Thank you so much for sharing this very personal essay - I understand now some things I did not before. I've heard a few others from former Soviet bloc countries describe some of these things, but never as eloquently or clearly as you have. You really should consider submitting it to an American magazine or opinion journal. *Really* - we aren't going to hear this kind of insight from American writers.
Strange... I was just reading this week about a study of suburban teen sexuality here in the US and found myself experiencing what is perhaps a similar kind of generation gap to the one you describe. This research project (as well as others I have read) found that kids are choosing to not have boy/girlfriends, but instead are "hooking up" or having "friends with benefits" - in both cases, sex without emotional attachment, perhaps even with deliberate detachment. They don't want to get hurt (emotionally), they don't want the "complications" of a relationship and so on. Oral sex isn't even "really sex," they say.
Now, you know how liberal I am and how strongly I feel about the need to provide thorough sex education in schools, given the peculiar American paradox of having our media and advertising saturated with sexual content, yet not being comfortable talking about sex in real life, especially with kids. So you know I'm not speaking as a prude here. But I think your point about the importance of *community,* of dependable bonds between people sounds an equally valid warning here: if our young people are essentially just masturbating with someone else's body to feel good without getting "involved," how will they learn to take the emotional risks that are necessary in forming deep emotional bonds? If it's just "take what you can get," then how will they learn to trust enough to make communities as they become adults? Loyalty requires trust, and friendship and community require commitment. How will these kids learn such values?
Although we did not have a recent radical change of governing systems, I, too, am wondering about the direction of my society at present. We had a period of rampant, unregulated capitalism in the previous century, and things got very bad for many - most - people before the government began to reign things in with labor laws, health and workplace safety regulations, a social welfare safety net and so on. Many of those protections have been neglected or actively weakened in recent decades, beginning with Reagan's time in the White House. And now we are losing our middle class, which is essential for a functioning democracy. (If there are only very rich and very poor, the former pretty much walk all over the latter, as history has shown.) For us to restore the kinds of sensible government involvement that could change these things, we not-wealthy folks will have to pull together and cast our votes.
But the young ones are the least likely to vote. Disaffected, they are said to be. I wonder if there are connections among these things - detachment in sex, detachment in society - in something like the way you see the loss of willingness to be loyal weakening the fiber of your society. And I wonder what we should/can do about it?
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-06-12 10:10 pm (UTC)Strange... I was just reading this week about a study of suburban teen sexuality here in the US and found myself experiencing what is perhaps a similar kind of generation gap to the one you describe. This research project (as well as others I have read) found that kids are choosing to not have boy/girlfriends, but instead are "hooking up" or having "friends with benefits" - in both cases, sex without emotional attachment, perhaps even with deliberate detachment. They don't want to get hurt (emotionally), they don't want the "complications" of a relationship and so on. Oral sex isn't even "really sex," they say.
Now, you know how liberal I am and how strongly I feel about the need to provide thorough sex education in schools, given the peculiar American paradox of having our media and advertising saturated with sexual content, yet not being comfortable talking about sex in real life, especially with kids. So you know I'm not speaking as a prude here. But I think your point about the importance of *community,* of dependable bonds between people sounds an equally valid warning here: if our young people are essentially just masturbating with someone else's body to feel good without getting "involved," how will they learn to take the emotional risks that are necessary in forming deep emotional bonds? If it's just "take what you can get," then how will they learn to trust enough to make communities as they become adults? Loyalty requires trust, and friendship and community require commitment. How will these kids learn such values?
Although we did not have a recent radical change of governing systems, I, too, am wondering about the direction of my society at present. We had a period of rampant, unregulated capitalism in the previous century, and things got very bad for many - most - people before the government began to reign things in with labor laws, health and workplace safety regulations, a social welfare safety net and so on. Many of those protections have been neglected or actively weakened in recent decades, beginning with Reagan's time in the White House. And now we are losing our middle class, which is essential for a functioning democracy. (If there are only very rich and very poor, the former pretty much walk all over the latter, as history has shown.) For us to restore the kinds of sensible government involvement that could change these things, we not-wealthy folks will have to pull together and cast our votes.
But the young ones are the least likely to vote. Disaffected, they are said to be. I wonder if there are connections among these things - detachment in sex, detachment in society - in something like the way you see the loss of willingness to be loyal weakening the fiber of your society. And I wonder what we should/can do about it?