Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (4 page)

But the gender inequality perspective also does not solve the puzzle, for while it helps explain why many girls in the United States experience a lack of physical pleasure as well as negative emotions about sex, espe- cially when sex happens outside of a steady relationship, it does not ac- count for the ambivalence and misgivings that many American boys also report. Nor does it account for the similarity in Dutch surveys in boys’ and girls’ reports of wanting, feeling control over, and enjoying first sexual ex- periences. Moreover, it offers no explanation for why, unlike the American parents interviewed for this book, the Dutch parents do not talk about gen- der as a salient feature of teenage sex and relationships, and why they are just as likely to permit daughters as sons to spend the night together with steady boy- and girlfriends. In fact, as we will see, gender plays a role in both countries—more overtly in the United States and more covertly in the Netherlands. But the perceptions and experiences of boys and girls in each country often approximate one another more than those of their same-sex peers across the ocean.

A final perspective on adolescent sexuality places it in the context of historical change. French philosopher Michel Foucault has argued that in the modern era, governments are no longer able to rule large populations through repression and punishment alone. However, they have found in official discourses about “normal” heterosexual identities and reproduc-

tive behavior effective methods for social control. Originating in religious, medical, scientific, and penal institutions, disciplinary practices and dis- courses encourage self-disclosure, differentiate people into categories, and goad them into new self-conceptions. Unlike the “sovereign” power of au- thorities who impose harsh punishments, the power of discipline and dis- course is harder to detect, which makes it effective. Modern power is “pro- ductive” rather than repressive, Foucault argues, because rather than forbid, it exhorts individuals to voluntary shape their subjective sense of them- selves according to confining understandings of what is normal, healthy, and desirable.
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Foucault’s argument that, in the modern era, conceptions and practices around sexuality have been power-ridden and often serve the interests of authorities is useful but incomplete. Indeed, as we will see, the dramati- zation and normalization of adolescent sexuality are imbued with forms of social control. But Foucault’s account does not help us understand why different discourses of adolescent sexuality have come to prevail in the institutions of two equally modern, post-sexual-revolution societies. Nor does it provide an explanation for why these different discourses—of adolescent-sexuality-as-risk in the United States, and of adolescent sexual self-determination in the Netherlands—resonate as they do among lay people. Finally, Foucault’s argument about the effectiveness of modern power misses key ingredients.

The successful use of contraception among Dutch girls appears a prime example of disciplinary power. But, I argue, this power “works” because girls remain connected to and supported by adult institutions and are able to develop self-mastery—parts of the puzzle Foucault bypasses.
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To solve the puzzle left unaccounted for by existing literatures, we must turn to culture. But as the British sociologist Raymond Williams famously noted, culture is one of the most complex words in the English language.
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Even sociologists have meant very different things with the concept, rang- ing from cultural products—books, music, and art—and the institutions that produce them, to assumptions and practices so taken for granted that they are largely invisible.
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They have debated whether cultural meanings form a coherent “system” or an assemblage of potentially contradictory cultural tools that people use as their circumstances and goals warrant.
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Moreover, sociologists have questioned the extent to which meanings are shared, given the social and economic inequalities that divide people.

Cultural forms—both cultural products and less tangible assumptions and practices—are used to signal and draw status distinctions.
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Socially marginalized groups, in turn, often construct alternative meanings and subcultures.
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Mine is a synthetic approach to culture.
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As an analytic category, I use the concept of culture to refer to three different processes—the three C’s. The first pertains to the way people
conceptualize
themselves, each other, and the world at large using language, concepts, and frameworks. These interpretative, descriptive, and communicative tools create what the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz poetically called the “webs of significance” that give meanings to bare facts. A second process pertains to the poten- tially
controlling
component of culture. Cultural tools not only interpret and describe. They also implicitly or explicitly prescribe individual behav- ior and relationships, and they thus serve as covert or overt vehicles for the exercise of power, especially by those who possess the resources to impose their will. Finally, culture is
constitutive
. Cultural concepts and practices get inside people’s skin, shaping their sense of themselves and of others by en- couraging certain proclivities, capacities, and “emotion work.”
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Central to my conception of culture is the notion that we live through shared “structures of meaning” which help us filter the myriad possibili- ties of being human. Such structures of meaning operate as preconscious, taken-for-granted interpretive frameworks that help us understand what aspects of the human potential are plausible and desirable, what we must do to develop those aspects as individuals, both within relationships and as communities of individuals, and what experiences are to be sought or avoided and what sacrifices are required to do so. Structures of meaning can interrelate to create a “cultural logic” that can give certain decisions and practices the appearance of cognitive, emotional, moral, and practi- cal commonsense. This does not mean that cultures are uniform, static, or that everyone agrees with one another. Even within the same cultural com- munity, people draw on multiple “cultural languages,” struggle with one another about how to apply cultural concepts, and confront experiences that contradict those concepts.
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As challenging as defining culture analytically is “finding it” empirically, for as cultural sociologist Ann Swidler has pointed out, “when culture fully takes, it merges with life as to be nearly invisible.”
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The merging of culture with experience makes the former invisible not only to lay individuals but also to the researchers studying phenomena that are shaped by culture. One way to illuminate cultural processes is to compare them cross-nationally, for exposing cultural differences denaturalizes them and provides an entry

into their internal dynamics. The highly charged emotional terrain of child- rearing and sexuality lends itself well for capturing and examining cultural differences. Asking people to make and justify a decision with regard to a hypothetical question, such as about a sleepover, encourages them to artic- ulate culture, often inadvertently in the language they use, the metaphors they choose, and the modes of reasoning that make most sense to them. But people’s articulations are not to be taken at face value. Rather, they must be used as clues to reconstruct the cultural processes in which they often inadvertently participate.

Culture is, at least in part, national.
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Nations provide people with distinctive conditions and resources for shared meaning-making. Trans- national economic and political processes notwithstanding, cultural pro- cesses are still shaped by nation-specific political, economic, and cultural institutions. National policies draw on cultural ideals and categories and, in turn, inform perceptions and experiences.
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Cultural products—elite and popular—both reflect and shape broader national cultures. But national differences in culture are not just products of current conditions. More im- portant are cultural concepts and practices that originate in, among others, formative geo-political events, geographic conditions, and religious tradi- tions, and that persist after their original impetus has either mutated or been lost.
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Language and rituals—everyday and exceptional—are both re- positories of cultural concepts and means to communicate and enact them. To argue that there are meaningful and systematic cultural differences across nations is not to suggest that those cultures are timeless.
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National cultures do change, but they usually do so in ways that build on their pasts. Indeed, the topic of this book—the management of adolescent sexuality in Dutch and American families in the 1990s—results from processes of change that played out differently in two different national contexts. And one of the book’s central contentions is that parents, policymakers, and in- tellectuals in the two countries have mobilized different cultural templates to come to terms with the challenges to the sexual, gender, and authority relations that existed before the 1960s. The cultural resources on which the generation of white middle-class Dutch adults who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s drew gave them reason to trust social bonds and self- restraint even as their attitudes toward sexuality, individuality, and author- ity changed profoundly. Meanwhile, their American peers drew on a model for individualism that made self-control and social bonds—intimate and societal—fragile when left unsupported by the traditional precepts that

kept men and women, teenagers and parents in their respective places.

If cross-national comparisons are fertile territory for the excavation of

cultural meanings, they also pose challenges. One such challenge is that there are, of course, multiple cultural communities within any given na- tion. Recognizing that people’s social class, race and ethnicity, and religion can profoundly shape their cultural processes, I avoid comparing apples and oranges by focusing on two white, secular or moderately Christian middle-class cultures. But even within this segment of the population there are differences—between spouses, parents and teenagers, girls and boys, lower- and upper-middle class families, and between liberal and conserva- tive families. Some of these differences cut across nations: girls and boys in the two countries confront similar constraining gender constructs. Parents in both countries face challenges in exercising control, and teenagers face challenges in developing independent selves. But, as we will see, cultural forces mediate gender, parental power, and adolescent maturation.

There are ways in which the position of the white secular or moderately religious middle class vis-à-vis other social groups in the two societies im- pacts the power of their cultural forms. Members of the white middle class have a disproportionate influence on the institutions of politics, educa- tion, and health care. Consequently, their cultural language, concepts, and frameworks are often presented as universal. Equally important, members of the white middle class have used conceptions of sexuality, as well as the cultural assumptions and ideals that inform them, to distinguish them- selves from members of other social groups deemed inferior. The United States has, for instance, a long history of defining white middle-class girls as nonsexual in opposition to the over-sexualization of low-income girls of color.
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Although the normalization of teenage sexuality in the Nether- lands preceded the largest influx of immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, normalization, which has also included homosexuality, has taken place in opposition to members of religious and ethnic minorities—especially Muslims.
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But while it is important to recognize how cultural forms can be used to impose norms and draw social distinctions, culture should not be re- duced to its uses in the exercise of power. The challenge is to at once rec- ognize that cultures allow people to make meaning and communicate
and
that such meanings can be used to draw boundaries against outsiders and exert control. As we will see, cultural concerns and ideals about the state of “complete freedom” shape the management of adolescent sexuality in American families, as do concerns and ideals about the state of
gezelligheid
or cozy togetherness in Dutch families. Genuinely treasured, these states of being are sources of pleasure and communion. At the same time, attaining “complete freedom” to do as one pleases is more accessible to certain seg-

ments of the American population than to others. And while the ideal of
gezelligheid
exerts control over those inside a given social circle, it can make it difficult for outsiders, especially new arrivals, to enter it.

The first step to solve the puzzle of the sleepover is to see that Dutch and American parents engage in different cultural processes as they interpret and manage teenage sexuality. Culling words, expressions, and modes of reasoning from interviews shows how the American parents engage in
dra- matization
: highlighting difficulties and conflicts, they describe adolescent sexuality, first, as “raging hormones,” individual, potentially overpowering forces that are difficult for teenagers to control and, second, as antagonis- tic heterosexual relationships in which girls and boys pursue love and sex respectively. Finally, parents see it as their obligation to encourage ado- lescents to establish autonomy—and gain the potential for financial self- sufficiency or marriage—before accepting their sexual activity as legitimate. And viewing sex as part of a process of separation in which parents must stand firm ground around certain key issues, the response to the question of a sleepover, even among many otherwise liberal parents is, “Not under my roof!”

The Dutch parents, by contrast, engage in a cultural process of nor- malization. Theirs is a conception of “regulated love”: that is, the Dutch parents speak of sexual readiness (
er aan toe zijn
), a process of becoming physically and emotionally ready that they believe young people can self- regulate, provided that they have been encouraged to pace themselves and prepare adequately by using the available means of contraception. But readiness does not happen in isolation. The Dutch parents talk about sexu- ality as emerging from relationships, and they are strikingly silent about gender conflicts. And unlike their American counterparts, who are often skeptical about teenagers’ capacities to fall in love, they assume that even those in their early teens do so. They also permit the sleepover for those in their mid- and late teens, even if it requires an “adjustment” period to overcome their feelings of discomfort, because they feel obliged to accept the changes and to stay connected as relationships and sex become part of their children’s lives.