My confusion surfaced again this past week when I read "Parents need to dispel kids' myths about sex habits," a column by Susan Reimer that appeared in my local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. Then I read "A Teen Twist on Sex" in TIME Magazine.
Both articles were about the just-released National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a survey made by a U.S government agency (the National Center for Health Statistics) in 2002 of the sexual habits of over 15,000 Americans ages 15 to 44 ... including over 2,200 teenage boys and girls ages 15 to 19.
The NSFG found, per TIME:
More than half the adolescents surveyed ... said they had engaged in oral sex ... That proportion was about the same among boys and girls. And although you may assume that girls mostly perform and boys receive, the numbers show the give and take is again about equal.
And this:
... about 11% of girls 15 to 19 say they have had at least one same-sex encounter — the same percentage that was found in women 18 to 44.
In other words, over one in 10 teenage girls 15 or older has presumably had oral sex with another girl!
Susan Reimer is alarmed about these statistics mainly because engaging in practices of oral gratification carries risks of sexually transmitted disease. Her article and the one in TIME both suggest this is happening because teens have heard the message that they'd better abstain from sexual intercourse, at least when unprotected by birth control ... so (they reason) why not avoid the issue of STDs and unwanted pregnancies entirely by resorting to oral sex.
That STDs can be passed also through oral sex has apparently not been impressed on them.
I find all this troubling because I have grave doubts about those who, like Susan Reimer, advocate teaching teens anything more permissive than good old-fashioned chastity. I don't think they can iron out all the internal inconsistencies in their position.
I say "chastity," not "abstinence," because the latter word suggests going against the presumed norm of teens having sexual partners at a young age and outside marriage. In other words, to tell a teen to "abstain" is to admit that most of his or her fellow teens are having sex, and then to say, in effect, "Be an exception." Chastity, on the other hand, purports to be the norm per se, such that those who have too-young or premarital relations are cast as the exception to the rule.
As for the inconsistencies, I feel it is contradictory to advocate strong parental input into teens' choices on sex, on the one hand, and to oppose parental notification laws on the other. Again, I have doubts about urging teens to choose condoms over abstinence. Even if condoms are OK for married couples, that doesn't mean parents ought to acquiesce in their children's sexual activity by recommending condoms to high-schoolers. That invites the response, "If condoms are OK, why not oral sex?" After all, condoms sometimes fail and leave users exposed to STDs.
Whether you call it chastity or abstinence, it pretty much means having a sex life of the type recommended in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Basically, no sex outside heterosexual marriage. No abortion. No gay or lesbian sex.No artificial birth control is another mandate ... though it's one I'm really dubious about, personally. (Read one Catholic theologian's argument against the church position on birth control here.)
As far as I can tell, the Catechism is not down on oral sex in the marital boudoir, somewhat surprisingly, as long as it is not done as a clever way to skirt intercourse and possible pregnancy.
I find myself strangely drawn to this old-fashioned, now-countercultural view of sex and marriage ... with one major reservation.
The reservation stems from my (admittedly intuitive) belief that the central organizing principle of all Catholic sexual morality is the glorification of a woman's fertility — of her ability to conceive and bear children.
As I wrote in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions, conservative Catholics extol a "new Catholic feminism" based on "the unique dignity and vocation of women." What is the basis for this "unique dignity and vocation" if not the fact that women, but not men, can conceive?
Conceiving, bearing, and raising children is the core idea of our much-vaunted family values. Since sex is traditionally required to initiate pregnancy, sexual relations must be confined to heterosexual marriage. Whatever the husband and wife do in the bedroom must be open to conception. And so on. Just about every Catholic teaching on sex, marriage, and reproduction derives from an urge to glorify — idolize? fetishize? — women's unique reproductive status.
Imagine an alternate world where all people are hermaphroditic beings with male and female reproductive parts. Any person of the proper age could impregnate any other. Marriages might not exist at all, or they might not be restricted to precisely two adults. The concept of separate gender roles would be meaningless. So would the concept of same-sex sex ... since, in a way, all sex would be same-sex sex.
Would such a world even care about "the sancity of marriage"? The rules for creating and nurturing succeeding generations would be wholly practical and entirely utilitarian.
Furthermore, it would be hard to imagine any basis whatever for designating one class of beings as having "unique dignity and vocation."
In other words, I don't see any coherent basis in our world for recovering old-fashioned values of chastity and sexual abstinence while still upholding feminist assertions of a woman's vocation as identical to a man's. The "unique dignity and vocation" view and the pro-chastity view seem joined at the hip, in our non-hermaphroditic world.
That's why you can color me confused. I don't want to acquiesce in a "new feminism" which validates women's "unique dignity and vocation" and thereby undercuts "old feminism." Yet I feel in my bones that, if we want to avoid taking internally contradictory positions about sexuality, we need to be teaching our kids good old-fashioned chastity.
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