Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [3]
The bottom line is that we don’t like to talk about teenage girls and sex. Sure, we see it everywhere. Teenage girls in provocative clothing flood the media. They have sex on Gossip Girl and Degrassi and One Tree Hill. And they definitely have sex on reality shows like The Real World and 16 and Pregnant. But when we discuss adolescent girls and sex, it is only in one way: don’t have sex. This is easier than anything else. We tell teenage girls to stay away from sexual behavior and to practice abstinence. Don’t have sex, we say, because we don’t like to imagine them having sex. If they do, then we have to think of them as sexual creatures, and that makes us squirm.
In fact, much of the promiscuity among young women, both heterosexual and homosexual, is likely to go undetected because it makes therapists uncomfortable. When I appeared on Dr. Phil to discuss two teen girls whose parents were unhappy they were having sex, the tagline next to the girls’ names when they were on screen was “sexually active,” as though that was a disorder or a crime of some sort.
But while we refuse to discuss teenage sex, it is happening. According to the Guttmacher Institute, although teenage sexual activity has declined 16 percent in the past fifteen years, almost half (46 percent) of all 15- to 19-year-olds have had sex at least once, and 27 percent of 13- to 16-year-olds are sexually active. The larger proportion of these teenagers are black (67.3 percent) and Hispanic (51.4 percent) rather than white (41.8 percent). Much of the sexual behavior occurs in populations traditionally thought to have less experience in sexual activity, though, such as teenagers from affluent homes and preadolescents.2
Ultimately, the statistics for STDs and teenage pregnancy aren’t promising. We are experiencing a record high of teenage girls with sexual diseases. Of the 18.9 million new cases of STDs each year, 48 percent occur among 15- to 24-year-olds. One in four teenage girls aged 14–19 and one in every two black teenage girls has an STD. Each year, almost 750,000 teen pregnancies are reported for women aged 15–19, and 82 percent of those pregnancies are unplanned.3 The MTV reality series Teen Mom, a spin-off of the wildly successful 16 and Pregnant, had the channel’s highest-rated premiere in more than a year—evidence, I’d say, of our fascination with teenage motherhood. What happens behind these statistics, the feelings and motivations behind promiscuous behavior, and the direct results of it, is less clear. These are the dirty little secrets that girls carry. These are the stories they have—we have—but don’t tell.
There is some research that casual sex among teenagers can be more harmful than we’ve thought. The adolescent brain’s prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for judgment—develops at an explosive rate. There are in fact only two times during development that the brain is overrun with synapses (neural connections) in this way: right before birth and right before puberty. At this critical time in preadolescence, the brain manufactures far more synapses than necessary. The synapses that are used become stronger. The ones that aren’t used weaken and die. As a result, certain experiences become sealed in that teen’s growth, in the strong synapses. If they handle intimacy—and sex—in ways that don’t get them what they really want, again and again, they are likely to wind up with a potentially harmful approach to intimacy.4
What’s more, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed