Ezra Klein likes this column by David Brooks. Ezra writes:
[Brook's column is] a perfectly sound meditation on the paradoxical relationship
between an increasingly sexual culture and a decreasingly sexual youth
that doesn't pivot into insane ravings in the last paragraph.
In the column, Brook says:
As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious.
Brooks then gives a list of stats which show or purport to show declining sexual activity among teenagers. I had originally intended to dig into the stats, but then I got to the CDC website, saw the huge PDF documents with hundreds of charts, and decided to junk the serious analysis and just go for the easy snark. As usual.
What Brooks is after is support for his "innately conservative" thesis about American society; i.e., Americans are basically all Puritans, no matter what we say. I have no idea if kids today are sexually less active. My instinct is that there is at least some education that is getting kids to use condoms more regularly, and also a fair bit of lying to people doing research, due to the onerous propaganda put out by the fundies. In other words, I bet that on one hand, the data doesn't support Brooks thesis (more kids using condoms is not conservative) and on the other hand, the data is wrong.
Brooks says:
American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in
the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.
By improvement, Brooks means less sex is being had. That's really the bottom line for right-wingers: fewer people enjoying themselves is better. And in fact fewer people may be having sex today, thanks in part to the anti-sex brigade, but even if so, I don't think what's happening is consistent with Brook's thesis that American youth are becoming more conservative about sex.
Kids that I do know - very intelligent, well-educated, if not all well-off - all seem to have a much more knowledgeable, mature attitude to sex that was not common when I was growing up. I don't know many teenagers, so my sample is skewed. If they aren't going out and getting sloshed and having random sex as frequently, perhaps that's because they don't feel compelled to get drunk as an excuse for sex. They're picking their shots because they don't have a better handle on the difference between sex and love, and they like both, just not necessarily from the same people. Or at the same time. I think the new maturity young people display, despite the efforts of the anti-sex crowd's, is largely due to the information and conversation available on the web. If you're middle-class and came of age since 1992, there has been no time you have not been able to flirt, make arrangements for sex, discuss sex or look at porn in complete anonymity. That ability has had nothing but an unalloyed good effect on the lives of young people, as it gave them the tools to find out and figure out what is what much more quickly.
Brooks says:
[I]t's becoming clear that we are seeing the denouement of one of the
longest and increasingly boring plays on Broadway, the culture war. ... [T]oday's young people appear not to have taken a side in this war;
they've just left it behind. For them, the personal is not political.
Sex isn't a battleground in a clash of moralities.
Put starkly like that, it is clear to me that Brooks is wrong. He hopes that young people have absorbed some religiously-based personal conservatism, a new prudery. I don't think so. But whether he is right or I am, or we're both wrong, it's impossible for people to separate their attitude towards sex from their political views. If kids are more prudish today, as Brooks says, then that will have an impact on their views of things like women's reproductive rights and sex ed in the schools. If they are more enlightened, as I believe, they will want to see the knowledge and self-determination that they enjoyed spread to others. The personal is not always the political, but when it comes to sex, it is.
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