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Sexual Politics and Our Children by Miles Mathis Many readers appear to have
found my commentary on sexual politics to be just as amusing and iconoclastic
as my commentary on art, so I hope I will be forgiven for continuing to develop
my opinion along these lines. This
essay will not concern sexual politics between men and women; it will concern
how our new sexual politics is affecting our children. In the last century we have had a unique opportunity to
fundamentally change the way we raise children. Just as our attitudes towards women, racial minorities, and the
poor have undergone a sea change, so have our attitudes toward children. We no longer raise children under the Oliver
Twist rubric, expecting them to be slaves or ornaments. We have attempted to treat children with
more kindness and consideration, to listen to them, to learn from them, and so
on. But while our intentions may have
been for the best, we have failed. The
pendulum has, for some reason or many, swung in the far other direction, and
our children are now out of control. We
all know the famous examples: Columbine and other school shootings, gang
warfare, street crime by teens, and so on.
But even disregarding this far end of the spectrum, average teens are
more rebellious and more undisciplined than ever. Fifty years ago, a high school or junior high in the US had some
small number of “hoods”. In the 60’s we
got the beatniks and then the hippies: we had a small amount of rebellion from
a small sector, and this rebellion tended to be based on some statable
scruple. Protest was focused, that
is—it wasn’t just bad behavior for the sake of bad behavior. But after Nixon and Reagan, the rebellion
spread. It not only spread, it became
unfocused. More than that, it became
unstatable. A high school became a
conglomeration of different sorts of rebellion, with almost everyone in some
sort of splinter group of dissatisfaction.
But most groups couldn’t even say what the problem was. Some groups, like the hippies and Goths,
still toyed with political ideas, but the groups just as often split based on
drug choice or clothing styles as on anything else. We have all read decades’ worth of commentary on this
problem, and since Columbine the amount of ink spilled is truly fantastic. There are a lot of people who really desire
a solution, but no one seems to have put his finger on the problem. The right tends to talk about family values
and more discipline, while the left tends to want to spend more money on
studies and conferences—which will allow us to share the pain of our teens and
create a culture of support and understanding.
Both approaches seem to contain a kernel of good sense, but on closer
scrutiny they dry up and blow away.
Both are an attempt to apply a pat, generalized answer to a question
that is basically undefined. Discipline
is the only part of all this that has any content, but discipline works only
when it has a definite direction. If we
are going to push, we have to push teens from one thing to another. If we don’t know what is wrong or what is
right, then discipline is just more cruelty.
All the rest, including “family values” and “cultural support,” is just
windiness and nebulosity. We will never begin to solve the problem unless we admit that
there is a reason why teens are rebelling. Almost everyone on both political sides seems to assume that
teens are rebelling out of boredom or contrariness. It is deemed to be a cultural malaise, and the teens are just
doing their own unfathomable part. The
right especially seems to think that teens rebel only because we are allowing
them to. They are just spoiled little
snots, acting out. Well, there is a
good deal of that going on, but it is not the primary cause of the
situation. We may indeed need more
discipline, but discipline alone will not solve the problem. It will only cover it up for a while. We assume that teenagers have always been rebellious and
that toddlers have always been hellions, but it isn’t really true. Children of all ages are often headstrong,
and most require very positive discipline of some sort, but the teenage years
were not always what they are now. In
past centuries, most of the difficulties of these years were caused by
puberty. Young people had to get used
to new bodies and new desires. They
still have that, of course, but now they have much bigger real
problems. And here is where I offer the
so-far-unseen problem. It has recently
begun to be reported on that the age of onset of puberty has lowered. It has been reported on because it has
become so obvious. But the truth is
that the age of onset has been changing for more than a century. In the 19th century, age of onset
was normally 14 to 16 for both boys and girls.
For many, puberty might not end until 17 or 18. This began changing at the end of the 19th
century, with medical and sanitary advances, better diets, and so on. By the 1950’s, it is estimated that the
average age of onset had already dropped by a full year. Since the 50’s the rate of advance has
increased, until now we see many boys well into puberty by 11 or 12 and some
girls seeing primary signs of puberty (breast swelling) at 8 or younger. All the causes of this are not known, but
hormones in food and other intended and unintended contamination of water, air
and food may be a primary cause. This
is on top of the obvious factor of better overall health. Why does this matter, you may ask? Well, it only matters when it is combined with another grand
societal change, which is the age of consent and marriage. While biology was moving in one direction,
culture was moving in the other. In the
19th century, people (especially girls) might marry at 14, or even
12. I am not condoning this. There is certainly something perverse about
marriage before puberty. But the fact
remains that, in most instances, the age of puberty and the age of consent or
marriage were pretty much the same.
Statistically they were close. But they are no longer close, and this is perverse for an
entirely different reason. It is
perverse because it creates, not just by expectation but by law, an extended period
of extreme sexual difficulty. The
average age of puberty is now estimated to be about 12.5, for both boys and
girls. The age of consent in the US is,
on average, 18. This is a period of
five and half years where sex is frowned upon, and often illegal. To state it in another way, a primary human
function (perhaps the primary human function) is placed in a state of
taboo, semi-taboo, or illegality. It is
placed in this state of taboo in its very first phase. As soon as young people become sexual, their
sexuality is placed by society in a negative category, or several negative
categories. It remains in this negative
category for almost six years. If you
do the math, six years is one third of the life of the teen living it. If a teen is celibate from 12 to 18, then
for one third of his or her life the teen will have been starving a natural
function and appetite. But it is even more than this, for it is not only sex that
is frowned upon, it is also marriage.
Teens used to be able to skirt the sex prohibition by getting married, but
that is no longer true. Up until the
50’s or 60’s, there was little or no stigma attached to young married
couples. Now there is, especially among
teens from “good” families, rich families, or families with college
expectations for their teens. If
someone presented you with a married couple from the US and told you they were
both in their teens, you would assume either 1) that she got pregnant and they
had to marry, 2) that they were both very rural, or 3) that they were both not very smart. In the recent past, almost no one would have jumped to any of
these conclusions. As I have said in
another paper, teen marriage is even more frowned upon than teen sex, since
teen sex does not necessarily affect anyone’s college or career plans. It is thought that teen marriage must. There have been other important changes, ones that are rarely
mentioned. One is that as recently as
the fifties and sixties, high school girls were not prevented from dating
college boys. In fact, it was a
cliché. It was understood by all
concerned that high school boys were too immature for many older teen
girls. A small gap in ages has been
common for centuries, perhaps for all human history. We find it a commonplace when we watch movies from the 50’s, or
when we watch movies about the 50’s.
High school girls wanted to date college boys, and many of them
did. In the rest of the world, it still happens. Even in western Europe there is no stigma
attached to high school girls dating college boys. If anything it is a badge of honor, a minor feminine
conquest. It was common in the US until
the 70’s, when some parent used the age of consent law against a boyfriend, and
now it is a thing of the past. Dating
is not strictly illegal, of course, but sex is. Without the potential of sex, both sides think, “why
bother.” College boys no longer drive
by the old high school, to see how Peggy or Sue is doing. It is too dangerous: they could actually be
arrested. Some may imagine that I am just reliving an old kvetch: I am
still complaining because I couldn’t cruise the high schools when I was in
college. But I don’t remember ever
wanting to cruise the high schools when I was in college. Had I gone to college in my home town, I
might have had the impulse to do so, but I ended up far from home, soon too
busy with “serious” relationships to cruise any hot spot. No, what clued me to the problem was
considering the thing from the side of the girl. After college I went back to cruise the college, and I found that
the girls had changed. They were weird
and getting weirder. The sort of girl I
had always dated had gone into a funk, and since this was the only sort of girl
I wanted to date, I had to try to figure out her funk. What sort of girl am I talking about, you may ask? I am talking about the smartest prettiest
girls in the class. When I was in high
school, these girls ignored the hell out of me, of course. I had a strong feeling they were my type,
but they didn’t happen to agree. A few
years later a few began to agree and I settled into a blissful, if short, span
of years. But pretty soon thereafter,
something changed. And it wasn’t
me. There were no Goths when I was
in school. My high school didn’t have
any Goths or hippies, much less gangsters or rappers. I predated all that. We
had a few very tame punks and that is about it. This was the late 70’s and things were very quiet. No guns, lots of virgins, lots of
Bibles. I went through puberty at 14
and had sex at 17. Only three years of
misery; perhaps less, because I wouldn’t have known what to do with a girl when
I was 14 or 15 (just ask Cindy). I
needed some time to settle in. Say two
years of misery. Anyway, the serious rebellion didn’t hit the high schools
in the US until the 80’s. It had been
drifting in through the music for many years, first in a mostly principled way
from people like Dylan and Mitchell, then in a slightly more dramatic and
slightly phonier way from someone like Jim Morrison and finally through punk,
from bands like the Sex Pistols. But
punk didn’t hit the mainstream in the US until the early 80’s and by then it
had splintered into a hundred directions.
All of these splinters were crying and screaming, but very few of them
could really say what it was all about.
Why so angry? Why so
alienated? Was it sex, politics,
psychology? Most people still can’t
say, the punks and Goths and metalheads included. One thing is pretty clear: it hasn’t really been about politics
since the 60’s. Marilyn Manson may talk
about Bush when he is giving an interview, but his audience often doesn’t care
about that. They are just bottled up
and they need a release. Why? Well, the very
form of that last sentence is a giveaway.
They need to scream and shout and hop up and down and knock eachother
about. They need to feel physical
pain. They need to be aggressive. Why?
Because they are sexually repressed. They weren’t or aren’t allowed to have sex,
and when they had sex they couldn’t allow themselves to feel good about
it. There was no positive release, just
more created tension. This is also why
they are angry. They should be
angry at their parents for creating a society that is sexually broken, but many
can’t figure out how to state that blame in sensible sentences. So they just develop a generalized and
unfocused anger. They are mad at
society and their parents, and they are mad at themselves and eachother for not
being able to focus the anger, to be able to do anything constructive. So they don’t do anything constructive. They just “deconstruct.” They deconstruct themselves with lots of
unfocused and illegible psychology, and they deconstruct their surroundings
with graffiti, modern art, raucous music and random violence. Girls are just as active in
this deconstruction and violence and rebellion, and it is because girls have at
least as much to rebel against. Girls
have gained cultural support in a thousand ways since the 80’s, mostly institutional
support from schools and governments in creating new opportunities. But concurrently they have suffered more and
more from sexual lines that make less and less sense. They have more career opportunity but less sexual
opportunity. You will say that sexual
mores have relaxed greatly since the 80’s, but this is not true. Only a given few of them have relaxed. Others have tightened, as I said above. We are somewhat more forgiving if two 16
year olds have casual sex, it is true, since if they use birth control and
don’t have cooties, no harm done. But
we are more disapproving of serious relationships than ever before, since we
think they must get in the way of college and career plans. And we have forbidden any age difference in
dating. To return to the high school
girl dating the college boy, I don’t think any adult understands the enormity
of this, for the girl. The
college boy can always date someone else.
It is therefore not a great onus upon him, as I would be the first to
admit. No, the onus is on the girl, who
must date a high school boy or no one.
Given the choice, many date no one, and this is a huge hidden societal
problem. In the past it was the smartest and prettiest who were able
to date the college boys. Everybody
knows this, since it is common sense.
They were the most in-demand.
Now, what happens if, overnight, you disallow the smartest and prettiest
girls from dating the college boys? The
shallowest of these girls will just date the best guys in the high school,
since they must be seen at the top of the given heap. But what of the other girls?
What if the high school boys just don’t interest them, in all
honesty? What do they do then? I’ll tell you what they do: they become
Goths and punks, they cut and dye their hair and pierce themselves and throw everything
back in your face. That is what
they do. That is the real explanation
behind the fact that the brightest and most attractive students are the ones
most likely to become rebels of one sort or another. Everyone knows that high IQ students are more likely to commit
suicide, to be Goths or punks, to join cults, and so on. This is one of the major reasons why, at
least on the female side of the equation.
They are forbidden to act naturally, to do what they would do in a
reasonable universe, so they act unnaturally and in an unreasonable way. They are not allowed to date who they want
to date, and should date, so they balk.
When a horse or donkey or dog balks, a good trainer will
assume that there is a natural reason.
You are asking the animal to do something he cannot do, or something he
does not understand. An animal does not
balk just to be contrary, or because he is of a certain age. An animal balks because he cannot go on,
physically or mentally. Man is an
animal. A high school boy or girl
balks because he or she is being asked to do something that is
unreasonable. Being crammed together
all day and all year in a big ugly building and listening to just-say-no
lectures is not reasonable, let’s face it.
High school used to make a bit more sense, due to the fact that more
reasonable information was being imparted and the fact that a majority of
students weren’t sexually ready to enter the world years before
graduation. Smart students weren’t
bored to death, since the classes weren’t taught to the lowest common
denominator (or, I should say, it wasn’t quite as bad as it is now,
qualitatively). Many were satisfied
being given a few years to gain confidence, since they hadn’t gone through puberty
in 6th grade. And those who
were more advanced, in whatever way, could date older guys or girls. The high school wasn’t in a sexual
lockdown. Ironically, high schools are now having to build real fences,
install actual detectors, and undergo physical lockdowns, and it is because
they first created this legal and moral lockdown years ago—a lockdown most have
forgotten exists. Society created a
sexual lockdown decades ago, with mores and actual laws, and the physical
lockdown has become necessary because the inmates have finally decided to
revolt. With each passing year they
revolt more and more. But the lagtime
in between the two lockdowns means that everyone, the kids and the parents
both, have all but forgotten what the revolt is about. The kids remember that they are being
repressed, but they can hardly remember the law or taboo that is repressing
them. They don’t know that the world
was different fifty years ago. They
believe their parents when their parents tell them it was always hard. They blame themselves for being such bad
kids. But still they must revolt. And revolt
they must and should, for their parents didn’t have the sexual problems they
have. Their parents didn’t go through
puberty at age ten or twelve, their parents got married at 18 or 20 or 22 and
had kids immediately. Their moms dated
college boys if they wanted. Their dads
may be 2, 3, 5 years older than their moms and nobody cares. Their parents had two or three years of
privation in a milieu when almost everyone was deprived and knew it. Kids now have five to eight years of
privation while watching half the world snog and snuggle on the TV and
internet. Their parents watched Dick
van Dyck and Mary Tyler Moore in separate beds. They have to watch everyone doing it, from fake lesbians and fake
heterosexuals on HBO to Homer and Marge Simpson on Fox. This and the kids also have to deal with the artifacts of
their own rebellion. Not only must the
kids survive the primary fact of a long, and, some must feel, penal celibacy. They must also survive being reminded of it
every moment by their capturing heroes—the Morriseys and Morissettes, the Nine
Inch Nails and Beastie Boys and Eminems.
Their light is turned on at six or eight by the Backstreet Boys or
N’Sync, they are jaded at 14 by Sarah McLachlan or Natalie Merchant or Tracey
Chapman, and finished off at 18 by Marilyn Manson, all before their first
time. My generation had it easy: we only had to survive the
light melancholy of Bread or Stevie Nicks.
Listening to Olivia Newton-John sing Please Mister Please was
never likely to leave anyone suicidal.
My parents courted to Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra and “Somewhere my
Love”. Peyton Place was about as smutty
as anything got back then. This was
when they actually had glee clubs. I
think “glee” has since been purged from the dictionary. Kids these days never see or hear anything
remotely like glee. Even Sesame Street
is too politically au courant to stoop to glee. By age ten, forgot it, kids are smoking cloves and reading the
Marquis de Sade. There are two pretty obvious
solutions to all this, neither of which is going to be easy. The first is to delay puberty. The only natural way to do this is to ban
any hormones that induce it. Anything
that may mimic these hormones must be kept out of the body. First we have to identify these substances
and only then can we hope to filter them all.
Of course this will not affect changes due to overall health. We can hardly malnourish our children in
order to delay puberty. The second is to better match our cultural timetable to
nature’s timetable. As the onset of
puberty comes earlier and earlier, so must our expectations of sexuality and reproduction. Study after study tells us not only that
puberty comes earlier, but that younger mothers are healthier mothers. Women who have their first child before 20
are less prone to all sorts of cancers and diseases, and their children are
healthier, too. The risks for all sorts
of retardation and deformity continually rise with the age of the mother. Knowing this, we still encourage women to
wait until they are 30. I am not recommending a return to old-style “family values”
but we must come to terms with the facts of biology. I have no problem with women wanting both careers and
babies. But if we can make this
possible for 30-something women, we should make it possible for teenage
girls. If a woman can have a full-time
job and a baby or two, then why can’t a teenage girl? Neither high school nor college is as time-consuming as a
full-time job. Why should women have
choices and girls none? Or, more to the
point, why should women be praised for bravery and girls suffer a stigma? It is not logical. Just as pressing as reproduction is sexuality without it. Girls who don’t want to have babies must nonetheless find a way to
be sexual creatures. A 16 year old
girl—who may already be six years past puberty—must have just as much right to
a sex life as a 26 old woman or a 66 years old woman. We don’t want the girl preyed upon by bad men of any age, but how
is a college boy a necessary danger? If
she is brought up properly, he is more likely to be good for her than bad. We think we can skirt some problems by only
allowing teens to date eachother. But
one partner in a relationship with some experience is often better than
none. It is two virgins that can do the
most damage (as is a joke in Europe). The major solution, though, is to move college up two
years. Send the kids to college as soon
as they can drive, at 16. Let them grow
up with a little bit of freedom. And
if they want to move in together or get married at 16, let them. Encourage them to love eachother and maybe
they will. We now encourage them to
treat eachother casually, and they do. Which,
of these, really makes more sense? And if they want to have babies, we should encourage that,
too. If it doesn’t make any sense the
way society is now set up, then we just have to change the way society is set
up. Sex and reproduction and happiness
and satisfaction should be the priorities, and business should be the enabler
of all these things. As it is, business
is the priority, and we deform everything else in order to fit this schedule of
business. For instance, if young mothers or couples cannot have babies
in the current market, it is because they cannot afford child care or medical
insurance or other such things. But in
many western countries, these things are already provided by the state. Here in Belgium, people can’t believe that a
rich country like the US would so effectively stigmatize and privatize a thing
like having babies. If the US does not
want to permanently subsidize these things (babies) and does not want to raise
taxes in order to do so, then it could provide assistance to young people as a
loan, to be paid back later in life.
After age 30 or 40, sex may not be such a pressing issue in the person’s
life, and he or she will have the degrees and experience necessary for a higher
income. Once the kids are out of the
house, both the man and the woman may be more career-oriented. They will need something to do, and that is
the time for industry and advancement.
Maybe that is the time to pay for all those diaper services and vaccines
and so on. It must be true that happier and healthier young people must
mature into happier and healthier old people.
Young people who were not deprived of sex and children will turn into
productive and well-cared for older people, who have plenty of grandchildren to
entertain them at lunch and after work.
As it is, it is nothing more
than cruelty to continue to countenance the sort of sexual existence we have
hoisted upon our children. They may be
rich and spoiled beyond belief, in many ways, but in the most important ways they
are still worse off than Oliver Twist.
Not only will we not give them more gruel; we will not give them
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