The casual emptiness of teenage sex
ANYONE MORE than a decade removed from high school has probably wondered what it's like to be a teenager in today's sexually saturated times.
On Sunday, The New York Times Magazine provided a bleak answer.
Benoit Denizet-Lewis's cover story, based on interviews and exchanges with nearly 100 suburban teenagers, opens a window onto a world of sexual encounters devoid of emotional connection, of casual assignations, arranged via e-mail or cellphone, deliberately divorced from dating or romance.
The picture the writer paints is of sexuality shorn of the rituals and romance many of us recall from the days when we were growing toward young adulthood. Flirtation, infatuation, invitation, dating, becoming steadies, progressing, stage by stage, toward sexual intimacy -- all that, for many suburban teens, has been replaced by matter-of-fact liaisons that treat sex as though it was little more than a biological urge to be indulged, by appointment, at the mutual convenience of mere acquaintances.
Among the teens Denizet-Lewis surveyed "hooking up" and "friends with benefits" -- that is, friends who have casual sex -- offer convenient answers to a high school environment where actual relationships are deemed too demanding or limiting, where oral sex is considered more social skill than intimate act, and where contemporaries who are steady couples are viewed as uncool or, even worse, losers. It's a world often absent any sort of emotional bond between sexual partners, and indeed, where the acknowledged rules of teenage trysts are that they stake no such claim. Brian, a 16-year-old, explained it this way: "Being in a real relationship just complicates everything. You feel obligated to be all, like, couply. And that gets really boring after a while. When you're friends with benefits, you go over, hook up, then play video games or something. It rocks."
Against the backdrop of not-so-distant sexual repression enforced by a conservative alliance of church and state, it's hard to think that legal or moral codes that condemn teenage sexuality are a preferred alternative; sovereignty in sexual matters best rests not with church or state but rather with the individual. That's why modifying people's behavior should be the province of persuasion, not of compulsion.
Yet to read the Times story is to come away fearing that the ideology of sexual freedom has robbed many of today's young people of an important internal check on their own conduct.
Conscience isn't quite the right word. Perhaps self-consciousness would be more apt. A realistic approach to sexuality isn't necessarily abstinence, as the various conservative movements would have it, but rather the recognition that liberty and license aren't the same thing and that sex is important enough not to be trivialized.
Whenever a story like Denizet-Lewis's sees print, it occasions a good deal of joking among middle-age men to the effect that today's male teens live in a paradise they themselves could only fantasize about. But if today's high school sexual scene really does make teenage guys the commitment-free recipients of easy oral sex, turning high school girls into so many willing sexual servitors, then the notion of sexual freedom has taken a truly disturbing turn.
What sentient people remember as central when they look back on high school and college are not the casual sexual encounters they had but the emotional experiences: the glow in learning that a romantic interest shared their feelings, the giddy delight of falling in love, the heartache of breaking up. Everyone recalls his or her various physical encounters, of course, but what helped shape us is the emotional connection of real relationships, relationships that let us grow, develop, learn, mature.
That's why it's truly sad to read of a high-school generation too detached to date, too indifferent for romance, too distant for commitment. And why it's hard to believe that the physical and the emotional can truly be compartmentalized, that two teenagers can be friends with benefits but without psychological consequences, that hooking up can reduce sex to a pure physical transaction without scarring psyche or soul.
Those are lessons no doubt hard to teach in the face of today's culture of casual carnality. And yet if you believe in the importance of love to achieving a happy, meaningful life, you can't help but hope that today's teenagers will come to understand that to rob sex of romance, to divorce it from of emotion, is to deny themselves exactly what makes it special.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 