Hello All! I just felt like posting this link to a book/documentary that recently came out. It is called "Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss," documenting the lives of young teenage girls (ages 13-15) living in Canada (A suburban area, unsure of the name) who engage in a sex trade. These are young girls who exchange sexual favors to young guys for the attention and the money to go shopping. WOW. I was pretty surprised when I heard about this. Just wanted your thoughts on this. The fundamental ideal of a woman celebrating her sexuality has been taken completely out of context. Clearly, media and its obsession with sexual body parts and the attention that sex gets is the culprit in my opinion. But what do you all think?
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I read that these stories are urban myths, just like the whole "rainbow party" myth that was going around. They are pushed forward by the abstinence only crowd to try and show people how sexually out of control young people are in order to gain support for their movement.
I must say I suspect that is probably correct in most cases. I'm sure some girls somewhere have traded sex for money, but I don't believe it is occuring to the degree pushed by some of these articles.
In fact Macleans, which is like Time magazine in Canada and is generally right-wing, recently had a big issue showing that teens are having LESS SEX then ever in Canada. The stats show a fairly consistent decline and that young people aren't having sex anymore now then they were 20-30 years ago.
So alot of these stories are just myths perpetuated by those with a religious or abstinence-only agenda. Keep that in mind whenever you see stories like this.
I have a hard time believing that its a big enough phenomenon to warrant a documentary. It wasn't too long ago that I was 15, and I didn't know of anybody doing this.
Very young girls was another documentary featured here on feministing that focused on this phenomena except in poor, urban areas.
So to me this story, despite being in an affluent community, is yet another story of girls struggling to just be allowed to mature in this world while from day 1 being bombarded by messages that our value comes from providing sex.
In the past and even still in some communities there would have been a lot more ostracizing and pushing this stuff under the rug. So it's good that it's being talked about.
HOWEVER...
I was only able to watch the preview but I noticed one thing was absent. The men. Now is the time to ask, "what about the boys and men"? Especially where they talked about 27 year olds hanging around 15 year olds????
And in the case of boys who are the same age as the girls, there are some very specific ways that our young people have become desensitized to oral sex. Some of the reasons are rational responses to fear of pregnancy, lack of access to reproductive services at least in the US (I can't speak for Canada). Of course any time media is mentioned folks cry foul. But with the youth, I think there is more evidence to support the media's role in at minimum, shifting perceptions about how widespread certain activities are, especially with regard to sex, i.e., kids who rationalize behavior based on the perception that everybody else is doing it too.
No no no. This is not at ALL like Very Young Girls. This Canadian doc that the OP is referring to is about teenage girls who have consensual sex with men for "attention" and money for shopping.
Very Young Girls (I saw it on HBO) is about teenagers who are abducted from the streets of (in this case) New York City and are forced into prostitution. They are kidnapped and beaten, living in poverty and isolation. It is not consensual. And it is not a phenomena, it is a tragedy.
You're right. I wasn't very clear. I didn't mean to compare the two in terms of gravity and severity of the problem.
The preview I saw for this Canadian doc (and I can only go by the preview) seemed to be talking about two scenarios: girls with boys their own age (consensual) and girls with older men (which would likely be considered statutory rape, but I don't know Canadian law)--it's the motivations behind the latter that I was trying to make a parallel to with Very Young Girls.
Besides kidnapping and running away, many girls' entry into the street often begins with relationships with older men; and the motives are exactly the same as what the girls were talking about in this preview: the guys treat them special and buy them things. This was the phenomena of which I was speaking (of course I didn't make that very clear in my comment)--that is girls (kids really) go with these older men often to the detriment of self-esteem or in severe cases become exploited.
Sorry if I wasn't clear on that.
I think you make a good point about how this seems to focus entirely on the girls and not at all on the boys. It's typical, really; the attitude that "boys will be boys" and anytime they are "boys" it's the girl's fault because OBVIOUSLY boys act that way, but if girls do it it's shameful.
Like how there's so much attention on rape victims but almost none on rapists. Imagine if we tried to limit or prevent murder exclusively by trying to examine what makes someone vulnerable as a "murder victim" instead of trying to catch and punish/prevent the murderers from committing the crime.
Seems like just the same attitudes here.
"And in the case of boys who are the same age as the girls, there are some very specific ways that our young people have become desensitized to oral sex. Some of the reasons are rational responses to fear of pregnancy, lack of access to reproductive services at least in the US (I can't speak for Canada)."
...and, in some families, hymen testing. The "if my finger finds your hymen then I know you never had sex" standard sure doesn't seem to count having had oral sex or having had anal sex as having had sex. o_O
What a misleading title. "Goodnight kiss" implies that we're talking about dating and new expectations about oral sex. Giving oral sex in exchange for money is not at all analagous to a goodnight kiss. The title also implies that this is some sort of widespread phenomenon, but in the interview I saw the author seemed to only be talking about a small group of girls in Canada. .
Thank you! My thoughts exactly.
In 1998 I was in the 8th grade and living in Arlington, VA, a suburb of DC. The story of my middle school classmates having parties and engaging in oral sex made the front page of the Washington Post. Kids would go over to each others houses when their parents weren't home and during the course of these parties the girls would give oral sex to many of the boys also attending the party. Not for money, but for attention, and the status of being "cool".
This is about the time when my mom talked to me about what oral sex was, what in implied, and how to make the decision to have oral sex safely when the time was right.
I think it's really important to talk to young women about using their bodies as a means to build self-esteem. I know it's an ongoing problem in this hypersexualized, yet abstinence teaching society.