Well someone is paying attention at last. Judith Warner, who writes the Domestic Disturbances column for the New York Times, has a column today that delves into the question I asked two days ago: Why is NO ONE interested in the fact that studies have shown that teens as a group aren’t actually promiscuous?

Warner first describes how Linda Perlstein, the author of Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, kept being called during the media frenzy over the “oral sex epidemics”:

“I’d say, ‘No one is doing that,’” she told me when I called her this week to refresh my memory of her story. “Even the sluttiest kids I knew, when I told them about that said, ‘Ewww. No one does that.’ This really prurient stuff was being way overblown.

“Believe me, I wanted to be on ‘Oprah.’ I had a book to sell. I’d say, ‘There’s lots of stuff to talk about. Stuff that really should be talked about, that’s more nuanced and complex.’ They were like ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

Warner has a theory well worth considering as to why society and parents insist on oversimplifying issues that relate to children’s loss of innocence:

All the examples of child myth-making that I’ve mentioned here have to do, at base, with the perceived corruption of childhood, the loss of some kind of “natural” innocence. When they depart from kernels of reality to rise to the level of myth, they are, I believe, largely projections that enable adults to evade things. Specifically, the overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life. [my emphasis]

In the case of the allegedly lascivious Lolitas, Kefalas sees this flight from reality very clearly: “People don’t want to hear about the economic context, the social context” to young teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy, she told me. “For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.” [my emphasis again]

It does seem rather fantastical to me that articles and authors group “teenagers” as a whole into one category, and then encourage parents to practice parenting based on a grossly oversimplified and sensationalized definition of what it is that teens do. It should be the responsibility of these authors and talk shows, particularly if they purport to care about teens’ lives and futures, to ignore the ratings and the talk show invites, to report fairly and with an eye to the specifics, both differences and overlaps, between groups of teens–and with an eye to root causes, far beyond and much more relative than “morality”, as to why some teens do engage in promiscuous behavior.

I teach a persuasive essay writing class to high school sophomores and every time a student hands in an essay draft, I inevitably hand it back with a big circle drawn around the intro: “You need to push this thesis–make it more complex, more sophisticated, more specific. Tell me how and why and in what way,” I write. We, as readers, as [future] parents, as once-teens-ourselves, have the responsibility to do the same for those who report on contemporary teenage behavior.

–Kristen Loveland