ON WHOSE KNEES?

one size fits all
Sharon forwarded this recent Atlantic Monthly essay to me this morning. The author, Caitlin Flanagan rips into a book called Rainbow Party (by Paul Ruditis) and uses it as a way to talk about the perception of an "oral sex epidemic" amongst today's teens and what it means, in particular, for the sexual identities of young women. In the process (this is at least a 4,000 word essay), she manages to cover a wide berth of topics, including 1) how models of positive female sexuality have gone from Judy Blume to Lil Kim, 2) how the media has whipped up hysteria around the "oral sex epidemic" (OSE for short), 3) theories on why sex seems more casual and debased than ever (she blames hip-hop, porn and a perversion of feminist ideals among others).

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[Quick summary of my post for those too lazy to read the whole thing: Flanagan writes about the hysteria around the oral sex epidemic. She has some funny writing, some serious writing. Some good arguments but her section on hip-hop is wack. And she doesn't realize that there is clear data out there that oral sex is not as one-sided as everyone presumes it is. This oversight weakens her argument considerably.]

I have to say: I should read more book reviews first of all. There's so much more freedom to ruminate on a variety of different topics in a book review vs. a music or even movie review. Flanagan manages to touch on a variety of different mediums and sources, from books to television to music to public healthy to government policy, etc. She does have the tendency to meander now and then but she never really goes "off topic." Her discussion of Blume is especially insightful.

Second, I like Flanagan's writing; she has a nice balance between irreverence and seriousness. Especially given the topic, there's more than a few LOL moments to be had here but also some powerfully stated arguments. Here's a selection:

"A huge report was issued by the National Center for Health Statistics. It covered the topic of teenage oral sex more extensively than any previous study, and the news was devastating: A quarter of girls aged fifteen had engaged in it, and more than half aged seventeen. Obviously, there was no previous data to compare this with, but millions of suburban dads were quite adamant that they had been born too soon."

"...what these kids allegedly engaged in combined the degeneracy of a satanic cult with the agility of a Cirque du Soleil troupe. We are told that a common after-school activity in Conyers was "the sandwich," in which a girl would be simultaneously penetrated by as many as four boys (the fourth, apparently a Johnny-come-lately, would somehow shoehorn himself into an orifice already occupied by one of his pals)."

"The oral-sex hysteria has attributed to American boys not only superhuman virility but also wanton emotional cruelty. The one is laughable; the other in the main is just not the case. Like the medical dodge, the demonization of boys oversimplifies the problem and spares one the arguably sadder truth."

I was actually quite impressed with the general arc of Flanagan's essay...until she got to hip-hop. Then things started to fall apart. Here's what she has to say about rap music and attempts to address its content. (Emphasis mine):

"One of the most astonishing things to happen during the 1990s was that rap music that included some of the most violent, sexually explicit, and misogynistic lyrics ever recorded slipped seamlessly and virtually unnoticed into the households of so many apparently responsible American families."

"Tipper Gore's heroic campaign to get explicit music rated and labeled was born after she decided to do something few parents had even attempted: actually listen to the albums her kids had bought. She was ridiculed by many factions, including those forces on the American left who cry censorship whenever anyone attempts to protect the public, including children, from smut (and in the case of rap, smut emanating from a source the left valorizes: black urban America)."

"The protests of white senators' wives and African-American senior citizens have not had much effect on music sales, and have not prevented a large number of poor and middle-class kids alike from becoming saturated by the world of spoken-word, hard-core pornography that is rap music.

As someone who firmly believes that misogyny in hip-hop is a serious problem, I still had to take a pause and utter underneath my breath: "c'mon, give me a fucking break."

For a pundit trying to counter how the media has whipped up hysteria around the OSE, Flanagan seems to have no qualms, whatsoever, in breathlessly engaging in her own examples of hyperbolic presumptions and accusations. I find the turnabout so striking because it's so superficial and unlike most of the rest of her text.

I can't say, for certain, that the fact that Flanagan is a middle aged white woman has anything to do with her narrow views on hip-hop (but of course, I'm saying that is has something to do with them) but anyone who would call Tipper Gore "heroic" is pretty much wearing a very particular kind of racial and cultural politics on her sleeve already. For certain, she doesn't lay (all) the evil of the world upon hip-hop's shoulders so I won't press this point too far, but it was one of the few areas where her argument, so impassioned and intelligent elsewhere, comes up so short that it deals a severe blow to her credibility.

However, when I was reading through her essay a second time, I realized there was something even more problematic with her entire essay, an omission or oversight so grand that it basically topples over some of her most salient conclusions. Moreover, what makes this oversight so egregious is that it was such a simple thing to do: check your facts.

Understand this: the OSE hysteria - as well as the conclusions that Flanagan draws about it - rely on one important idea: that teenage girls are willingly going out into the world, giving out blow jobs like they were candy, and expecting nothing in return. She takes this following argument for granted and never really questions it:

"Fellatio, which was once a part of the sexual repertoire only of experienced women, is now commonly performed by very young girls outside of romantic relationships, casually and without any expectation of reciprocation."

Ok, that makes things pretty clear, no-strings-attached oral sex, yada yada. Flanagan actually takes this idea and threads it into the heart of her conclusion where she suggests,

"The modern girl's casual willingness to perform oral sex may -- as some cool-headed observers of the phenomenon like to propose -- be her way of maintaining a post-feminist power in her sexual dealings, by being fully in control of the sexual act and of the pleasure a boy receives from it. Or it may be her desperate attempt to do something that the culture refuses to encourage: to keep her own sexuality -- the emotions and the desires, as well as the anatomical real estate itself -- private, secret, unviolated. It may not be her technical virginity that she is trying to preserve; it may be her own sexual awakening -- which is all she really has left to protect anymore."

Powerful words but the problem is that they rest on a faulty assumption.

Here's the thing...if you go back to the September 15, 2005 report issued through the CDC and reported on by the National Center for Health Statistics, what you find is this under Table 16 (which is the main set of data that most news outlets - and Flanagan - draw from):

% of girls, 15-19 who have GIVEN oral sex to an opposite sex partner: 43.6

Suburban moms and dads everywhere gasp in horror! But wait, keep reading...

% of girls, 15-19 who have RECEIVED oral sex from an opposite sex partner: 49.6.
% of boys, 15-19 who have given oral sex to an opposite sex partner: 38.8
% of boys, 15-19 who have received oral sex from an opposite sex partner: 51.5

. Sure, there is an imbalance here - clearly, boys are more likely to receive than give. But hold the friggin' presses...according to this, MORE teenage girls receive oral sex from boys than give it.

Unless I'm reading this data wrong, it pretty much, um, blows a hole in this idea of hordes of teenage girls on their knees without ever expecting some downtown action in return. It's such a simple fact to look up: took me all of five minutes and yet, it completely demolishes one of the most hallowed underpinnings of the OSE hysteria as well as Flanagan's own arguments. Her conclusion, that perhaps girls are giving oral sex as a way to protect their own sexuality, simply doesn't work any more. These teens that we're talking about are sexually active in the fullest sense of the term: they're not simply giving pleasure but it seems fairly clear: they are receiving it too.

It might very well be that sex has become far too casual amongst teens today - oral or otherwise (notably, most of the media outlets wouldn't go anywhere near touching the rising rates of anal sex amongst teens. It's an obvious corollary but still too taboo for many). I don't doubt that the average 16 year old is far, far more sexually experienced - and perhaps blasé - than I was when I was 16 in the 1980s (then again, I was a total square back then). Nor do I doubt that there are probably many teenage girls out there with a debased sense of self who are willing to satisfy men sexually without ever asking for reciprocation.

But according to the data, they are, by far, the exceptions and not the rule. What seems far more likely is that you have a generation of teens experimenting with sex together rather than it being a purely or even mostly one-sided affair. Not to say that it still isn't awkward or traumatic but I would think that today's girls are just as curious about their own bodies and own pleasure as today's boys seem eager to learn.

I would have liked to see Flanagan take these facts into mind in her essay and see how she might have drawn different conclusions. It just seems a shame that such a lengthy and thorough essay otherwise would suffer from such a simple oversight.

--O.W.