Reading Clementine Ford’s piece in Daily Life on teenage sexuality something struck me about the young girls she was describing.
The arrival of One Direction certainly took Australia by storm – mostly because nobody outside of the 12-17 year old teen girl bracket and a handful of their mothers had ever heard of them. But more interesting than the so-called ‘hysteria’ was the rampant hormonal explosion that occurred simultaneously. The sexual energy that heralded One Direction’s arrival was not only palpable, it was on full display in the homemade signs held aloft by teenage fans outside the Sunrise studios last Thursday morning. Banners bearing slogans such as, ‘Point your erection in my direction’ and ‘Send your one thing Down Under’ were spotted outside the Martin Place broadcast, and captured on TV for a scandalised nation to see.
Channel Seven was forced to apologise for allowing such rampantly offensive behaviour to roam wild in the Serengeti that is the breakfast broadcast. Meanwhile, Julie Gale, founder of the irritatingly text-moderne named Kids Free 2B Kids, declared the signs ‘highly inappropriate and reflective of the sexualised world kids are part of’.
These girls were being assertively playful. It caused outrage, of course, because ‘assertive’ and ‘playful’ are not terms we tend to allow young girls in expressing their sexuality, but personally, I find these girls refreshing. Because, relax everyone, they don’t necessarily have the slightest intention of acting on their flirtations. They’re just trying it out. Who doesn’t like to make a boisterous joke about what they’d like to do with a celebrity crush? And it was nice to read that article and think that some girls feel sufficiently in control over their emerging sexuality to have already developed a sense of humour about it. In all honesty, I admit I would likely be a little embarrassed if it were my daughter holding up the sign because she’s my kid and I can’t really imagine her as a teenager. And really, I don’t need to know that much about anyone’s sexual fantasies if I am related to them. But otherwise, I don’t think it is outrageous to see that girls have desire.
It made me think about how I felt about my own sexuality at that age. Frankly, I pretty much felt threatened. Shortly before I became a teenager I suddenly started receiving unwanted attention from older males (sometimes much older males), which I found alarming and uncomfortable and it didn’t give me a hell of a lot of room for being assertive and playful. It was a relief when I got far enough into adolescence that boys my own age were showing interest in me instead of just older males.
Somehow I would like this all to be very different for my own children.
One thing I am going to do differently as a parent is go easy on the ‘save sex for someone special’ rhetoric with my kids – both with my daughter and my son. I noticed some unintended consequences happened among my friends and I when we were growing up with this. The ‘save yourself for when you really love someone’ thing comes from a good place – being nice to yourself and only choosing people who are also nice to you – but it pairs up too easily with the general culture of slut-shaming that’s out there. The ‘precious vagina’ can easily become the ‘shameful vagina’.
‘Saving yourself’ can obviously also lend itself to an exploitative situation where male sexual pleasure is centred in sexual activity. Here’s how that works. You’re a girl and you’re having sexual encounters with boys (is it different for girls only hooking up with other girls?), and they’re very nice and you’re very attracted to them but they are not ‘the special one’ so for as long as possible you end up choosing sexual activities that don’t involve your precious, precious virginity. The safest activities for this are those aimed solely at his sexual pleasure. With some friends I think this established a pattern that took them years to overcome in their sex lives.
The whole need to always be in control for girls is problematic because being able to orgasm seems to involve being able to ‘let go’. If you don’t feel safe ‘letting go’ with someone – for all sorts of reasons, but your virginity being at stake is certainly part of it and then there’s the ‘shameful vagina’ thing – then there is not much point aiming for your own orgasm and if you’re not aiming for your own orgasm then how much focus do you put on your sexual pleasure in the encounter?
Also, adolescence is this time in life where many girls suddenly get this tiny taste of power in the form of desirability. When girls spend so much time feeling powerless this seems like a breath of fresh air. But it’s a power used against you just as quickly as you can wield it. And unlike the kinds of power that boys get to experience more readily – like physical strength and ferocity and fearlessness and leadership – sexual desirability is a power entirely dependent upon someone giving it to you.
Being desired is such a difficult power for girls to have mastery over, too. They have to balance on this knife-edge where they are available enough to be keeping someone’s attention but unavailable enough to continue to be pursued. When sex is tangled up with all this it becomes very complicated for young women – too complicated for them to be loosening the grip on control over their own pleasure. So, what activities do you choose? You choose the ones that enhance your desirability, again, you choose what he wants. Assertive and playful suddenly sounds like a real achievement.
So, how would you like sexuality to be different for your daughter, or girls generally, in growing up? How would you like your son to learn about girl sexuality differently?
(Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town).
POST-SCRIPT: Reading discussions of this post elsewhere on-line I don’t think I was clear enough about my conclusions here because some people are missing the point. It is not that penis-in-vagina sex was missing from the emerging sexuality of girls when I was growing up and how that was so very terrible – my point was that ‘blow-jobs’ and ‘hand-jobs’ got priority over anything else, including everything aimed at female sexual stimulation.. for all the reasons I have outlined above. And that girls became specialists in how to deliver sexual satisfaction to boys rather than know and understand their own sexual desires and I think that was because of a strange contract made with their parents about saving sex for someone who they really love which translated as I will do that but I will have desire in the meantime and I will end up channelling that towards the boy’s desires because he has authority about his own desire.
I think “save yourself” implies that she’s saving her virginity for a purpose that has nothing to do with her, and particularly focusing on virginity=lack of vaginal penetration by penis rather than avoiding sexual experience in general. So I don’t like that rhetoric. I have no problem with someday telling my daughter that it’s probably in her best interests to wait until she is in a situation that feels totally right to *her*, and that if she finds herself in a situation that doesn’t feel right but is worried that maybe she should do it anyway because maybe she won’t get another chance–that the odds are excellent that she will have another, better chance. Basically, I hope to bring my daughter up with the strength and self-esteem to wait until the choice is right for HER. But I’m also not going to be shy to say that I don’t think that having your first time be before you’re, say, 16, or when you’re not in a committed relationship, is probably right for a lot of people. Some of the specifics of what I tell her will depend on her temperament. Since my daughter is still in diapers, I have some time to figure this out.
The thing is I don’t think for the girls I grew up with that our parents intended for us to be doing other sexual activities with boys instead of penis-in-vagina when they said ‘save yourself for someone you love’. They meant the whole kitten-caboodle, I’d guess. I think they under-estimated the pressure on girls to engage in sexual activity and/or the desire we had. So, the message about saving yourself for love was supposed to be quite liberal and empowering, but it had these other consequences given the rest of the culture we grow up in.
it also trapped a lot of young women I know – because if you saved yourself for True Love and then it turned out not to be true love, you have to either admit you wasted what you’d meant to save, or you stick it out and try to make it be True Love. Even if it gets really, really bad.
The whole “save yourself for someone special” thing really backfires, too, when it comes down to someone manipulative showing up and saying “I guess I’m just not special enough for you, or you’d let me [insert activity here].” It’s all-around just an issue of giving control to everybody but the person who should have it. “Know yourself well enough to know when you are or aren’t ready, give yourself room to say you’re not, be with someone who will respect that (and respect it from others) and know that having done it before doesn’t mean you’re ready forever after” is a much better philosophy.
Yes, that ‘know yourself’ bit is so important. Know your own desire, know your own body, know your own sexuality, know what you really want. Both you and Elaine really make that point and that’s it exactly.
The problem with the “save yourself” rhetoric is that it turns virginity into a thing – a perfectly wrapped present to give – instead of a state of being. And this state of being is really a description about one’s experiential knowledge of an intimate relationship between people. The terminology of “losing your virginity” is also pretty unfortunate and just adds to the idea that this one specific sexual act is like diving off a cliff. For me, it was more like wading deeper into the water. I don’t know how this will translate into parenting, but I hope that my daughter doesn’t feel like everything rides on this one time when she first experiences intercourse. Hopefully I can figure out how to convey that this is just another way in which you can know someone else – one that comes with emotional and physical responsibility. But it’s not going to change you into something else, or somebody without a special present to bestow.
This is really interesting. I grew up Catholic with an extremely Catholic mother, and while I don’t consider myself one any more, I know I still have some pretty sizable baggage as a consequence. I really admire the way you’ve articulated the nuances of this issue. I have to go away and think about this some more.
This paragraph really resonated with me:
Shortly before I became a teenager I suddenly started receiving unwanted attention from older males (sometimes much older males), which I found alarming and uncomfortable and it didn’t give me a hell of a lot of room for being assertive and playful. It was a relief when I got far enough into adolescence that boys my own age were showing interest in me instead of just older males.
I was thinking recently about how when I was 14-18 I had tons of unwanted attention from older males. Many of them much older. Many of them married. It was uncomfortable, unwelcome, and alarming. Most of this attention has waned as I’ve grown older myself. It is disturbing to think that I get much less attention from older men as a 25 year old than I did as a 15 year old.
I became sexually active during my adolescence, something I don’t regret. But it is worrying that most of the rhetoric directed at me about sexuality was about “saving myself for marriage” and about how all boys my age only wanted one thing – sex! – and I was to resist them and be “pure.” There was no space for me to be able to have a healthy sexual relationship with a boy my age AND resist degrading comments or unwanted sexual attention from older men. This is part of the problem with the idea of “saving your virginity.” You’re either pure or a whore. You had to either be completely unsexual or accept unwanted sexual attention, which of course you “deserved” because you were sexually active.
I just recently wrote about this http://modernparentonline.com/unplanned-parent/good-girls-like-it-too/
We act as if teenage girls don’t have sex drives they want to satisfy as well, but they do. I am also going easy on the “save yourself” thing.with my daughter. I’ve spent a lot of mental energy sorting through the mess that made in my head/relationships.
Very interesting and completely true – the double standard is everywhere especially the media and government rhetoric. I wonder if so much fuss would have been made if it was teenage boys holding up signs at female celebrities? And I agree with all the other comments – abstinence=virgin/whore dichotomy, pure and simple. Also, abstinence is misogynist and anti-feminist because why aren’t boys told to save themselves for marriage and resist girls’ advances? Why is penetration so much more important than any other sexual activity? I mean, its the most vanilla option!
Reblogged this on Diary of a VirginWhore and commented:
The Abstinence message (even in the lighter, ‘save it for someone special’ version) leads directly to the virgin/whore dichotomy. It is misogynist and anti-feminist because 1)it controls female sexuality but not male as boys aren’t usually given this message; 2) it priveleges vaginal penetration over all other, kinkier sexual acts which is confusing for homosexuals and anyone who doesn’t privelege penetration; 3)it suggests that penetration is the absolute, totally different from other sexual acts which isn’t necessarily true; 4) It leads to a woman’s worth being judged on how sexually repressed she is/what she does and doesn’t do sexually; 5) it creates inequality between the genders. This is a really good article that illustrates how society gets shocked by teen female expressiveness and the harm the ‘save yourself’ message does. Really good comments below it, too.
(Also commented at Hoyden.)
Hrm. My experiences of sexuality at that age were almost entirely negative and largely for reasons different from “save yourself for the [sufficiently] special one” rhetoric. I do remember that rhetoric from teen girl magazines especially and I found it grating at the time. An kind of irritating step-down: they know they can’t say “save yourself for marriage” with a straight face, so you save yourself for love instead.
Anyway, my negative experiences came partly from my total undesirability to men (being heterosexual, this was relevant). I don’t have very direct evidence of this — one can’t, usually, ask one’s attractive peers why they aren’t attracted to you — but it is probably a combination of my really really unusual height (I am 193cm/6’4″) and that kind of academic success it’s possible for a gifted kid to have in some mainstream high schools where every single prize at the prize night has your name on it. (Actually I do know some people who had that experience of university too, but it’s rarer, and in any event, those people definitely weren’t me.) Certainly, all the attention I received from unknown men was highly negative until I was about twenty. (“Fuck off square.*” “Fuck off, you fucking lanky bitch.”)
So, this is hard. Because while I would prefer that my (hypothetical) daughter not experience early sexuality as “the fact of your body and mind is universally repulsive” it’s not the kind of thing that I as a parent can do anything about, whereas at least one could feel that one had some power over the “save yourself” discussion by advocating different models of relationship. If my daughter has no relationship possibilities, there’s no model to advocate without sounding smug and/or desperate. (My mother went for “I promise promise promise university is totally different socially, I promise.” Which is probably the best that there was to say, although it must suck for people who turn out to not be a social/sexual fit for their young adult life either.)
I guess in terms of my (non-hypothetical, at least as assigned gender goes) son, this means I would emphasise “no you don’t have to be attracted to people necessarily BUT you should let their body exist free in the world without your lack of attraction aimed at it maliciously”, I guess.
* My parents, although mostly very sympathetic, found it hilarious that my peers used the, to them, very dated slang “square” for academically successful kids in the middle of the 1990s with no sense of irony. I had no idea what they were talking about at the time.
I was in a similar boat Mary and didn’t really get to enjoy being sexual until my 20s. And at that point I found it was good fun. So my hope is that my daughters will be able to enjoy their sexuality when they are ready and I’m definitely going to pass on the moral instruction. I will however be furious if I hear of them being abused as you were or receiving unwanted attention from older men.
Mary, my god, obviously I am disgusted at the treatment you experienced.. what the hell is wrong with people, that they do this to a girl? So incredibly destructive that people feel such a sense of entitlement to evaluate and persecute body shapes. It is also a good reminder for me of what to look out for as my daughter is very tall.
It is far from the most stigmatised of body shapes, but generally speaking it does seem that if you have an unusual body type that is considered unattractive (generally speaking women are “supposed” to be shorter than male partners, so being tall falls in this category for some people) that (some, jerky) people feel the need to tell you at lot about how very unattractive you are to them. And alas like a lot of harassment, it’s not a two way conversation, so you don’t get the satisfaction of any kind of confrontation, you have to resolve the criticism within yourself if you can.
This article and the whole discussion is excellent and I’m with Allison – I really need to go away and think (I have a four month old daughter). But there’s a piece of context you really should know: One Direction’s first hit was all about telling “you” (an unnamed girl aka every preteen listening to the song) that she’s much more beautiful than she thinks she is. The song describes her insecure behaviour and her lack of self esteem in loving and accepting terms (at which point I thought, “That’s nice. Girls need to be told they’re pretty, even if only through a song”). . . then came the final line (which is also the title): “That’s what makes you beautiful.”
EXCUSE ME WHAT?!?!?!?!?! These . . . . . people. . . . . are wandering the world telling preteen girls that they have to be desperately, visibly insecure to be attractive. The worst part of all is how it’s exactly this message that seems to provoke the most enthusiastic – and apparently most sexually available – responses.
My choices now are: Find a way to fill my daughter with disgust at anyone who even hints as such a message – regardless of how pretty and internationally famous they are. . . or find me a lasso of truth and strangle every singer, actor, and producer who dares speak that kind of rubbish aloud.
Maybe both.
Louise Curtis
From my own experience, and that of my group of teenaged friends who were attracted to boys AND girls – yes, it is different. It is different precisely because of this reason. Because the stakes are lower (at least in this particular way, they can be higher in others), you don’t have to ‘save’ anything, there’s less pressure for everything to flow on a pre-set script, to feel certain things at certain times. There’s less ‘this is the one’ and more ‘this is another human being that I am attracted to, who is attracted to me, who I am sharing this experience with’. You can explore desire and desirability without giving away your power over yourself and your sexuality.
Well, mostly. People are complicated, after all.
The message I got from my parents was ‘be careful, be safe’ and I was one of the last of my peer group to loose whatever you might define as my virginity. Because I wasn’t ready early, and I didn’t want to, and I felt able to say no or avoid having to say no without giving in to pressure from authority. That is, I felt I had my own choice and agency, with relatively little pressure either way. Sample size of one, obviously, but it worked for me. When I got together with my first boyfriend (the first relationship that my parents knew about) my dad bought me condoms. Despite how embarrassed I was by this, even at the time I was touched. It was a gesture that told me ‘I want you to be safe and to do things that make you feel good’. Bless him!
Fascinating discussion, giving me much to reflect on as the mother of a young daughter. As a Catholic, I grew up with the ‘save yourself’ discourse, which didn’t seem problematic until the nice Catholic boy I fell for at 19 revealed he had a sexually transmissible infection. Fortunately it was curable, but as his other sexual partner at the time was also sleeping with someone who injected drugs, it might not have been. I think when my daughter’s time comes, I’ll be going with the ‘be careful, be safe’ message, with the addition of ‘have fun.’
The message I got about sex was “it is fun BUT only do it with someone you love and don’t get pregnant because if you have an abortion you’ll NEVER get over it and if you don’t your life will be RUINED and I’m not raising it”. She was absolutely horrified by the thought of oral sex or anything else. Fortunately I never listened to my mother, but I was old when I shed my virginity (and boy was that a relief).
As the mother of a preteen son I tell him it feels really good when you do it with someone you like, respect and feel safe with. Hopefully he’ll work the rest of it out and extend the respect and safety to his future partners.
Great blog. I’m in my 50s now, and frankly, could hardly wait to have sex. The only thing that held me back was fear of pregnancy. At 15, finally, and with much enjoyment, lost my virginity, though still lived in fear that various contraceptives wouldn’t work. Seems to me that the possibility of pregnancy is one reason (though not the only one, as noted in other comments) people try to control girls’ sexuality more than boys.
I also had unwanted attention from considerably older men from the age of about 12 – went through puberty at 10 (much more traumatic than finally having sex – was totally unprepared) and reached my final height of 172 cm at 13. Fortunately, apart from unwanted groping, escaped their attentions without problems.
As long as teen and pre-teen girls have some idea what lies ahead, more than I did, anyway, and have support from parents, other adults and peers, the “be careful, be safe, have fun” message seems a pretty good one.
Egads – I tried to write a reply on my mobile and it chucked a wobbly, so here goes:
Greetings!
I feel a bit hesitant to add my comment because it’s been such a different journey for me and the way we are raising our daughter. However, I’ve been really interested to read other feminist parents’ thoughts about this issue.
I was raised in a minority culture in which abstinence is expected for both males and females before marriage. Not just vaginal intercourse, but any and all sexual activity. I don’t know if other kids were secretly breaking the rules but I followed them and maybe everyone was too guilty to tell me what they were up to hehehe. But to be honest, that took a lot of the pressure off having to decide was “this boy” or “that boy” the right one.
It’s not that I didn’t have those terrible teenage unrequited crushes, or fantasies of kissing guys (in my case Johnny Depp from 21 Jump Street), oh did I suffer like any hormonal teenager, but in hindsight I’m really pleased I was too religious for getting up to anything and I “saved” myself for my lovely hubby (now of thirteen years).
We’re raising our daughter similarly and it would be exactly the same for a boy. She’s only eight so discussions around sex have mostly been of the information variety (following her direction over what questions she asks at what time she is interested) but importantly, we also affirm that as she matures she becomes more and more responsible for her own choices and decisions. We hope that this, along with a strong message of acceptance for who she is, and trust in her growing maturity, that this will stand us all in good stead.
Wow everyone. Er so, my experience was different. I drafted this a couple of days ago when I first saw the post with no comments, so here we go.
I would absolutely suggest to nonsexually active kids or teenagers that it’s a good idea to wait until you feel ready and/or to find someone you love – not because you have to for moral reasons but because emotionally it is a safer space. I wouldn’t be shaming them if they decided differently, but it was great for me and I would really want them to feel ready if they weren’t feeling the love thing, just lust. I fell in (mutual) love when I was 15 and it was very respectful.
Funnily enough my first two relationships were respectful enough that I thought every boyfriend would be that nice, and it was a shock in my 20s to discover that many guys were not as nice, in fact in some cases increasingly less respectful as I got into my late 20s. I sometimes wonder how I managed to get so lucky when I started out (it’s not like I should have stayed with either of the first two).
The interesting thing is that I got this message from reading magazines (essentially the message I remember is ‘it’s a good idea to wait until you are ready and that is probably when you are in love’ – definitely not ‘saving’ yourself). My parents didn’t like me having a boyfriend but they didn’t shame me either. I just grew up with no hang ups about myself sexually. (Not coincidentally, I was raised in a secular household, had secular schooling and have never been religious.) Problems I have had came with experiences from when I was older, not from my initial sexual experiences.
I see the points about how it also results in more oral sex for boys, but consider this: teenagers also don’t have many spaces to have sex of any kind in, which makes you choose activities where you can keep some clothes on and be in less obviously sexual positions. As a 15 year old my boyfriend and I stuck to mutual non-PIV activities and I didn’t try PIV until I was 18 – two boyfriends later. Because I wasn’t ready before that.
I think your approach of being ready and/or find someone you love essentially amount to the same thing. If they are in love but not ready then they’re just not ready so not recommended. So, my approach would be do it when you are really ready and be safe.
What about oral sex for the girls? I can’t see how it is really more inconvenient or whatnot than the other sort. Anyway, you said mutual so obviously it is possible to get around.
To put it bluntly: you can give a guy a blow job in a car. I haven’t personally tried, but I know the way I like to receive oral pleasure could not be achieved in a car, with pants on!
I believe loose skirts are pretty handy too, someone can even be hidden under one!
Can I recommend Kaz Cooke’s “Girl Stuff” as a great resource for girls entering puberty and throughout their teenage years? I gave it to my 11 year old daughter late last year and she read it cover to cover. The book provides good openings for discussion and carefully constructed messages. Kaz says, “It’s okay to wait for the right person and it’s okay to experiment, as long as you stay safe and are treated with respect and kindness.” I think the experimentation option helps girls to understand that it’s normal and okay, perhaps a better message than just “saving yourself”. It helps that it’s a funny book, too.
So far, I’ve found that keeping the conversation doors wide open has helped, but we have a way to go yet before we’re finished. High school starts next year. I’m trying to ensure she has confidence and respect for herself and that she feels safe to ask me when she’s not sure of anything. She tells me when she’s having difficulties with any of her friends, boys or girls, so I’m hoping that will translate into healthy relationship discussions in the future.
🙂 !!
I almost don’t even feel qualified to comment on this, because basically my answer has been to stock our bookshelves with titles like The Guide to Getting It On and s.e.x.: the all you need to know guide to progressive sexuality to get you through college alongside The Ethical Slut and Everything Your Mother Never Told You About Sex and similar titles. I know that my focus, having boys (well, so far; I have books for that contingency too), will primarily be on relationship-building, and teaching them how to resist narratives that treat sex as something women have and men want. They’re young yet, but we talk a lot about respecting each other’s boundaries, using our words, that sort of thing, and those are skills they will hopefully carry with them into future romantic/sexual relationships.
I think that there is no right answer other than listening with eyes and ears and being truly open to and observant of the people we live with. To begin with I think we should stop categorizing and thinking of people as children, teenagers, adults. These states of being are abstract, constantly evolving and full of preconceived notions, which can be perceived as positive (the innocence associated with early childhood) and negative (the terrible twos, the tortured teens) but are always limited and in my opinion to be avoided. My son is a person of six years of age. People are sexual from day one simply because they are conceived through sex and they are born with penis and/or vagina. It isn’t something that suddenly happens. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t touch myself with the healthy curiosity of a person exploring her body. However like many of the women responding to this article I was raised in a family that had set ideas about “education” with seemingly good intentions but who looked right past me and the person I was.
Every person experiences sexuality differently and parents obviously have a very important role to play BUT I think that the trauma that imposing (or strongly suggesting) abstinence can lead to is a symptom of a much larger issue which is raising children (both male and female) in fear and to fear.
Fear of failing. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of trying something new. Fear of speaking up and expressing ourselves. Fear of judgement. Fear of rejection which are all basically the same fear which is the fear of not being loved.
But then how do we love? The debate about “waiting for the right one or not” is not the real issue. It is just a choice to make. How can we love our children and give them the support and respect that they need in order to grow every day more strong and live and make choices out of love rather than fear?
This is a bit of a digression but I also object to the way teenage pregnancy has been problematised.
Also of course people are attracted to teenagers. There is nothing shocking or disgusting about that. What is always shocking and disgusting however is abuse of power.
I love this mamachi. I always say to people that I try to treat children like I do any adult. I don’t expect them to warm to me immediately (because of some idea that all children are immediately trusting of strangers), I don’t expect to get on with all of them because I don’t get on with all people, I just try to give them the politeness and respect I would any person. I think this started with my parents who mostly eschewed baby talk once we were past the baby stage, and spoke to us like we were rational beings. Part of my work is with teenagers and people so often say to me ‘ugh teenagers’ or ‘teenagers ARE THE WORST’. Poor teenagers, they are pretty maligned.
“The safest activities for this are those aimed solely at his sexual pleasure.”
Whoa, slow down there. There is a whole universe of sexual activity that does not involve penetration. It’s a maybe even a little heterocentric to rule out all the great things that women enjoy that don’t involve risk of procreation or fluid exchange. Or to assume that your kids will have the same types of first experiences that you had.
I’m a little unclear on what the counter-message is supposed to be. What if we just redefine “special” as, “knowing yourself and your partner well enough to know that you’re both physically and emotionally ready, that there is mutual respect and mutual communication and respect for boundaries,” (I might even dare say that respect + communication + lust are three really essential ingredients towards love so the old way of looking at it isn’t totally off base.)
I think the sentence you quoted not bluemilk’s opinion, she was illustrating how the “saving yourself” approach ends up centring the male’s pleasure.
I agree with much of what’s been written here, but I also hope that I have the courage to be a little more concrete with my children, ie to help them answer, how will I know when I’m ready? I hope to be able to say, you are ready if you are mature enough to sit through the conversation I am about to have with you! You are ready if you can look at a penis/vagina with the light on, and be looked at too. You are ready if you can enjoy an orgasm by yourself, and know what makes your body feel good. You are ready if you and your potential penetrative partner have experimented with other ways of making each other feel good and it didn’t feel awkward or embarrassing. And I hope I have the courage to talk to my daughter and any future sons about how wonderful sexual encounters can make you feel when they are right, and how truly terrible they can make you feel when they aren’t. And of course there’ll have to be a lot in there about how alcohol relates to sexual activity because a lot of negative sexual encounters happen after too many drinks in a very unstaged way. And I guess I hope I am strong enough to let my children decide when they are ready, and let them undertake these kinds of activities in our home, so that their behaviour is not restricted by what can be done discreetly in a car with your pants still on! 🙂
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