Run away!

Let's talk about sleepovers - National - smh.com.au

This is a long, mildly interesting, article about Australian teenagers and sex today. It notes that:

Three-quarters of teens in year 10 remain virgins, says a national survey of secondary students in 2002, and the adolescents themselves tend to think this is a good thing.

But barely a few sentences later:

The average age for first intercourse among men 40 years ago was 18, and for women, 19. It has dropped to 16 for both sexes.

By year 10, most kids are deep kissing and genital touching. Roughly a third experience oral sex, with the practice widely seen as a safer alternative to intercourse. This development is new. Before the porno flick Deep Throat popularised fellatio in the 1970s, it tended to be the preserve of married couples.

Hmm. That's what we have to thank porn for; increasing this activity amongst 15 year olds?

Anyway, here is the section that is the reason for my title for this post:

Kids already know about bestiality, anal sex and the turkey slap, but they could use a word or two on how real intimacy might feel. Professor Susan Sawyer, a leading pediatrician who directs the Centre for Adolescent Health at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, thinks parents ought to start the conversation with their kids by giving condoms and the morning-after pill on their 15th birthday. Not as a green light, but as a reality check and an opening to confide. "By the time they're 16, kids ought to have opened up a condom, blown it up and played with it."

What an understatement opens the next sentence:

This won't be everyone's style...

Given the frequent perversity with which teenagers don't exactly follow their parents' world views, I can imagine that the (surely rare!) sort of parent that wants to play condom balloons with their son or daughter on their 15th birthday will sometimes find said child recoiling with horror at the affront to their desire to remain a virgin until married.

This has also just reminded me of the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Malcolm's mother horrifies and sickens him by holding him hostage in the car while he gets an extremely detailed talk on sex and relationships.

Oh - which reminds me of one of the funniest scenes in that show, at least in the later series, and it's on YouTube!

Here's the background: the evil girl in this episode has set up both Malcolm and his brother Rhys by lying to both of them that their brother has confided to her that he is gay. The brothers are both shocked, but nice enough to try to be "supportive" of their brother's apparent secret, leading to some very odd behaviour in front of the rest of the family. This scene is after the family has come back from seeing "Mama Mia" (again, I think it was the girl's suggestion):



It cracks me up.