Where’d You Learn That?

The cute little couple looked as if they should be sauntering through Great Adventure or waiting in line for tokens at the local arcade. Instead, the 14-year-olds walked purposefully into the Teen Center in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. They didn’t mince words about their reason for stopping in. For quite some time, usually after school and on weekends, the boy and girl had tried to heighten their arousal during sex. Flustered yet determined, the pair wanted advice on the necessary steps that might lead them to a more fulfilling orgasm. His face showing all the desperation of a lost tourist, the boy spoke for both of them when he asked frankly, “How do we get to the G-spot?”

Whoa. Teen Center nurse Patti Towle admits she was taken aback by the inquiry. She couldn’t exactly provide a road map. Even more, the destination was a bit scandalous for a couple of ninth-graders in the heart of Mormon country. But these kids had clearly already gone further sexually than many adults, so Towle didn’t waste time preaching the gospel of abstinence. She gave her young adventurers some reading material on the subject, including the classic women’s health book Our Bodies, Ourselves, to help bring them closer in bed. She also brought up the question of whether a G-spot even exists. As her visitors were leaving, Towle offered them more freebies: “I sent them out the door with a billion condoms.”

G-spots. Orgasms. Condoms. We all know kids say and do the darndest things, but how they have changed! One teacher recalls a 10-year-old raising his hand to ask her to define oral sex. He was quickly followed by an 8-year-old girl behind him who asked, “Oh, yeah, and what’s anal sex?” These are the easy questions. Rhonda Sheared, who teaches sex education in Pinellas County, Fla., was asked by middle school students about the sound kweif, which the kids say is the noise a vagina makes during or after sex. “And how do you keep it from making this noise?”

There is more troubling behavior in Denver. School officials were forced to institute a sexual-harassment policy owing to a sharp rise in lewd language, groping, pinching and bra-snapping incidents among sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Sex among kids in Pensacola, Fla., became so pervasive that students of a private Christian junior high school are now asked to sign cards vowing not to have sex until they marry. But the cards don’t mean anything, says a 14-year-old boy at the school. “It’s broken promises.”

It’s easy enough to blame everything on television and entertainment, even the news. At a Denver middle school, boys rationalize their actions this way: “If the President can do it, why can’t we?” White House sex scandals are one thing, but how can anyone avoid Viagra and virility? Or public discussions of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and herpes? Young girls have lip-synched often enough to Alanis Morissette’s big hit of a couple of years ago, You Oughta Know, to have found the sex nestled in the lyric. But it’s more than just movies and television and news. Adolescent curiosity about sex is fed by a pandemic openness about it–in the schoolyard, on the bus, at home when no adult is watching. Just eavesdrop at the mall one afternoon, and you’ll hear enough pubescent sexcapades to pen the next few episodes of Dawson’s Creek, the most explicit show on teen sexuality, on the WB network. Parents, always the last to keep up, are now almost totally pre-empted. Chris (not his real name), 13, says his parents talked to him about sex when he was 12 but he had been indoctrinated earlier by a 17-year-old cousin. In any case, he gets his full share of information from the tube. “You name the show, and I’ve heard about it. Jerry Springer, MTV, Dawson’s Creek, HBO After Midnight…” Stephanie (not her real name), 16, of North Lauderdale, Fla., who first had sex when she was 14, claims to have slept with five boyfriends and is considered a sex expert by her friends. She says, “You can learn a lot about sex from cable. It’s all mad-sex stuff.” She sees nothing to condemn. “If you’re feeling steamy and hot, there’s only one thing you want to do. As long as you’re using a condom, what’s wrong with it? Kids have hormones too.”

In these steamy times, it is becoming largely irrelevant whether adults approve of kids’ sowing their oats–or knowing so much about the technicalities of the dissemination. American adolescents are in the midst of their own kind of sexual revolution–one that has left many parents feeling confused, frightened and almost powerless. Parents can search all they want for common ground with today’s kids, trying to draw parallels between contemporary carnal knowledge and an earlier generation’s free-love crusades, but the two movements are quite different. A desire to break out of the old-fashioned strictures fueled the ’60s movement, and its participants made sexual freedom a kind of new religion. That sort of reverence has been replaced by a more consumerist attitude. In a 1972 cover story, TIME declared, “Teenagers generally are woefully ignorant about sex.” Ignorance is no longer the rule. As a weary junior high counselor in Salt Lake City puts it, “Teens today are almost nonchalant about sex. It’s like we’ve been to the moon too many times.”

The good news about their precocious knowledge of the mechanics of sex is that a growing number of teens know how to protect themselves, at least physically. But what about their emotional health and social behavior? That’s a more troublesome picture. Many parents and teachers–as well as some thoughtful teenagers–worry about the desecration of love and the subversion of mature relationships. Says Debra Haffner, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States: “We should not confuse kids’ pseudo-sophistication about sexuality and their ability to use the language with their understanding of who they are as sexual young people or their ability to make good decisions.”

One ugly side effect is a presumption among many adolescent boys that sex is an entitlement–an attitude that fosters a breakdown of respect for oneself and others. Says a seventh-grade girl: “The guy will ask you up front. If you turn him down, you’re a bitch. But if you do it, you’re a ho. The guys are after us all the time, in the halls, everywhere. You scream, ‘Don’t touch me!’ but it doesn’t do any good.” A Rhode Island Rape Center study of 1,700 sixth- and ninth-graders found 65% of boys and 57% of girls believing it acceptable for a male to force a female to have sex if they’ve been dating for six months.

Parents who are aware of this cultural revolution seem mostly torn between two approaches: preaching abstinence or suggesting prophylactics–and thus condoning sex. Says Cory Hollis, 37, a father of three in the Salt Lake City area: “I don’t want to see my teenage son ruin his life. But if he’s going to do it, I told him that I’d go out and get him the condoms myself.” Most parents seem too squeamish to get into the subtleties of instilling sexual ethics. Nor are schools up to the job of moralizing. Kids say they accept their teachers’ admonitions to have safe sex but tune out other stuff. “The personal-development classes are a joke,” says Sarah, 16, of Pensacola. “Even the teacher looks uncomfortable. There is no way anybody is going to ask a serious question.” Says Shana, a 13-year-old from Denver: “A lot of it is old and boring. They’ll talk about not having sex before marriage, but no one listens. I use that class for study hall.”

Shana says she is glad “sex isn’t so taboo now, I mean with all the teenage pregnancies.” But she also says that “it’s creepy and kind of scary that it seems to be happening so early, and all this talk about it.” She adds, “Girls are jumping too quickly. They figure if they can fall in love in a month, then they can have sex in a month too.” When she tried discouraging a classmate from having sex for the first time, the friend turned to her and said, “My God, Shana. It’s just sex.”

Three powerful forces have shaped today’s child prodigies: a prosperous information age that increasingly promotes products and entertains audiences by titillation; aggressive public-policy initiatives that loudly preach sexual responsibility, further desensitizing kids to the subject; and the decline of two-parent households, which leaves adolescents with little supervision. Thus kids are not only bombarded with messages about sex–many of them contradictory–but also have more private time to engage in it than did previous generations. Today more than half of the females and three-quarters of the males ages 15 to 19 have experienced sexual intercourse, according to the Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health. And while the average age at first intercourse has come down only a year since 1970 (currently it’s 17 for girls and 16 for boys), speed is of the essence for the new generation. Says Haffner: “If kids today are going to do more than kiss, they tend to move very quickly toward sexual intercourse.”

The remarkable–and in ways lamentable–product of youthful promiscuity and higher sexual IQ is the degree to which kids learn to navigate the complex hyper-sexual world that reaches out seductively to them at every turn. One of the most positive results: the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and of teenage pregnancy is declining. Over the past few years, kids have managed to chip away at the teenage birthrate, which in 1991 peaked at 62.1 births per 1,000 females. Since then the birthrate has dropped 12%, to 54.7. Surveys suggest that as many as two-thirds of teenagers now use condoms, a proportion that is three times as high as reported in the 1970s. “We’re clearly starting to make progress,” says Dr. John Santelli, a physician with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of adolescent and school health. “And the key statistics bear that out.” Even if they’ve had sex, many kids are learning to put off having more till later; they are also making condom use during intercourse nonnegotiable; and, remarkably, the fleeting pleasures of lust may even be wising up some of them to a greater appreciation of love.

For better or worse, sex-filled television helps shape young opinion. In Chicago, Ryan, an 11-year-old girl, intently watches a scene from one of her favorite TV dramas, Dawson’s Creek. She listens as the character Jen, who lost her virginity at 12 while drunk, confesses to her new love, Dawson, “Sex doesn’t equal happiness. I can’t apologize for my past.” Ryan is quick to defend Jen. “I think she was young, but if I were Dawson, I would believe she had changed. She acts totally different now.” But Ryan is shocked by an episode of her other favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which Angel, a male vampire, “turned bad” after having sex with the 17-year-old Buffy. “That kinda annoyed me,” says Ryan. “What would have happened if she had had a baby? Her whole life would have been thrown out the window.” As for the fallen Angel: “I am so mad! I’m going to take all my pictures of him down now.”

Pressed by critics and lobbies, television has begun to include more realistic story lines about sex and its possible consequences. TV writers and producers are turning to groups like the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent health-policy think tank, for help in adding more depth and accuracy to stories involving sex. Kaiser has consulted on daytime soaps General Hospital and One Life to Live as well as the prime-time drama ER on subjects ranging from teen pregnancy to coming to terms with a gay high school athlete. Says Matt James, a Kaiser senior vice president: “We’re trying to work with them to improve the public-health content of their shows.”

And then there’s real-life television. MTV’s Loveline, an hour-long Q.-and-A. show featuring sex guru Drew Pinsky (see accompanying story), is drawing raves among teens for its informative sexual content. Pinsky seems to be almost idolized by some youths. “Dr. Drew has some excellent advice,” says Keri, an eighth-grader in Denver. “It’s not just sex, it’s real life. Society makes you say you’ve got to look at shows like Baywatch, but I’m sick of blond bimbos. They’re so fake. Screenwriters ought to get a life.”

With so much talk of sex in the air, the extinction of the hapless, sexually naive kid seems an inevitability. Indeed, kids today as young as seven to 10 are picking up the first details of sex even in Saturday-morning cartoons. Brett, a 14-year-old in Denver, says it doesn’t matter to him whether his parents chat with him about sex or not because he gets so much from TV. Whenever he’s curious about something sexual, he channel-surfs his way to certainty. “If you watch TV, they’ve got everything you want to know,” he says. “That’s how I learned to kiss, when I was eight. And the girl told me, ‘Oh, you sure know how to do it.'”

Even if kids don’t watch certain television shows, they know the programs exist and are bedazzled by the forbidden. From schoolyard word of mouth, eight-year-old Jeff in Chicago has heard all about the foul-mouthed kids in the raunchily plotted South Park, and even though he has never seen the show, he can describe certain episodes in detail. (He is also familiar with the AIDS theme of the musical Rent because he’s heard the CD over and over.) Argentina, 16, in Detroit, says, “TV makes sex look like this big game.” Her friend Michael, 17, adds, “They make sex look like Monopoly or something. You have to do it in order to get to the next level.”

Child experts say that by the time many kids hit adolescence, they have reached a point where they aren’t particularly obsessed with sex but have grown to accept the notion that solid courtships–or at least strong physical attractions–potentially lead to sexual intercourse. Instead of denying it, they get an early start preparing for it–and playing and perceiving the roles prescribed for them. In Nashville, 10-year-old Brantley whispers about a classmate, “There’s this girl I know, she’s nine years old, and she already shaves her legs and plucks her eyebrows, and I’ve heard she’s had sex. She even has bigger boobs than my mom!”

The playacting can eventually lead to discipline problems at school. Alan Skriloff, assistant superintendent of personnel and curriculum for New Jersey’s North Brunswick school system, notes that there has been an increase in mock-sexual behavior in buses carrying students to school. He insists there have been no incidents of sexual assault but, he says, “we’ve dealt with kids simulating sexual intercourse and simulating masturbation. It’s very disturbing to the other children and to the parents, obviously.” Though Skriloff says that girls are often the initiators of such conduct, in most school districts the aggressors are usually boys.

Nan Stein, a senior researcher at the Wesley College Center for Research on Women, believes sexual violence and harassment is on the rise in schools, and she says, “It’s happening between kids who are dating or want to be dating or used to date.” Linda Osmundson, executive director of the Center Against Spouse Abuse in St. Petersburg, Fla., notes that “it seems to be coming down to younger and younger girls who feel that if they don’t pair up with these guys, they’ll have no position in their lives. They are pressured into lots of sexual activity.” In this process of socialization, “no” is becoming less and less an option.

In such a world, schools focus on teaching scientific realism rather than virginity. Sex-ed teachers tread lightly on the moral questions of sexual intimacy while going heavy on the risk of pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease. Indeed, health educators in some school districts complain that teaching abstinence to kids today is getting to be a futile exercise. Using less final terms like “postpone” or “delay” helps draw some kids in, but semantics often isn’t the problem. In a Florida survey, the state found that 75% of kids had experienced sexual intercourse by the time they reached 12th grade, with some 20% of the kids having had six or more sexual partners. Rick Colonno, father of a 16-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter in Arvada, Colo., views sex ed in schools as a necessary evil to fill the void that exists in many homes. Still, he’s bothered by what he sees as a subliminal endorsement of sex by authorities. “What they’re doing,” he says, “is preparing you for sex and then saying, ‘But don’t have it.'”

With breathtaking pragmatism, kids look for ways to pursue their sex life while avoiding pregnancy or disease. Rhonda Sheared, the Florida sex-ed teacher, says a growing number of kids are asking questions about oral and anal sex because they’ve discovered that it allows them to be sexually active without risking pregnancy. As part of the Pinellas County program, students in middle and high school write questions anonymously, and, as Sheared says, “they’re always looking for the loophole.”

A verbatim sampling of some questions:

–“Can you get aids from fingering a girl if you have no cuts? Through your fingernails?”

–“Can you gets aids from ’69’?”

–“If you shave your vagina or penis, can that get rid of crabs?”

–“If yellowish stuff comes out of a girl, does it mean you have herpes, or can it just happen if your period is due, along with abdominal pains?”

–“When sperm hits the air, does it die or stay alive for 10 days?”

Ideally, most kids say, they would prefer their parents do the tutoring, but they realize that’s unlikely. For years psychologists and sociologists have warned about a new generation gap, one created not so much by different morals and social outlooks as by career-driven parents, the economic necessity of two incomes leaving parents little time for talks with their children. Recent studies indicate that many teens think parents are the most accurate source of information and would like to talk to them more about sex and sexual ethics but can’t get their attention long enough. Shana sees the conundrum this way: “Parents haven’t set boundaries, but they are expecting them.”

Yet some parents are working harder to counsel their kids on sex. Cathy Wolf, 29, of North Wales, Pa., says she grew up learning about sex largely from her friends and from reading controversial books. Open-minded and proactive, she says she has returned to a book she once sought out for advice, Judy Blume’s novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and is reading it to her two boys, 8 and 11. The novel discusses the awkwardness of adolescence, including sexual stirrings. “That book was forbidden to me as a kid,” Wolf says. “I’m hoping to give them a different perspective about sex, to expose them to this kind of subject matter before they find out about it themselves.” Movies and television are a prod and a challenge to Wolf. In Grease, which is rated PG and was recently re-released, the character Rizzo “says something about ‘sloppy seconds,’ you know, the fact that a guy wouldn’t want to do it with a girl who had just done it with another guy. There’s also another point where they talk about condoms. Both Jacob and Joel wanted an explanation, so I provided it for them.”

Most kids, though, lament that their parents aren’t much help at all on sexual matters. They either avoid the subject, miss the mark by starting the discussion too long before or after the sexual encounter, or just plain stonewall them. “I was nine when I asked my mother the Big Question,” says Michael, in Detroit. “I’ll never forget. She took out her driver’s license and pointed to the line about male or female. ‘That is sex,’ she said.” Laurel, a 17-year-old in Murfreesboro, Tenn., wishes her parents had taken more time with her to shed light on the subject. When she was six and her sister was nine, “my mom sat us down, and we had the sex talk,” Laurel says. “But when I was 10, we moved in with my dad, and he never talked about it. He would leave the room if a commercial for a feminine product came on TV.” And when her sister finally had sex, at 16, even her mother’s vaunted openness crumbled. “She talked to my mom about it and ended up feeling like a whore because even though my mom always said we could talk to her about anything, she didn’t want to hear that her daughter had slept with a boy.”

Part of the problem for many adults is that they aren’t quite sure how they feel about teenage sex. A third of adults think adolescent sexual activity is wrong, while a majority of adults think it’s O.K. and, under certain conditions, normal, healthy behavior, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit, reproductive-health research group. In one breath, parents say they perceive it as a public-health issue and want more information about sexual behavior and its consequences, easier access to contraceptives and more material in the media about responsible human and sexual interaction. And in the next breath, they claim it’s a moral issue to be resolved through preaching abstinence and the virtues of virginity and getting the trash off TV. “You start out talking about condoms in this country, and you end up fighting about the future of the American family,” says Sarah Brown, director of the Campaign Against Teen Pregnancy. “Teens just end up frozen like a deer in headlights.”

Not all kids are happy with television’s usurping the role of village griot. Many say they’ve become bored by–and even resent–sexual themes that seem pointless and even a distraction from the information or entertainment they’re seeking. “It’s like everywhere,” says Ryan, a 13-year-old seventh-grader in Denver, “even in Skateboarding [magazine]. It’s become so normal it doesn’t even affect you. On TV, out of nowhere, they’ll begin talking about masturbation.” Another Ryan, 13, in the eighth grade at the same school, agrees: “There’s sex in the cartoons and messed-up people on the talk shows–‘My lover sleeping with my best friend.’ I can remember the jumping-condom ads. There’s just too much of it all.”

Many kids are torn between living up to a moral code espoused by their church and parents and trying to stay true to the swirling laissez-faire. Experience is making many sadder but wiser. The shame, anger or even indifference stirred by early sex can lead to prolonged abstinence. Chandra, a 17-year-old in Detroit, says she had sex with a boyfriend of two years for the first time at 15 despite her mother’s constant pleas against it. She says she wishes she had heeded her mother’s advice. “One day I just decided to do it,” she says. “Afterward, I was kind of mad that I let it happen. And I was sad because I knew my mother wouldn’t have approved.” Chandra stopped dating the boy more than a year ago and hasn’t had sex since. “It would have to be someone I really cared about,” she says. “I’ve had sex before, but I’m not a slut.”

With little guidance from grownups, teens have had to discover for themselves that the ubiquitous sexual messages must be tempered with caution and responsibility. It is quite clear, even to the most sexually experienced youngsters, just how dangerous a little information can be. Stephanie in North Lauderdale, who lost her virginity two years ago, watches with concern as her seven-year-old sister moves beyond fuzzy thoughts of romance inspired by Cinderella or Aladdin into sexual curiosity. “She’s always talking about pee-pees, and she sees somebody on TV kissing and hugging or something, and she says, ‘Oh, they had sex.’ I think she’s going to find out about this stuff before I did.” She pauses. “We don’t tell my sister anything,” she says, “but she’s not a naive child.”

–With reporting by Julie Grace/Salt Lake City, Richard Woodbury/Denver, Charlotte Faltermayer/New York, Timothy Roche/Fort Lauderdale and other bureaus