If you aren't comfortable with your own sexuality or challenging deeply-embedded ideas about sex being "bad," can you teach your kids anything different? In defiance of socially conservative mythology, approaches that are positive about sex do not lead to licentiousness, STDs, abortions and despair. On the contrary, the more you teach children about healthy, responsible sex, the more likely they are to treat sex in healthy, responsible ways. In general, they are more knowledgeable, more emotionally mature about it and "safer" in the scary-sex way. It goes a long way to understanding why the rate of teen pregnancy is the U.S. is four times that in the Netherlands, for example. (Emphasis added)
Here's the thing that bugged me most about that paragraph in Chemaly's article: She's right.
Well, not completely right. You don't have to be in youth ministry very long to understand that teenagers who experience sexual relationships are rarely--if ever--unaffected by severe and painful emotional and physical consequences that are conveniently omitted from sitcoms where everyone seems to be hooking up with almost zero consequences at all. So for the most part, I disagree with the article, especially her main point that encouraging teenagers to have sex with their significant others is a good and healthy thing to do. The statement that she's partly right about is the one I emphasized above:
If you aren't comfortable with your own sexuality or challenging deeply-embedded ideas about sex being "bad," can you teach your kids anything different?
Now, there's a bit of a straw man argument going on here. If you read the whole article, it's pretty clear that Chemaly thinks that only ignorant and bigoted people (no exaggeration) advocate for abstinence among teenagers anymore. To make her point, she tries to paint everyone who thinks that it's not healthy for teenagers to engage in sexual relationships with the same brush. However, she's right in that if we treat sex as something that is inherently bad--as many of us believe because of what we were told and not told about sex as teenagers--how can we teach teenagers what is good about sex? With that in mind, she asks some important questions:
Would you rather teach your kids that sex is dangerous and forbidden or that it is permissible and... well, awesome? Are you a "responsible-sex-is-good" parent, or more in the "scare-them-silly" camp?
In essence, it seems that she believes there are only two options when it comes to talking to teenagers about sex:
- Talk about sex openly and encourage teenagers to have sexual relationships, or
- Tell them sex is bad, evil, and wrong (and pray they never want to try it)
The problem is that all too often, we (parents and youth workers) somehow believe that these are the only two options as well. Realizing that the first option isn't a good one, we fall back to the second one and try to scare kids out of having sex (which doesn't work, by the way). To fill the gap, I'd like to offer a third way of approaching the conversation about sex: Tell the truth. Namely that sex is an amazing gift.
Some of you reading this are waiting for me to finish that last sentence. Perhaps you'd like me to add "that must be enjoyed within the confines of marriage." Or maybe you're waiting for me to quickly address the physical, emotional, and spiritual dangers of having sex before you're married. Now, I understand the need to reiterate to teenagers the boundaries in which God created sex to be enjoyed--the ways that he designed sex to be best it can be. But perhaps we are so uncomfortable with sex that we are quick to attach provisos and conditions to it in a way that we wouldn't with other gifts God has given us.
To be honest, I'm not really sure how this plays out practically in conversations between parents and teenagers and in youth rooms when the youth pastor gives the obligatory message about sex every spring. After all, sex is different from other gifts. It's intimate in a way that to share with the world our enjoyment of it the same way we would a new bike we got for our birthday would degrade it. And yes, sex has the power to severely damage teenagers who find out too late that giving themselves sexually to someone else isn't as carefree as their favorite TV shows tell them it is. But I wonder if maybe we started to treat sex a little more like the gift that it is rather than a problem, what we say about it--whether as parents or as youth workers--wouldn't carry just a little more weight with teenagers.
