Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (28 page)

The language of shared agreement is not always matched by teenage be- havior. And vigilant leniency notwithstanding, Dutch teenagers are some- times
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. At fifteen, Fleur is angry that she is only allowed to go out to cafés once a month. Her parents appeal to their agreements with her, but she thinks “did I really agree to that?” In an effort to change the status quo, Fleur tells her parents: “Why should I not be allowed to go out more often? I wouldn’t make a mess of things, like coming home really late. . . . Why are you begrudging me the pleasure of going out twice a month?” Her parents counter by taking out the family date book and saying: “Look at how often you have had a party?” But there is a reason Fleur has many

parties: as home-based forms of
gezelligheid
, parties are not subject to the same restrictions. Sometimes, as part of birthday parties, Fleur goes out to a café in town
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. She also uses a strategy common among her American peers:

I sleep over with friends [who live one village over] and then I often go out. [My parents] say: “Yes, I do need to be able to trust you.” . . . And I say, “You’ll just have to trust me.” Look, then I am lying, but it is also a little bit their own fault, I think. If they were a little more lenient, then I wouldn’t do that. But they are not.

With regard to drinking and smoking, some Dutch teenagers also fudge the truth. When Gert-Jan’s father asks him how much he has drunk, he “makes the number smaller.” Erik’s parents allow him to drink beer when he goes out with his friends. What they don’t know is that he also drinks cocktails and started when he was fourteen: “I felt very tough and started to drink whisky. But I also liked how it tastes, that is the problem.” Karoline’s mother has not forbidden her to drink and smoke, saying “otherwise you’re going to do it
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and that I do not want to have at all.” Still Karoline smokes at parties without telling her mother. Her mother also does not know that when Karoline and her friend Lieke go out, they “pre-drink” store-bought alcohol in groups of friends. Lieke realizes “it is actually quite a lot that you drink. Sometimes, you feel quite tipsy, my parents think that I only drink a few glasses, but I drink more than my parents think.”

Indeed, parental and peer norms about the acceptability of drunken- ness diverge. Unlike their parents, many Dutch teenagers are not troubled by drunkenness per se. But while they do not reject drunkenness outright, those who accept it as part of
gezelligheid
draw telling distinctions between problematic and nonproblematic varieties of being drunk: the first criterion is whether drinkers take into account their social relationships and refrain from causing trouble and disruption. Pauline thinks being drunk “happens sometimes” and that “is fine [as long] as you are not a nuisance to other people.” Erik also says that people who are able to drink “normally” are those who “don’t bother others.”

The second related criterion is that drinking must be motivated by an inner desire and characterized by inner control, even in a state of drunk- enness. Madeleine thinks boys drink initially because they are trying to impress others. That is wrong, she says. But, “if you say, ‘I am drinking because I think it tastes and feels good,’ well, then you should drink. As long as it does not make you aggressive, I don’t mind.” When you first

start drinking, Erik says, “You make mistakes, you keep chugging and you get toasted. After a while, that lessens and you drink because it tastes and feels good to you yourself and because it is
gezellig
.” Marjolein also distin- guishes between different kinds of drunkenness: “Being drunk is in and of itself not so bad. . . . It is a broad concept. What I don’t like is when people can’t stand on their legs. Drinking a bit is no problem if that makes your evening more fun, but you need to be aware of how much you can take.”

And although they recognize that they go beyond their parents’ limits, most Dutch teenagers believe that they still know “what can and cannot be done.” Marjolein says, “When I look at myself and my friends, then [how we drink] is
gewoon gezellig
. It is not too much.” Marcel also feels he has control: he knows when to switch to soft drinks in time. He does not want to throw up or be unsafe on the bicycle ride home. He does not want to bike in a crooked line at the end of the evening, or else his sister would suspect that he is tipsy. Pauline says “I know what I am doing when I drink. It is not like I am drinking for the first time this year.” Her parents are con- fident she can handle alcohol: “I don’t always tell them how much I have drunk because that would just worry them. Sometimes I come home and I am tipsy, but I can keep it hidden from them.” Elizabeth also says she can handle alcohol most of the time: “Yes, yes . . . sometimes, not yet. But usu- ally yes.”

Several of the older Dutch teenagers report having drunk or smoked marijuana a lot and say that they have since arrived at a place of greater control and self-possession. Ben’s parents always said, “You must learn from your mistakes,” and he believes he has: “I can keep myself under con- trol. After twenty [half-pint] beers, I am still quiet. You need to know your limits. If it goes over that limit, it will all come out again. But under that, I am fine. I am a calm drinker—I am not aggressive. I talk normally; no one notices it about me.” After a period of smoking a lot of marijuana, Sam drastically cut back after coming to the realization one summer, “It really does feel better to be without alcohol and drugs.” Monique also has had a learning experience. When she was sixteen, she often had the experience of “really being drunk, which is why later, at age seventeen or so, I really did not do that anymore.” Now, she gets a little tipsy but not drunk: “It is a discovery: ‘What can I do, what can I not do.’ You need to try that out.”

In short, vigilant leniency does not prevent the Dutch teenagers from doing things
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or sometimes going to excess. But although in doing so, they go beyond their parents’ viewpoints, their transgressions do not take them completely outside of adult-regulated society. First, for better or for worse, teenagers have access to institutional spaces—the family meal,

family celebrations, the café, and the disco—in which they participate in
gezelligheid
alongside adults of different generations. Equally significant, however, are the ways in which young people, even as they discover their individual capacities and boundaries, measure their behavior against shared notions of
what can and cannot be done
. Having gotten drunk once and running rampant through people’s gardens in the middle of the night, sixteen-year-old Thomas is unsure about whether he is ready to drink: “On the one hand yes, on the other hand no. I know what can be done and what cannot, I think.”

In contrast to their American counterparts, for whom sexuality is a furtive or segmented experience of coming of age that causes separation in their relationships with their parents, Dutch teenage girls and boys are encour- aged to make their sexuality
gewoon
and
gezellig
—integrate it into the self and the household without having it cause unnecessary upheaval and dis- cord. As we have seen, Dutch girls and boys encounter a range of home en- vironments, and the degree to which the negotiation of sexuality matches the ideal of tension-free “normality” also varies. Such variations notwith- standing, being able to discuss sexuality and spend the night with serious girlfriends and boyfriends at home lessens a tension that could grow into a disjuncture between peer and parental culture. The sleepover also cre- ates a bridge between continuity and change. And the Dutch teenagers do generally experience, or foresee, a self-directed sexual development while remaining connected to home and parental support.

This connection goes hand in hand with a sometimes subtle, some- times not so subtle ongoing control, including the admonishment to use contraception and the explicit or implicit encouragement to engage in a relationship-based sexuality with partners their parents like. Socialized to view sexuality as closely connected to contraception and condom use, most Dutch girls and boys do regard the responsibilities and pleasures of sex as intertwined. With some of the highest teenage contraception and dual protection rates in the world, they largely—though as Ben’s experience il- lustrates certainly not always—practice what they have been preached.
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Notably, unlike the boys, a few Dutch girls say they would rather sleep over at their boyfriend’s house than at home. Their reluctance suggests that these girls want to avoid the parental scrutiny and the emotional work that is involved in bringing a boyfriend home for the night, or to simply bypass the interweaving of middle-aged domesticity and youthful romance.

The psychology of incorporation is embedded in a broader pattern of domestic life, which anchors adolescents to other members of the house- hold in the pleasures and obligations to togetherness. As they move from the relative unquestioned obliging to parents during childhood to the for- mation of independent positions during adolescence, Dutch teenagers are required to observe the mandates of
gezelligheid
and develop an interde- pendent conception of their personhood. These mandates include manda- tory sharing and mutual attunement among family members, which are intended to produce agreement and commonality and to avoid secrets and alienations. The togetherness that results from the mandates of
gezelligheid
facilitates the “vigilant leniency” that parents practice with regard not just to sex but also to drinking, smoking, and drugs. For folk wisdom, shared by youth and adults alike, has it that the exercise of blatant power through prohibitions and punishments is ineffective, as teenagers will “just do it anyway.”

Such “soft power” may work wonders much of the time, but it is not foolproof. Some Dutch teenagers go out at night
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when they think their parents’ “vigilant leniency” is not lenient enough. And some youth move faster sexually than their parents would like or do not use contra- ception. Many Dutch teenagers who partake in the pleasures of alcohol stretch the truth about how much they drink. Indeed, Dutch teenagers are as likely as their American peers to have been drunk, although they are less likely to have used drugs.
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Excess comes at a price—Dutch interviewees who say they have drunk or done drugs a lot have often had to repeat a grade in high school. But with a system that gives many second chances to complete high school, with emergency contraception and abortion easily accessible, and without the dangers of driving or harsh legal sanctions for soft drug use, veering off course may take its toll but rarely leads teens into dire straits. Indeed, as those who admit they went too far insist, being able to “discover and try it out” has allowed them to learn from their experience what “can and cannot be done.”

SEVEN

Romantic Rebels, Regular Lovers

Throughout the preceding chapters, we have seen many indications that Dutch and American parents and teenagers conceptualize and experience gender differently. The American parents paint a gender-polarized universe in which girls and boys battle over competing aims—but rarely meet on mutual terms. We have seen that for American girls, it can be difficult to reconcile sexual maturation with parents’ expectations of them as “good girls,” while American boys confront the expectation that they will be “bad.” Dutch parents, by contrast, assume that boys and girls both will fall in love and form relationships, and Dutch girls and boys encounter similar preconditions for a sleepover—personal and interpersonal readiness, con- traceptive use, and respect for domestic peace. But girls are more likely to encounter tension in negotiating their sexuality and some prefer reducing parental involvement by sleeping at their boyfriends’ houses.

This chapter switches gears to examine how girls and boys in the two countries, using the messages they receive in school, from health-care insti- tutions, and in popular and peer culture, conceptualize and navigate dilem- mas of gender outside the home. Two issues are at stake. The first concerns the physical risks and dangers of sex which have traditionally been thought to plague girls disproportionately—both in reality and in the discursive construction of sexuality. Indeed, American feminist scholars have argued that sexuality always takes place at a nexus of pleasure and danger, although for teenage girls, the emphasis on danger often outweighs that on pleasure.
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But what we will see in this chapter is that American girls
and
boys both express little faith in their capacity to control the outcomes of sexual activ- ity, with boys as, if not more, likely to articulate a discourse of danger. The Dutch boys and girls assume, by contrast, that they can proactively prevent

the unwanted consequences of sex, although, especially in long-term rela- tionships, much of the work of creating a sense of safety falls to girls.

The second issue concerns the ways teenagers in both countries con- front gender-specific expectations and constraints, including the sexual double standard that makes (too much) sex a liability for girls and too little a liability for boys.
2
Notably, Dutch teenagers are more prone to speak of differences and conflicts between girls and boys than are their parents. Indeed, in some respects, the generation of teenagers gives evidence of more cross-national similarity than does the generation of parents.
3
At the same time, how teenagers perceive and experience these shared dilemmas of gender differs depending on their cultural templates. The template of adversarial individualism—with its skepticism about people’s inherent re- lational needs and proclivities—leads American teenagers, especially boys, to construct an oppositional understanding of self. Meanwhile, in accord with the template of interdependent individualism, neither Dutch girls nor their male counterparts view themselves as especially unique for wanting to integrate love and lust.