, I heard commentators attri- bute societal disarray and poverty to sex among unmarried teenagers—an

attribution not corroborated by my experience in the Netherlands, where unmarried youth formed sexual relationships without living in the poverty that I witnessed in the United States.

Two decades later, many of the contrasts I observed remain. Despite a sharp decline in teen births over the past fifteen years, by age twenty almost one in five American women will have given birth.
1
While some such births have been planned, and, once born, many unplanned children are deeply cherished, most births to teenagers are unintended, and they alter the lives of young people in ways that are not of their choosing.
2
American teenag- ers also have some of the highest rates of STDs—including life-threatening ones like HIV/AIDS—in the industrial world.
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Equally significant are the ambivalent and negative feelings that American youth attribute to their first sexual experiences, with many young women and men describing a lack of what researchers sometimes call “agency,” a sense of full control over their sexual decision-making process. Finally, sexuality and relationships are a source of strain in many American families, especially between daughters and parents, and between parents and non-heterosexual teenagers.
4

While not without its challenges, adolescent sexual and emotional de- velopment remains considerably less problem-fraught in the Netherlands. Even though Dutch youth initiate sex at comparable ages, their birth and abortion rates are eight and two times lower, respectively, than those of their American peers: in 2007, one in twenty-four American girls aged fif- teen to nineteen gave birth, versus one in nearly two hundred Dutch girls.
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And even in low-income immigrant communities in the Netherlands— where births to those under twenty tend to be concentrated—the teenage birth rate remains considerably lower than in low-income communities of color in the United States.
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HIV rates are also substantially lower among Dutch youth than among their American counterparts.
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As important: most Dutch youth surveyed report that their first sexual experiences were fun, wanted, well timed, and in their control.
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Finally, although Dutch parents and teenagers must also negotiate tensions over sex and romantic relation- ships, teenage sexuality is more integrated into family life than it usually is in the United States.

Why these differences? One answer is simply different public invest- ments in the provision of resources and services. Lacking quality schools and health care, a guaranteed minimum income, and adequate housing, the communities that have the highest pregnancy and STD rates in the United States are characterized by a prevalence and intensity of socioeco- nomic disadvantage that is unparalleled in the Netherlands.
9
While Ameri- can teenagers have very uneven access to sexual education and health care,

Dutch policymakers and physicians have committed to make sure that all Dutch minors are educated about and can obtain contraception. And while abortion remains both practically and culturally very difficult to access in the United States, Dutch girls sixteen and older have access, without paren- tal consent, to free abortions. Without easy access to vital resources, ser- vices, and education, it is no wonder that in spite of impressive increases in condom use, American teenagers remain much less likely to use the most reliable forms of birth control, use dual protection, or terminate unin- tended pregnancies than are their Dutch counterparts.
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But access to resources and services, essential as it is, constitutes only one piece of the puzzle that explains the international differences in the experience of teenage sexuality. Another piece is the difference in adult ap- proaches, which are, in turn, shaped by different cultural frameworks for understanding what teenage sexuality is, what capacities young people can and should develop, and what the responsibilities of parents and other care providers are.

This book illuminates important differences in those frameworks. In Dutch middle-class families and institutions, adolescent sexuality has been normalized. In contrast, in American middle-class families and institu- tions, adolescent sexuality has been dramatized. Although differences in adult approaches
within
the two countries deserve further study, there is reason to believe that the cultural differences highlighted in this book shape experiences and attitudes beyond the specific populations studied, not in the least because they disproportionately influence the institutions of government, health care, education, and the media.
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What we have seen is that adolescent sexuality has been
normalized
in Dutch families—viewed as a continuum of feelings and behaviors, which are accepted as part of adolescent development and relationships. Youth are expected to possess an internal barometer with which they can pace their sexual progression, within the context of trusting and loving relation- ships, and discern the point at which they are ready to move toward sexual intercourse. While parents have the responsibility to educate about con- traception, the cultural mandates dictate that, in order to stay connected to their children and their relationships, they are wise to accept that from sixteen or seventeen onward adolescents’ sexual progression may include intercourse. Normalization also means that most parents permit steady boyfriends and girlfriends to spend the night in their teenage children’s bedrooms—usually on the condition that they have gotten to know and like them—even if this means parents must self-regulate their own feelings of resistance.

Adolescent sexuality has, by contrast, been
dramatized
in American fami- lies. Although they see them as natural and inevitable, many American par- ents view sexual desires as spurred by “raging hormones” that are easily out of control. Thus they consider sexual acts—usually thought of in terms of acts of intercourse—undesirable and dangerous during the teenage years. Indeed, not only adolescents’ sexual urges but also their emotional long- ings are viewed askance; parents see a battle between the sexes in which boys pursue sex and girls pursue love and in which both parties can be duped. With adolescent sexuality as an internal and interpersonal battle- field, it is not surprising that few American parents permit high-school- aged couples to sleep together. But opposition to the sleepover stems also from a conviction, shared by liberal and conservative parents alike, that children must establish themselves independently from their parents be- fore it is right to sanction their sexuality or necessary to overcome one’s discomfort about it.

Normalization and dramatization are rooted in different ways of under- standing what it means to be and become an autonomous individual and form relationships with others—indeed, in different cultures of individual- ism. One reason that adolescent sexuality is such a drama for both parents and teenagers in the United States is that the culture of “adversarial indi- vidualism” dictates that to attain full autonomy a person must first sever his or her dependencies on others. This conception of autonomy, how- ever, leaves adolescents—who are in the process of becoming autonomous selves—without the continuity of social bonds—especially with adults— that provide them with support and with the grounds for exercising self- restraint within an intergenerational sociality. With sexuality culturally coded as symbolic for the break between teenagers and parents, the latter become disconnected from a developmentally important part of their chil- dren’s lives, and they can often offer little guidance other than to urge them to postpone sex until they are on their own.