Instapundit Extra!

May 30, 2002

TEEN SEX LETTERS! Here are a few. Will Wilkinson writes:

Loved your FoxNews piece. I've been arguing the same thing for years, that teens as a group are a weird hybrid of a welfare and leisure class. What I've missed in the discussion is a frank recognition that the evolutionary psychology of sex, together with the economics of birth control, creates a situation on which demand for sex by teens is huge, while the costs are ever diminishing.

From a biological perspective, teens ARE adults. And fashion and culture have always fixated on the sexuality of youth because we're wired to detect reproductive viability, which is highest in the young. There's a reason why there are so many "teen" porn sites, and it's not socialization. The cultural stuff is a reflection of biological inclination. And then public high schools hand out condoms, and huge numbers of high school girls are on the pill anyway. So the demand for sex is high, and the costs in terms of potential for pregnancy are about as low as they've ever been in history.

I know folks of my generation (X) have largely come to see sex as a recreational activity. Emotionally tricky, sure, but a recreational activity nonetheless, mostly dissociated from reproduction and institutions like marriage that emerged to internalize and manage the costs of inevitable sexual behavior. (There's also a good reason why the average age of marriage goes up every year or so). So fretting, or abstinence education will do next to nothing. What the anti-teen sex folks have to do is come up with some way to reduce the demand for sex among teens, which is unlikely, or raise the cost, which is hard when birth control and STD prevention and treatment keeps getting better. Scaremongering sex-ed courses might raise the perception of cost in the short-term, in the way scaremongering anti-drug propaganda can do. But those perceptions tend to get exploded by eventual observation of the real costs, and causes distrust in the information conveyed by adults. "I see friends have sex and they don't get pregnant, contract diseases, get abused, sunk in depression, etc. And they're having a lot of fun. So why are they telling us we're all going to ruin our lives?"

As long as teens aren't being stupid about disease and birth control, it's just hard to see what the problem is. Yes, it's emotionally tricky. But that's life. And that's what parents are there for, to help their kids learn how to nagivate the emotional complexities of adult life.

Home-schooler Dave Thomas writes:

I was pleasantly surprised by your column in Fox News today regarding teen sexuality. Our kids are refreshingly engaged in life and enjoying a broad spectrum of activities with kids their age of both genders. I believe that this is due, in large part because they are not under the extreme social pressure imposed upon children in public schools to 'score with the babes'. Being the different ones, we always feel that there are very few individuals that see the virtue in home schooling for social and educational reasons (people always ask, 'how do they socialize? We reply 'Just fine. Your children are OVER socialized'. Read 'Lord of the Flies'). The following is a post I made on your website:

My wife and I home school our two boys, 14 and 16 years of age. We do so for many of the reasons stated in Glen Reynolds column in the Fox News website. Our boys are well respected, successful (our oldest placed third in the state for trumpet performance, our youngest eighth on oboe), have been offered scholarships, and are pleasant to be around. The enrichment music program that we participate in is full of children(300+) just like this! It is amazing! They don't date, and they don't care! They are much happier being friends. Classes are also not separated by age, which is also detrimental to the social development of children. I wish Mr. Reynolds would do an analysis of home schooled children in light of the research results surfacing concerning children in government training (public school) programs.

I really do wish you would consider an in-depth look into the social circumstances of home schooled children (and the enrichment-course environment) in comparison to public school children.

Well, maybe one day. I was homeschooled for a year, though it was for practical reasons (we were living abroad and my mother was a teacher anyway). It was the greatest period of intellectual growth in my childhood, though.

posted at 05:35 PM by Glenn Reynolds