Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (15 page)

FOUR

Adversarial and Interdependent Individualism

The previous two chapters have left us with a puzzle: the American and Dutch white middle-class parents I interviewed—who resemble one an- other closely in terms of age, occupation, and education—nonetheless dif- fer dramatically in how they understand and respond to the sexual matura- tion of their teenage children. Dutch parents construct a nonproblematic, non-emotionally disruptive, and decidedly relationship-based adolescent sexuality. American parents, by contrast, construct adolescent sexuality as dangerous, conflicted, and deeply polarized. The difference between the American drama and the Dutch “normality tale” crystallizes around one striking contrast: a high-school-aged teen spending the night with a boy- or girlfriend at home is potentially permissible to nine out of ten Dutch par- ents, while this practice strikes nine out of ten American parents as beyond the pale, and even, quite frankly, as ludicrous.

What explains this dramatic difference between two otherwise similar groups? Are Dutch teenagers so different from American teenagers? This is part of the story. American girls are more than four times as likely to become pregnant and more than two times as likely to have abortions as their Dutch counterparts, even though they first have sex at comparable ages. Sharp differences remain even if we compare only white girls.
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It also appears that Dutch teenagers are less likely to have sex outside of the con- text of monogamous romantic relationships.
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In other words, when the American and Dutch parents talk about adolescent sexuality, they are ref- erencing a different set of realities. But as we will see in later chapters, the experiences of American and Dutch teenagers are not as different as their parents would lead us to expect. The behavior of teenagers often—though not always—reinforces parents’ expectations and approaches, but it does not explain them.

To understand why American parents dramatize and Dutch parents nor- malize, we must look at the two cultures of modern individualism that emerged out of the pivotal decades of the 1960s and ’70s and that became embedded in both private and public institutions, including the welfare state, in the two countries during the last quarter of the twentieth century. These different cultures of individualism constitute distinct responses to the challenges to traditional authority relations and sexual morality. The common currents of technological, political, and cultural change that swept through the advanced industrial world, unsettling the existing pat- terns of power and possibility, were interpreted through country-specific cultural and political traditions and were filtered through country-specific historical contingencies. What resulted were different conceptions of how individuals come to control themselves, attain autonomy, and assert and accept authority.

The first section of this chapter examines cultural traditions that shaped the perception and experiences of the changes of the 1960s and ’70s in the United States and the Netherlands. Out of the confluence of different cultural traditions, the social policies they influenced, and the different ex- periences of the upheavals of the unruly decades emerged what might be called an “adversarial” and an “interdependent” individualism. Using the interview material from parents who lived through these decades and be- gan raising children in their wake, I then unfold the different individual- isms by examining three “gray” areas parents confront as they guide their children through adolescence: the fostering of self-control, the attainment of adulthood, and the exercise of authority. Finally, we see how the indi- vidualism on which each set of parents draws sets up a logic that makes their approaches to teenage sexuality possible and plausible, in part be- cause adversarial and interdependent individualism not only control but also constitute youth.

The parents I interviewed—most of whom were born between the mid- 1940s and mid-1950s—have seen the norms that govern behavior for ado- lescents and adults change dramatically in their lifetimes. The societies into which they were born dictated rigid gender roles between men and women and strict authority relations between parents and children.
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But when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dutch and American parents began rais- ing their own children, a more egalitarian and individualistic childrear-

ing ethic had come to prevail, especially among the middle classes.
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In the 1990s, with their children poised at the cusp between childhood and adulthood, the American and Dutch parents said that they wanted their teenage children to become independent, self-determining individuals. Yet what it means to encourage these traits differs between countries, for par- ents in the two countries were referencing two different kinds of modern individualism.

A key difference between the two individualisms pertains to the rela- tionship between the self and others. In their 1985 classic
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues assert that “individualism lies at the very core of American culture.”
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Such individualism celebrates the sacredness of indi- viduals and their judgment, self-reliance, and self-expression. But inherent in American individualism is also a tension between autonomy and soci- ety.
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Indeed, write Bellah and colleagues, American individualism includes a fear that “society may overwhelm the individual and destroy any chance of autonomy unless he stands against it.”
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That fear is accompanied by the belief that, to attain full autonomy and to commit to others and contribute to society, “one must be able to stand alone, not needing others, not de- pending on their judgments, and not submitting to their wishes.”
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Given that Americans view social ties as matters of individual volition rather than necessity, Bellah and colleagues worry that with the waning of cultural languages that have long encouraged Americans to make commit- ments to family, religion, and civic life, their social fabric is fragile. One cultural vocabulary that allows Americans to reconcile their conception of themselves as free agents with their need for union is, Ann Swidler argues, the ideal of love (in the context of marriage) because “it describes a rela- tionship so right that it can be simultaneously perfectly free and perfectly binding.”
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But, argues family scholar Andrew Cherlin, Americans have ended up on a “marriage-go-round.” Being both more individualistic and more attached to marriage as an ideal than their European counterparts, they are more likely to marry, divorce, and remarry again.
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If in the private sphere American individualism is accompanied by an exceptionally strong attachment to the institution of marriage, in the public sphere American individualism has gone hand in hand with an ex- ceptionally punitive justice system. On the one hand, the celebration of self-reliance—and the stigmatization of dependency—have inhibited the institutionalization of income replacement programs that have made day- to-day living since the 1960s more secure in Europe.
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On the other hand,

the United States has long imposed harsh justice on those deprived of freedom.
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Lacking a notion of membership in a wider society apart from individual volition, Americans see no alternative to punishment when in- dividual volition proves insufficient to regulate behavior. Following the 1960s, the tradition of harsh justice grew into what David Garland has called “a culture of control”: the divestment from public welfare accompa- nied by rapid growth in incarceration rates, especially since the start of the War on Drugs, which has imprisoned a large segment of population, often on minor charges.
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In contrast to a conception of the self as ideally completely self-reliant and unencumbered by social ties other than commitments that he or she has freely chosen, the Dutch conception of self situates the individual within the sociality of which he or she is part. Writing in 1987, North American anthropologist Peter Stephenson observes that “the concept of self with respect to others in the Netherlands is simultaneously intensely egalitarian and highly individualistic.” Noting the expression, “One Dutch- man a belief, two Dutchmen, a church, three Dutchmen, a schism,” Ste- phenson argues that Dutch culture is characterized by a high degree of dif- ferentiation among individuals.
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And yet, an equally pervasive cultural value is that of functioning and living in close interaction and cooperation with others, a potential contradiction that is resolved by a particular con- ception of the self as “a discrete individual who can nonetheless work well with others.”
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The cooperative yet individualistic concept of self that Stephenson ob- serves has multiple antecedents. Citing British historian Simon Schama, Stephenson traces it back to the seventeenth-century floods in the Nether- lands, which instilled an understanding of interdependence and inter- reliance in Dutch citizens.
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And the Dutch scholar Walter J. M. Kickert has argued that consultation and cooperation, aimed at consensus between leaders of different interest groups, are “centuries-old characteristics of the Dutch state.” During the twentieth century, Kickert argues, this tradition in- formed Dutch industrial practices—including collective labor agreements between employers, unions, and government—and what political scientist Arend Lijphart has termed the Dutch “consensus democracy,” whereby the elite representatives of interest groups—including religious groups—broker mutually acceptable compromises.
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In the post-1960s era, this “politics of accommodation” was democratized to include new interest groups.
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Indeed rather than view equalization and individualization as a threat to the social fabric, prominent Dutch sociologists of the 1970s and 1980s

argued that people were becoming more dependent upon one another, leading to the “emancipation” of previously subordinate groups—children, workers, women, and homosexuals.
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They saw a new mode of regulating social relations in private and public life—negotiations between more or less equal parties who exercise self-restraint and willingness to consider each other’s needs.
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Theory reflected public policy. Following the expan- sion of the welfare state in the 1950s and ’60s, Dutch society of the 1970s and ’80s underwent one of the strongest equalizing trends in the industrial world.
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And the assumption that people would, under controlled circum- stances, self-regulate their impulses was reflected in a lenient penal pol- icy, including the tolerance of soft-drug use, which was institutionalized in 1976.
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The cultural traditions—most notably about the self in relation to oth- ers—filtered the experience of the 1960s and 1970s and their aftermath in the two countries. Many scholars and lay individuals in the United States harbored misgivings about the changes wrought by shifts in sexual and au- thority relations in part because, ironically, the conception of the self, cele- brated and feared in middle-class culture, does not provide tools to concep- tualize and foster self-restraint and social bonds without institutions that can hold individuals in check: marriage, religion, and the justice system. In the Netherlands, by contrast, lay individuals, scholars, and policymakers embraced the gains of “modernization” because they could draw on cul- tural resources to reconcile growing self-determination with strengthening of social bonds: traditions of inter-reliance and cooperation between elites lent themselves as means for exerting “soft” control and maintaining sta- bility at home and in the polity in a more democratic society.
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Notable is that order
was
in fact maintained in the Netherlands.
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As we saw in the previous chapter, few Dutch parents describe their own coming of age as out of control.
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Nor do they describe a fundamental uprooting of the mutual obligation between men and women noted by many American interviewees and by American feminist scholars who argued that the sexual revolution enabled the “flight of hearts” among men.
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At the same time, interdependence between the sexes came at a price: until the 1990s, Dutch mothers were usually full-time homemakers.
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In the 1970s and ’80s, their participation in the labor force was a fraction of that of their American counterparts, even if the latter often worked by economic necessity rather than choice.
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Finally, lacking the intergenerational battles over Vietnam and struggles over racial oppression, the Dutch did not confront the vio- lence on their own soil that Americans did.
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Out of the confluence of nation-specific cultural traditions, historical trajectories, and policies emerged two different versions of modern indi- vidualism in the two countries. Asked to address three gray areas in the fostering of autonomy—the acquisition of self-control, the attainment of adulthood, and the exercise of authority—parents in the two countries il- luminate what I call “adversarial” and “interdependent” individualisms. Presuming the antinomy between autonomy and social relationships of dependency, the former celebrates the capacity to leave the collectivity and establish full self-sufficiency, while at the same time it requires exter- nal control of adolescents’ drives, using blatant force if necessary. The lat- ter presumes mutual dependence of individual and relationships, which makes fostering autonomy a matter of encouraging self-determination and self-regulation within ongoing but changing relationships of interdepen- dence, maintained through consultation.

I gauge the conception and management of autonomy in three areas. The first pertains to parents’ perceptions of self-control. I gauge those percep- tions by asking them about their conceptions of and approach to alcohol consumption. Because alcohol can enhance emotionality and impulsive- ness, the question of when and how young people ought to be permitted to drink invites parents to articulate assumptions about teenagers’ capacity to control their emotions and impulses. We will see that American parents articulate notions about alcohol that are similar to those about sexuality— the adolescent self who is not yet equipped to control the strong inner pas- sions or peer pressures and whose potentially out-of-control drinking must be held in check by adult supervision. Dutch parents, by contrast, assume that young people can and will control their alcohol intake and place their drinking in the context of their participation in sociality.