In what is ostensibly a review of the book _Rainbow Party_, Caitlin Flanagan hashes out an incredibly detailed and complicated look at teenage sexuality and how it has changed over time. She describes recent trends and media scares (I was unaware of how big of a deal oral sex has become among 13-year-old girls, and their parents) and traces a path of awakening and shifting cultural mores from Judy Blume’s original groundbreaking work in the 1960s right up to the culture and media of today. The pictures she paints — complicated, conflicted, tinged with self-doubt and uncertainty — is an upsetting one. But in many ways, as much as I don’t like to admit it, she is probably right.
Aside
…and to add some more thoughts:
I’m definitely one of those on the side of keeping the government out of the content censorship business, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy with the state of today’s media culture. Personally I have found a lot to love about the modern media landscape, good writing, good movies, good television, good music, but there is also plenty to dislike. One has to admit that childhood development is complicated and children are vulnerable to all kinds of influences.
For example, when I was young I read several science fiction books with strong misogynistic undertones, and it took me many years to realize that I fundamentally disagreed with how the main characters behaved. At the time I thought I was aware of what was going on, but there were things I didn’t have the experience or capacity to understand, and it is possible that the themes of the books have in some way shaped my personality, even though they are themes that, in retrospect, I find abhorrent.
The author is right inasmuch that parents are left with very few tools to control what their children see, hear, and read. Our social fabric, for many, many reasons is far less family-centric and far, far less supportive of the idea that some things are best learned in the home or that parents know best. I am a strong believer in the intelligence and adaptability of children. I am a strong believer in the idea that oftentimes parents *do not* know best. But I am not anti-parent. I want to be a parent. I want parents, especially the caring, involved, well-meaning parents, to be in a position to succeed in having influence over their children’s development. I want children to grow up in an environment of love, trust, understanding, knowledge-seeking, growing, learning, grasping, forming opinions, taking risks. And in so many ways our world is far less “safe” than it was even ten or twenty years ago.