The year was 1998. Two dozen parents met with the Principal of a Washington, DC middle school where they were informed that as many as a dozen girls had been performing oral sex on two or three boys for most of the school year. These 13-and-14-year-old students were engaging in this behavior at parties, in parks and a couple of neighborhood parking lots.[1]  We would go outside, then come back in and sit around and talk about it. It was no big deal.” This is another stark reminder from the war on intimacy’s latest casualties, many of whom don’t even  know what they have lost.  

How did we arrive at a situation where 13-and 14-year-old girls’ first introduction to intimacy with the opposite sex was not a kiss, but literally (pardon the strong language) having someone’s genitals shoved in their faces? How will these girls will feel in 10 years when they think about their first “intimate” experience with the opposite sex?? Will they feel “sexually empowered” or a sharp bite of humiliation and pain? What kind of exploitative habits will these boys develop after having learned that girls can be led, or coerced, to be used in this way? What kind of marriages will they have, if they do get married?

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Chapter 14

We have argued that teens using pornography and engaging in premature sexual activity is no accident. Rather, it is the product of an environment, shaped by adults, that encourages this kind of behavior. A case in point: On the very same day in 1998 when the article about oral sex in a Middle School appeared in the Washington Post , teenwire.com, a website sponsored by Planned Parenthood, carried these posts:

There is a whole universe of sexual activity that doesn’t involve penis-in-vagina sex but can be fun, exciting and fulfilling enough to keep you busy for hours and leave both you and your partner grinning from ear to ear.  How are you supposed to ignore your sexual urges when they seem uncontrollably intense?

Efforts to promote oral sex and other sexual activity among teenagers did not begin in 1998, but rather at least a decade earlier. Consider the following statement directed towards health teachers by Debra Haffner, executive director of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1988: “We should teach teens about oral sex and mutual masturbation in order to help them delay the onset of sexual intercourse and its resulting consequences.”   

Is it mere coincidence that in 1988 Haffner advised health teachers and those who write curricula and train health teachers throughout the United States that teenagers should be taught about oral sex and, within ten years, “a whole universe of sexual activity that doesn’t involve penis-in-vagina” is promoted on a Planned Parenthood website for teens and oral sex becomes a common practice of 8th grade girls in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in the country?

Consider another recommendation from Debra Haffner, “Colleagues and I have fantasized about a national ‘petting project’ for teenagers…A partial list of safe sex practices for teens could include: … Massaging, caressing, undressing each other, masturbation alone, masturbation in front of a partner, mutual masturbation.  Teens could surely come up with their own list of activities.”

[1] Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, Riverhead Book New York, 2007, 2.