Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (12 page)

kids make that they’re not able to handle the consequences [of] and it ru- ins them for five, ten, fifteen years, maybe the rest of their life.”

The dangerous consequences of teenage sex loom particularly large be- cause parents see a disjunction between the onset of hormones and the development of the cognitive and emotional capacity to handle them. Jany Kippen thinks her son Neil is definitely not ready to have a sexual relation- ship because he lacks “a real clear picture of the consequences.” She just cannot “see Neil remembering to use a condom.” He “is not ready to take responsibility for what he does. I mean not that he doesn’t know that there are consequences but they’re always not going to happen to him. He’s the invincible fifteen-, sixteen-year-old and nothing could go wrong.” Rhonda Fursman’s son Sam “has all the adult equipment, he’s got the desires. . . . [It’s] just a question again of perhaps learning how to channel them.” She wants to avoid putting him in “situations where he can’t make a decision, or a more reasoned decision.”

A sleepover with a girl- or boyfriend would be the kind of situation in which American parents believe teenagers might be unable to make a “more reasoned decision.” While sexual interest is expected and to a cer- tain extent even welcomed, parents see their own role as containing and directing, rather than giving full range to, their children’s raging hormones. Theirs is a delicate role, for while many parents institute rules against dat- ing before sixteen, or keeping the door open when girl- or boyfriends are visiting, none go as far as to prohibit dating altogether, an acknowledge- ment that some amount of romantic and sexual exploration should be part of the adolescent maturation process.

Yet, that exploration should be kept within certain parameters. And given the assumption that when offered the opportunity, teenagers may not be able to control themselves against the forces of their hormonal urges, permitting a sleepover of the kind that is common in Dutch middle- class families strikes many American parents as ludicrous.

The second cultural frame that structures discussions of teenage sexuality among the American parents is that of the
battle between the sexes
. While the Dutch parents talk about teenage sexual desire in relation to being in love and forming a relationship with another person, the American parents are more likely to talk about teenage sexuality in the context of internal hormonal urges and external peer pressures than as the result of a strong romantic connection with a girl- or boyfriend. Indeed, many American

parents express extreme skepticism about the possibility of falling in love as a teenager; several suggest that while teenagers, particularly girls, may think they are in love, they are not actually in love. Instead, the American parents emphasize the ways in which girls and boys have opposing, even antagonistic, desires and interests, and the ways in which girls and boys pay a different price when they do engage in sexual activity during high school.

Harold Lawton believes that boys want to get laid at any cost, while his wife Doreen believes that girls have sex grudgingly, only to hold on to their boyfriends.
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Like Doreen Lawton, many American parents assume that boys are much more active than girls in pursuing sex. Helen Mast be- lieves that if her daughter Katy decides to become sexually active, it will not be because she herself wants to, but because “she’s only doing it because [her boyfriend] wants her to.” Dierdre Mears believes that boys
and
girls are hormonally driven, but “most teenage boys would fuck anything that would sit still. And some things that wouldn’t. . . . And I don’t believe girls would do that.” Donald Wood was anxious about his daughter’s recent dating debut. He explains why: “I’m a parent of a teenage cheerleader. I’m very concerned: ‘Dirty little boys! Get away! Get away.’”

Like Doreen, many American parents argue that girls make an emotional investment in their sexual partners that boys do not. Jennifer Reed believes women “perceive sex as something very permanent and lasting where I don’t know, I don’t think, this is hearsay, because I am not a man but I think a man can definitely have sex just for the night.” Pamela Fagan says, “Teenage girls have so much more of a romantic fantasy, and emotional in- volvement [than boys] and all-encompassing kind of emotions with it and think, ‘I am so in love and this love will last forever.’ It’s not likely it will.” Helen Mast also sees girls, not their boyfriends, “emotionally distraught over a broken relationship.” To remind her sixteen-year-old daughter that her relationship will probably not be the last one, she will ask her, “Are you guys going to get married or something?”

If different investments are one part of the story, different costs are an- other. Parents stress both the emotional and economic costs of sex. Dierdre Mears thinks that “when we got rid of the double standard and had the ‘sexual revolution’ someone forgot to say, ‘Excuse me, it appears that the emotional cost is higher for women than men.’” And Frank Mast is trying to teach his daughter Katy:

The ultimate shouldering of the responsibility of making a mistake, having a boy/girl relationship, is on the girl. The boy can say, “Sorry, it didn’t work

out,” walk away, “See ya later.” . . . They [have to] feel mentally responsible for what they did, or have some deep inward feeling that “I’m responsible,”

. . . to step up and say, “I’m financially responsible.” . . . Ultimately girls don’t have that choice.

One of the costs of sex for American high-school girls is the loss of sym- bolic resources. What it takes to acquire a “bad reputation” differs in dif- ferent social locations. A good reputation is fairly precarious in small-town Tremont. But even in Northern California’s Corona, “the old double stan- dard is still there,” Flora Baker knows. “As much as we would like to think not, if a girl has sex with a couple of different people, she gets a reputa- tion.” She recalls the words her daughters use: “They call someone a slut, whore . . . She’s a . . . yeah, she’ll do anybody. She’ll go to a party, she’ll do anybody. To some degree that’s [a bit unfair]. But that is something that women have to deal with.”

But parents also suggest that, in today’s world, sometimes girls are ag- gressors. Deborah Langer was dismayed when she intercepted a number of notes boys had written her daughter. The sexual acts they described con- vey an “astounding” lack of respect for women. She tells herself, “Boys are boys and I have two of them myself. And I’m not saying that some of these boys won’t turn out to be nice young men some day, but they’re going to have daughters too.” Deborah wonders whether perhaps girls have become more like boys: “I just feel that there’s just a lack of modesty and I think that some of the girls are almost just as forward as the boys and perhaps my own daughter included.”

More socially liberal than Deborah, Rhonda Fursman thinks “boys will be boys” is a “piece of crap.” She believes that in the post-sexual-revolution battle over sex’s costs, boys too can become victims. Rhonda worries that her son might fall prey to a girl who wants sex only to get back at her mother. By not letting her son date until he is sixteen, she is protecting him, she explains, against becoming a victim of a girl’s pressure “to bring her flowers and stuff.” Now her son can just say, “My mom won’t let me do this.” Bonnie Oderberg wants her son to understand “the vulnerability of both himself and of girls.” But like Rhonda, Bonnie worries about (ab)use: “I don’t want [Alan] to be a user of women. He’s a real good-looking young man and he has a lot of girls that call him all the time, so I want him to be respectful and responsible with their feelings as well as his.”

With sex at adolescence conceptualized as a battle where there are costs and benefits, winners and losers, it is not only the power of biol- ogy that makes adolescent sex such a risk-ridden territory. The battle be-

tween the sexes and the different types of pressures boys and girls exert on one another are also cause for parental concern. Not just “hormones” but “love,” or what especially girls might mistakenly call love, is easily out of control, and parents encourage their children to consider the costs of both. Given these concerns, the American parents view it as their job to rein in romantic relationships during the high-school years. Not wanting their children to fall prey to dangerous and premature relational entangle- ment, placing external parameters on their romantic relationships—for instance, by not permitting a sleepover—is one way to protect adoles- cents against relationships that they are not yet equipped to successfully negotiate.

Since they envision young people as easily carried away by their hormonal urges or by emotions they mistake for love, American parents view it as their responsibility to prevent their teenage children from having the op- portunity to engage in sexual activity, at least within the domain that par- ents ought to control: the parental home. Such
parent-regulated adolescent sexuality
stands in tension with another mandate, namely, to respect and promote the development of autonomy, and to provide adolescents space to explore their emerging independent identities outside the home. Indeed, parents expect and even encourage young people to experience themselves as driven by sexual interest—in fact, they are sometimes concerned when they see no evidence thereof—but they also believe it is vital for parents to place clear external parameters on that interest.

The often visceral opposition to a sleepover—even for older teenagers who are still living at home—is one parameter on which almost all of the American parents agree, even when they appear reconciled to the fact that sex will likely become part of their children’s lives during their adolescent years. Henry Martin is a divorced father with full-time parenting responsi- bilities who has gone farther than most in providing his son with sex edu- cation. He has instructed his son Steve on the details of female anatomy and sexual pleasure, so that his son will know how to be a good lover. But when asked whether he would permit his seventeen-year-old daughter to have her boyfriend spend the night, Henry recoils. There is “no justification for any of that, in whatever sense,” he says. “It goes completely against the things I believe in. For one, religiously, I don’t believe that type of relation- ship would be good, but I don’t live that kind of life.”

The belief that permitting a sleepover under one’s own roof is inappro- priate is particularly noteworthy in American parents who may be liberal in other ways. Iris DiMaggio, for instance, has openly discussed sexuality and contraceptives with her children. She does not, however, let her son Phillip sleep with his girlfriend at home. Why? “Maybe it is my own com- fort,” she says. “It’s like giving them license to do as they please, and I am not ready to do that.” Neither would she let her nineteen-year-old daugh- ter spend the night with her boyfriend. “That’s not an example I want my [son] given,” she says. What example does she want him given? “There is a time and a place. And it’s not at home.” Bonnie Oderberg has spoken openly with her stepson Alan about sex, and she has left condoms for him in the bathroom. Still, she cannot imagine letting him spend the night with his girlfriend at home. “It would be uncomfortable for me.”

Relative to their Dutch counterparts, American parents are very upfront about their emotional discomfort with teenage sexuality. They experience and express it strongly, without apparently feeling a social pressure to moderate their emotional reaction. About the prospect of a sleepover, Bon- nie Oderberg says, “It’s not necessarily that I would feel it would be wrong for him. It would be very uncomfortable for me” because “it’s right in your face that they’re having an adult type of relationship.” Kirsten Rickets does not like the idea of permitting a sleepover, now or in the future:

It’s better not to have it so blatant, to do things a little more secretively like I was raised. We were on the sly and in secret. It seems a little better that way, rather than blatant in front of your parents about it. . . . If my [adult] son wanted to bring a girlfriend home he can rent a hotel room. . . . I’m not going to have some adults in my house screwing away in the bedroom and I can hear them. Forget it.

In addition to emotional recoiling at the thought of a sleepover, the American parents also oppose a sleepover because it would violate their notion of proper sequencing in the adolescent developmental trajectory. Like Cheryl Tober, Iris DiMaggio believes her son’s continued dependency on her makes a sleepover inappropriate. Once her son Phillip is “really on his own,” and is “making his own decisions,” Iris says she would no longer object to a sleepover: “When you are still living in this house you are still financially dependent on us. To some degree you are emotionally depen- dent on us. You are dependent on us for almost everything, day to day.” Self-sufficiency makes the sexuality of children their own business: “To be honest with you, when they are gone, they will be living their own lives,

and I don’t have a say. So if they come home and they choose to share a bed with someone, that’s their choice.”

In other words, Iris would accept the sleepover
not
because she wanted to make sure that, as a parent, she continues to be connected to her son’s development, or because she is willing to accept his girlfriend as a (tempo- rary) member of the family. Rather, Iris would accept the sleepover out of respect for Phillip’s hard-won autonomy and out of recognition that she no longer had the right to “have a say” over what he does. Like Iris, Calvin Brumfield would not permit a sleepover until his son has attained full fi- nancial autonomy—which Calvin defines in legal terms. In the meantime, Calvin sympathizes with, even encourages, his son’s “raging hormones,” chuckling when he found fifty condoms in his drawer. But a sleepover is out of the question until age twenty-one: “Twenty-one is the magic num- ber. You’re not a teen anymore, you’re an adult, you can be sued, you can be, you know, [you’re] super-adult, you know, there is no more.”