Bartcop,
Right now, at this very moment, John Stossel is on 20/20 with an "exposé" of teens and their sex lives.
As a teen who is still a virgin, I find
this "exposé" of something that does not resemble my life in the
slightest to be both appalling and degrading.
I do believe that teenagers should remain,
to an extent, underneath their parents' supervision and should
try to respect their parents' wishes. But
at the same time, teenagers are very close to adulthood, and they
have real adult sexual curiosities and
proclivities. Adolescence is a very tough place in life. It's hard to be
told you're still a child while knowing
in your heart that you aren't quite the same way you were only one,
five, or ten years ago. It is such an amazing
and complex period of time. But despite the wonder of the age,
all I can see in this Stossel "exclusive"
is more demonization of teens' sexual urges, and demonization of the
influx of confusing hormones that teens
must undergo.
But this "teen sex" problem is not nearly as bad as he likes to imply.
And that brings me to my point: there's
all this conservative talk these days about how we will "protect the
children". Protect us from what? From our
own eeevil minds? From our feelings? Our desires and thoughts?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and
ask parents if it would really be so bad to allow children to make their
own mistakes if they're hell bent on doing
just that. You can lead a horse to water, after all, but you can't
make it drink. All kids need is compassion
and understanding parents, which luckily, I have (might I add that
they're LIBERAL!!!!). But the conservatives
don't seem to think that. They don't want to trust us by just
coming out and being honest and telling
us "what's what", ESPECIALLY when it comes to sex. They hope
that telling us "what isn't really what"
will trick us into acting a certain way--the way sexual education classes
are being stamped out all over the nation
in favor of abstinence courses is the prime example
-- But we're not fucking blind.
And once kids have been lied to and they
find that out, what makes adults think that their children will
EVER listen to them again?
Don't get me wrong; Stossel actually interviewed
some good people on this show. He interviewed some
good parents and some good kids who honestly
wanted to make a difference and do what was right for
them and their families. But he has a real
talent for twisting peoples’ words to suit his political agenda.
He just didn't let up. Despite the responses
he got, he always found a way to twist the message to the right
and distort reality with his own paranoid
conservative views that society might just be changing in a way
that he doesn't like.
He goes on to say that teen sex went down
by about 4% from the beginning of the 1990's, but tries to boost
parental concern once again by saying that
oral sex has gone up (he doesn't say by what percent, however,
and I have to wonder if his "information"
actually came from what he saw on"Dawson's Creek" or "Buffy the
Vampire Slayer"). Instead of praising us
for our growing maturity, we're instead berated for trading one evil
for another (as if adults don't do the
same thing). It's not good enough for Stossel, for 20/20, or for the
Republican Party. We just can't win. We
can NEVER win. We haven't been able to win since the 80's when
the so-called political "battle" was against
drug use among teens, and even then, no matter what teens did to
clean up their lives, the Repubs would
just find something else to piss and moan about.
Why should sex, the most powerful human
interaction on the planet, be in the hands of children? Of people
who don't fully understand it? This is
what they are asking. And that really is a good question. But I’d have
to
answer that question by posing another:
why do 1 in 2 mature American adults run the risk of being unfaithful
in their marriages, approximately 15-35%
more than people from other countries? Why are mature American
adults the world's foremost consumers of
pornography? Why do mature American adults lead the rest of the
world in rape and domestic abuse?
But I shouldn't be asking such things. After all, I'm a kid who "just doesn't understand".
I hate being made into a Stossel-mentary.
Stossel doesn't know me. He doesn't know the rest of my virgin
friends and why we chose not to have sex,
and he certainly doesn't know my virgin boyfriend and why we
have chosen to wait until we are married
to have sex with each other. He feels that he doesn't have to know
these things. All that matters are those
kids that actually HAVE had sex, and all that matters is whether or
not he can focus on them and make a problem
that is getting better seem like it's getting much worse.
All he needs are negative-sounding statistics
and he knows that if he makes a big enough deal out of them,
he'll get the conservatives' panties in
a bunch, much in the same way Bush has used that technique in order
to get support for his war on Iraq. Stossel
has been doing this for years. He poses as some concerned
sociologist but makes such outrageous generalizations
about groups of people—teens, women, consumers
of products, men, celebrities, politicians,
etc.—that it’s hard to believe that other people can’t see through
him and recognize him for the puppet that
he is. I may not have been around as long as some other people,
but I have been around long enough to know
when I smell a rat.
And Bart...reach for your gun...
He makes a wonderfully graceful and subtle
comparison between Clinton and teens' definition of what
constitutes as sex. He states it in a voice
over played alongside the famous "I-did-not-have-sexual-relations"
clip of Clinton and says, "Clinton's definition
of what sex was was actually closer to the kids' definition
than to the parents'."
I expect that was supposed to imply something
about Clinton's "immoral" character. I certainly wouldn't
put it past this hypocrite. But all
this aside, if generalizations and shortsightedness are what he want,
I can do that too. I can stoop to that
level and say it in terms that he'd be able to understand:
BITE ME, STOSSEL!!!!
Sincerely,
Tara T