“On his show, he says a girl is ‘on her knees in a bathroom,’ going
down on a guy. While I think that has probably happened, in all of the
stories I have heard from friends, there’s never been one where a
middle school kid was doing that,” she says. “I feel like most of us
didn’t even know what that was back then.”Girls who engage in
oral sex are bad girls, Dr. Phil implies. But surveys conducted by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and first person accounts
reveal that most young women who are going down are doing it for their
own reasons, not to get attention. And most of them are not doing it in
school bathroom stalls, either. Check any online teen health message
board, like Oprah’s community message board — it seems that most teens
are engaging in oral in their bedroom, or in the bedroom of their
partner, not on the streets. “It’s not so difficult to do that you have
to resort to doing it at school.” Erica says. “There are lots of
opportunities outside of that.”But it seems in nearly every case, the girl still gets the blame for the activity.
Dr.
Phil hopes to “protect our daughters from giving blow jobs,” yet he
says nothing about concern or responsibility regarding teenage boys.
Little does he realize that boys are giving (and obviously getting) as
well.
Seriously, those of other generations than mine (late X, for the record), chime in here: There has always been a moral panic about the sexuality of our daughters, right? Women have ALWAYS been getting too uppity and letting the boys put their hands under our letter sweaters, right? My grandmother’s generation had its loose women, too, and somehow humanity survived. Or am I just reading too much Victorian lit these days?
Because my instinct is that this is nothing new. Kids have been getting pregnant and doing filthy, filthy sexy things out of wedlock since the beginning of time, and probably always will no matter how many suburban marketing moralists chide them for it on national TV. That’s the major effing rationale for sensible sex ed as early as possible.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I will take teen sex panics seriously when they start being about pressuring young men to either wrap up their schweens or put them away. Until then, don’t ask me to worry about the major epidemic of girls giving blow jobs in kindergarten because not so much:
In an article from the Washington Post, Jennifer Manlove, who directs
fertility research for the organization Child Trends, says that guys
give as often as girls.“You assume that females are more likely
to give, males more likely to receive,” she says. “We were surprised
that the percentages were similar.”
A.