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A couple of weeks ago, I laughed when I saw the headline on
an online news article that read Teens
Still Having Sex. Seriously? It makes for a good blog heading, but this
does not qualify as news. They call it “news” for a reason. The teen sex headline
could have appeared carved into a rock in the Stone Age, and it would not have
even been news then. I suppose this just goes with the territory nowadays as we
wander through the wonderland of fake news, fact checking, biased information,
distortions of research findings for monetary gain, and obfuscation of truth. News
has lost its identity. These days, people define true and false according to
their own personal and often fairly random belief system. If someone doesn’t
like a “fact,” they will google around until they find information supporting
their desire to un-fact that fact. So I’m not surprised that journalists are
grasping at straws to provide news that is absolutely 100% true. You can always
depend on teens having sex to be an indisputable fact.
These days, we have to track down the source of news and
information, and then decide if we consider it a trustworthy and real source of
true information or not. For instance, it drives me crazy when I see articles
touting “research” about how wonderful statin drugs are, and that everyone
should be taking them because they effectively lower cholesterol. Studies cited
are generally those commissioned by the drug companies that make and sell
statins. (Surprise.) Meanwhile, the truth, and this is real news, is that
cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. In fact, statins interfere
with our ability to process cholesterol effectively, and they have serious
health consequences despite the fact that Big Pharma has brainwashed doctors
into thinking statins are benign. Follow the money, as they say. Research
promoting statins is brought to you by the folks who profit from you buying
statins. Rant over. Where were we? Oh,
right, teen sex. It’s safe to say that teens really are still having sex. The
lucky ones anyway. So that qualifies as true information, albeit old news. Let’s
call it olds.
Over the years, as a grant writer, I have occasionally been
offered work writing federally funded grants to promote teen abstinence. I
always turn these projects down since I subscribe to the research that
indicates that a fundamental developmental purpose of adolescence is to explore
sex. Teaching safe sex makes more sense to me than trying to convince a
creature pumped full of exploding hormones that they don’t want to have sex. Preaching
abstinence does not end well. Look what happened to Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood
in “Splendor in the Grass.” If you look up the antonym for sexual abstinence in
the dictionary, it says “teenage boys.” Trying to convince a teenage boy that it’s
not a good idea to have sex is like trying to dissuade a cat from eating tuna.
Hardwired.
I read an article by novelist Daniel Handler (A.K.A. Lemony
Snicket) in which he discusses how his most recent teen novel was classified as
an adult novel because it has so much sex in it. He says he purposely put a lot
of sex in it to encourage teen boys, who make up a large proportion of “reluctant
readers,” to engage in the activity of reading. Handler argues, and he has a good
point, that teen boys are far more likely to read books with plenty of sex in
them. I think this is largely the case with the majority of males of any age. I
abandoned Oscar Hijuelos’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in mid-sentence because I got
bored with the continuous boinking on every page, and began to yearn for a
story about something more thought-provoking than the feel of a woman in nylons.
When I mentioned this to my husband, he immediately dropped the nonfiction tome
that he had been reading and snatched up my copy of Mambo Kings. They never really outgrow it, these guys. The fact
that Mambo Kings won the Pulitzer
prize only cements my contention that men dominate the Pulitzer prize selection
committee. Which is why a book in which a man converses with his penis is a
surefire candidate to win the Pulitzer. It worked for Phillip Roth and Junot
Diaz. (I just googled “Pulitzer Prize winning novels in which men talk to their
penis” and I got over one million hits.) I just realized that if I write a book
in which a woman talks to a penis I may finally have a fighting chance of
getting a book published. Does this qualify as news?
I seem to have wandered pretty far astray from where I
started. My point is that teenagers having sex will never be news. Wake me up
if they stop.
Why the picture of the daisies? What picture do you suggest for this blog post?
In the movies they always cut to a field of daisies during the sex scenes, right? So here you go.
