Are You Ready for the Question?
It’s a tricky one. Our society undergoing a seismic, economic, technological, cultural, and social upheaval. One of the by-products of which, is that we marry later. It used to be 3-4 years from the time of sexual maturity until we married. Now it’s 15-16 years. Our young people are at the height of their sexual energy — and social pressures make it necessary to delay marriage.
The traditional sex-rule, “don’t have sex until you marry,” isn’t biologically tenable any longer.
But unfortunately, when we abandoned the traditional sex-rule, we also threw out the accumulated wisdom around how human sexuality unfolds. Our new sex-rule, “everybody screws everybody as long as nobody gets hurt…”
…it’s not working much better than the traditional rule.
The reason the conversation about when our kids should start having sex is so difficult, is because our society doesn’t have any shared, tried-and-true, shared norms. The old rule doesn’t work any more, and the new ones haven’t factored in the ancient wisdom.
Which makes ours a time for hammering out new sexual norms, norms that factor in both the fifteen-year problem and the wisdom of the ages.
This is episode 2 of 3.
Have a listen,
Doug
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This podcast “When should I start having sex, dad (Part II) was the clearest thoughtful response to that question that I have heard. It put the question into context and provided an answer that will still be a challenge to follow, but contains the explanation of why this is a good approach. Thank you. After thinking about the podcast for a while it occurred to me that it does raise some follow-on questions including: What is the whole arc of the teenage sexual experience and what is appropriate at what stages? What does kissing imply? When is it appropriate and when not? Same question for petting, and for heavy petting. …and what do you mean by having sex? Is that intercourse or does it include oral sex? The teens have a long track to run and are likely to need intermediate guideposts. I don’t know if there are already plans to address these questions in later podcasts, but wanted to leave the comment here while I was focused on it.