Teen Sex | The Perils Of The Teen

You know, "the more things change, the more they stay the same," which is true, of course. Teenagers are always going to experiment sexually, socially, risk themselves romantically and emotionally with passion and perhaps not a lot of forethought"that's their job. It's just that when I was a kid, the kind of notoriety that followed a bad move could be contained. You didn't read about it on Page Six or Gawker . Parents didn't sue schools for suspending kids, or each other, although probably some of the scores raised in my book might have been settled through fists, violence, and the court of the streets. Lives have always been ruined by heedless acts, but perhaps not so loudly and thoroughly. So in some ways the stakes have changed.

The other big change I see is in sex roles. Growing up in the '70s, feminism was a big part of my consciousness and the rhetoric in the world that surrounded me. As girls, we were taught that we needed to have our own careers and aspirations, we needed to be able to take care of ourselves. We were taught not to depend on our sexuality to get us ahead. Again and again, I heard: You girls can do anything you want. And clearly, many things have changed for women for the better. My little friend from elementary school Elena Kagan grew up to be a Supreme Court justice. Call that pride by lack of association, as I haven't seen her in 35 years, but boy, am I thrilled about her. What amazed me when my children were in private school was the amount of highly educated women, with M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s and law degrees, who opted out of the workforce. They often did this for good, loving parental reasons"to be active parents to their kids. They had all the choice in the world, and they chose to stay home. I found that interesting. But still"the brain drain! And what was to be done with all that drive and intelligence? Similarly, men who also had choices (a minority"most of us have no choice but to work as much as we can) seemed locked in a different paradigm. All the flexibility the '70s promised in the workplace and the family seemed to me a vanished dream. These guys appeared to shoulder a tremendous amount of responsibility for their families, and in this way we'd almost moved backward, it seemed. The message then to many young girls, even young girls of privilege, from what they see at home, school, in the media, in the fashion magazines, and in the stores, was that the way to get what you want was through sexuality and appearance. Oddly enough, even though we did not have the same opportunities these kids have, my friends and I as teenagers did not see ourselves like that.