Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (9 page)

think as a parent you anticipate . . . [Sex] is going to happen. . . .” And once you know that they are going to bed together. . . . Well, then it doesn’t seem such a problem to let them spend the night together.” Parents are much more inclined to accept the sleepover when they know that a relationship, and the sexual component of that relationship, have built gradually over time.

Marlies de Ruiter says her daughter Frieda developed sexually “step by step” in the relationship with her boyfriend until they eventually had sex- ual intercourse. But that only happened after they had spent “many a night together that they did not go to bed with each other.” If Barbara Koning’s son were to have a girlfriend, she would let them sleep together. But per- mission is not unqualified. Barbara hopes her son’s first experience is “as innocent as in our time.” Such “innocence” means
not
doing what she has heard about: “That they just have a girlfriend and it is just a love of a few weeks, and then boom, they dive into bed. That is a bit exaggerated. Get to know each other first.”

We have seen that three cultural frames interact to create a web of meaning and feeling that gives the practice of the sleepover its cognitive, emotional, and moral sense.
14
The first is
normal
sexuality: the sexuality of teenagers can and ideally should be talked about and dealt with in an open, friction- less, and matter-of-fact manner. Things sexual, including bodies and their functions, should inspire as little discomfort or turmoil as talk about what and when to eat. The second is
relationship-based
sexuality: sexual desire and sexual acts grow out of a teenager’s feelings for and relationship with another person. Finally,
self-regulated
sexuality dictates that readiness for sex is a moment when emotional and physical desires are united and sen- sible preventative measures are taken.

On the one hand, the three cultural frames lead parents to interpret adolescent sexuality, and their own role as parents, in such a way that the sleepover makes sense. On the other hand, the sleepover itself is a practice through which parents normalize. Conversations about when the sleepover is allowed and breakfasts where boyfriends and girlfriends join other fam- ily members give an everyday quality to adolescent sexuality. When parents permit only serious boy- and girlfriends to spend the night, they encourage a relationship-based sexuality. And when adolescent sexual development happens gradually over time, as it can when the prospect of sexual activ- ity is openly discussed, rather than engaged in furtively and suddenly, it

becomes easier for teenagers to plan and take precautions against dangers. With the conversations they have, the rules they enforce, and the rituals they institute, parents create conditions under which adolescent sexuality can be experienced as a normal, nondisruptive part of childrearing and coming of age.

While many Dutch parents do worry about AIDS, and some worry about pregnancy, these concerns do not swell into sources of strong paren- tal anxiety.
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Fact and faith, experience and expectation, largely corroborate one another. Rates of pregnancy, birth, abortion, and HIV among youth are much lower for Dutch teens than they are for their American counter- parts.
16
And, unlike their American counterparts, few Dutch parents know teenagers who become pregnant.
17
Just how rare it is for Dutch middle- class parents to be confronted with pregnancies among teenagers becomes evident when Piet Starring tells of his shock after hearing from acquain- tances about a girl who became pregnant at age sixteen: “My God, can you imagine that happening to you, [your daughter] comes home saying, ‘I’m pregnant.’”

At the same time, as a cultural process, normalization also evidently takes place in opposition to examples of non-normalized adolescent sex- uality. Several Dutch parents clearly construct their own capacity to nor- malize in opposition to “other” times and “other” people. They oppose their own normal ways to the secretiveness and shame they experienced in their own upbringing. Nienke Otten explains overcoming reservations because “you do not want to do it the way you were raised yourself. That you just don’t want. You want to try to keep up with the times.” Mariette Kiers remembers being told, “You must save yourself because men are only looking for [sex].” She did not want to teach her daughter, as she had been taught, that men are predators. Mariette has made a point of not teaching her daughter that her virginity is something that should “be saved.”

It is not only their own parents to whom the Dutch interviewees oppose themselves. While none of the parents are explicit about which “other” groups in Dutch society treat sexuality in non-normal ways, they imply that these others have a lower class status. Some interviewees—usually those who came of age earlier and experienced the most notable shift in attitudes during their own youth and young adulthood—express pride, see- ing themselves as especially progressive frontrunners in a historical trend. Anneke Schutte and Daphne Gelderblom think that in their circle parents are open about sexuality. “I don’t think we are average,” says Anneke. More- over, Daphne believes, in certain (lower) milieus, “[sex] does not get talked about.” Barbara Koning also sees herself as different from most parents

who are, she believes, stricter than she and her husband are. They are not representative. “No, my husband and I are pretty open for all kinds of new developments and we try to go along with those as much as possible.”

Yet, even within the middle-class family, there are signs that sexuality is not without the taboos, secrets, and feelings of shame that were character- istic of the past. Sometimes, teenage children are not as eager to normalize sexuality as are their parents. The Starrings found Hans not terribly coop- erative when they wanted to educate him: “You know we had all the [sex education] books at home, and I think he read things and talked about things, but if you really wanted to start talking about something, then he didn’t really care for that, no.” About her daughter’s first time, Mia Klant says, “They never tell you. . . . They never told me.” Mariette Kiers also bumped up against the limits of normalization when she tried to initiate a conversation with her daughter about when might be a good age at which to have sex. Marjolein responded, “‘A, I don’t feel like talking with you about that’—I could understand that—‘but B, not anytime soon.’”

To overcome tensions and inhibitions, and to bring the potentially un- comfortable aspects of sexuality into language, many Dutch parents use humor. Mia Klant was not pleased about her daughter’s first boyfriend. She did not feel she could really influence her daughter’s choice, but she tried: “You can talk about it, you know generally. Like, ‘Is he really the best . . . you know the guy is nice but why don’t you look around a bit more.’ And then sure, you make jokes, you make jokes, until that little light in their head goes on.” Corinne van Zanden was relieved when her son Anton finally told her that his friend Johan was gay. Sensing that An- ton had been troubled for a while, Corinne asked him what was wrong. Later Anton remarked that he should have told her earlier. “We have no problems about [his being gay] because he is and remains Johan. I mean we can say Johanna, now, just for a joke, but he remains
gewoon
Johan to us.”
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And when there are tensions between what parents want and what hap- pens, humor is a way to manage conflicts and discomfort. Daphne Gelder- blom and her husband Peter joke about everything with their children— life, death, and sex. Their fourteen-year-old has just had the “sex project” at school, the term Daphne and Peter use jokingly to refer to the officially entitled “relationship lessons.” Although she and her husband joked by giving their children golden colored condoms for Christmas—which they

had purchased on a visit to Berkeley, California—Daphne would not like her daughter to become sexually active at age sixteen. Were that to happen, however, she would permit the sleepover, she says, because she finds it “ex- traordinarily hypocritical” to say not under my roof when you know it is happening elsewhere. But tellingly, Daphne adds, “I am not going to jump up and down with joy in front of their bedroom either.”

Another source of tension is sex that is
too
normal—that is, sex that is too easy. A number of Dutch parents suggest that sex has become a mat- ter that young people take too lightly and that it has lost its “specialness.” Mieke Aalders tells her sons “sexuality is not [part of] the consumption society.” Trudie van Vliet believes that “it has become very normal, if you have been out a few times with someone, and sometimes even the first time, which is what I am hearing. Well, that I don’t think is normal yet. . . . That scares me. Because I think sex is something that can be very beautiful and it should not become so regular as saying goodbye or hello.” Marga Fenning thinks “it is good that [young people today] are able to tell and ask everything at home.” But sometimes she wonders whether freedom has gone too far. “My mother would turn over in her grave” if she could hear “all the things [my children] talk about during dinner. There are words that I have never heard of. . . . Well by now, I know them all, but I had never heard of them.”

A final source of tension is sex which takes place
too
early. When their children are seventeen, most Dutch parents do not “have problems” with their sexual activity. Parents are divided over whether sixteen is too early or just right for sexual initiation. But most agree that at age fourteen and fif- teen, teenagers are too young. When sex does happen, or threatens to hap- pen, too early, the framework of normalization provides only limited tools to account for, or deal with, the reasons for and results of this experience. Han de Vries and Mia Klant were confronted with their daughter Irene’s early sexual initiation. At fourteen, Irene was too young, in Han’s opinion. “For parents, it is by definition too young,” Mia adds. Irene’s sexuality sits more comfortably with her parents now that she is a happy and healthy seventeen-year-old and in a relationship with a boy they like very much. In retrospect, they don’t think Irene’s early initiation harmed her.

In short, some of the parents acknowledge that sex is not always easy to discuss normally, that sometimes sex becomes too normal, and that sex can sometimes happen too early. Still, they firmly believe talking openly about adolescent sex is better than keeping it secret, that young people can and do form relationships of mutual care and respect, and that they can and should be in charge of determining when they are ready and of pre-

venting any unwanted consequences. Worries about sexuality constitute discordant notes against the main tune of their expectation that all will go smoothly and turn out well. But as the following two vignettes demon- strate, the dominant frames of normalized adolescent sexuality—as nor- mal, relationship-based, and self-regulated—sometimes fail to account for real experience. Both vignettes expose a silence in normalization, namely, about the conflicts of interest, inequalities, and use of power that can shape relationships.

When Marga Fenning’s son Thomas was in elementary school, two boys in the neighborhood took him into the bushes and “told him something, they said things and did things, nothing serious luckily.” After that she no- ticed that “Thomas suddenly, and he was still very young, suddenly he had a lot of interest in those things. When I stood in the bathroom, and it even embarrassed me really . . . and you know, we have always washed ourselves
gewoon
and walked around at home, nothing with bathrobes and being
stiekem
. [But] then he would start sitting like this [bending over to look up] and start to look at me. And oh, I did not feel good about that at all [laugh- ing]. . . . But I would think, behave
gewoon
, behave
gewoon
. But really it was terrible, he just kept on looking.”

Thomas became very interested in sexual play. At one point, a friend, Marcel, told Marga, “‘Our kids need to get married with each other now because they have examined each other thoroughly and . . . in the bath- room you know.’ And I say, ‘Oh.’ But I was sort of . . . he really had to laugh about it. He’s a teacher, so I’m sure he is used to a lot. A really nice guy. . . .” Marcel’s daughter Madelief would come over to play often. And when Marga would come home in the afternoon, she could look up from her car and see through Thomas’s bedroom window that the two of them were “messing around” on the bed. “Well, nothing could happen because they were really too young for that, but still.” After that, Thomas’s sex education took off in quick tempo: “He started asking questions and later . . . well, we talked a lot about it. But really, I was very unhappy that those kids had done that with him, because then it became for him such a revelation that he kept on going on with it and asking about it and acting on it. Well, I really did not like that at all, I really did not like it at all. But I did always answer [his questions].”

Marga felt angry at the older boys for initiating Thomas prematurely. She felt embarrassed by his behavior in the wake of the incident and un-

certain about how to respond to that behavior. Yet, all along, she opted for a response that played down her own discomfort and carefully accommo- dated his questions and play, even though this course of action required considerable emotional restraint and adaptation on her part.

Only when Thomas was older and was becoming interested in girls again in his mid-teens did his approach to sexuality lead to an open con- flict with his mother. She started cautioning him against getting a girl preg- nant. But his attitude, she felt, was much too cavalier. “He was like, ‘Oh well, then she can just have it taken away [an abortion].’ And then I said: ‘Well, that is no way of behaving,’ I said, ‘to get someone pregnant and then to say ‘take it away.’ I say, ‘[If that happens] you are equally responsible.’ I say, ‘Not just the pleasures, but also the burdens.’ I say, ‘You’ve got to re- member that.’”