I wrote a post last November about the very positive reception my students had given to Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti’s immensely popular and useful primer and polemic.
Now that I’ve assigned the book to several different classes, I’ve had a chance to collect a wider variety of reactions. Happily, the responses of my students to Valenti’s text remain uniformly positive, or very nearly so. And perhaps not surprisingly, one particular section of FFF continues to elicit the most impassioned reactions. In November 2007, I quoted this short section:
I’ve had more than a couple of embarrassing moments in my life and sexual history — but isn’t that what makes us who we are? Do we really have to be on point and thinking politics all the time? Sometimes doing silly, disempowering, sexually vapid things when you’re young is just part of getting to the good stuff.
That resonated with my students then, and it resonates now. I had some great in-class discussions about this particular passage in my spring class, and got some marvelous journal responses as well. And the real meaning of those three sentences is deeper than may first appear. One of the most salient of Jessica Valenti’s points is that the dominant narrative, the one that suggests that poor choices in puberty (particularly poor sexual choices made by girls) will “ruin your life”, is largely a false one.
We live in a society that is, I think, rightly concerned about teenagers. But we tend, far too often, to be concerned about the wrong things. In particular, we focus on keeping teens “safe” from sex and drugs, imagining (for any number of reasons, some good, some specious) that these represent the greatest threat to both the long and short-term safety and happiness of adolescents. There’s no question that poor decision-making can have a deleterious impact on a young person’s life. But whether motivated by a paternalistic desire to protect or a moralistic desire to ensure “purity”, we live in a culture where the “sex is dangerous” theme is wildly oversold. (The enormously popular movie “Mean Girls” features a clever spoof of the way in which this hopelessly inaccurate message is perpetuated. In the film, a very unhappy P.E. teacher simply repeats the message “If you have sex, you’ll die”. It’s funny in the movie, but not so funny in real life — anecdotally, I hear from my students who saw “Mean Girls” that the sex ed scenes weren’t far from the mark.)
I would never pretend that the decisions we make when we’re young can’t have life-changing consequences. I don’t know any feminists who suggest otherwise. But we live in a world where our frequently irrational anxiety about the well-being of the young has hit a fever pitch; never have we had a generation of parents as fearful as those we do today, hovering and “helicoptering” over their children. And one particularly unpleasant manifestation of this angst-ridden Zeitgeist is a message largely aimed at young women: one “poor decision” when you’re young can “ruin your life.”
This message isn’t just about sex. Though the abstinence-only crowd has, in the past few years, been particularly zealous about wildly over-emphasizing the disastrous (perhaps even lethal) consequences of pre-marital sex, this obsession with “keeping kids safe” shows up in other areas as well. Our worries about driving have hit a fever pitch; we are increasingly reluctant to trust those under 18 to do anything right behind the wheel. Our requirements for teenage licenses have become much more stringent. Anxiety about college board tests seems to be growing worse and worse; ask any college counselor at an upper-middle class high school today: the collective worry about getting into the “right” college (and the concomitant anxiety about how falling short can “doom” a young person’s lifetime earning prospects) has hit an intensity unheard of a decade or two ago. Every test is imbued with greater and greater significance. Little wonder that so many young women are crippled by a frantic pursuit of perfection, and that so many young men are opting to soothe themselves with porn, pot, and Playstation!
I am not in favor of recklessness. But I believe, as Jessica Valenti does, that mistakes and setbacks are essential parts of growing up. When we raise our children in sterile environments, protecting them from every imaginable bacterium, we inadvertently increase their vulnerability to disease. Kids need to be around dirt in order to develop healthy immune systems. There’s a truth there that applies to older kids as well. Though each young person is different, it’s safe to say that our mistakes and our failures and our embarrassments are often prerequisites for developing a healthy adult identity. This isn’t the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Rather, it’s a sensible recognition that adversity is often a better teacher than success. A little bit of “dirt” in the private life of a college student can have the same salutary effect as the real thing has on a small child’s immune system.
In the end, human beings will all make mistakes. We will do the “silly, vapid” things, though not all of us will do them in the sexual arena. We will also, from time to time, be the victims of other people’s recklessness. And no amount of protectiveness on the part of parents, pastors, presidents or professors can insulate young people from the “thousand natural shocks” that growing up is heir to. What young people need are not more dire warnings about the consequences of making decisions motivated by desire or impulse. What they need most is a reassurance that while all choices have consequences, in the end the old rascal was right: What doesn’t kill us does indeed make us stronger. And not only stronger, but often far better equipped both for service to the world and the pursuit of our own happiness.
There’s a middle ground we need to take between two extreme messages. On the one hand, we can’t say seriously that experience is always the best teacher. The fact that I slept with oodles of people in my youth didn’t automatically make me a better lover. On the other hand, we must avoid the hysterical “one bad mistake can ruin your life” narrative so common in our anxiety-ridden culture. Suffering can breed apathy and despair, but it can also breed deep empathy and a commitment to transforming the world. Silly, vapid experience can render us numb and cynical, or it can enrich and enhance our lives. And to a very great extent, the choice is ours. We need to teach the young, and perhaps especially young women, this important and reassuring message: no matter what, no matter what, you’ll be just fine.
Hugo–
In genral I agree with you, however I would be careful about suggesting that “no matter what, no matter what, you’ll be just fine,” applies to all situations. I know a number of women who felt that at one time they were pressured into a sexual experience they would have prefered had not happened. These girls seem less than fine to me. In fact several of them have had a hard time dating latter on in their lives. I think these type of experinces (one’s were the girl would like to say no, but for what ever reason feels she can’t) stem from the submissive roles women are taught to fulfill in our society. Spesifically I know a number of women who are so afraid of upsetting people that they will agree to do things when they would rather not. I think that women need to be allowed to feel that NO is a word that they can and should use in all aspects of their lives. Thus, I believe that we women should feel it is more than fine for us to both experiment in the bedroom, as well as say no in and outside of the bedroom.
Amd as you surely know from my many posts about enthusiasm and consent, Catie, I am a great advocate of “No”.
Amen! This post speaks to me as a girl going from an ultra-conservative mindset to a more experimental one. I crave new experieneces and I want to learn from people with different worldviews. As such, I should probably re-read FFF again. I will likely gain greater appreciation for it.
PS. Your blog won’t let me change my blog URL for some reason when I hit the “change” link beside “Mermade.” If you could, could you change it for me?
http://www.bittenfruit.wordpress.com
The ambitious form of this argument shows up in the “Tapestry” episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”: the thing you MOST REGRET about your foolish, misspent youth has shaped you positively.
I certainly agree that children and young adults are overprotected in this day and age. Some might even say that we extend childhood and adolescence unnaturally in many cases (you’ve written Hugo about the “waiting to be struck by certainty” problem). In some ways, I think these are linked. I don’t know sometimes if there isn’t some basis for concerns about the possible lengthening of long-term effects of our early choices these days, though. Not so much because the natural circumstances young people face is so much more dire than it used to be (I don’t think that it is) so much as because achievement and success these days seem to be much more competitive, and the collateral consequences of some decisions these days have been deliberately enhanced (like the drug-free student loan amendment, for one example, or the Facebook/Myspace effect of having your dirty laundry shared with a million of your closest friends). While I’ve done okay so far, I had a bad semester or two, and an AOD history and minor-league criminal record, that I’m sure had a negative impact on a few decisions about my future. I’ve seen people get into drama that limited their participation in activities, academic, professional and what-not, over the fallout of problematic relationships and encounters.
Don’t know what the middle ground is, maybe something along the lines of being free to explore life, but recognizing and remembering that choices have consequences. That might be somewhat more empowering, putting a focus on choice.
Apologies for commenting on just two words from a whole post, but:
Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti’s immensely popular and useful primer and polemic
Given that the book may well be the single most (negatively) criticized text in the entire gendersphere, “immensely popular” strikes me as a monumentally counterintuitive way to put it.
(It may, in fact, be “immensely popular” with your students, but that read like a general description to me, as general as the statement that it is a primer.)
Daisy, I did indeed refer to its popularity with my students. I also note the book is ranked highly by Amazon in feminist categories (currently #8 in “feminist theory”). Whether it deserves that popularity is debatable, and we have had that debate. Today’s post was certainly not intended to resurrect that old discussion!
Actually, Hugo, what doesn’t kill us can leave us permanently scarred and crippled. You have enough privilege and support to have been able to recover from your mistakes, and you apparently haven’t made any that are unforgiveable or irrevocable. It’s irresponsible of you to vicariously exhort the kids to ‘get dirty’ from your safe, middle-aged perch.
Tom, I really don’t think kids are overprotected. I do think parents worry about the wrong things (forget about ’stranger danger’, people, worry more about who’s coaching the youth soccer team); but I like the world being safer for me than for my kids. When I was their age, seatbelts were an optional nuisance, smoking was dumb but everyone else had to put up with it, and school bullying (ranging from harassment up to and including serious violence) was seen not as a problem, but as a rite of passage.
Mythago, I’m not asking kids to do life-endangering things. I’m asking them to consider the possibility that risk is a continuum, and that playfully entertaining some of the risks is a good way to learn. I don’t advise driving drunk at 90 miles an hour. I’m talking about a little bit of exhilarating impulsiveness, trusting that scars can heal.
You’re asking kids to put themselves at risk, trusting that their scars will heal, without much more to justify it than some vicarious enjoyment and “well, *I* turned out okay”. And if the risk goes bad or those scars run deep, well, that’s not on your tab, is it?
You’re not a parent yet, so I’m guessing you don’t have a ground-level view of how much the ‘helicoptering’ and ‘overprotecting’ nonsense is a combination of Kids These Days and NYT writers’ desperate need to fill column inches.
Yes, it’s bad to teach our children lies–if nothing else, because they won’t believe us when we warn of real danger. There’s a big difference between honesty, and the kind of handwaving you do here, where you breezily say they ought to take risks because of some pseudo-Nietzchean bullshit about how it will make them better grown-ups.
Actually, Hugo, what doesn’t kill us can leave us permanently scarred and crippled. You have enough privilege and support to have been able to recover from your mistakes, and you apparently haven’t made any that are unforgiveable or irrevocable. It’s irresponsible of you to vicariously exhort the kids to ‘get dirty’ from your safe, middle-aged perch.
Well said, Mythago, and importantly said, too. What disturbs me the most about Hugo’s remarks is that they are coming from a youth leader!
There are many things that can go wrong and seriously harm or even kill children. I grew up in the inner city. Life is considerably safer for my two sons and I like it that way. Of course, they face dangers that differ from those that I faced at their ages, but if I had been allowed–or even encouraged–to engage in a reckless youth, I might well not have lived long enough to reproduce and my boys might not be here.
I share your concerns about adults who do not yet have any children of their own waxing rhapsodic about the benefits of kids taking risks while young. It’s true that we can learn from negative experiences, but it’s reckless to exhort young people to take unnecessary risks; life presents enough dangerous experiences without any extra prompting from us.
In reply to you, Hugo said this:
It makes me crazy to read that. As a boy, I was no natural athlete, but I worked hard to participate in sports. In large part for the thrill of it, I was involved in sports that some people would consider risky: BMX, hockey, and boxing. My parents were pretty darned protective, too. Without developing undue anxiety about the issues, I learned that drug usage and premature sexual activity could indeed create serious problems that would face me into adulthood. I was also one of the kids who did very well on standardized tests and in school, and who also had street smarts. However, if at anytime before I reached my early 20s, someone talking to me about how “risk is a continuum” would have elicited a blank stare from me in response. FWIW, like you, I’m a lawyer today.
I’m doing a very poor job of getting my point across. I’m not advocating doing what is clearly dangerous. The enemy I want to fight is not danger but shame. I don’t want kids playing chicken in traffic, for heaven’s sake. I do want young people, girls in particular (who are so much more vulnerable to shaming social messages) to act in accordance with their desire for adventure and experience and less out of anxiety about how they will be perceived. In other words, fooling around with a guy from another race and social background, a race which your family finds “threatening”, is a good kind of assertive risk-taking; having unprotected sex with him is not.
Hugo,
What minimum age are you talking about, when you say “young people, girls in particular”?
‘In other words, fooling around with a guy from another race and social background, a race which your family finds “threatening”, is a good kind of assertive risk-taking; having unprotected sex with him is not.’
Does your definition of “fooling around” include having protected sex?
It could, Fred, it could. That doesn’t mean it must. There’s a difference between a license and a mandate!
And I’m talking about the age group for which Valenti wrote her book, meaning girls in high school and college.
As a child of the 80’s whose sex life (to this day) was pretty much destroyed by “sex with other people can/will likely KILL YOU”, I wish I had had some training about risk assessment and the idea that I could make some poor (but non-lethal or criminal) decisions and I would not only turn out okay, but that I could still be a good and moral person. The burden of perfection, of never making a mistake is pretty intense. And worse, when you suffer under that kind of yoke, it can make you very intolerant of other people and their mistakes.
Mythago, I believe that BOTH processes occur among different children (or, sometimes, among the same children with different caregivers: over- and under-protection). It’s often a product of circumstances. Different kids have different needs and different caregivers face different options, based on the maturity and responsibility of the kid, the available family resources, who is present to look after them, the sort of dangers that they’re facing, and so forth. While there’s definitely a need to protect young people from the greater and more severe dangers (hard drugs, sexual abuse, reckless driving, unsupervised access to guns, etc.), some things they eventually have to learn to handle themselves.
Bullying, an example you raised, is a good example, and I speak as someone who has dealt with an awful lot of bullies of every description in my time. While interventions need to be made in cases in which people are facing threats that they are not equipped to handle themselves, exploitative, domineering and even violent or physically threatening behavior is an unfortunate fact of life that doesn’t end when one leaves school. Schoolyard bullies tend to pop up again later, in workplaces, campuses, social settings, and on the street, tailoring their game to new sets of circumstances. Learning to protect oneself from these people becomes, sooner or later, an essential life skill.
Well, sex can kill you, and considering the demographic with the highest rate of new STI’s & STD’s these days are young people…there’s reason to advocate caution. Sure, condoms might protect you from HIV, but they sure as heck won’t always protect you from herpes, and considering the pathetic state of sex education today…young people aren’t necessarily getting the information that they need and they are “taking risks” with no safety net.
amen, hugo and tom.
i feel my generation is to some extent a product of such overprotective parenting, but i feel much, much luckier to have been a teenager back then than to have been one today in this respect. it does seem like today many (at least middle-class) parents go overboard in some ways.
everyone wants to protect their kids, but young people also need to learn how to handle a mistake and to move on. this applies to sex as well. i have to say that i may still have a regret or two about instances in my sexual past, it’s taken me years to shake some regret that has come from a society that teaches really messed up ideas about young women’s sexuality and to realize i’m a stronger, more capable and self-aware person for having the experiences i have.
I took part of Hugo’s point here to be that so much of what passes under the guise of “protecting children” isn’t really about protecting them, but rather projecting our own fears, hang-ups, obsessions, etc on them (both as parents and as a larger society), we’re utterly delusional about this fact, and that’s not good for children/teenagers. It’s not good for them b/c we focus on imagined dangers at the expense of real ones, and we manage to fill (some of them) with a fear of “screwing up” so great that it’s, well, screwing them up.
I don’t have kids of my own, but seriously, the degree of anxiousness and nervousness I see in the college freshman I teach now, as opposed to my first batch a decade ago, is considerable. Living your life as if the the smallest mistake will invariably screw up your future forever isn’t healthy, nor is it true.
You do realize you just contradicted yourself there? “Facing threats that they are not equipped to handle themselves” is an unfortunate fact of adult life, too, so should we just leave our kids to figure that stuff out? Why is it OK to intervene for some threats, but coddling to intervene in others?
djw, while I agree with you about projecting anxieties, the flip side of that is projecting our nostalgia and middle-aged longing for our ‘exciting youth’ onto kids.
Mythago, I don’t see that it is a contradiction. First, not all threats require the same level of intervention and assistance. Second, there isn’t always going to be a teacher, police officer, or HR rep to protect everyone. Thirdly, many bullying problems that people face, particularly a great deal of what gets labeled as “peer pressure”, “social aggression”, or indirect bullying, and particularly in adult contexts when bullies can no longer get away with physical assaults and get smoother and slicker, will not rise to the threshold that prompts official intervention. Finally, learning the distinctions between these types of problems and how to handle them is part of the growing up I described, that allows kids to protect themselves or call for help as needed, while allowing them to live socially functional lives.
Let me put it more bluntly: one of the reasons that schoolyard bullies are “an unfortunate fact of life” is that adults enable bullying by refusing to intervene. Imagine police coming to a domestic violence call and telling a battered woman that they’re not going to arrest her boyfriend, she’s going to need to learn how to handle this situation since the police won’t always be around.
Mythago, I agree that bad people are enabled to some degree by the unwillingness of responsible people to intervene. On the example you cite, yes I’ve seen and read and heard of enough examples where the legal authorities didn’t do enough in domestic violence-type situations until someone was dead, and I’m glad that there’s been some progress, such as the laws that require an arrest on a DV call, even if more still ought to be done.
I would imagine that where we probably differ is in how much responsibility ought to be and can reasonably be assigned to the relevant authorities in any context; and in how efficacious they can be at that task both in any specific case and in general.
The courts have ruled, in some pretty awful cases in which people lost their lives as a result, that the police cannot be legally held to answer for the failure to investigate or prevent any specific crime. That’s a practical recognition that the criminal justice system has a general responsibility to control crime, and not the sole responsibility to protect anyone or everyone.
I don’t believe that social predators are enabled to the greater degree simply by the unwillingness of authorities to intervene. In my view, some people simply will take what opportunities they can to take things for themselves and aggrandize themselves at the expense of and without regards to the rights of others, and there are always going to be such people out there. This may be a difference of opinion on human nature between us I suppose, and thus one that we could debate quite a few times without convincing each other either way.
What I will say, bringing the ideas of responsibility and efficacy together, is that we have certain norms and presumptions, both in our criminal justice system and in the grievance and disciplinary structures in most of our institutions, such as presumption of innocence, meeting a burden of proof, rights of the accused to challenge accusations, and so forth. We also limit, most notably in the criminal justice system, the ability of the authorities to investigate anything or detain anyone that they might wish to without cause based on articulable facts. These norms do inevitably provide a gap through which some bad conduct will always go uncorrected, and predatory people who cannot attenuate and modify their behavior at least enough to slide through that gap eventually tend to be relegated from society and its institutions, being variously incarcerated, expelled or fired. Those who are left often learn to skate by, and empowering the authorities sufficiently to deal with any significant proportion of such people would probably require discarding those norms that protect the accused to a degree that most of us would not countenance.
This goes all the more so for risks other than overt victimization by others, in which the inherent threats themselves do not change with the actions of the authorities, but arise simply from the risks and hazards of the natural and social world. An even GREATER degree of control and regulation of everyone’s behavior would be required if we were to try to stamp out utterly the dangers posed by unwise sexual choices or drug use (the apparently limitless rise in both the powers and size of the criminal justice system and the prison population in this country arising from actions against the latter prove my point).
It’s something of a Hobbesian argument, that we all are stuck with some degree of responsibility to protect and fight for ourselves. The only ultimate solution though would require empowering Hobbes’ unlimited sovereign to rule us all.
Hugo,
“I do want young people, girls in particular (who are so much more vulnerable to shaming social messages) to act in accordance with their desire for adventure and experience and less out of anxiety about how they will be perceived.”
It would be interesting to see how a daughter of parents, with similar views to yours, would accomplish this. I could see something similar to the 80’s sit-com, “Family Ties”, where the two very liberal parents had a conservative son, Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox). She could go the other way and have even less limits on her own behavior than her parents. Or, she could do both!
I was 13 in ninth grade and so were quite a few of my fiends. So I could see the daughter being a 13 year old high school student dating her 30-something year old teachers, out of a desire for adventure and experience. Then when she was 18, she could marry a rich, privileged, white, 40 year old, oil executive and start having the first of her ten children. She could wear chinchilla fur coats to various “Stop Global Cooling, Burn More Oil” and “Ban Feminist Studies in Public Colleges” fund raisers. Being raised not worry about how her parents and society perceive her, she could use her millions from her husband’s trust fund and stock options to help politicians get elected to repel Title IX and the Civil Rights Act. I’m sure her parents would be proud of her not being vulnerable to shaming social messages or being anxious about how her parents perceive her.
This was written in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.
Why does this hypothetical woman automatically become a social climber/gold-digger/hypocrite because her parents give her the message that she shouldn’t feel shame from having sex or whatever? Also, 30 year old men cannot have sex with a 13 year old, sorry. 13 year olds can get raped by 30 year olds, though, is that what you meant?
Nav,
This hypothetical woman does not automatically become anthing. She chooses to make decisions motivated by her desires without regard to her parent’s values, or society’s. In this case, her parents values are pro-feminist, pro-equal rights, pro-vegan, anti-privilege, anti-global warming, and anti-fur. Therefore, to she is asserting her agency to make decisions in opposition to parents’ and society’s expectations.
Some thirty year old men do have sex with thirteen year olds. It is called statutory rape. Statutory Rape is illegal sexual activity between two people when it would otherwise be begal if not for their age, i.e., sexual intercourse with a person who is younger than the statutory age of consent. Most ages of consent for women in this country are between 16 and 18. Society labeling a 16 year boy as a “sex offender for life” for commiting statutory rape with his 16 year old girlfrind is a form “legal” shame.
Hugo used the the example of high school and college age daughters having protected sex with someone that her family finds “threatening” as a good kind of assertive risk-taking. I used the age of 13 because there are a lot of 13 year old high school students in this country. I could have used 14 or 15 years old for my example instead.
I wish I could edit my comments in this blog.
“begal” should be “be legal”
Sorry, can’t agree with you there. When authorities openly refuse to intervene, social predators are not only enabled, they are encouraged. If the police department in your area announced that they were no longer investigating car break-ins, how long do you think your stereo would stay in your car?
In the case of children, who are subject to parental and school authority, the work-it-out-with-bullies message says “We do have authority over you and choose to exercise it. We just don’t choose to do so in the area of protecting you from predators your own age.”
Whether the authorities intervene in any particular area or not definitely can affect whether predators do their hunting there, but not as much whether they do so at all. Should the police crack down, for example, on car break-ins on the street, I’d expect those pursuing that activity to shift their activities into a safer line, maybe going after car stereos in long-term parking for example.
We’ve got 2 million-plus people locked up in this country, and more than twice that number under the supervision of the criminal justice system to some degree as a whole.
And I made a distinction between the choice to exercise authority and the ability to exercise it. Even parents and schools are limited, often enough by the fear of lawsuits these days, into what they can do with troublemakers.