Sex is FREE!

I have been reading Time Magazine for almost 20 years. Sure the format has dumbed down in the past 10 years making more room for bite size news à la USA Today but it’s still my main source of long form written information. Every issue brings something surprising and thought provoking. I have loved the recent profiles of Bill Gates, Mark Twain and Nelson Mandela.

I just got around to reading The Pursuit of Putity (July 17th.) On the Time.com website the article is titled The Pursuit Of Teen Girl Purity. Maybe Time.com employs CNN’s sex keyword combination SEO expert.

This article is very interesting and my favorite quote is from one of the fathers at a ball covered by the reporter, his name is David Diefenderfer.

“I never planned to have nine children by seven women”

This phrase opens a huge can of WTF!?!1! How can you not plan to have 9 children by 7 women. While it’s certainly not as hard to get 7 women pregnant 9 times as birthing and raising 9 children, it still takes some involvement. Thirty eight years ago, this man had sex with a virgin who immediately got pregnant. This unplanned event produced his oldest daughter, Juliet, who is also quoted in the article. Juliet and I have much in common being the result of unplanned parenthood.

I truly feel that if teenagers got comprehensive education on sex AND sexuality AND adulthood they would most likely make the right choices for themselves. Sex is an unfair burden for teenagers and young adults so making a purity pledge is not a bad idea in itself but it falls into this proven inefficient system of “abstinence”. It’s like saying “promise me you wont have sex until marriage so I don’t have to go through the uncomfortable step of teaching you about life”.

If I can divulge a big secret about sex here is that it pretty much sucks until you get good at it or find someone decent to do it with. This will most likely not happen until you are in your twenties or later.

Sex is a long term investment however it has a lot of risks attached to it making it a bad use of your time, espescially when you are a teen. Sex is an important part of life and my recommendation to abstain from having sex when you are a teen has absolutely no relation to religion or morality and everything to do with long term life strategy.

The other secret is that not everyone is doing it. I have had sex with virgin guys (from late teens to early thirties) over the past 20 years. What I have noticed is that the longer a guy waits to have sex, the better his satisfaction is with the resulting “sex life” (and I draw from my conversations with guys in general because I do like to ask those kinds of questions!) I have also chatted with guys who are around 20 and think it is scandalous that they are still a virgin. What they think is unusual is actually quite normal. Plus it only means that once they find that awesome person to have sex with it will likely be much more satisfying.

I have also known someone who was promiscuous as a teen and developed a huge amount of guilt and hang ups about sex. It was as if he did not understand sexuality beyond the use of his genitals. He never talked about sex other than to criticize or judge and would be too self-conscious or ashamed to dare plan sex in the future. Then he would suddenly want to have sex at the most inopportune time completely unprepared! This is how he got his girlfriend pregnant when he was 17. I wonder if he will have 9 children by 7 women.

And because I quote a guy out of context above, I am reprinting the whole passage from the article so you can enjoy it as well.

Out on the terrace under an almost moon, the black swans have vanished into the lake. David Diefenderfer has slipped outside for a cigarette; he’s a leathery South Dakotan in a big black cowboy hat, and he hands over his card. HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL: BREEDER SERVICE, it says, with a picture of a syringe. He’s in the cattle-reproduction business. He’s also the father of nine children by seven women.

Three of his daughters are with him tonight, including 10-year-old Taylor. I asked what purity means to her. “I don’t really know,” she says, and she’s shy about talking about all this. “But it means you make a promise to your dad to be a virgin until you are married and not have a lot of boyfriends.”

That’s what her oldest half sister Juliet was taught as well; she remembers hearing how her mother got pregnant the very first time she had sex. Juliet is now 37 and has come from Reno, Nev., where she works for Microsoft Licensing. She has watched the evening unfold with some skepticism. “I think I’m finding I’m more of a feminist than I thought,” she says with a sly smile. “I had a hard time there hearing about ‘rescuing’ our girls. I was brought up to be a strong woman. Why would I need rescuing?” It’s the boys who she thinks need help these days. “It’s great for girls to have a Cinderella night with Dad, but families still need a good strong father role model,” she says. The role-model question is tender for her. “I didn’t have that–no offense, Dad,” she says, and then she looks hard at him. “But my siblings do. He really stepped up to the plate. He’s a great dad now. I say that with a tinge of jealousy. I’m not afraid to admit it.”

Her father hopes his kids will learn from his mistakes. “I never planned to have nine children by seven women,” he says. “I believe it’s necessary to instill a set of values, give them tools to make good decisions.” But he won’t be there to help. Juliet explains when he goes back inside the ballroom to catch up to the younger girls: “We’re sort of here on borrowed time,” she says. David Diefenderfer has Stage 4 inoperable lung cancer; they figure tonight is something of a gift. “He won’t be at their wedding,” Juliet says, looking into the glowing room, “but they can look back and remember the dance they had tonight.”

From The Pursuit of Teen Girl Purity, Nancy Gibbs, Time Magazine, July 17, 2008.

I built my first homepage in early 1995. I have always loved home pages built by people who talk about anything and everything that is of interest to them. I admire someone who will go through the trouble of documenting their life and hobbies to teach others. It takes a bright and intelligent individual to figure out how to make a website and then consistently add to it.

MySpace

Today however, the web is not reserved for bright people anymore and every vapid attention seeker and her dumb little brother can have a MySpace page or a Facebook account. When Kendra Wilkinson or Brody Jenner refer to their MySpace page as their official blog, I just cannot help but chuckle. How can you say this in the same breath as you talk about business and professional aspirations. A few years ago people would have told me to shut my elitist mouth up because MySpace did give us celebrities like Tila Tequila. What would we be without Tila?! In two years will we be asking “Where would we be without Tina Chen“? The state of the world is so glib that the bar has dropped very low on acceptable distractions. Anything will do.

Facebook

I have never had a MySpace account but I joined Facebook after a few friend nagged me to join (By that I mean in person nagging, not stupid e-mail spam notifications.) While Facebook is getting dumbed down, it is possible to configure it so you don’t have to suffer the consequences. Today I only have a few applications and they all display things that I have made myself such as my pictures, my videos, my Kiva.org businesses, my crafts, RSS feeds from 4 blogs (but not this one) and the few books I have read through. No glitter text porn star name for me (though I am very proud to not only, have a “porn star name”, but own the accompanying domain name too LOL) Basically my motto is: “If I didn’t painstakingly make it myself, it does not belong on my Facebook profile.”

I am quick to point out to people the security problems associated with certain settings in Facebook especially when it comes to viewable pictures that might depict something that is funny to them and their friends but perhaps not appropriate to show friends-of-friends or the public at large. That’s when they usually think I am a crazy stalker and ignore me until they run into someone they barely know who make salacious comments about their new thong bikini.

I discovered that there are crazy mass befrienders and pedophiles on Facebook when I became friends with Yoshi’s (TPB’s) 13-year-old brother Chibiyoshi. I triangulated all of his “friends” dropping the schoolmates and sports celebrities only to wind up with a list of a dozen random adults he did not seem to know in person. These people were either “friends” with a whole bunch of teenage boys or published inappropriate content (pictures and video) to his SuperWall. I went over the profile with Yoshi and we identified all the inappropriate applications that give access to him (by unknown adults) and Yoshi took care to clean up his little brother’s profile (and endure the firestorm of complaints and anger that ensued obviously.) As adults we are responsible for his well being even if we are not his direct parents. Too many kids are hurt while unrelated adults mind their own business. I think it is hard to explain to young teenagers how adults use their photos because they do not have a sophisticated understanding of “adult sexual intent” and most likely will never fully understand criminal, sexually deviant, psycopathic or sosciopathic intent. The number of these people is not great but applications like Facebook makes it easier for them to find you in search by searching through high schools. After almost 20 years on BBses and the Internet, I am still learning the makeup of the intent, desires and thought process or people who fall into those categories. After using Facebook to track and hunt down a very active criminal I can also appreciate that Facebook is a great counterstrike tool as well.

I feel that I must do something though to warn parents who’s 13 year olds will soon have access to Facebook as they enter high school next month. I live in a French speaking area and I fear French speaking parents do not have access to adequate information to understand and supervise their teen’s access to Facebook. The few articles written on the subject are only available in English and they only scrape the surface of how Facebook works. There are other issues as well because Facebook will most likely be the first public forum that teens access where online responsibility is a must. Because Facebook associates everything to your real name, great care must be taken when you use it.

But then again, sometimes we can be glad some dumb people don’t.

I was going to write about how I love Facebook too but I’ll keep it for another time…

I asked my ex to do some research on The Corey (as well as catch up on BB8) so he could do a follow-up on the letter (from a former Corey point of view.) I think he misunderstood me a bit and at first thought I wanted him to tell the world how I was so wonderful for fixing him. I already have plenty of long written letters, emails and notes written by him specifically thanking me for doing key things to help him and I am not ever throwing them away. I am kind of his Reform School Mistress in a sense and I have kept private 99% of his process over the past few years.

What I have long wanted him to do is own his story. He is ashamed of what happened to him and how he let someone else influence him badly into a downward spiral that could have ended in un-fixable mistakes. But there is no shame in being a teenager and being impressionable. There is no shame in telling the world specifically how things went wrong and what happened along the way. I was a troubled teenager and left home when I was barely 17 as well but that was a really long time ago. His story is fresh and relevant to teenagers who are not likely to judge him so much as recognize their own experiences and WHO in their surrounding poses the greatest danger to them.

The reason why I do not let go of my ex is that everything he does affect two other people. I have been “training” him for almost 2 years to be the primary care taker of two people who REALLY need him. His mother who has a pattern of depression, sickness, helplessness and homelessness (a problem shared by more than 25% of parents.) Even more important he MUST raise his younger brother who is now 13 years old and is entering into the void of teenagedom where everything can go abso-fucking-lutely wrong. I am not talking here about being the man and paying for everything which is some men’s idea of doing ‘enough’ for their family. I am talking more about emotional support, leadership and unconditional love. There is not enough money in the world to buy those things for someone else.

While my ex has had the pleasure of re-building a relationship with his dad over the past year, his little brother has never known his own dad. Obviously, I could snap my fingers and have that guy (who is only 33) found and brought to me tomorrow but if it does not serve a purpose and is not the right time then it is useless. That would be more of a 3-6 month project to vet the dad and assess whether he could be a plus or minus in his child’s life and educate a 13 year old to make the decision for himself as well. That may seem cruel but I sincerely feel that some parents bring nothing to the table and if they abandon their child in infancy or even later they better work damn hard to get the respect and access back. No child owes his parents respect of they have abandoned him or abused them just because they are related by blood. If my ex and I decide that this is a worthwhile project to take on, I will definitely touch on it here.

My ex thinks that I did everything for him but I really didn’t. I made a huge effort not to!!! I simply created an environment for him to do the work himself over and over again. The rest is easy, it’s just being me and living in my non-cahotic, no-drama life with my own awesome well behaved co-parented child. I do not want to police his mom or his little brother and I would rather they give my ex the credit and respect for doing the day-to-day. I was only the one who provided the daily love, hugs and cuddles at the end of a frustrating day. I have gone over my ex’s head to make hard decisions but they were only in times of crisis. I can see clearly in the future and have found that acting quickly and decisively can make a huge difference.

We had a brainstorming session which is turning into a long list of teen issues that are either close to my experience or his. Often they are topics which have affected both of us. 16 years separate our teen stories and so much has changed. I really miss the time when I did not have access to technology that could blow all my teenage stupidity out of proportion. I think that perhaps I made the same mistakes along the way the difference is that I was a girl and he is a guy.

The whole difference in this process is that I am not his mom. I have no specific rules (other than age-appropriateness) and have found that I have a knack for hacking teenage boys (Teenagers are between 13-25 and, quite sadly, getting older every year.) As long as there is no underlying mental illness (psychosis, scociopathy, etc.) I can probably do something good. I did not invent myself a raiser of boys, I have had the pleasure of raising other people’s boys through my life, as a nanny. It was totally random that I got to raise 7 boys and only 1 girl between the ages of 4 months and 10. I recently looked up most of my boys (through their great parents) and they were so proud to tell me how they have become awesome teenagers and young adults (I was only there 1-2 years along the way but made sure to protect these precious treasures.) I have yet to getthe official news on the one who had very cold and dismissive self-involved doctors for parents (these people creeped me out) and I resist the urge to Facebook stalk him I so want to know how he grew up in an environment where money was never an object but time was too precious to spend on menial tasks like the day-to-day raising children. “The Nanny Diaries” made me cry from beginning to end.

But family circumstances and money aside, most teenage boys go awry because of the bad influence of others whether it’s a parent, sibling, supposed friend or unrelated adult in a position of power and influence. With every transgression develops a feeling of powerlessness and that is a huge burden to bear for a teenager.

There is no such thing as “All your dreams are dead” however dire your life seems when you are young.