Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (22 page)

Besides, she would already have had an orgasm by the time she tucked his cock inside her, since she came beforehand by humping his thigh, so Adrian ultimately was able to cast a positive light on lasting barely three minutes inside her: he hadn’t begun to prematurely ejaculate.
Not at all!
What he’d done was custom-develop a hyperefficient style of lovemaking. Fucking was pointless for her since she could only have clitoral orgasms. So in his genius, he’d cut it down to a bare minimum.

The first theory to explain his unusual behavior is called the Masturbation Substitution Theory. It holds that if you (or anyone) were to arrange your life such that you’re ready and willing to fuck as frequently as Adrian would masturbate, he’d ultimately make the switch and fuck you in place of masturbating, which would automatically endow your lovemaking with the ejaculatory efficiency of his masturbation.

This conventional explanation faces a challenge from the Mononucleosis Hypothesis. Some have correctly pointed out that, halfway through the relationship, Adrian contracted mononucleosis from the First One. Theory holds that the catastrophic impact on his immune system had the side effect of making him a premature ejaculator.

The curious reader, if annoyed at how Adrian rarely comes, could stage an experiment. First try harvesting all his semen and then infect him with a virus—nothing too serious, please—and see which technique makes him ejaculate faster.

4
After he’d gone to all that trouble using the 69 to finesse the Loved One into giving him head, Adrian found her fellatio disappointingly tepid. One night, lying there with his cock in her barely animated mouth, everything became crystal clear to him: Her old boyfriend had shot off in her mouth without warning and she thought that was going to happen with Adrian, too, bringing their fun to an end. He thought, Good news! I can clear up this misunderstanding in a jiffy!

Raising his head off the mattress, he happily announced, “You know there’s no way I’m ever going to come in your mouth, so you don’t have to worry about that at all!” Now he figured she could relax and enjoy sucking his cock as much as he enjoyed eating her pussy, but instead of the reassurance he had intended, she took his statement as a mortal insult against her cocksucking skills. She heard “You give head so lousy that you could stay down there till next Tuesday and I’d never get off.”

In response to his unintended challenge, the Loved One pushed her cocksucking to heights of hair-raising intensity. She encouraged him to ejaculate in her mouth, even before he’d fucked her. “I’ve got a washcloth right here!” After dishing out several servings of the best blow job that came out of her kitchen, she got positively panicky about getting him off. To give her some hope to hang on to, he abandoned the position that busting his nut during head would be impossible and took to promising that he was seriously getting very close to getting off.

A few weeks into the Loved One’s blow job ejaculation project, Adrian finally came while fucking her. He was so surprised that he completely forgot what they’d been going through and reverted to being worried that he’d come too soon. “Were you done?!” he asked. She gave him a look like,
Yeah, I was done two months ago
.

The Continuing Criminalization of Teen Sex

Ellen Friedrichs

Sometimes it seems as if we live in a world that is getting more fearful about teens by the day. But while the specific concerns may be new, targeting youth really isn’t. Since the dawn of recorded history, adolescents have caused adults a fair amount of stress, even as the sources of that stress have changed from generation to generation. Today, people seem to be worried about sexting and self-injury, teen moms and bi-curiosity. A few years back, it was school shootings, the oral sex epidemic, and methamphetamine. When I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, AIDS was on everyone’s mind, and the panic over heavy metal music (does it lead to Satanism? Murder? Suicide? Too much black eye makeup?) was just calming down. Ten years earlier, alarm bells had sounded about young runaways. Before that, it was hippies, potheads, and free love. That followed fears about hoodlums, the homosexual menace, and teen marriage, which only appeared after anxiety about flappers and girls who wanted to ride bicycles in short new haircuts subsided. Indeed, adult nervousness about teens has always run the gambit. But while we fret over just about everything, the idea of minors having sex seems to elicit a unique brand of paranoia, and these days this paranoia has convinced a surprising number of people that an ever expanding list of sexual experiences should actually be prosecutable offenses when they involve minors.

This view is a demonstrated shift from the recent past. When I was in high school 20 years ago, most kids weren’t worried that the long arm of the law would reach into their highly personal, and obviously juvenile, sexual encounters (though gay boys, and black boys who dated white girls, have always had to look over their shoulders). And usually, this was for the best. Personally, I’m pretty sure that my rocky road to adulthood would not have been any smoother had the authorities discovered the revealing Polaroids that my 14-year-old girlfriends and I took of ourselves at a sleepover. Or had my 17-year-old boyfriend (a fellow who, if Facebook is to be believed, is now a happily married father of two) been charged with the crime of statutory rape when we had sex the following year. But things have changed over the past two decades, and we are currently living in a society with a legal system that can lump pedophiles together with teenagers having sex, that can treat kids who text naked pictures of themselves to a classmate the same way it treats child pornographers.

This change has occurred for a few reasons. One is that we are at a crossroads where old laws are meeting new technology with sometimes catastrophic collisions. Another is that over the past 15 years there has been an increase in the enforcement of statutory rape laws. These are laws that ban persons over the age of consent (which is different in every state) from having sex with anyone under the age of consent. In cases of statutory rape it is usually understood that a teen has agreed to have sex, but this agreement isn’t considered valid since juveniles are regarded as too young to make such a decision. Statutory rape is different from child molestation, where an adult is typically charged with abusing a prepubescent child. It is also legally different from sexual assault or forcible rape. The word
rape
is used in this situation because it is assumed that pressure or coercion must be involved when there is a difference in age between sex partners. To be sure, statutory rape laws can be an important tool in preventing sexual manipulation of teens by adults. But they can also punish kids involved in noncoercive situations—for example, a teen over the age of consent who has sex with a peer who is underage.

Today, most states set the age of consent at 16 to 18. This is a lot higher than it was a century ago, when 10 or 12 was the norm (though in the case of Delaware it was seven!). Moral reformers of the day, already fighting for temperance, suffrage, and social purity, successfully advocated to raise the age, and by the 1920s the age of consent for heterosexual sex was increased in almost all 48 states. But while they have been on the books for well over a hundred years, prohibitions against statutory rape began to be implemented more frequently in the late 1990s. Oddly, this was a result of the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which was designed to reduce the number of people receiving welfare payments. One way the bill sought to do so was by decreasing the number of “welfare moms”—basically single women with children who received social assistance. At the time, these women were a big target, often finding themselves blamed for draining welfare funds and cheating the system. In 1993, President Bill Clinton even championed the Welfare Reform Act with the claim that reducing welfare benefits “would be some incentive for people not to have dependent children out of wedlock.”

It was in this climate that a study emerged showing that the majority of teen moms were not having babies with the boys from their geometry class. Rather, the research demonstrated, it was men in their twenties who were most likely to blame for underage pregnancies. So in addition to all its other money-saving strategies, the Welfare Reform Act encouraged states to, “aggressively enforce statutory rape laws” as a way to prevent young single mothers from draining the system. This aggressive enforcement has remained in many places long after the hysteria over welfare cheats has died down.

One unintended result of the increased prosecutions has been the criminalizing of teens most people wouldn’t label as sexual abusers. Take Genarlow Wilson, for example. Wilson served three years in a Georgia prison after a conviction stemming from a 2005 New Year’s Eve party where the then 17-year-old boy received oral sex from a 15-year-old girl. Another kid took a picture of the act, that kid’s parents found the camera, the police were notified, and Wilson was arrested. Neither the girl in the photos nor her parents wanted to press charges. And despite the fact that Wilson was only two years older, he was above the age of consent in Georgia and she was below it. At the time, Georgia had a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for this crime. So that’s what he got—10 years in jail for getting a blow job. A year into his sentence, the law was changed to make the maximum penalty in this situation a still pretty serious 12 months in jail. Even so, it took another two years for a judge to allow Wilson’s release, and the boy was locked up longer than many serious felons.

Photographic proof is, of course, far from the only trigger of a statutory rape charge for a teenager. Charges often arise after parents notify the police about an incident. The result can be law enforcement that relates more to individual parental anger than it does to the gravity of the crime allegedly committed. Arrests can also come about as the result of state laws mandating that doctors, therapists, teachers, and even parents report
any
teen sexual activity that they get wind of.

One boy who found himself shouldering the burden of a sex offender conviction as a result of such snitching was a 16-year-old from Iowa named Ricky Blackman. Blackman became known to the authorities after a 13-year-old girl he met at a club for teens told her social worker that the two had had consensual sex. Because he was over the age of consent in that state and the girl was under it, Blackman was charged and convicted as a sex offender. This status meant that the boy was removed from his high school and prohibited from being in the presence of children other than his younger brother. He couldn’t go near schools, day-care centers, or parks. His 11-year-old brother couldn’t bring friends into their house. If his younger brother had been a girl, the teen would have been removed from his home altogether. To really drive home the point that Blackman was a danger to society, his driver’s license had the phrase “sex offender” stamped in red letters under his photo. His mother, Mary Duval—whose tireless advocacy on his behalf eventually helped secure his release from the registry—told a Nevada news station that sex offender registries are “setting registered offenders up for failure.”

In other situations, teens find themselves in a legal bind once a high-profile case captures the public’s attention. When, in 2007, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, then a teen actor starring in a Disney show, announced that she was pregnant by her 18-year-old boyfriend, Casey Aldridge, there was speculation that the boy would be charged with statutory rape. But no one could quite figure out where she actually got pregnant. Spears split her time between her home in Louisiana, which had one set of laws, and the set of her TV show in California, which had another. It was soon discovered that Aldridge was not quite two years older than Spears. This meant he could have been charged in California, but not in Louisiana. That is because Louisiana is one of 11 states with close-in-age or “Romeo and Juliet” laws on the books. These laws ensure that if a couple is close in age (typically between two and three years apart), even if one person is over the age of consent, then the case is looked at differently than if a 25-year-old had sex with a 15-year-old. Nevertheless, despite the fact that California does not have this legal loophole, prosecutors there declined to pursue the case.

That wasn’t the initial decision in another high-profile case. In September 2010, Massachusetts teens Sean Mulveyhill, 17, and Austin Renaud, 18, were charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old girl named Phoebe Prince. Prince made national headlines after committing suicide in the face of relentless bullying, and there were calls for something to be done. Since Massachusetts had no anti-bullying laws, the DA went for something that was indeed illegal: statutory rape—despite the determination early on in the investigation that the girl took her life after suffering from relentless harassment, not as a result of her sexual relationships. And though the boys she slept with seemed to be members of the social circle that was intent on tormenting her, they did not appear to be the bullying ringleaders. But in bringing statutory rape charges in this way—for a purpose unrelated to the harm done by the sexual encounter—the DA continued the national trend of inconsistently and haphazardly applying such laws. Ultimately, the following May, after a request from Prince’s family, the charges were dropped. Still, the fact that the charges were brought in the first place served as harsh warning for all teens.

The history of how statutory rape laws and age-of-consent rules have been applied to same-sex couples is somewhat different. While lesbians were rarely considered by lawmakers, many states passed unique prohibitions against sex between men. Often these laws imposed far harsher penalties for same-sex statutory rape cases than they did in comparable situations between opposite-sex partners. One of the most famous victims of this disparity was a developmentally delayed teen named Matthew Limon. In 2000, Limon was living in a group home in Kansas. A week after his 18th birthday, the boy performed oral sex on another boy who was 14 at the time. Both teens said the sex was consensual. But because Kansas had sodomy laws that applied only to gay men, and because Limon was legally an adult while the other boy was a minor, he was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to 17 years in jail. Had he performed oral sex on a 14-year-old girl, the maximum sentence would have been just 15 months. Limon spent five and a half years in jail before finally being released in 2005. His freedom was not won due to the compassion of the system, but rather as a by-product of
Lawrence v. Texas
, the 2003 case that saw the repeal of the federal sodomy prohibitions. Once those laws were overturned, Kansas and other states were forced to strike down laws that punished underage sex more severely if it involved homosexual acts.