If you’ve found any of my other links about teenage sexuality the least bit interesting, you *cannot* ignore the article in this week’s _New York Magazine_ titled The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School. The initial hook to the story is learning about salacious goings-on at one of NYC’s most prestigious public high schools, but it doesn’t stop there, oh no. To whit:

bq. These girls have obliterated the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t� stranglehold that has traditionally plagued high-school females. They set the sexual agenda for their group. And they expect reciprocation. “I’ve made it my own personal policy that if I’m going to give oral sex, I’m going to receive oral sex,� says Jane.

I think what I find most interesting about the article is that once you get past the entire subset of teenage culture that some of us were completely unaware of and are probably at least a bit uncomfortable with, you find out that, in the end, not much has really changed. Sure, teenagers ideas of friendship and intimacy and flirtation have changed dramatically, but is it any more dramatically than the change from the time when boys and girls weren’t allowed together unsupervised? The time when they didn’t even speak to each other except at heavily supervised formal events? Or even the time when a young man had to ask a woman’s (and per parents!) permission to write her letters?

During my high school years (not too long ago) the rules were different, and while I did find myself allowed to be alone with girls, I remember even then feeling uncomfortable on the occasions when I found myself in a girl’s bedroom. I, no doubt, was pretty far on the conservative end of the spectrum, as were most of the girls I hung out with. So I don’t find this current shift to be at all out of place.

And I find it comforting, when looking at the change, to see that beyond the superficial and the flirting and the day-to-day encounters of teenager-hood, the real longing for companionship still remains:

bq. Most of the kids say they hate relationships, that they don’t want to be tied down, that they want to be open to different possibilities and different genders from minute to minute, but there is a natural tendency—as natural perhaps as the tendency to experiment—to try to find connection. Like it or not, emotions get involved. If you look closer, you can see the hint of longing, the momentary pouting, the tiny jealousies. Jared can’t take his eyes off Nikki, but Nikki seems interested mainly in Alair. Jason, too, is angling for Alair’s attention, but Alair is once again focused on Jane. And Jane, well, Jane might actually be in love.

I find this sentiment comforting, and I think in the end the article shows us that kids will be kids, teens will experiment and be trendy and push against the blurry boundaries of social norms, but when it comes right down to it the adults of tomorrow still want what the adults of today, and the adults of yesterday want — comfort, companionship, stability, connection, love. In short, don’t freak out, we’re gonna be okay.

What I still can’t get a handle on, though, is that this is *Stuyvesant*. I guess I just figured, from my warped persepctive and my middle- and high-school experiences, that the “intelligent,” “driven,” “hard working” kids were the ones least likely to be at the leading edge of these sorts of social changes. But then, perhaps I was hanging out with the “wrong” crowd. 😉 And in a school of 3,000 — no matter the school — there is always going to be *someone*, to use a marketing slogan, “think[ing] different(tm)”.