September 24th, 2008
DEAR STRAIGHT TALK: A friend lets her teenage daughter stay overnight at a household where many teenagers regularly stay the night together, co-ed. Sometimes the parent of that household is there, sometimes not. When I bring up concerns, she says, “Those kids are all just friends.” I think she is naïve. I mean, honestly, teens? Raging hormones? How could something NOT be going on?
Roseville, CA
Mariah, 16
I have many friends of both sexes who sleep together and do not have sex. Sure it happens sometimes, but that doesn’t mean all teenagers are sex-crazed. Some teenagers really are JUST friends with the opposite sex and have no intention to sleep with them in the sense you mean. Usually nothing ever happens because the guy is gay or he needs a place to crash and ends up with a good friend who happens to be female. Most of my friends are male and I don’t see the big deal of having a non-sexual relationship with them.
Jennifer, 14
It is different in every situation, but friends of the opposite sex CAN sleep in the same bed together without having sex. Even promiscuous people are not always at fault. This is a very flirtatious generation that most adults don’t understand. If you see your teen flirting with someone don’t automatically assume something is going on.
Michael, 16
There are situations where the guys and girls are just friends. But it can be hard to completely stay away from having something sexual creep in. In many cases, we’d be lying to say it’s strictly friends.
Shelby, 16
I find it offensive that just because we’re teens you assume we are having sex all the time. Could you be any more judgmental? I have quite a few guy friends who I feel totally comfortable sleeping over with — and we’re not having sex, we’re talking! Did you have sex every time you spent the night at a guy friend’s house?
Katie, 15
I go camping with my boyfriend and his family, and usually there are eight or nine teenagers spending all day and night with each other. Nothing happens between either friends or couples because parents have said if we are caught doing anything, we all go home and there’s no more camping. But they give us the opportunity to prove that we can be trusted. If parents make the limits clear, and provide strong consequences, the situation is under control.
Sawyer, 17
Males and females sleep together a lot and nothing happens. Co-ed sleeping isn’t so much the problem, it’s the drinking and smoking that needs to be monitored. Yes, sex happens sometimes, but at least when it does, we’re educated. We didn’t do what your generation did! There was so much sex in the 60s and 70s, most of it unprotected. All our STDs come from you guys! When it comes down to it, the sex education we’ve been given brings in a huge amount of safety.
Kendal, 21
It depends on the kids. They could very likely be just friends and really have nothing going on. It really does happen a lot. However, the fact that there aren’t parents home is a red flag. Not that parental supervision insures that there are no sexual activities, but it’s definitely a mood-killer. Your friend needs to be a bit more realistic and make sure there’s parental supervision. And you need to mind your own business.
DEAR ROSEVILLE: Well, there’s a wrap! Anything else you’d like to know? We loved your question, by the way, and I wanted to close with Kendal’s common-sense advice regarding parental supervision. This generation has platonic male-female relationships unlike anything our generation could, or can, imagine. Assumptions about sexual behavior are harder to make, but parental supervision will always be a no-brainer.
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September 10th, 2008
DEAR STRAIGHT TALK: I grew up in London and attended the London School of Economics with Mick Jagger. For a college project, I managed one the Rolling Stone’s first gigs in Surrey, England. My generation loved our music so much that we traveled hundreds of miles to listen to it. I often wonder how important music is for young people today. Do you teens today love your music as much as your mother loved hers?
Pip, Carmel CA
Megan, 19
I’m so glad you asked this question! I’ve poured everything I’ve got into a modern music college and I’ve had to ask myself: Why do I love music and what do I want to accomplish with it? For me, music is all there is. Many talented people today don’t go all the way; they record a song or an album to fit the mold of what’s popular. But our parent’s music completely CHANGED the mold, and that’s what made people travel as far as they did. There are many bands today that I love, but Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Beatles, The Stones, they were legends then, and still are today. I doubt many of today’s musicians will become legends. Our parents lived in a different atmosphere, there was a different passion coming from the performers.
Lennon, 21
Old rock is GOD. I wouldn’t travel hundreds of miles for today’s music. And rap is only slightly more amazing than bottled water. It doesn’t encompass the entirety of a person. You can’t hear the emotion coming through; feelings are either missing or deadpan. The 60’s through The Grateful Dead, that’s when people played music because it oozed from them, not because it gave them a big paycheck. It was sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll. Now it’s sex, drugs and money. Big difference.
Graham, 14
Yes, we really do love our music. We listen to it all the time and play it on our own instruments as much as is humanly possible! But for me and many of my friends, our favorite music is not from our generation. Metallica, Guns ‘n Roses, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen are well-loved, even worshipped as rock gods. Driving distances to hear music happens less often because CD and MP3 recordings are usually higher quality than live.
Dominic, 21
I took my mom to Def Leppard recently and got to see some of that era come back to her. I travel far for the right show, even if it is my parent’s music.
Emily, 16
My taste in music changes with my mood. Indie and country are my feel-good genres, slow country my sad genre, screamo when I’m mad, rap or R&B when I’m excited. Because of money, I don’t go to extremes to see live music. Plus, many singers today are so edited, they are horrible live.
Sawyer, 17
Rap is my favorite music and Eminem is my favorite rapper. The music is visual, it’s not sad or emotionally questioning. It pumps me up and causes ideas to pop into my head.
Michael, 16
It’s hard to prove we love our music because this is the digital age and we don’t have to drive hundreds of miles to hear great sound. My favorite music is rap, which is from my generation. But a lot of my generation denies liking rap, and I think that’s because they have to defend liking it because so much of the hip hop scene supports gang culture, like with 50 Cent, where it’s all about money, crime and bashing women. But there is some really good rap out there, like from Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West, that doesn’t need defending. It’s intellectual and cerebral and gets you thinking about societal issues. That’s the kind of rap I like. It’s about ideas.
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January 2nd, 2008
Dear Readers: Each New Year I do a column on what I consider the most crucial issue of our time. This year that issue is what I call The Male Crisis.
Males are in trouble. Of all the American adults behind bars, on probation or parole, 93 percent are male. Males in America are five times more likely than females to commit suicide. Drug abuse, alcoholism, homicide, homelessness, violence — all are significantly dominated by males.
Those red flags have been waving at us for some time now. There are new flags, however, hoisted in the last generation, so new and so foreign that many people aren’t seeing the bright red cloth.
For instance, did you know university campuses are now dominated by females? Last year, the student body of the average four-year college was 58 percent female, 42 percent male. At some larger universities, there are two females for every male. Most girls enrolled will earn a degree. Most boys will not. Compare this to 1959 when 64 percent of the average student body was male and it was girls who tended to drop out.
Girls today are smart and driven. Boys today are laid-back and unmotivated.
From kindergarten to college to middle age, males have lost their drive. One third of men ages 22 to 34 are now living with their parents (a 100 percent increase over the last 20 years). The New York Times recently documented the trend of able-bodied men throughout the nation who are neither working nor looking for work. One in seven men in the prime of life, mostly white, mostly middle class, often college educated, has no interest in working.
Of course there are still intense, passionate young men who are striving toward success and independence, but they are the exception. Most follow the “slacker-dude” profile, preferring to take a subsistence-level job, play video games, and “just have fun.”
Did you know that the sperm count of a young man today is less than half of what his grandfather had at the same age? That 70 percent of college-aged men regularly view pornography? That one in three college-aged males reports erectile dysfunction? Some use Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra, others have given up on the dating scene entirely and rely on pornography as their only sexual outlet.
If I could beg my readers for something, it is to read the book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Dr. Leonard Sax.
Below is a summary of the factors Dr. Sax thinks are responsible for what he calls “this weird new virus of apathy” affecting males.
Factor 1: Kindergarten is the new first grade. Schools disenfranchise boys with too-early reading and writing, removal of competition, and abstract knowledge favored over hands-on knowledge. Females thrive in this environment, males do not.
Factor 2: Video games affect the part of the prefrontal cortex, different in males than females, that controls real-world drive and motivation. We’ve all experienced the rapidly growing species of irritable, socially-isolated males with no interest in anything but video games.
Factor 3: ADHD drugs (Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate), prescribed primarily to boys so they can “sit still” in our new “feminized” schools, turn adventurous boys into a lazy boys.
Factor 4: Estrogen mimics, chemicals leached from plastic bottles into our water and soft drinks, have flooded our endocrine systems with female hormones.
Factor 5: Traditional rites of passage are absent. The transition from boy to man is not hard-wired, it must be taught. And it is — by Snoop Dog, Eminem, and Homer Simpson.
Dr. Sax lays out the most documented evidence for the male crisis that I’ve seen to date. There is no preaching and he wraps up the book with solutions. Please read Boys Adrift. Our boys — and all of us — are depending upon it.
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