Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (31 page)

In trying to discern what it means to fall in love, some set the bar very high. Phillip is disdainful of people “who have been going out for a month or so and they
think
they’re in love.” And even after dating his girlfriend for a year, Daniel is reluctant to say he is in love: “I am not really sure about [whether I am in love], so I’d say I wasn’t. I am not a hundred percent sure.” One reason for his uncertainty is that in high school “you need to explore different kinds of people.” Another reason may be that “being in love,” as several American boys describe it, requires an almost superhuman capacity to feel and to give, a heroic relinquishing of self.
21
Jesse, for in- stance, says that his first priority in life “is being in love with my girlfriend and giving her everything I can.” Patrick does not think he has loved any of his previous girlfriends because that would mean “you’re willing to give up anything for that person. . . . Love means you’re willing to do anything for them no matter what the consequences are.”

Like several female counterparts, a number of American boys view mar- riage as the benchmark for a truly meaningful relationship and the ideal

circumstance for sex. However, the marriage ideal may not serve as a useful measure for healthy adolescent relationships. Even Jesse, who is “head over heels” in love with his girlfriend, still says that “the best situation for two people to have sex would be if they were totally committed to each other, like married.” Randy struggles to explain the relationship that makes sex right. Finally, he says, “I’d say like when you’re married. That would be the best way to put it. I’m like abstinent and everything. . . . I hope it is something I still have when I get married.” Phillip wants “to really fall in love with somebody” before he has sex. He elaborates: his partner “has got to be someone where I can’t see myself living with anybody else. Possibly even waiting until I am completely married.” Yet, since many American teenagers are likely not to marry until almost a decade after they start hav- ing sex, this means that they set their ideals very far from the concrete real- ity of their lives.
22

In the following vignettes, we meet two Dutch teenagers, Pauline and Erik. In several respects, their experiences resemble those of Stephanie’s and Jesse’s featured at the start of the chapter. Like Stephanie, Pauline had her first sexual intercourse under conditions that were less than ideal— uncertain, unprotected, and, from what we can ascertain, unsatisfying. And like Jesse, Erik is in a serious relationship with a steady girlfriend with whom he is very much in love. Moreover, in both countries, the girls and boys encounter some similarities in gender constructs and constraints pro- mulgated in peer and popular culture. But despite similarities between the teenagers in both countries, Pauline’s and Erik’s experiences of themselves as sexual and romantic beings differ notably from their American counter- parts, due to the institutional supports they receive and the cultural tem- plates they have available to them.

In her sixteen years, Pauline has been in love plenty of times. She describes the experience as “thinking a lot about that person, feeling comfortable with him, being able to talk well with him. . . . You just feel good with that person. You want to be near him.” At this age, Pauline explains, being in love “has a lot to do with your hormones . . . with your sexuality, and what you want. . . . It’s the feeling that you can have of being really sexually at- tracted to that guy or girl, and [figuring out] whether you want to do some- thing with him . . . go to bed with him.” She sees boys and girls as more similar than different:

Both boys and girls are thinking about sex and they also want to do it, I think, but maybe don’t dare to, [while] with relationships, it is more we’ll see how far it goes, and now and then it is serious. . . . Perhaps boys think a little sooner, “Oh, I am going to be stuck with the girl,” and boys may want sex a little sooner, but that can also be the reverse, so I don’t see a clear-cut separation [between the two].

But probed about whether girls and boys are
viewed
differently, Pauline says:

With boys, it is more seen as “tough” (
stoer
) when they have been to bed with a girl. [And] if they have not lost their virginity by age eighteen, [it is a prob- lem]. And with girls, it is [different]. Everyone is just like, “I am not ready for it, so I am not going to do it,” you know. They deal with it differently.

And probed about whether or not girls are looked down upon, Pauline says: “More quickly [than boys], I think. . . . If you kiss with a [different] boy often, then you are more quickly [viewed as] a slut than a boy who kisses a [different] girl each week. And a girl who often has a boyfriend or often goes to bed with a boy will be looked down upon more quickly.” Girls are safe, she says, as long “as it doesn’t go too quickly.”

When Pauline was fourteen, she had a boyfriend for six months with whom she had “gone further [than just kissing] and stuff.” She asked her parents whether she could sleep over at his house: “We talked about it well. Of course, I went on the pill—well, I had not started it but I had gotten it. They knew how far things were.” But, waiting for her period to begin, Pau- line had not started the pill when she spent the night:

He asked me, you know, “Would you like to go to bed with me.” And then I did it anyway. It is very strange, how you weigh things in that kind of mo- ment, thinking of the reasons you would and the reasons you would not do it. I thought, at a certain point, well, “Why would I not do it? I want to, but . . .” And what that “but” is, you don’t know. But still, you are not stand- ing completely behind it.

The experience was not a success: “The condom slipped off. That is really very shitty! And that for your first time! Well, I was like . . . [to the] hospital for the morning-after pill.” She and her boyfriend broke up. All in all, the experience “scared [her] to death.” Still, she does not regret it: “Because

the boy was really . . . not someone who talks, you know. . . . Because if he had started talking [and telling everyone] then you do start to think, ‘Oh, why did I do this?’” Since then, she has kept relationships shorter, “going further” without having intercourse.

Looking back Pauline says, “I was young compared with other girls in my class. But that happens, when you have a boyfriend for six months. He was also older. He was eighteen, and you know, then you come to it sooner.” Two years and several short-term relationships with no inter- course later, Pauline says, “I am ready for it. And I would like [to do] it.” She is “open to” having sex with her current boyfriend once she really trusts him and is sure she is ready to do it. If she felt that certain, her par- ents would not stop her, Pauline says, if “I were on the pill and safe”— using condoms and contraception, as “really gets harped on in those commercials.”

At sixteen, Erik feels that he is given a lot of freedom in society and at home. Of course, there are “moral rules” which dictate that he must not go about his “business in an asocial manner.” With regard to sex that means, as his father explained to him, “doing it safe, and general things, like, ‘You should not do it when your girlfriend doesn’t want to.’” Erik sees nothing unusual in his father’s words: “Most parents tell their children on time how everything works and what can be done and what cannot be done.”

When Erik and his girlfriend had been together for a few months, his parents and hers decided that the couple would be allowed to spend the night together. Erik explains: “They could see that the relationship seemed kind of serious.” Around age sixteen, “it is normal to be allowed to sleep together,” says Erik. “I’d let my children do the same.” Erik’s parents might have been surprised to discover that their son’s first sex took place consid- erably before his first sleepover: “We did it after two weeks, but to tell you the truth, it just felt perfect,” Erik says. One reason, Erik says, is that “I re- ally had the idea that I wanted to do it with
her
.” He explains, “I had had the idea for a while, ‘I want to grow old with you.’” And indeed, a year after first consummation, the relationship is going strong.

Erik sees few gender differences when it comes to sex:

In the past, [there was the idea that] boys were into sex and girls were not. But I think that difference is not really there. Girls think the same about sex. [And] when I was younger, I had the idea about sex, that girls wanted love,

but I think that is not really true. I mean, I think that boys are perhaps more likely to do it “just for an evening” and then nothing. A girl won’t do [a one- night stand] so quickly. But in principle I think boys and girls think the same about it.

Nor does Erik see himself as an exceptional guy because he has a serious girlfriend: “I think in my circle of friends, most guys think the same about things. You know there are always going to be a few guys who have a big mouth, but I think that in principle, they all want to have a relationship before having sex. . . . I think that everyone wants that, to have a relation- ship and everything.” Nor does wanting a relationship mean that sex is devalued. If anything, the opposite is true. Erik struggles to articulate his belief that sex is important to teenagers and that relationships are normal: “In the beginning, young people have sex to have
sex
. . . but . . . they will [tend to] wait until they have a good relationship, not just after a week. . . . The first time they do it to have
sex
. . . . [But for] those in their right mind, I think, sex happens in a relationship of some sort.”

What distinguishes Pauline and Erik from Stephanie and Jesse is first an assumption that they have the power and the institutional support for “do- ing it safe.” Sex education and health-care practices have made contracep- tive use practically as well as conceptually accessible to Dutch youth. Ever since the early 1970s, policymakers and health-care providers have been committed to removing financial and emotional barriers to contraceptive use among teenage girls. Low rates of unintended pregnancies, primarily the result of high rates of contraceptive use—two thirds of sexually active Dutch girls are on the pill—and secondarily, emergency contraception, il- lustrate how Dutch women and girls have been largely “liberated from the fear of pregnancy.”
23

The message that sex is fun and to be enjoyed by girls and boys equally, combined with the message that both should take responsibility for avoid- ing unwanted consequences, runs throughout sex education not only at school but also in commercials, magazines for youth, and media sources that youth value for their information.
24
Public health campaigns feature images of both opposite- and same-sex couples playfully holding condoms combined with such slogans as “Take off Your Pants, Put on Your Coat,” “Your Condom or Mine,” and “I Make Love Safely or Not at All.” In the 1990s, such campaigns were stepped up in response to concerns about

AIDS, leading Monique to complain, “It is like they’re stoning you to death with all the safe-sex messages.”

Like Erik, other Dutch boys say they have been educated to be “in their right mind” and to not behave in an “asocial” manner when it comes to sex and relationships. Frank knows that “of course, you should not be so stupid to [have sex] with a drunken head.” Thomas knows that it would not be right “if it went wrong, to not take responsibility for it, like if the girl becomes pregnant, you should not say, ‘Okay, goodbye then.’” Peter has heard so much about contraceptives from the “papers, television, and stories” that “it goes without saying that you use them. You really do not need to talk about it.” He explains that sex used to be for procreation, but nowadays, he says, “You don’t want kids, and over the last few years, all kinds of horrible diseases have entered into the picture, so you also [use contraceptives] for those reasons.”

But although Dutch boys have been schooled both at home and at school not to be “asocial” in sexual matters, Dutch girls experience most strongly the imperative to prevent pregnancy. That, like their adult coun- terparts, Dutch girls do typically use birth control pills effectively explains why Dutch boys do not voice a fear of sex “screwing” them for life.
25
And with confidential and free abortion services available in clinics across the country, even when girls do not follow the mandate to use contraceptives and become pregnant unintentionally, as did Ben’s girlfriend, they rarely give birth. For although Dutch girls are far less likely to become pregnant than their American counterparts and less likely to have an abortion, if they do become pregnant they are more likely to terminate their pregnancies.
26
Thus, even when sex “goes wrong,” Dutch boys can be fairly confident that they will not become fathers against their will.

While Pauline was able to obtain emergency contraception without sham- ing, like Stephanie she was nonetheless scared and somewhat scarred by her first time. Yet, the shadows cast by those scares and scars are distinct in their shading. Unable to reconstruct a narrative in which her choices make sense to her, Stephanie looked back on her first time as a terrible personal mistake and gladly relinquished her sexual agency to her mother. Pauline, by contrast, drew the conclusion that she behaved unwisely by not standing completely behind, and not being complete prepared for, sex, but she did not view her experience as a big mistake that diminished her faith in her- self. Instead, the experience led her to take subsequent relationships more

slowly, experiment with romance and sexuality within parameters that feel comfortable, and remain confident that she would be able to control and recognize her progression to feeling truly ready.

One reason that Pauline is able to maintain her sense of agency in the wake of her first time is that she is less fearful of social derogation for hav- ing had sex. Unlike their American peers, Dutch girls do not spontaneously relate stories about “sluts.” Certainly the label slut (
slet)
exists, but it does not have the same power in Dutch peer culture as it does in American peer culture, where it is used as weapon against girls who even suggest sexual behavior. One reason for the difference in the potency of the slur is that Dutch girls are unambiguously certain that within a well-functioning, steady relationship, sex is permissible. When a girl has sex with a boyfriend, says Marjolein, “It isn’t [looked down upon] at all.” Lieke also thinks that having sex is acceptable for girls, when “you’re fifteen or sixteen and you have a boyfriend you can trust.” Having sex in one or two successive re- lationships is fine, says Lieke, as long as “they are both in love.” Nor do Dutch girls risk being labeled a slut for desiring sex. Indeed, with no ap- parent qualms about expressing desire, Pauline says, “I am ready for it” and “I would like [to do] it.” Consequently, in Dutch peer culture, sex—or more precisely the mere suggestion of sex—is not as readily mobilized in the kind of name-calling and sexualized bullying that permeate American middle- and high-school cultures.