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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

A match made in Graceland
He wore white patent leather shoes and I still married him.
By Carol Ormandy
[01/18/00]

A Fisch by any other name
My last name is Fisch. My husband's last name is Flynn. Our son's last name is Flysch. No, it's not a spelling error.
By Audrey Fisch
[01/20/00]

Why should a baby get the father's last name?
Historians, scientists and legal scholars offer some explanation.
By Carol Lloyd
[01/20/00]

A new year and a new spouse
Forget losing weight. For 2000, a vast number of British couples resolved to lose something else.
By Shelley Emling
[01/21/00]

Southern governors declare war on divorce
But their methods ignore social science, solutions and their neediest constituents.
By Lisa Moricoli Latham
[01/24/00]

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"There are few hard statistics on the trend," Franks concedes in the story. The most she manages to reveal is that the percentage of teens who have intercourse by the age of 15 has risen in the 27 years since 1970. This, too, is hardly news. (What is news, which Franks fails to mention, is that teen pregnancy has declined steadily since 1991.)

But the lack of hard statistics doesn't keep Franks from speculating that an entire generation of children is growing up without sexual morals. She says at one point: "The kids indulge in behavior that seems a far cry from what their parents generation called 'free love.' The children's version is 'free sex.'"

But as we all know, "free love" was never more than a euphemism for "free sex." This comparison would be simply laughable if it weren't so damned mean-spirited. What can Franks possibly hope to gain by turning contemporary children's sexual experimentation into pathology, while claiming that sex play in their parents' generation was nothing but good clean fun?

And nowhere does she prove that the kids' involvement in sex has anything to do with their values in the first place. Indeed, there is nothing to indicate that their sex play, which rarely seems to involve intercourse, is anything but play, at least in their minds.

Franks paints a world where kids from 12 to 16 experiment with everything "from French kissing to fellatio" -- nice alliteration but a rather wide range of experience. Of course, one might expect this range. Franks herself cites statistics that show that, in the U.S., 38 percent of teenage girls and 45 percent of teenage boys have had sexual intercourse by the age of 15. Although even Franks admits that sexual experimentation isn't quantifiable, she chooses, for the pleasure of her readers, to dwell on fellatio (and the less alliterative cunnilingus). Franks, it turns out, can only think of one thing.

Basically, it all adds up (conveniently) to a rather cynical excuse to print hardcore porn from the mouths of babes. And for the rest of the article, that is what Franks does.

For example, "Darcy," 13, describes "playground sex" -- the perfect fusion of childhood innocence and sexual wantonness: "It's not dangerous -- the crazies are scared of us 'cause we're butt naked in like, five minutes. I do gymnastics. My thing is the rings."

I'm not going to tell you what "Darcy" does on the rings, but Franks does. There are several interesting aspects of this confession (or boast, we don't really know). But nothing about the statement would indicate that our kids are going to hell. (Although, God willing, Franks just might be.)

Just imagine the kind of questions Franks is asking these kids. No one would expect an adult to answer queries designed to elicit graphic detail about their sex lives -- literally blow by blow -- especially when the answers are meant to appear in a mainstream magazine. (I'd like to see someone ask Leo about his exact position during his most recent sexual encounter.) I'm 26, so I think my mother assumes that I have something of a sex life, but I don't expect her to ask me about my blow job technique. Nor would I expect a reporter to ask me to describe my last tryst in graphic detail. And if she did, I'd tell her to go fuck herself. But that is because I am her peer -- not a 13-year-old trying to please or impress an adult, or, even cooler, to get a quote in Talk magazine.

To ask these questions of 12- to 16-year-olds is to exploit -- even endanger -- any number of relationships between adults and kids. Kids' tendency to want to please adults means that, when confronted by a reporter asking salacious questions, they may feel that they have no choice but to answer. Their desire to appear more sophisticated, worldly and experienced than they actually are may lead them to exaggerate or just plain make stuff up. And their fear of being judged or punished means that they follow every confession with a penitential plea for leniency.

But regardless of the answers, no kid should be asked these questions. For an adult to sit down with a kid and lavish attention on him in the form of an intimate probe about sex has many -- obvious -- ramifications. I'm more shocked by the idea of an adult asking teenagers to reveal the intimate details of their sex lives than I am by the idea that teens have sex lives to be revealed.

Next page | Then what did you do? Did you swallow?