Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (2 page)

imagining changing her position on permitting the sleepover, although maybe “if they are engaged or about to be married . . .”

Karel and Rhonda illustrate a puzzle: both white, middle class, and sec- ular or moderately Christian, they belong to the one hundred and thirty Dutch and American parents and teenagers, mostly tenth-graders, whom I interviewed between the early 1990s and 2000.* Despite the fact that both groups of parents are similar in education, religion, class, and race— features that often influence attitudes toward sexuality and childrearing— the vast majority of American parents oppose a sleepover for high-school- aged teenagers, while most Dutch parents permit it or consider doing so under the right circumstances. This book seeks to solve the puzzle of this striking difference, which is all the more surprising given the liberaliza- tion in sexual attitudes and practices that took place throughout Europe and the United States since the 1960s. Given similar trends, why do the Dutch and American parents respond so differently? How do the parental approaches affect teenagers’ experiences of sexuality and self? To answer these questions, we must look beyond sexuality at the different cultures of individualism that emerged in American and Dutch societies after the sexual revolution.

Not Under My Roof
will take us beyond our usual perspectives on ado- lescent sexuality.
2
Medical and public health literatures conceptualize ado- lescent sexuality primarily in terms of individual risk-taking and the factors that augment or lessen such risks.
3
American developmental psychologists tend to view adolescent sexuality as part of adolescents’ separation from their parents and as an aspect of development that is especially perilous given the disjuncture between teenagers’ physical and cognitive develop- ment.
4
American sociologists have generally bypassed the parent–teenager nexus to focus on relationships and networks
among
teenagers—in romance and peer groups. They have examined how peer cultures and networks and the status hierarchies within them impact adolescent sexuality.
5
Finally, gender scholars have examined how teenage girls’ and boys’ experiences of sexuality are profoundly shaped by gender inequalities—including the sexual double standard.
6

This book takes a different approach. It focuses on the negotiation of adolescent rights and responsibilities within the parent–teenager relation-

* To promote narrative flow, I will often refer to “Dutch” and “American” parents and teenagers rather than specify the socio-demographic characteristics of the groups I studied. But since there are many sources of cultural variation within each country, care must be taken in generalizing from the findings and analyses to the larger Dutch and American populations.

ship as a particularly fruitful, and often overlooked, site for illuminating how youth come to relate to sexuality, themselves, and others. This cross- national comparison shows how much of what we take for granted about teenage sexuality—in American folk, professional, and academic wisdom— is the product of our cultural constructs and institutions. Indeed, the ap- parently trivial puzzle Karel Doorman and Rhonda Fursman introduce is not just a puzzle but a window onto two different ways of understanding and shaping individuals and social relationships in middle-class families and in the societies at large, which constitute nothing less than two dis- tinct cultures of individualism. Each culture of individualism comes with freedoms and sacrifices: the Dutch cultural templates provide teenagers with more support
and
subject them to deeper control, while the American cultural templates make the experience of adolescent sexuality particularly conflict-ridden.

Today most adolescents in the United States, like their peers across the in- dustrial world, engage in sexual contact—broadly defined—before leaving their teens, typically starting around age seventeen.
7
Initiating sex and ex- ploring romantic relationships, often with several successive partners be- fore settling into long-term cohabitation or marriage, are normative parts of adolescence and young adulthood across the developed world.
8
In the Netherlands, as in many countries of northwestern Continental Europe, adolescent sexuality has been what one might call
normalized
—treated as a normal part of individual and relational development, and discussible with adults in families, schools, and health care clinics.
9
But in the United States, teenage sex has been
dramatized
—fraught with cultural ambiva- lences, heated political struggles, and poor health outcomes, generating concern among the public, policymakers, and scholars.

In some respects, it is surprising to find adolescent sexuality treated as such a deep problem in the United States. Certainly, age at first intercourse has dropped since the sexual revolution, but not as steeply as often as- sumed. In their survey of the adult American population,
The Social Orga- nization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States
, Edward Laumann and colleagues found that even in the 1950s and 1960s, only a quarter of men and less than half of women were virgins at age nineteen. The major- ity of young men had multiple sexual partners by age twenty.
10
And while women especially were supposed to enter marriage as virgins, the major- ity of those who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s had sex-

ual intercourse before they married.
11
Still, a 1969 Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans said it was wrong for “a man and a woman to have sex relations before marriage.”

But by 1985, Gallup found that a slim majority of Americans no longer believed such relations were wrong.
12
Analyzing shifts in public opinion fol- lowing the sexual revolution, sociologists Larry Petersen and Gregory Don- nenwerth have shown that among Americans with a religious affiliation, only fundamentalist Protestants who attended church frequently remained unchanged. Among all other religious groups acceptance of premarital sex grew.
13
This growing acceptance of premarital sex did not, however, extend to teenagers: in their 1990s survey, Laumann and colleagues found that almost 80 percent of the American population continued to believe sex among teenagers was
always
or
almost always
wrong. Since then, two-thirds of Americans have consistently told interviewers of the General Social Sur- vey that sex between fourteen and sixteen is always wrong. Interestingly, disapproval has remained widespread even among youth themselves: six in ten fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, surveyed in the National Survey of Fam- ily Growth, said it was not right for unmarried sixteen-year-olds who have “strong affection for each another” to have sexual intercourse.
14

Part of the opposition to, and discomfort with, adolescent sexuality is its association with the high prevalence of unintended consequences, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In the United States, the rate of unintended pregnancies among teenagers rose during the 1970s and 80s and started dropping only in the early 1990s.
15
However, despite almost a decade and a half of impressive decreases in pregnancy and birth rates, the teen birth rate remains many times higher in the United States than it is in most European countries. In 2007, births to fifteen- to nineteen-year-old girls were eight times as high in the United States as they were in the Neth- erlands.
16
One reason for the different birth rates is that while condom use has improved among American teenagers, they remain far less likely to use the most effective methods of birth control, such as the pill.
17
Another rea- son is that, once pregnant, American girls are far more likely than their Dutch peers to carry their pregnancies to term.
18

Nor are high rates of unintended pregnancies the only problems. Many American teenagers have positive and enriching sexual experiences, yet researchers have also documented intense struggles. Sharon Thompson found that only a quarter of the four hundred girls she interviewed about sexuality talked about their first sexual experiences as pleasurable. Among the girls Karin Martin interviewed, puberty and first intercourse decreased self-esteem. Psychologist Deborah Tolman found that most of the girls she

interviewed struggled to fully own their sexual desires and experiences in the face of cultural constructs such as the double standard and the “slut” label that stigmatize and deny girls’ desires. Laura Carpenter illuminated another side of the double standard, finding that many of the young men she interviewed experienced their virginity as a stigma which they often sought to cast off as rapidly as possible. And in her ethnographic study
Dude, You’re a Fag
, C. J. Pascoe found that teenage boys were encouraged to, treat girls as sex objects and risked social derogation if they openly ex- pressed affection for their girlfriends.
19

These qualitative studies are corroborated by national surveys that show that American teenagers feel widespread ambivalence and misgivings about their first sexual experiences, which suggests that they do not feel control over, or entitled to, their sexual exploration. In a national survey, a minor- ity of young women and a small majority of young men in their early twen- ties reported that their first heterosexual intercourse was “really wanted.” Almost half of the women and a sizable minority of the men surveyed said they had mixed feelings.
20
In another poll, a majority of American girls and boys said they wished they had waited longer to have sex.
21
Research has also found that if girls are young relative to their peers when they first have sex, they are more likely to experience negative emotions afterward, espe- cially if their relationship breaks up shortly thereafter. But even without intercourse, first romance can bring girls “down” because their relationship with their parents deteriorates.
22

American teenagers have received uneven, and often very limited, sup- port in navigating the challenges of sexuality and first relationships from adult institutions outside the family. Despite rising pregnancy rates, in the early 1970s American policymakers and physician organizations lagged in making contraception easily available to teenagers, and even today Ameri- can youth face multiple barriers in accessing contraception, including con- fidentiality concerns.
23
With few other venues for discussing sexuality, the media has been an important, although often unrealistic, source of sex education for many American teenagers. Describing the 1960s and 1970s when sex permeated the media, historians D’Emilio and Freedman write, “From everywhere sex beckoned, inciting desire, yet rarely did one find rea- soned presentations of the most elementary consequences and responsibil- ities that sexual activity entailed.”
24
Since then, researchers have noted that some media including magazines and Internet sites provide good sexual health information but not the interactive dialogue with adults that teen- agers seek.
25

Teenagers have been unlikely to find such dialogue in the classroom.

Along with fights over the legal age to consent to contraceptive and abor- tion services, battles over sex education have been among the most heated sexuality-related political struggles in America.
26
Politically organized reli- gious conservatives succeeded in institutionalizing a federal sex education policy that has required the schools it funded to teach “abstinence only until marriage.” Initiated in the early 1980s, federal support for abstinence- only policy was institutionalized in the 1996 welfare reform bill. Gener- ously funded for many years, this policy dictated that schools teach that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is likely to be damaging, and it prohibited them from teaching about the health benefits of condoms and contracep- tion.
27
Even in school districts not funded by this federal policy, sex educa- tion about contraception, pleasure, sexual diversity, and relationships has often been greatly constrained.
28

Few survey findings have been as consistent as the finding that the gen- eral public supports sex education in schools.
29
In keeping with surveys of the past three decades, a 2004 national survey by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University found that most parents wanted their children to learn about contraception and condoms. Yet, the same survey also gives some insight into why the abstinence-only policy nevertheless prevailed: while most parents did want their children to learn the infor- mation they needed to protect themselves, most respondents also wanted students to be taught that they should not engage in intercourse or other intimate sexual activities. And they accepted the “marriage only” frame- work: two-thirds of parents of middle and high-school students agreed that teenagers should be taught that abstaining from sexual activity outside of marriage is “the accepted standard for school-aged children.”
30
Abstinence, most agreed, includes refraining from oral sex and intimate touching— sexual activities that most American youth, in actuality, start experimenting with in their mid-teens.
31

In a late 1980s qualitative study with one hundred and twenty parents and older teenagers, Dutch sociologist Janita Ravesloot found that in most families the parents accepted that sexuality “from the first kiss to the first coitus” was part of the youth phase. In middle-class families, parents ac- cepted their children’s sexual autonomy, though lingering embarrassment kept them from engaging in elaborate conversations. Working-class par- ents were more likely to use authority to impose their norms, including

that sex belonged only in steady relationships. In a few strongly religious families—Christian or Muslim—parents categorically opposed sex before marriage, which meant “no overnights with steady boy- or girlfriends at home.”
32
But such families remain a minority: a 2003 national survey by
Statistics Netherlands
found that two-thirds of Dutch teenagers, aged fifteen to seventeen, who had steady boy- or girlfriends, said that their parents would allow their boy- or girlfriend to spend the night in their bedrooms; girls and boys were just as likely to say that they would be granted permis- sion for a sleepover.
33