Teens thoughts on sex in the noughties.

How time flies when you’re busy and having fun! It’s been a while since my last post, and unfortunately more due to busyness than fun, although I have been having, if not fun, then some light-hearted and interesting conversations with Jamie and his friends.

At the end of my last post I said that I was going to work at opening up some dialogue with Jamie about sex and I am pleased to report that this has been happening. The breakthrough came a few days after I had written that last entry. It was a Friday night and Jamie’s three closest friends were all round at our house for a sleep-over. I’d been out all day and arrived back to find them all hanging out in the kitchen. They are all really great kids and I have a lot of time for them, so I stuck around and butted into their banter and conversation every now and again – being careful not to be too intrusive of course!

It occurred to me then, as they were all being so wonderfully chatty and communicative, to ask them for their thoughts on what I’d written about Sexting. So I asked them if they’d heard of it. They hadn’t. So I described what it was and once I had they knew what I was talking about. It turned out that they had all had pictures sent to their phones. So I asked them what they thought about it and whether they felt they were being overly exposed to sex. They thought the pictures were just a bit of a laugh, but agreed that they were exposed to a lot of sex. So I asked them what they thought about that and their responses were quite a surprise to me.

Whereas I, a 40-something parent who despite being reasonably open-minded still has an unfortunately predictable ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ kind of attitude, (and of course it goes without saying that ‘my day’ was better than ‘their day’), clearly think that seeing all this sex is a bad thing, an unhealthy thing, that it must make sex less ‘special’, less ‘sacred’, less ‘meaningful’, they really didn’t see it that way at all.

Chris, probably the most outspoken and eloquent of the four boys, spoke up first and put his point of view across in a very thoughtful and considered way. The basic paraphrase of what he said was: I think it will make us more open-minded and knowledgeable about sex! Well, I have to be honest, the fact that it could be a positive thing had never, not once for even a second, crossed my mind! And this pretty well summed up the general viewpoint of all of them, that it would make them less hung up and more comfortable about sex.

However, slightly shocked though I was, I accepted their point of view and since that day they have begun to talk to me more openly about sex. I know now which one of them is no longer a virgin, I know which one is very sexually frustrated and I know that Jamie isn’t yet ready for sex. We have talked about the differing and sometimes conflicting needs of men and women and even, what they can do to be considerate and caring lovers to the women they are with (this presumes of course they will all be heterosexual, which I accept may not be the case).

It is this last bit that felt the best. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if all boys were taught how to be generous and considerate lovers? Jamie did get a little embarrassed at this point, hearing his mum speak about sex like this, but he said he could cope if I acted like I was talking only to his friend and made like he wasn’t there!

One other thing I found out was that the one of them who is no longer a virgin had that sexual interaction without a condom! Thankfully the other 3 had clearly given him his due amount of flak about this and told him how stupid it was, so I didn’t feel I needed to add anything. But what really shocked me was that here was a bright, well-educated boy, who has had his full quota of sex education, taking this kind of risk. So I had to ask why, as it certainly wasn’t ignorance! The reason he gave was that, in the moment, it was too awkward to broach. Amazing! Here we are in what we think is an enlightened society, with what we consider a high level education system and yet here is a teenage boy and girl for whom the primary considerations overriding all of this are those of romance and the sensibilities of innocent and tentative intimacy. It would seem that for all our education and rationality, we are still fully prey to the dictates of our hearts and our bodies.