Ahhh, teenage sex.
How fondly I remember not having very much of it at all.
The same can’t be
said for students in Massachusetts,
who are apparently at it like Kim Catrall on rabbit hormones.
According to the
Guardian, 17 young girls at a single school have found themselves in a family
way after entering into a “pregnancy pact” with each other, whereby they would
each get knocked up and then everyone involved would raise the resultant babies
as a group.
Obviously, it’s an
idea so stupid that it frightened scientists by showing up on the Richter
scale,* but the resulting furore, at least as reported in the Guardian piece,
seemed woefully misguided.
As usual, everyone is
kicking off about contraception, and, as with pretty much every problem this
decade, it seems fair to blame George Bush.
(I refer to George W.
Bush, although, as this is about not using contraception, the blame can also be
placed on his old man.)
The Bush
administration’s policy on teenage sex (“don’t have it”) was always a little
optimistic. I think all males can agree that “American Pie” was a more honest
portrayal of teen sexuality than anything the Christian abstinence programmes
ever came up with. Teenagers have literally spent years waiting for the chance
to fuck something, and smart contraception advice understands that, and goes on
to throw condoms at people like rice at a wedding.
The authorities in
the heavily Catholic area of Gloucester,
Massachusetts, however, have a
standing policy that no contraceptives shall be given to any kids unless their
parents sign off on it.
Personally, I’d
rather be abstinent than ask my mother for a condom, but then again that’s not
a choice I have to face. These kids, on the other hand, do.
So the draconian,
Republican-endorsed sex education policy, continued by a tremulous, non-combative
Obama administration, is already likely to cause a lot of teen pregnancies.
This isn’t news. It's also, from what I can see, not the real issue, here.
At first, what seemed
to be the issue was good old fashioned sexism.
These girls – who are
all middle class and white, from what we’re told – don’t have any aspirations
except to be incubators. That’s as far as they’ve got with their thinking. The
most they can be in life is a fleshy oven.
I don’t know what
it’s like to be in the head of a teenage girl. I spent highschool trying to get into
any part of a teenage girl without
success. Still, I can’t fathom the lack of ambition at play, here. None of
these girls wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut or even a fucking
waitress. They just plumped for “teen mom” as a job, and that was that.
I said the problem
“seemed” to be sexism, because once you realise that these girls have given up
being anything except cattle, you end up realising it’s not about gender.
It’s about age.
Sure, these girls
gave up on having careers (or at least made it prohibitively difficult for
themselves) but who were the guys knocking them up? What were their ambitions?
A hunch tells me, they weren’t shooting for the stars, either.
In a world where
unemployment and recession feel like the paving stones of the endless road
ahead, why are we surprised that kids don’t want to make anything of their
lives? Degrees are becoming devalued to the point of worthlessness, job security
is a quaint notion from history and the one percent are too busy laughing at
the rest of us to even notice.
I can see a worrying
spin on this story, too. Someone, somewhere is going to play the inverse racism
card and claim that American society is so busy pandering to minorities and
teaching them to achieve their goals, that these poor white children were left
out and settled for early motherhood. So let’s stamp that out right now: The
fact that the ethnic background of these girls keeps getting mentioned is
depressing proof that American society is still segregated along racial
divides. The colour of these kids shouldn’t matter. This is everything to do
with generations and nothing to do with race.
It’s not my place to
tell anyone in New England their business – God knows nobody listens to me in
normal England,
let alone the sequel – but so much of this story screams of a culture that’s
utterly broken. I don’t just mean American culture, although that whole nation
has been going downhill ever since they cancelled “Arrested Development.” The
world as a whole has gotten so shitty that kids in the first world are aspiring
to be teen mothers because they don’t see that they can be anything else.
These young girls
didn’t need lecturing, or Jesus, or even the pill.
They just needed to
feel like society had a place for them.
And that’s something
even adults are struggling with, these days.
*Japanese scientists were scared when they thought it was an
earthquake, and then so excited that they spunked themselves to death when they
heard the part about schoolgirls having sex.
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