Everyone in junior high plays by someone else’s rules. What others think of you defines what you think of yourself. Who you sit with at lunch and what kids say about you are always forefront in your mind. That and sex. Sex is on almost everyone’s mind and it changes the way we treat each other, starting at a younger age, before most youth even know what sex is. We need to take a closer look at what part sex is playing in youth suicides and bullying. Our community needs clarity on the common youth experience, because kids are killing themselves and each other over sex.
The only person I knew who killed himself was a friend from church, a teenager torn up over his feelings and betrayal with his friend’s girlfriend. My brother, a teacher, lost one of his favorite students, who was shot to death in a Sears’ parking lot, over a girl. When kids kill themselves, or try to, there is often a story from the family that the child had been teased for being gay or kissing someone, or a rumor of them engaging in a sexual activity, or not engaging in another.
And it’s not only teen sexual violence and youth suicides that are of grave concern, but the increase in mass school shootings. Last year in Idaho, a male teen threatened to kill a group of female cheerleaders for refusing to send him nude pictures of themselves. In fact, many school shootings have a common theme of hating women for sexual rejection. In 2014, there was a mass shooting in front of a sorority house, the shooter left a note saying “All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women,” and uploaded a video saying the following:
“For the last eight years of my life, since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men, never to me.” *
In another part, he continues, saying, “I’m 22 years old and still a virgin, never even kissed a girl.”*
In the Oregon shooting at Umpqua Community College, Chris Harper Mercer, 26, gave a student in the classroom where he was terrorizing his former classmates a bundle of documents to deliver to the police. In them, CNN reported he detailed his frustrations “at not having a girlfriend and being a virgin.”*
This is not good. On top of everything that many teens deal with on a daily basis, including abusive or absent parents, poverty, homelessness, eating disorders, drug abuse, binge drinking (which kills brain cells in the developing teenage brain), going to school, the constant pressure to go to college and work…. They have, on top of all of that, sexual harassment, pressure to lose their virginity, slut shaming, sexting, and online pornography, which may be their primary sexual education. Our youth are also obsessed with, and making the careers of celebrities who are intentionally using sex to manipulate them and succeeding but celebrities are also changing our young people’s expectations of what sex is, how they perform and how they want others to participate. Basically, they are not prepared to experience sex as something natural and biological. They are dependent on someone else’s idea of sex.
Sexual independence is a greater crisis for our young women, whom we are teaching to think of sex as a performance not an experience. In the great new book Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Orenstein writes:
“I’d heard horror stories from friends with teenagers about how girls were treated in the so-called hookup culture; of girls coerced into sexting or victimized in social media scandals; of omnipresent porn…. Every single girl I spoke with, every single girl- regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance- had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or often, all three.”
Another major problem in our community: kids spend their youth listening to us tell them that they need to be ready for college, then they go to college and are sexually harassed, if not raped, harassing, if not raping. The first thing I remember about going to college was the guy who called me more than once to sexually harass me and threaten me, and eventually was arrested after several freshman year girls started talking to each other about the same guy. I was not the girl to start talking. So how can we prepare teens for college and sexual independence? We can start by changing the discussions we have in our communities about sex and perhaps we do this while they are learning about sex in middle school (and hopefully before they have had it). I encourage you to ask the teens in your life about what they think ‘hooking-up’ is, and listen. They have much to say.
Maria Gregori
Director of Leading Learners
Youth Advocate
*Quotes from TeenVogue
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