Straight Talk For Teens By Teens

Parents in the dark on their teens’ sexual activity

Dear Straight Talk: I’m 16 and I’ve been reading the last few columns and I’m writing in response to what Rose said about the way girls are treated differently than boys around promiscuity. Girls are labeled “sluts” even if they do it just once with their boyfriend. You don’t have to “sleep around” to get this label. Both girls and guys throw this word around and it’s very negative. Yet there is no degrading label for a guy who has sex. Guys can be as sexually active as they want and nobody cares.

Also, Rose is completely right about how girls really put their emotions into it, taking it much more seriously, wanting there to be love. The slut label can really tend to pigeon-hole a girl and make her feel like a loser, when in fact she’s acting no differently than anyone else. Everyone is basically doing it. Farren mentioned in an earlier column how naïve parents are as to how much sleeping around there is. This to me is the number one amazing thing! Our parents are clueless! From what I observe, about 70 percent of girls lose their virginity before they graduate from high school. Sophomore and junior years are the most common time that it happens and once a girl’s done it, the average number of partners she’ll have before she graduates is about four. Most girls tend to lose their virginity with a steady boyfriend but after that, it generally happens when the opportunity arises, which is usually at parties when everyone gets drunk. That’s when it’s most common. It’s almost funny how clueless this generation of parents are; it’s like they turn a blind eye.—Average Auburn teen

Dear Average teen: Thank you for writing. I’m sure you opened some of those blind eyes today—unless of course they don’t believe this could possibly be their child. I expect some mail on this one! Fasten your seat belts for more perspective from the Straight Talk staff:

From Brittney, 16: I agree with everything you are saying. Most parents are completely in the dark. Very few kids ever talk to their parents about their sexual activity. I know girls who have been lying for years about where they are spending the night and parents just don’t check up on them. I think it’s mostly a trust thing. Parents are trusting because their kids are basically good kids and they don’t realize how promiscuous we are. It’s like we are a generation of actors. We are really good at making a fabrication seem sincere. And with so many of us doing it, we learn from each other how to get better and better at lying effectively. If parents really knew what was going on, they would think less of us, they would be “disappointed”, but the fact is, almost everyone’s doing it. And what do you expect? Since birth, the media—run by our parents’ generation, as Ashley pointed out—has been feeding us movies and TV shows with singles meeting, drinking and having sex. It’s 24/7. We’ve been brought up in a sex-crazed world. We’re products of the media.

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Teen girls feel the need to look perfect

Dear Straight Talk: I’m 17 and I agree with a lot of what Farren had to say in last week’s column about the problems with my generation. Everyone’s trying to look so perfect resulting in eating disorders and large amounts of stress mentally and physically. The question is: Why do we feel we need to look perfect? I think it’s because the media puts pressure not just on girls but also on guys to look and act a certain way. What really bothers me is that it is our parents’ generation that runs this media machine that is so lousy for us. My generation is crying out for help. We want to be healthy and yet with all the stress that are parents are under, world stress in general, and the media giving us a constant stream of the wrong impressions, we aren’t able, under the circumstances, to de-stress and be healthy.—Ashley

Dear Ashley: The media has become the new patriarch and matriarch of the family and youth are especially vulnerable to its “messages” regarding what to eat, how look, how to act, how to love, what to consider important. Given the same influences, I’d say your generation is doing as well as any other would. I find your point about the “media machine” being run predominantly by parents unsettling to say the least.

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Teens’ lives like robots: programmed & structured

Dear Straight Talk: I’d like to add to the list of gripes about my generation and say that we’re like robots—we don’t think about what we’re doing. There’s so much programming, our lives are so scheduled and structured that we don’t have time to know ourselves.—Overbooked

Dear Overbooked: You’ve mentioned another circumstance unique to your generation. Starting from a very young age, the average kid is whisked here and there, her days and weekends scheduled to the brim with adult-organized activities. It’s very different from earlier generations, where, after school, kids had a few hours to “de-stress” by tromping around the neighborhood unattended by adults. When kids did burst into the house looking for food, shelter, and solace, there was generally a mother there to attend their needs. The constant structure and scheduling needed to accommodate that missing parent has taken a toll on this generation.

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