Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (6 page)

There are multiple relationships between what sociologists call the “micro-sociological” teenager-parent interactions and the “macro-sociolog- ical” political and economic structures. The prevailing legal climate, for in- stance, places clear constraints on the forms of adolescent experimentation that can be legally negotiated between parents and teenagers. With sexual intercourse before the age of eighteen illegal in the Northern California field site, permitting a sleepover is a potential legal liability, as is permitting teenagers to drink alcohol. Using drugs, engaging in sex before the age of consent, or drinking alcohol before the legal age also puts American teen- agers at risk of a criminal record. That neither consensual adolescent sexual experience nor teenage alcohol and soft drug use are subject to criminal- izing procedures in the Netherlands gives Dutch parents a great deal more leeway to determine their own household policies.
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At the same time, the management of adolescent sexuality in the middle-class family is a cultural process through which parents model and induce competencies that are useful given the organization of the societies for which they are preparing their children. Indeed, normalization and dra- matization encourage young people to acquire proclivities, engage in emo- tion work, and develop self-conceptions that allow them to thrive in their respective societies. Learning to experience oneself as autonomous from social ties and free from ongoing interdependencies, for instance, makes it easier for young Americans to navigate the geographic mobility typical for American middle-class educational and occupational trajectories. By the same token, developing a strong sense of one’s autonomy in the context of ongoing yet shifting relationships of interdependence allows Dutch young adults to hold their own and exhibit flexibility in institutions that will re- quire them to engage in a great deal of negotiation to reach consensus.

The above does not mean that we can reduce the cultural processes at work in the management of adolescent sexuality to the organization of po- litical and economic institutions. Rather, the management of adolescent sexuality proves to be a sensitive prism that allows us to see core cultural ideals and contradictions that structure social institutions throughout so- ciety. “Raging hormones” symbolically represents the potential and the problem of unlimited drive, not held back by dependencies or internal brakes. But such a vision denies people’s inherent dependencies and re- lational needs and legitimates external control for the maintenance of or- der. “Regulated love” is premised on an ideal of an adaptive yet stable co- constituted sociality, in which people adjust themselves in such a way as to prevent intractable conflicts of interest. Yet this ideal denies that some conflicts and differences do not lend themselves to accommodation, and that in the course of creating togetherness some parties make greater sacri- fices than others.

At the same time that interpretation and management of adolescent sexu- ality are “functional” in that they prepare adolescents to function within the institutions they will enter, especially for American teenagers and their parents these cultural processes also take a toll: teenagers do better emo- tionally when they can remain connected to their parents during adoles- cence.
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But with sexuality culturally coded as a symbol of, and a means to attaining, separation between parents and children, an important develop- mental experience becomes cause for disconnection in the parent-teenager relationship. This disconnect makes it more difficult for parents to serve as support when adolescents start their first sexual experiences during their mid-teens. And when teenagers must keep their sexual behavior a secret or know it is a disappointment to their parents, it becomes more difficult to seek assistance from adults—to obtain contraception, assess their readi- ness, or discuss the qualities of a romantic relationship.

The ways in which the American culture of individualism conceptual- izes autonomy and intimacy also do not serve adolescents well. The cul- tural narrative which dictates that one must attain financial and emotional autonomy before being ready for sex and emotional commitment leaves youth with a conception of autonomy they cannot attain until their mid- twenties, if ever. Such a conception does not provide the cultural tools to develop the
internal
discernment and regulation necessary to exercise psy- chological autonomy within teenage sexual and romantic relationships.

As important, this narrative leaves young people and their parents without cultural templates for validating and assessing adolescent intimate rela- tionships on their own terms. Strikingly, many American parents as well many American teenagers—girls
and
boys—use marriage as the ultimate measure of love. But this ideal may lead teenagers to diminish the forms of intimacy that they are capable of and to strive for commitments they are not yet able to make.

The Dutch culture of interdependent individualism does not lead to the same psychological disconnect between parents and teenagers. Though the negotiation of adolescent sexuality is not tension-free, especially when it concerns the sexuality of girls, ultimately most of the Dutch girls and boys can integrate their sexual development with their relationship with their parents.ThiscontinuedconnectednessmakesiteasierforDutchteenagers to draw on the support of parents and other adults as they move through their adolescent sexual and emotional explorations. With autonomy con- ceptualized as a matter of exercising self-direction within relationships, and with interdependence viewed as a matter of necessity rather than choice, Dutch teenagers also receive more cultural validation for their intimate re- lationships. At the same time, the cultural template of interdependent indi- vidualism makes it more difficult for Dutch teenagers and their parents to recognize and address conflicts of interest within relationships than it is for their American counterparts, who speak readily of conflicts and battles.

Chapters 2 and 3 illuminate normalization and dramatization as cultural processes, respectively. Analyzing the interviews with the Dutch and Ameri- can parents, they highlight the cultural frames on which parents draw to interpret adolescent sexuality and make sense out of their decision to per- mit or to not even consider a sleepover. The chapters show, moreover, how normalization and dramatization each operate as active cultural processes through which parents constitute themselves as well as their children as distinct types of individuals. At the same time, the two chapters illuminate the “holes in the webs”: the silences in the cultural languages that parents use, the ways in which they negotiate differences between themselves and their children, and between cultural expectations and lived experience. Fi- nally, the chapters show how the interpretation and management of ado- lescent sexuality are grounded in experiences of history.

Chapter 4, “Adversarial and Interdependent Individualism,” delves into the dilemmas faced by parents and public authorities in the post-1960s

and 1970s era, namely, how to make space for the autonomy of subor- dinates while inculcating restraint and maintaining social order. With the fixed hierarchies and social roles that had previously structured fam- ily life and other social institutions challenged, if not entirely eradicated, middle-class parents in the two countries use the cultural tools available to them to handle gray areas of the adolescent parenting project—the inculca- tion of self-restraint, the exercise of legitimate authority, and the fostering of autonomy. How parents in the two countries interpret and handle the three dilemmas differently illuminates the two different models of individ- ualism on which they are drawing. These different models—of adversarial and interdependent individualism—create the cultural logics that give the normalization and dramatization of adolescent sexuality their common sense.

Chapters 5 and 6, “‘I Didn’t Even Want Them to Know’: Connection through Control” and “‘At Least They Know Where I Am’: Control through Connection,” show how the American and Dutch teenagers, respectively, view and experience the negotiation of sexuality, alcohol, and other poten- tially contentious issues within the parent-teenager nexus. In Chapter 5, we see that despite sometimes radically different parental responses to their sexuality, American girls and boys engage in a psychology of separation from home. Encouraged to make their adolescent experimentation furtive, when they do, teenagers often lose partial or complete connection with their parents, despite an earlier closeness in the relationship, making it necessary for their parents to exercise overt control to reestablish that con- nection. In Chapter 6, we see that Dutch girls and boys receive more simi- lar treatment, and that the parental strategy of exercising control through maintaining connection induces a psychology of incorporation. Neverthe- less, we see evidence of tension, especially among girls, some of whom say they want to keep their sexuality and the parental home at arm’s length.

Just as chapter 4 compares parents in the two countries with regard to their shared dilemmas of autonomy and authority, chapter 7, “Romantic Rebels, Regular Lovers,” compares teenagers in the two countries with re- gard to their shared dilemmas of gender. This chapter shows that in the United States, the construction of sex as risky, promulgated in the home and school, makes sex appear by definition dangerous to boys and not just to girls, as folk wisdom and gender theorists assume. In the Netherlands, by contrast, girls and boys assume that the risks of sex can and should be controlled. However, in practice, it is teenage girls on whom much of the work of prevention falls. The bulk of the chapter focuses on the teenagers’ negotiation of sex, gender, and relationships in relation to peer and popu-

lar culture. It shows how in both countries girls and boys encounter the double standard, but that the meaning and experience of this gender con- struct are mediated by culture-specific conceptions of love and lust.

Chapter 8, “Sexuality, Self-Formation, and the State,” demonstrates the parallels between the conception, control, and constitution of individuals in the family and in the polity. It shows how the interpretation and man- agement of adolescent sexuality express core cultural ideals and contradic- tions about individual and collective well-being. It also shows how eco- nomic and political institutions in the two countries support and constrain parents in their childrearing choices. We see how concerns about sexuality are vehicles through which parents and teenagers engage in processes of self-formation—processes through which they develop capacities that serve their participation in society at large. In the book’s concluding chapter, I address the problem of culture’s costs and the potential for cultural cre- ativity. With sexuality a symbol of, a means for, and a potential threat to attaining autonomy, teenagers in the United States do not receive the sup- port they need to navigate sexual and emotional maturation. To change this situation, we must engage in processes of cultural and institutional innovation.

TWO

Dutch Parents and the Sleepover

Few aspects of mothering two teenage daughters seem to faze Jolien Boskamp, a casually dressed, part-time secretary who lives with her daugh- ters and her husband, Mark, a salesman, on the outskirts of Eastern City. That their eldest daughter Natalie regularly spends the night together with her boyfriend Rob in their modest middle-class home is not something that Jolien regards as problematic. Jolien told Natalie long before she met Rob: “If you are ready (
er aan toe
), say it honestly and use the pill—in any case.” Jolien had been very clear: “If you are ready—not with the first per- son who comes along—you can only give it away once. Give it to someone about whom you think, ‘this is the one.’”

Jolien knows that Rob might not turn out to be Natalie’s
only
one. But she trusts her daughter and has confidence in the relationship. “Natalie is just the kind of child that is so open and honest and sensible—almost like an adult—that, when Rob slept over . . . well . . . for me it was really a mat- ter of course that they would sleep together.” But that Rob would spend the night in his home was not a matter of course for her husband, Mark.

Natalie was sixteen and had been in courtship (
verkering
) with Rob for a couple of months when her father asked her, “Are you going to bed with Rob?”
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Natalie was indignant, “What do you think of me? I need to have been in a courtship (
verkering
) a little longer to do that.” At that time, Nata- lie had started spending the night at Rob’s house. But for a while Natalie and Rob just slept together, “sleeping, literally,” her mother knows. Jolien was impressed. “You would think, [as] she’d been crazy about him for years, that the first best time—as a figure of speech—you’d say ‘let’s do it,’ but no, it really took a few months,” but “at a certain point you can’t hold back those feelings, and then it goes further.”

At a certain point, things did go further. Natalie wanted Rob to spend

the night with her at home. “Absolutely not,” was Mark’s first response. Jo- lien played a mediating role. She told Natalie, “Rob is your boyfriend, you two want to sleep together. It’s all right with me. It’s not all right with papa. Therefore you will need to talk about it with papa.” Natalie questioned her father’s objections. She didn’t let him off the hook when he claimed that Rob’s presence would make it impossible for him to feel free in his own house. “You don’t have a problem with a girlfriend sleeping over.”

Mark had to fight the battle on two fronts. When he told his wife, “I wasn’t allowed to sleep with you either when we were younger,” she re- torted, “Are they supposed to do penance for that—you know, if you put it that way—that you weren’t allowed to sleep with me?” At the same time Jo- lien sympathized with her husband. “He was confronted with a fact that he was not really thinking about yet or ready for. He saw Rob as an intruder, which he did not feel with her girlfriends, because Rob was a boy who had a relationship with HIS daughter,” Jolien explains. “Well, it is his daughter, his honor, his oldest.” But that is history. For the past nine months, Rob has spent the night in their house and “Mark doesn’t have any problems with it anymore. No, no.”