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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November 21st, 2007
Dear Readers: Last week the teen panel and I responded to “Call me square” who complained that all her daughter’s friends dressed like hookers for Halloween. She then asked if Halloween was where girls began training to be strippers as she’d heard that one in 22 girls works as a one. To my young readers — and those young at heart — you will be happy to know that I roundly defended Halloween (Halloween is when you’re supposed to dress up! Thank heaven a little steam gets vented once a year on this unique day), and Brittney of the teen panel rightly called bull on the rumor that 5 percent of the female population strips for a living. Nonetheless, “Call me square” hit a nerve that has nothing to do with Halloween and today we will respond to that.
I often hear 18 and 19-year-olds say things like, “little kids these days are growing up too fast,” or, “that 9-year-old dresses like a slut,” or, “that first-grader watches too many R-rated movies.” Older teens feel the end of childhood sharply, and many worry about the continuous and rapid shrinkage of childhood and how its loss will affect the future. They look at the commercial media, they look at their parents’ generation, who either creates that media or doesn’t shield their offspring from it, and they shake their heads. I hope this column is a wake up call because if raising kids was a 4H project, we wouldn’t make it to the fair.
From Betsy, 19: Kids are growing up way too fast. The media influences what young girls perceive as “cool.” They see singers, actresses and models wearing next to nothing and they see the reaction it has on boys. Their insecurity kicks in and they feel mature and confident in outfits that make older generations want to faint. This Halloween I was appalled to see girls walking around in their underwear! I asked one girl what she was and she replied, “I’m a Victoria Secret model.” I felt a little foolish in my ghost costume but I think she felt more foolish when she saw my shock of disgust.
From Elizabeth, 18: The style for girls these days is tight-fitting, revealing, and sexy. And it’s not only on Halloween that girls dress this way. When I go to clothing stores I’m appalled at the clothing for children as young as three. I read an article that described young girls dressed in the latest fashions as “prostitots.” It’s a trend set by Lindsey, Brittany and Paris, and its popularity is growing at an extreme rate.
From Lennon, 21: With clothing trends for females moving closer and closer to being virtually naked, I would think girls would enjoy putting some clothes on for a change. This Halloween many girls told me in advance they were dressing as hookers, then when I saw them in costume, I thought, “Is that a wig or did she dye her hair? Oh, she’s got some fuzzy little rope-thing twirled around her neck. But other than that, yep, seen all those clothes before.” And for 13-year-olds to be dressing like this?! What happened to being Snow White? Or a witch? You could go as Hermione for crying out loud! The problem is the media. Nonetheless, if my future 13-year-old daughter tried to dress as a slut for Halloween, I’d say “Well, this evening is going to be a real treat because we are going to sit down and watch a nice old movie called Jack the Ripper. And believe me dear, you’ll have to get into some clothing darn quick to change my mind!”
Children are growing up too quickly. The solution? Ship all the stupid adults to Mars and start over. Or get them to recognize that childhood is worth more than their quarterly sales.
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