Café Philos: an internet café

I've noticed for sometime now a steady stream of traffic to this blog because of a brief post I made back in May on fatherless girls. So, tonight, I was trying to count all the fatherless girls I've known in this town.

I would count a few, think I'd finished, then remembered another one or two. In the end, I simply gave up. It's overwhelming. Not the numbers, but the faces. Overwhelming.

I wonder if we will ever again be a society in which it is unusual to grow up without a father. My own father died when I was two years old. At the small school I attended, I was the only child in my class of about 100 students without a dad at home. What are the numbers today?

When I came to Colorado at midlife, I landed in a coffee shop that was a hang out for an eclectic crowd that included everyone from the mayor of the city to a group of homeless gentlemen. The coffee shop was also two blocks from the city's largest high school, and it attracted very many mildly disaffected youth who enjoyed its eclectic atmosphere as much as I did. Most of the first 200 or so people I met in this town were mildly disaffected kids.

Some of those kids attached themselves to me. When I look back it strikes me that the boys who attached themselves to me usually had fathers. But the girls who did were usually fatherless.

I wonder why most of the boys had fathers, while most of the girls didn't?

Growing up a male myself, I knew the boys at that age are not usually looking for a father figure when they attach themselves to an older man. Instead, they are most likely looking for help in entering the adult world. That is, at that age, they want to work out how to relate to adults who are not their father. I suppose the girls wanted pretty much the same thing.

Yet, I don't know. I don't know why most of the boys who wanted to associate with me had fathers while most of the girls who wanted to associate with me didn't have fathers. Nor do I know whether there was any difference between the boys and the girls in why they wanted to associate with me. Some things seem bound to remain a mystery.

At any rate, my experience of fatherless children -- or more precisely, my experience of fatherless girls -- has convinced me they are especially vulnerable, they are often overlooked, and that we all could do more by them. So, I've decided to make my own small contribution to their cause by blogging from time to time about some of the fatherless girls I've known, what kinds of problems they've faced, how they met those challenges, and what wonderful people they are. I hope you'll be interested.

How old, on average, is a person in the West before they first have sex?

Well, according to Julien O. Teitler, the median age for first sex among people living in Western industrial nations dropped steadily from 1960 to 1995, before stabilizing at around age 17.

(Damn! If I'd only known that sooner, I wouldn't have held out until 50.)

Although the median age for first sex has declined, the median age for marriage has risen in those same countries. Clearly, it is now normative in Western industrialized countries to have sex before marriage. In America, for instance, fully nine out of ten people have sex before marriage.

(Damn! If I'd only known that sooner, I would never have promised my latex love doll a wedding ring after our first night together.)

The problem is our ideals have not kept pace with our actual morals. So many people in the West still act as if it is reasonable to expect kids to hold out until marriage, even when they themselves failed to do it! Instead of merely expecting kids to hold out until marriage -- something only one in ten of them will do -- we should be teaching kids how to deal with premarital sex.

Teaching kids how to deal with premarital sex involves much more than merely teaching them to use a condom. Among other things, it involves teaching them a whole morality, a whole sexual ethics, and even a sexual etiquette.

A few years ago, when I was hanging out with dozens of kids here in town, I was often asked questions about ending relationships. Naturally, if you are going to start having sex years before you get married, you are almost certainly going to face the prospect of ending one or a few relationships. But when and how is it best to break up? Kids need to be taught a practical morality that addresses those issues.

That's only one example. There are many more moral, ethical, and etiquette issues that are not being adequately addressed in part because we still hold to the ideal of waiting for marriage to have sex.

Our failure to adequately address those issues goes beyond idle interest. Morality, ethics, and etiquette are ideally ways in which generations pass down what they've learned of life. When all we pass down are failed ideals, we are relinquishing our responsibility to the next generation to share what real wisdom and learning we have to share.

I blame my mother for teaching me three truths about youth.

The first of her truths is that all girls are pretty and all boys are handsome. I used to hate being taught that one by her.

She taught it to me throughout my childhood and adolescence. She did it simply: Merely by praising the beauty of myself and my young friends. I hated it when she did that because it sounded false to my naive ears. Especially during adolescence, I couldn't believe she was anything but a lunatic when it came to beauty, because I had a markedly different standard of beauty than hers.

I had internalized the standards of my peers. Among ourselves, we had no sense of the universal beauty of youth. We didn't see that truth. One of us might be beautiful, but certainly not all of us. Certainly not our classes' ugliest girl nor most homely boy. So I would shrink in fright each time my mother pronounced that one or another of my classes' "less attractive" boys or girls was beautiful. I'd think, "Has anyone overheard her besides me? I'll die if they discover my Mom is an idiot! "

Roughly around 40, I discovered for myself the universal beauty of youth. That is, I finally saw what my mother had been talking about all those years. The beauty of youth transcends whatever happens to be fashionable beauty. It is timeless and universal.

The second truth my mother taught me was how transparent a youth is to an adult.

Mostly she did that by instantly seeing through my every pretension. Many times when we're growing up, we want to put on a front, we want to have pretensions, and we especially do not want our mothers to see through those pretensions. Instead, we want the sense of privacy that comes with imagining no one else knows we're bluffing.

Yet, just as a six year old is transparent to a 16 year old, so is a 16 year old transparent to a full adult. To this day, I have mixed feelings about that truth.

On the one hand, I've learned over the years that it is basic human nature to play at being something before one becomes something. Like all mammals, humans in most cases learn best through play. If you want to be a charitable person, first "play pretend" you are a charitable person. If you want to be a good lover, first "play pretend" you are a good lover. Playing/pretending kicks in whatever gears there are in our brains that allow us to learn very complex behaviors. So, to the extent we put on fronts as part of that learning process, it's not all that helpful when your mother tells you to "quit pretending to be something you're not."

On the other hand, when your mother tells you to "quit pretending", it can be a great lesson in the futility of living inauthentically. The trick is whether your mother knows you well enough to steer you away from trying to become something untrue to your nature, and instead tries to steer you towards becoming things true to your nature. That's largely what my mother did, and today I'm grateful to her for it.

She allowed and even encouraged me to play pretend at things that developed my natural talents into skills. She discouraged me from playing pretending at things I had little or no natural talent for, or which were anti-social. She was able to do that because she was some 39 years older than me and my own true nature was transparent to her.

At 37, I moved to Colorado. Through a strange set of circumstances it happened the first 200 or so people I met here were mostly kids. Some of them attached themselves to me, and I used to wonder why they willingly attached themselves to a man two decades their senior.

One day the answer came to me: I was doing for them what my mother had done for me. I was encouraging them to be true to themselves in the same persistent and often subtle ways my mother had encouraged me to be true to myself. That's what they wanted and even needed from a man two decades their senior -- someone who could see through their insecure fronts, and encourage their true selves.

The final truth my mother taught me about youth is the tragedy of wasted potential. This was something she taught through her comments on people. As I was growing up, she would occasionally point out how this or that person had wasted their talents. She never made a big deal of it, and her comments were always more or less in passing, but her point nevertheless sank in.

Is some part of youth's universal beauty the almost tangible sense of potential that young people exude? I don't know. But I know potential is thick on youth. I know that youth is a time when crucial steps are taken -- or at least should be taken -- to realize that potential. And I know that a thousand pitfalls await youth which will prevent all but a minority of them from ever fully realizing their genuine potential. That last strikes me as an especially poignant tragedy, and I think the reason the tragedy of wasted potential affects me as deeply as it does is in part because of my mother's teachings.

Again, this is something I saw most clearly in my late 30s and 40s, and if you have kindly read this essay, you will know by now that's a pattern with how I've absorbed my mother's teachings about youth. In each case, she pointed me to look. But in each case, I either didn't look, or perhaps couldn't look, at what she pointed until I was middle-aged. Yet, once I looked, I saw clearly what she had been all those years talking about.

Now, if I add all three of those lessons together to make a sum, then I get something like this: My mother prepared me through her teachings to clearly see, once I was older, how beautiful youth is, how important it is that youth learns to be true to itself, and how tragic it is when it doesn't.

All in all, I think those are some pretty profound lessons.

D.H. Lawrence somewhere says that youth should not be misled into believing that it must rebel against authority and tradition in order to achieve freedom. Lawrence asserts that those battles have already been fought and won. Youth is largely free to do as it pleases today, and so it is misleading youth to tell them that they should be battling against authority and tradition.

On the other hand, Lawrence points out that the real revolution youth must accomplish is "to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door." That is, to find and exploit the aspects of life that youth does not even as yet suspect are part of life. Doing so will bring about a greater revolution in youth than will battling against authority and tradition.

What do you think of this? Is the real job of youth to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door, or is it to battle against tradition and authority? Which brings greater freedom? Which is more revolutionary?

When Bob Dylan sings the words, "He's not busy being born is busy dying", he offers us an important insight into human psychology. Namely, if we ever are so foolish as to refuse rebirth and renewal, then we are "busy dying". For the only way a human can stay alive spiritually, or psychologically, is to be reborn -- again and again and again.

I am often reminded of that truth these days because of a friend of mine. He has reached old age and, unfortunately, ceased being reborn.

Even on a relatively superficial level -- the level of one's opinions -- my friend has turned to stone. The opinions he has today are substantially no different than the opinions he held a decade ago. His intellectual curiosity has evaporated. He merely repeats himself.

Somewhat more profoundly, he has come to isolate himself as much as possible from new experiences. His routine is set. His day contains few challenges. He no longer wishes to be bothered with the new, the novel, the unexplored.

Old age can do that to us; it can be merciless. I do not point to him in order to blame him for what so many of us experience -- or will experience -- if we live long enough. Instead, I merely wish to illustrate how "He's not busy being born is busy dying".

Yet, we need not look to old age alone to illustrate in what ways Dylan's observation might be true. Society in many ways puts a great deal of pressure on all of us to be as unchanging, as constant, as ossified, as possible. Nor does one have to look far to see great and small examples of that pressure. Didn't society teach you the only valuable love is unchanging? Didn't it teach you any love which comes and goes is "mere infatuation"?

Or, look at class distinctions in so many societies -- the social sanctions that are leveled like canon against anyone who dares to break out of the social class they were born into.

Again, take even the most trivial example: How often have you heard someone called a "flip-flopper", a "waffler"? How often have you heard it said changing your opinions shows a lack of firmness and character? Demanding that someone never change their opinions is tantamount to demanding they learn nothing from one day to the next. Yet, society generally values the person who learns nothing during the course of a day over the person who learns something new.

I cannot begin to cover here the myriad ways society tries to pressure people into remaining constant. Yet, remaining constant is not at all the same thing as being true to ourselves.

"He's not busy being born is busy dying". How else can you stay genuinely true to yourself without being reborn -- again and again and again? For the self is always changing.

I think that becomes obvious once you give up trying to be a self and instead just observe yourself day to day. When you have learned to observe yourself like a scientist would observe a fruit fly -- as dispassionately as that -- you see how much you change. But to clearly observe yourself, I think you must neither condemn nor praise what you observe. A dispassionate scientist would neither condemn nor praise a fruit fly -- why should we think we need to condemn or praise ourselves? Condemnation and praise seem to be mere ways of escaping from clear observation.

I do not believe it is necessary -- and I believe it can even be detrimental -- to set for ourselves a goal of change or renewal.

Instead, once we learn how to dispassionately observe ourselves, we will understand ourselves -- and with that understanding comes change. But if we set a goal of renewal, we will only achieve a little change -- far short of a rebirth -- and then backslide. Everyone has seen that happen to those people who pray fervently to become better people, go for two weeks or two months, and then backslide. It's even true some people spend their whole lives doing that without ever catching on to how worthless it is. Yet, merely learn how to dispassionately observe ourselves and the rest will come naturally.

D. H. Lawrence somewhere writes beautifully of another reason we should avoid setting a predetermined goal for how we want to change. Speaking to young people, he reminds them they have often been told that the challenge of youth is to throw off the chains that oppress them. He then explains how they have been misled by that, and how throwing off the chains that oppress them is by no means the primary challenge of youth. Instead, he tells them their job is to "discover the unexpected door" to their lives. Why is that true?

I think it is true because, as Heraclitus long ago said, "No man steps into the same river twice, because either the river has changed, or the man has changed, or both." Now, if that's a simple fact, then how can anyone stay true to themselves without being reborn -- without "discovering the unexpected door"? Perhaps when we set a predetermined goal to how we want to change, we close off that unexpected door, and with it, our chance for genuine rebirth.

According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy:

Despite a one-third decline since the early 1990s, the United States still has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and birth among comparable countries. In 2004, the U.S. teen birth rate was 41.1 births per 1,000 teens aged 15-19. By way of comparison, the U.S. teen birth rate is one and a half times higher than the teen birth rate in the United Kingdom (26.8 per 1,000) which has the highest teen birth rate in Europe, more than twice as high as the teen birth rate in Canada (14.5 per 1,000), seven times higher than the teen birth rate in Japan (5.6 per 1,000), Denmark (5.7 per 1,000) and Sweden (5.9 per 1,000).

Why does America lead the industrialized world in teen pregnancies? Let me suggest the reason might have something to do with the willful stupidity of American policy makers.

The nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (NCPTUP) released on Wednesday a comprehensive review of research into teen sexual behavior. The review utterly damns America's cherished "abstinence only" sex education programs. Abstinence only sex education programs are programs that teach kids only one way to deal with their sexual feelings -- and that's by abstaining from sex.

The NCPTUP review failed to find even a single abstinence only program anywhere in the country that works -- despite that they looked at a total of 115 studies. They couldn't find one program that delays the initiation of sex. They couldn't find one program that hastens the return to abstinence. And they couldn't find one program that reduces the number of sexual partners. In any sane country, policy makers would study the NCPTUP report and abandon all support for abstinence only sex education.

This not a sane country.

Instead of abandoning abstinence only sex education, the Federal Government is about to increase the funding for it. Just a few days ago, the Democrat controlled Congress agreed to Bush's demand for an additional $28 million to fund abstinence only sex ed. That brings the annual funding for the Federal CBAE program to $141 million -- more than enough to wreck a few teens' lives. Can anything be more willfully stupid than that?

The CBAE program even requires those it funds to lie to kids about their sexuality. "For example, any program that receives CBAE funds has to teach [kids] that 'sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.'" Yet, if a kid is so young or fragile they are going to experience "harmful psychological and physical effects" from sex, marriage isn't going to make much difference.

In stark contrast to abstinence only sexuality education, the NCPTUP report found that, "Two-thirds of the 48 comprehensive programs that supported both abstinence and the use of condoms and contraceptives for sexually active teens had positive behavior effect." Comprehensive sex ed programs do not fail to teach abstinence. Instead, they teach abstinence as the preferred behavior and the use of condoms and contraceptives as the second, fall back behavior. The "positive behavior effect" of comprehensive programs included delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.

Opponents of comprehensive sex ed have often promoted myths about it. One thing that makes this NCPTUP report especially interesting is that it confronts the lies told about comprehensive sex ed by its opponents:

The study, conducted by Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates, also sought to debunk what the report called "myths propagated by abstinence-only advocates" including: that comprehensive sex education promotes promiscuity, hastens the initiative of sex or increases its frequency, and sends a confusing message to adolescents.

None of these was found to be accurate, Kirby wrote.

Instead, he wrote, such programs improved teens' knowledge about the risks and consequences of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and gave them greater "confidence in their ability to say 'no' to unwanted sex."

So, there you have it. Not only does abstinence only sex ed utterly fail, but comprehensive sex ed succeeds more times than not. Yet, abstinence only sex ed is Federally funded while comprehensive sex ed receives not a penny in Federal funds. Small wonder the US leads the industrial nations in teen pregnancies.


References:

Emerging Answers 2007: Report of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

Report: Abstinence Programs Don't Work

One More Time: Abstinence Only Programs Don't Work, Comprehensive Programs Do

Just Say No To Increases In Abstinence Funds

Is it just my imagination or has anyone else noticed that when teenage girls talk about having "spiritual yearnings" it means they're horny?

I don't mean to put down teenage girls here. They face a lot of challenges and don't need to be dumped on. Yet, at the same time, I believe I've noticed on many occasions how the word "spiritual" can seem almost synonymous with the word "horny" as it's used by teenage girls. Not always, but often enough to be noticeable.

I even have a theory about it (why, of course I do!). My theory is that most of us, when we enter puberty, don't make an instant connection between the new feelings we experience and horniness. In both boys and girls, feelings of horniness are created by the hormone testosterone. But those feelings don't come labeled "horniness". Instead, we must learn to interpret them as horniness. And while we are learning to properly interpret them as horniness, we often interpret them as something else, such as a "spiritual yearning".

What are the feelings produced by testosterone? Well, one of the most common feelings is sometimes described as "a desire or longing to hit the road". You can see how easily that feeling could be interpreted as spiritual if you listen to Led Zeppelin's famous "Stairway to Heaven" while Plant sings, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving."

Testosterone also produces a feeling very akin to "emptiness" -- and I've long noticed that when adolescent girls talk about their spirituality, they often talk about it in terms of feelings of longing and emptiness.

I speculate it might be a little harder for girls to make the connection between the feelings produced by testosterone and sexual yearning because girls don't come equipped with an appendage that frequently rises up and points out the connection to them. Boys do. But perhaps a bigger reason it might be more difficult for girls to make the connection is that society expects and accepts that boys will get horny, while at the same time, society more or less still frowns on girls getting horny. Therefore, there might be some pressure on girls to find a more socially acceptable label for their testosterone induced feelings than "horniness". What could be more socially acceptable than a "spiritual yearning"?

None of this is meant to discount the genuine spiritual needs of adolescent girls. I merely wish to point out my impression that girls (more often than boys) sometimes confuse horniness with "spiritual yearning". Adolescence is usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with spiritual matters. It is also usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with sexual matters. Since both concerns are in many ways new and unfamiliar to us, it seems possible that we might at times confuse the two.

If so, I wonder how often an exceptionally fervent teenage interest in religion is due to good, old fashioned horniness?

The other day I was listening to a bimbo talk show host who was scandalized that a nudist resort in Virginia or someplace allowed teens. He seemed to feel that while it was OK for consenting adults to practice nudity, it was horrifying that teens would be allowed to practice nudity. In fact, he thought it was downright immoral of the resort to allow teens in.

Now, I happen to think the talk show host was making a moutain out of a mole hill. For some years ago, I was acquainted with many teens in this town, several of whom would invite me to go along with them on their various excursions, which were often to a nude resort up in the mountains. I recall a number of things about those trips, including staying up until three in the morning in the sauna listening to the teens discuss relationships, sex and God, or being sought out by one teen or another for private chats about their anxieties, but I don't recall that any kids were traumatized by their experiences on these trips. So, I tend to think the bimbo talk show host was just being a bimbo.

But what do you think? Do you think the bimbo talk show host for once had a point? Is there a danger to teen nudity that I didn't see (wouldn't be the first time I haven't seen something)? Should teens be allowed in nudist resorts?

A new poll of young people (ages 13 to 24) jointly conducted by MTV and the Associated Press finds that "being sexually active leads to less happiness among 13 - 17 year olds" but more happiness in the moment for 18 - 24 year olds.

Of course, by "leads to", the folks at MTV and the Associated Press meant "it correlates with". So, the press release should have read, "being sexually active correlates with less happiness among 13 - 17 year olds, but correlates with more happiness in the moment among 18 - 24 year olds." The difference is important.

"Leads to" implies that sexual activity causes less happiness among 13 - 17 year olds.

However, there could be all sorts of other reasons why sexually active 13 - 17 year olds are less happy than their non-sexually active peers. For instance, it could be that unhappy kids start having sex earlier than happy kids (Perhaps unhappy kids are using sex to escape their unhappiness). If knowing why sexually active 13 - 17 year olds are less happy is important, then it is important to be straight about the difference between "leads to" and "correlates with".

Having said all that, I might add that if any kid were to ask me when they should start having sex, I would most likely tell them, "sometime between 18 and 24". That is, unless I knew the kid well enough to sense that he or she would be happier starting sex earlier or later than that age range. Yet, for most people, it seems a pretty good bet that sometime between 18 and 24 they will be emotionally and mentally mature enough for sex.

I do not know at what age someone will be emotionally and mentally mature enough for sex, but I do know that it's very difficult to be happy having sex if you are not emotionally and mentally mature enough for it.

I'm not sure I thoroughly care at what age women are typically the sexiest, but the question still amuses me enough to pose it this morning. Especially since silly American culture seems to insist that real women are not sexy -- rather, mere teens are. Fashion is driven by 16 year olds. So, at what age are women typically the sexiest?

My hunch is most of us will think first of the age at which women look the sexiest. Nothing wrong with that. The women who are held up to us as sexy are almost always women we know through the media, and the media emphasizes not only youth but looks too. So it's almost natural for us to think, "sexy = pimping good looks". But can we think outside that box?

In real life, isn't sexy, like charisma, most often associated with behavior rather than merely with appearances? And if that is true, shouldn't we take into account such things as the sexual confidence of women when asking the momentous question?

I've read psychologists who assert that around age 35 most women undergo a sea change in their attitudes towards sex. They gain vast sexual confidence. Let's suppose that's true. If so, would that explain why -- in real life -- a 30-something woman can often create in men more sexual excitement than her younger sisters? I don't know, but I'm tossing it out as a definite possibility, and my nomination for the typical age at which women are sexiest.

Of course, I don't mean to imply by any of this that women older or younger than 30-something cannot be drop dead sexy. Instead, I'm merely suggesting that women in their 30's tend to reach a sexual peak. There are exceptions to every rule. Besides, the real point of this exercise has been to question the common American notion that female sexiness belongs almost exclusively to teenagers. That's just silly.

One night, when there was a comet in the sky over the San Luis, Jackie and I sat beneath a blanket on the porch of the Oak House at Valley View Hot Springs, which is a naturalist resort in Colorado.

It is sometimes easier to talk frankly and intimately with someone who is naked, if you yourself are naked too, than it is to talk frankly and intimately when either one of you is wearing clothing. Jackie and I were naked together under the blanket and I think that might have had something to do with why Jackie chose that night to tell me the story of her relationships.

She took two hours in the telling. Despite how earnest she was, my mind drifted off the meaning of her words, and I spent most of those two hours listening to her emotions and to the night, rather than to her words. Finally though, she summed up: "What do boys want? I don't care what it is, I just want to know what to give boys that they want. Tell me what they want so I can have a relationship that lasts."

She spoke with earnest intensity: Those weren't rhetorical questions to her. Yet, I hadn't been listening to more than a quarter of what she'd said that night. I asked for time to think through my answer. The two of us then watched the comet for a while.

Finally, I spoke to her about being true to herself. "Don't try to change yourself to suit the boys, Jackie. You'll only find yourself changing to suit the ones who don't really like you in the first place. Then when someone comes along who likes you for who you are, you will have changed so much to suit the ones who don't quite like you for who you are, that you won't know what to do. Instead, be yourself. The boys who like you for who you are will like that about you -- that you are yourself. And the rest be damned."

Jackie and I sat for sometime after that in silence. Then we decided to go for a soak and that ended the topic. Yet, I wondered that night what I should have told Jackie to help her. I considered the words I'd given her inadequate and even worried a bit about having let her down.

Then, about a year afterwards, Jackie spoke to me about that evening. Reminded me of it-- be yourself. "It didn't make sense at first", she said, "But I kept thinking about your words, and eventually it came to me what you were trying to tell me. Since then, I've kept what you said in mind, and it's helped a lot."

Sometimes we get lucky with our advice. We feel so inadequate in giving it, but then we get lucky -- someone comes along who works at understanding it.

I happen to think there's a great deal of truth in the African proverb that Hillary Clinton made a title of her book, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child". The truth in that seems so obvious to me, in fact, that I wonder why the proverb is so often ridiculed by bimbo talk show hosts. Is that because Clinton used it as the title of her book, and they don't like Clinton?

Back when I hung out with people much younger than me, I discovered that kids will seek out adults to hang out with. Not every kid, of course, but many kids befriended me and I very strongly suspect they did so because I was an accessible adult they could interact with -- and thus they could put a toe or two into the adult world.

One night at the coffee shop where I'd met most of those kids, a man nearly my age, Tim, approached me and demanded (out of the blue), "I want to know what your secret is."

"Secret?"

Tim didn't hesitate, but went on, almost angerly: "You're always surrounded by kids. They talk with you. I've been coming to this coffee shop over four months now, and I've only spoken to two kids. What's your secret? How do you get them to talk with you?"

"What are you trying to talk with them about?" I was beginning to suspect the man was a kook.

"Their souls. The Bible. Salvation. What are you telling them." He said "What are you telling them" as if he'd already made up his mind what I was telling them, and wished only to have it confirmed.

"They tell me whatever they want to tell me and I listen." I had by then decided Tim was indeed a kook, and so I made some excuse to leave him, which ended that bizarre conversation.

Some days later, however, I spoke with Tim more fully and got the story from him. It turned out he was a lay preacher at his church and his mission, for the last few months at least, was to "reach out to youth of the city with the gospel of Christ's salvation." Somehow, he had decided the coffee shop was the perfect place to do that. But he'd been completely unsuccessful. Only a couple of kids had listened to his salvation sales pitch, and neither one of them had bought it.

Plenty of kids, of course, are interested in religion, and I don't quite know why Tim was so unsuccessful in finding those who are.

Yet, most of the kids I knew weren't looking for an adult to sell them a religion. They were, if anything, looking for an adult to listen to them, to accept them, to help them discover who they were, and to encourage them to be true to themselves -- things more along those lines.

Good parents do that, of course. Yet, I think at some point in a kid's life, they need some adult other than their parents to do it too. They need to know the adult world accepts them. And perhaps that's one way in which it takes a village to raise a child.

A while back, I watched an episode of the Bill O'Reilly "comedy hour" during which Bill pretended to be scandalized that a teacher from a Northern state had vacationed in Florida, and while on vacation, had gone to a night club where she flashed her breasts for all the O'Reillys of the world to see. Naturally, Bill called on her school board to fire her. Bill is the Grand Old Prude of the Republic.

Somehow I got to thinking of that episode tonight, and along with thinking about it, recalled things I'd done that Bill would certainly disapprove of.

When I was new to Colorado Springs, I frequented a coffee shop a block from my apartment. The shop was near a high school, and consequently, the first 200 or so people I met in the Springs were mostly high school kids who frequented that same shop.

Several of those kids befriended me. They took to inviting me on all sorts of excursions -- from dances to rock climbs to road trips to sleep overs. Perhaps because I'd recently divorced, knew almost no one else in town besides those kids, and wanted a distraction, I almost always accepted any invitation from them. That's how, at 40, I ended up somewhat frequently going to clothing optional hot springs with high school kids.

The youngest of those kids was Harriett. When I met Harriett, she was a shy, quiet 15 year old genius bored to death with her school.

We met in the coffee shop when I walked up to were she was sitting alone and challenged her to a game of chess. After that introduction, she fell into the habit of seeking me out when I was in the shop and sitting with me, sometimes for hours -- but seldom saying much and never demanding my attention. Occasionally, we played chess.

So, I was surprised when one day her mother showed up at the place I worked asking for me. At that time, I knew Harriett only from the coffee shop, and then only as the girl who quietly sat away the hours on the fringes of the group I was a part of. But her mother revealed that Harriett had been coming home nearly every day to talk about what I'd said. In fact, Harriett had spoken so much about me to her mother that her mother now believed I had considerable influence on Harriett and thus wanted to meet me.

I started paying more attention to Harriett. I discovered, among other things, that she was exceptionally bright -- probably genius bright -- played the violin, piano and guitar -- was frequently depressed -- had an absent father -- had done modeling -- and knew nearly every artist in town due to her mother's participation in the local arts scene.

A few weeks after we met, Harriett's mother, Liz, and I got to talking about Valley View Hot Springs, and I think it was she who suggested I take Harriett along the next time I went to the Springs with a group of kids.

Valley View is located on the side of a mountain overlooking the world's largest intermountain valley, the San Luis. The nearest town of any size is 37 miles distant as the crow flies, and much further by road. At night, there are a billion stars over the valley in a sky so dark and deep you feel you sipped infinity looking at them.

The owners of Valley View keep the place as undeveloped as possible. You soak in natural pools, on beds of pebbles, sand, and moss. The wind sounds like a river rushing through the pines. In the evenings, you hear the coyotes calling to each other. Sometimes, wild mule deer come to feed on the grass by the pool you're soaking in.

There are people who believe Valley View is sacred, and they speak in whispers when there, as if in a cathedral. The perfect place to be naked to the world.

At the time, I saw nothing scandalous in a 40 year old man taking a 15 year old girl to a clothing optional hot springs. After all, Harriett was something of a sacred girl, and Valley View was something of a sacred place. It made emotional, poetic sense to give her the experience of that place, one of the most beautiful places in Colorado. Yet, looking back on it now, I realize both Liz and I were naive. Had word of that gotten to the wrong ears, Liz could have been charged with child abuse, Harriett summarily taken away from her, and I could have faced an investigation for statutory rape. People so often put the worse possible interpretations on things.

Some years ago, when I was new in Colorado, I frequented a coffee shop near my apartment that was the hang out of kids from the local high school. Consequently, the first 200 or so people I met here were almost all of them between the ages of 15 and 19.

Several of those kids befriended me, and took to inviting me on road trips, or to parties, sleep-overs, concerts, plays, movies, rock climbing expeditions -- just about anything and everything they did together.

I came to know over time perhaps a 100 young men and a 100 young women, some of them quite well. And it seems to me that I noticed a difference between many of the young women who had fathers and many of the young women who didn't.

In general, the difference was this: The fatherless women were less self-confident around men than the women with fathers.

For instance: The fatherless women were less likely to assert themselves. They were less likely to let men know what their boundaries were. They were less likely to be strong individuals around men.

On the other hand, the fatherless women were more likely to be relatively obsessed with their boyfriends. They were more likely to be emotionally dependent on them. And they were more likely to cling to relationships in which they were being abused.

It seemed to me that one thing fathers tend to do for their daughters is help them be self-confident when dealing with men. Does that make any sense?

According to a new study on the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education, kids who are taught to abstain from sex do no better at abstaining from sex than other kids. Or, as The Washington Post reports:

A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration's social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a condom.

Authorized by Congress in 1997, the study followed 2000 children from elementary or middle school into high school. The children lived in four communities -- two urban, two rural. All of the children received the family life services available in their community, in addition, slightly more than half of them also received abstinence-only education.

By the end of the study, when the average child was just shy of 17, half of both groups had remained abstinent. The sexually active teenagers had sex the first time at about age 15. Less than a quarter of them, in both groups, reported using a condom every time they had sex. More than a third of both groups had two or more partners.

"There's not a lot of good news here for people who pin their hopes on abstinence-only education," said Sarah Brown, executive director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a privately funded organization that monitors sex education programs. "This is the first study with a solid, experimental design, the first with adequate numbers and long-term follow-up, the first to measure behavior and not just intent. On every measure, the effectiveness of the programs was flat."

Of course, proponents of abstinence only sex education are not giving up. They're trying to spin the study as highly inconclusive. Yet, the results of the study are not substantially different from several other smaller studies done over the years.

Nay, little one, it is not love as yet.
Dear as thou art, and lovely, thou canst not love,
Thy later loves shall show the truth of this.

- Laurence Hope


A 13 year old friend of mine professed to be deeply in love with a boy in her class. “People think I’m too young for it to be true love”, she complained to me, “but that’s not so: I know how I feel.”

In a way, she had a point, of course. Many a 13 year old is well enough emotionally developed to feel intense romantic love for a person, no matter how much parents, relatives, and older friends might wish they couldn’t. My young friend was simply reporting a fact when she told me she was in love.

Yet, how do you tell a 13 year old girl – a girl who knows full well how she feels when a special boy smiles at her, who knows full well how she feels when she doesn’t see him for a day or two – how do you tell her that what she feels is not mature love? Do you lie a bit and say it’s just infatuation? Do you try to explain the difference between the love she knows and the love she has yet to know? Or, is there something else you can do?

I’m personally terrible at explaining love to young people. The last thing I want to do is give them the impression I’m discounting their feelings. Yet, I know they are not capable of a mature love. Not only are they incapable of experiencing it – they are incapable at their age of really, deeply understanding what a mature love is. So, my usual strategy when a young friend brings up the subject of love is to simply listen, and listen well, to what she has to say. I refuse to judge her. I refuse to discourage her. But I sometimes try to gently point out there are unimagined depths to love that she can look forward to experiencing when she gets older.

The human brain is not fully formed until a person is in their early 20’s, so this matter of whether one can love well and truly at a younger age is very likely not just a question that applies to my 13 year old friend, but to all adolescents, and perhaps even to some very young adults. We shouldn’t confuse the question of whether a person can love well and truly with the related – but distinct – question of whether a person is ready for sex. Everything I know of that latter question suggests to me that most people are emotionally, physically, and mentally ready for sex sometime in their later teens. Yet, the capacity for love takes longer to fully blossom in our species than the sometimes related capacity for sex.

In general, the younger we are, the more likely we are to focus on our own feelings when in love. There could be a simple explanation for that. Perhaps we are more likely to focus on our own feelings because our feelings are so new and strange to us. But another explanation is we are more likely to focus on our own feelings because our brain isn’t yet developed enough to easily and accurately empathize with others. There is at least one study I know of that supports the second explanation. There might be other causes too, but whatever the cause(s), the fact is, when we are young, we tend to focus more on ourselves than on the people we love.

Compared to when I was, say, sixteen, at 50 I hardly notice when I’m in love. The people I love are more vivid to me than my feelings. That might be because I’ve been through those feelings so many times before that there is no longer anything surprising or novel about them. Hence, they are easy to simply acknowledge and then move beyond them. However, I can remember paying the utmost attention to my feelings when I was sixteen. In fact, I once paid so much attention to my feelings, and once paid comparatively so little attention to the people I loved, that today I could tell you much more how I felt about someone at sixteen than I could tell you what kind of person they were.

I don’t think that’s unusual. Far from it. When teenagers have told me about their love for someone, they have almost always focused on their feelings for that person, rather than on the person they loved. They scarcely notice that’s what they’re doing, focusing on themselves rather than on the one they love. I don’t fault them for that, but I recognize that it creates all sorts of problems for them. And maybe it’s because we older folk recognize the many problems with young love that we are almost always a bit alarmed when a young friend of ours tells us she’s in love.

The other day, I stumbled across a Christian youth site on the net that had recently done an informal survey on the attitudes of Christian youth towards female modesty.

As the site itself pointed out, the survey is not scientific, since among other things it was self-selecting. Yet, the basic premise of the survey is nevertheless interesting enough: Should women and girls dress modestly to help their brothers in Christ avoid lusting for them?

Over 200 women and girls responded to the survey, and over 1600 boys and men. The survey asked 148 questions in such dress categories as swimsuits, undergarments, shirts/dresses, layering, and so forth. Respondents were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, were neutral towards, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with such statements as, "Seeing even an inch of skin between the bottom of a girl's shirt and her pants is a stumbling block", or " A girl's underwear should never show [emphasis in original]."

Now, some liberal bloggers have sharply criticized the implied premise of the survey that it is the job of women and girls to prevent boys and men from lusting after them. The bloggers have pointed out this unreasonably shifts the burden of lust from the male to the female.

I agree.

I could say much about this, but I'd like to focus on one thing alone. Post-pubic boys and young men need to learn how to deal with their natural desires, and removing anything from their environment that stimulates their desires is certainly not the best way to help them deal with those desires. Instead, it is actually the best way to help them avoid dealing with their natural desires. Consequently, they are not challenged to mature into adults that can look upon a woman without lust when lust is inappropriate.

This recalls to me the story of two Zen monks who were travelling when they came to a swollen stream. Standing in the road beside the stream, wondering how she might cross, was a beautiful young woman. Without hesitation, the older monk picked up the woman and carried her across the stream. She thanked him and went on her separate way. The two monks then travelled on together for several hours, until the younger monk, deeply troubled, could no longer remain silent. "Brother, aren't we forbidden to have any physical contact with women?", he asked. Replied the older monk, "I put her down several hours ago, but you are still carrying her."

A woman's dress, no matter how provocative, does not determine whether we lust for her. What determines whether we lust for her is we ourselves. Hence, no one but we ourselves can properly take responsibility for our desire.

The image to the left comes from Eolake Stobblehouse's "adult" website, DOMAI. I put "adult" in quotes because I have never found an image on Eolake's site that it wouldn't be appropriate for a healthy 14 year old boy to look at.

Eolake never publishes photos that degrade his models -- unless you are deeply buried in the American psyche and warily suspect nudity itself is degrading. But Eolake is Danish and his models have actual personalities that go way beyond the playmate's plastic smile. He does not turn his models into copycat bimbos.

If I had a 14 year old boy --- or a 14 year old girl interested in girls --- I'd comfortably give him or her the link to DOMAI..

In the first place, nearly every 14 year old in the country now has access to porn --- real porn. The kind you would prefer they didn't have access to. My thinking is to guide them to something better.

Second, I like the articles on Eolake's site. You should know upfront there are no articles of general interest, no interviews with famous people who are not erotic photographers, nor updates on men's fall fashions. Instead, most of the articles are in one way or another on erotic beauty and our responses to it. The ones I've read were healthy, authentic and inspiring. Any 14 year old could do with a dose of those articles to inoculate him or her against all the bullshit that gets dumped on 14 year olds these days with regards to their sexuality.

Last, I'd be comfortable giving the DOMAI link to my 14 year old because, as I mentioned above, the models are not degraded, have dignity, and come across as real people.

If I have any qualms about Eolake's site, they come from a conversation I had with Anne a while back. She pointed out the site pretty much represents only one standard of feminine beauty and that it tends to idealize that standard. I agree with her, and it's a serious criticism. But given the site's pluses, I'd take that minus and still give my 14 year old the link.

I've been using "14 year old" here just to illustrate. But when you get right down to it, Eolake's wonderful site is suitable to any person of any age who is interested in beautiful nudes.

So there you have it. My proposal for corrupting today's youth in a nutshell. Underlying my whole dastardly scheme is the notion it is far better to guide a horny teenager to good erotica than it is to sit back and hope s/he doesn't find worse stuff on his or her own.

After all, it is foolish to tell teens sex is evil and hope that lie keeps them from corruption. And it is just as foolish to throw them to the wolves by giving them no guidance at all. So, I think my approach is actually the more reasonable and practical one. What do you think? Am I right about that?

UPDATE: There is a correction to this article here.

Ever wonder why teens have mood swings? Well, Sheryl Smith has managed to make a dent in that question. From The Guardian:

Scientists have found that the mechanism normally used by the brain to calm itself down in stressful situations seems to work in the opposite way in teenagers, making them even more anxious.

When the brain senses a stressful situation, it reacts by switching on receptors, using a range of chemicals, including a steroid called THP. In an adult or even a younger individual, THP would reduce anxiety. But in experiments on adolescent mice, THP increased anxiety.

The experiments, by Sheryl Smith, a physiologist at the State University of New York, offer the first physiological explanation for adolescent mood swings. Previous work has focused on analysing behavioural changes in teenagers during adolescence. Her results are published today in Nature Neuroscience.

The research raises an interesting question: Now that we know what causes mood swings in teenagers, should scientists make a pill to counter the effects of THP on their developing brains?

As a practical matter, I'm sure some drug companies are reading the findings of Dr. Smith with considerable interest. But do you think they actually should develop a pill to counter THP?