Condone Teenagers Having Sex? What's a Parent to Do?
As my 19-year-old son and his high-school-senior girlfriend head off to bed, suspiciously early, my dear friend and host turns to me and says, “How do you feel about them sleeping together?” We are visiting for the weekend and had previously discussed the sleeping arrangements.
“I’m fine with it,” I reply lightly. “If they want to have sex, they’ll find some way to do it. At least in a bed they can explore the intimacy of cuddling and sleeping together.”
“Oh,” she says. Then, silence… “Aren’t you concerned about what her parents might say?” Instead of answering, I ask her how she feels. “Well,” she wades in, “I feel a bit uncomfortable about it. I didn’t let my daughter do that in high school. Once she went to college, it was different. But even then, if she brought a boyfriend home, I put them in separate bedrooms. I knew they were sneaking down the hall in the middle of the night,” she chuckles, “but that was ok somehow.”
She describes a common practice. We passively accept a college-aged daughter having sex, but don’t actively acknowledge it or talk about it; it makes us too uncomfortable.
“To answer your question,” I say, “her mom let her come for the weekend. And she knows they spent the night camping together, last month. I feel responsible for my son. I am not responsible for his girlfriend’s mother.”
“What if she gets pregnant?”
“Growing up with me for a mom, my poor son couldn’t be more educated about avoiding unwanted pregnancy. I taught him that it is his responsibility to ask about her birth control and to use his own. He’s a kind and respectful young man. And the two of them are communicative and comfortable with each other.” For a moment I wonder if I am too naive or overconfident. But, no. As a parent, I have a sizable list of my inadequacies, but in this arena, I think I’ve done pretty darned well.
So far, my friend has presented a representative line-up of society’s fears and concerns about young people having sex, especially those raised as girls.* First, the discomfort of the grown-ups and what other people might think. Second, the dangers of pregnancy and sexual infections. Next up, the psychological impact.
She says, “Kids are so insecure these days and they think that relationships and sex will fill their void. I worry that it’s not healthy.”
I laugh, “You mean sex won’t heal me and make me whole? Seriously, it would be great if we were all self-actualized before we started a sexual relationship, but our species might die out if that was the entrance ticket!”
I often hear parents proclaiming the high standards that young people must achieve before they are ready to have sex, standards to which most adults still strive -- love, communication, trust, commitment and readiness to have a baby.
We talk for a while longer before my friend says, “Sex is painful for girls in the beginning. It takes a while for it to get better. And younger girls don’t know what they are doing, so they should be older before they go through that.”
Wow, I think, there it is!!
My friend has just voiced the cultural belief that I most want to change: Sex for women is going to be unpleasant in the beginning. Young women aren’t really expected to enjoy sex. As a culture, we believe that it is nearly universal for boys to have lots of pleasure and orgasms when they start having sex (an assumption with its own problematic sequelae) and for girls to have limited pleasure and few, if any, orgasms when they start having sex.
Furthermore, we assume that sex will get better for women, but we do not talk about how that will happen nor how long it might take. The journey of young women exploring sexual pleasure and orgasms is behind the curtain from the cultural discourse. We don’t talk about it, and we don’t teach it. We leave each young woman to figure it out on her own.
Wanting to hear more, I say, “It sounds like you expect girls not to enjoy sex for some time. Why’s that?”
“Well, women are different than men. It is so easy for a guy. They have trouble not having an orgasm,” she laughs.
“You have a point,” I concede. “Vagina’s and vulvas are definitely more complicated than penises. I read recently that it takes a guy 4-5 minutes on average to reach orgasm while it takes a woman 18 to 20 minutes. To me, that means everyone needs to learn a lot more about those complicated orgasms! Let’s figure it out. Let’s educate. It doesn’t mean that we get to devalue or disregard women’s orgasms. How a person with a vulva does orgasm is just as valid as how a person with a penis does orgasm. And, sexual pleasure won’t come with the mere passing of time, getting older, or even gaining more emotional maturity. We need more books like Come as You Are (by Emily Nagoski) to be shared with younger women and books like She Comes First (by Ian Kerner) to be shared with men.” (I had indeed given that book to my son.)
I continue, “We need to expect that girls can find pleasure in sex right from the beginning. Sex that feels good. Sex that is fun. Sex that is an exploration. Not sex that hurts. Not sex that is boring. Not sex that is all about the guy.
“Comfort, curiosity and a good relationship are important. Much more important than age. But girls should know that a good relationship does not guarantee good sex. For girls, it takes knowledge of their bodies. If they know how to have sex with themselves - how to masturbate and orgasm - before they have partnered sex, they will be way ahead of the game. Just as important, girls should expect sex to be an exploration of pleasure that they deserve as much as their partners. If they know what sexual pleasure feels like, they will know to question painful sex or a partner who doesn’t value reciprocal pleasure.
“I’ve talked with women for whom it took years and myriad partners to discover pleasurable sex, women who endured decades of lousy sex because they did not know it could be better, nor did they expect that it could be better. They accepted sex as it was, in silence. What a shame. That needs to change!”
When I slow down enough to take a breath, my friend takes one last crack at my passionate diatribe. “But you didn’t have girls,” she says. “Do you really think you would have talked to your daughter about all this and let her spend the weekend with her boyfriend when she was still in high school?”
I pause. “I will never know because I didn’t have a daughter. But, like one of my friends, I think I would have given my teenage daughter a vibrator. I would have empowered her as much as possible with knowledge about her body and sex and trusted that her choices would lead her down a path of healthy exploration. So, yeah, I would have approved of her sleeping with her boyfriend in high school, if the relationship seemed healthy, and I knew she had a voice to advocate for herself.” Then I look over at my husband, “Am I overselling myself here?”
He smiles back at me, “Not at all.” Then he laughs and says, “Thank goodness we didn’t have daughters!”
* In this conversation, my friend and I discuss only cis-gender women and cis-gender men in heterosexual encounters. The spectrum of gender identity, gender roles and sexual orientation create much more nuanced experiences, often without many of the pitfalls we talk about.