The Talk

"Son," I called into the next room, "would you come in here, please?"

"Coming!" His reply made me sigh unconsciously. The falsetto squeak of my young teenager's changing voice was just another reminder of how quickly time goes by. "What is it, Dad?"

"Put your game down," I told him, and he could tell right away I was using my "serious" voice. I remembered having the same feeling of anxiety he was feeling whenever I heard that voice from my own parents. Fortunately - or unfortunately - for both of us, I wasn't going to yell at him, or question him, or punish him.

No, as his sixteenth birthday loomed, and soon he'd be taking girls to prom, asking to stay out all night with friends, and driving his own hovercar, it was time to have "The Talk."

I gestured for him to come sit next to me on his hoverbed. "Son," I began, clearing my throat, hoping my own nervousness wouldn't show through, "it's time we had a talk."  I gave him a meaningful look. "THE talk."

"Aw, Dad," he hung his head down, kicking his feet, "We have the googlenet, I know about sex and stuff."

"I know, but it's not enough to just know the mechanics. Pretty soon you're going to be going out with girls or attractive robots, and I've got to make sure you understand there's a big responsibility that comes with it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well son," I took out the box I'd been sitting next to, the awkwardness of the moment startling even me. "if you're going to have sex, you've got to use a condom."

"Daaaaaad!" He was just as embarrassed by the whole thing as I was, but I knew this was important.

"This is important," I pressed, letting the box of hovercondoms float next to him, even while silently wondering if maybe mankind had gotten overzealous with hover technology. "Sex is a wonderful thing, but it can carry some heavy consequences. If you're not careful, you can get a girl pregnant."

"What?" He seemed genuinely shocked. "Babies come from sex?"

"It's true," I affirmed, "but these will help prevent that from happening."

He took the box and looked it over, quickly putting it to the side, clearly feeling uncomfortable. "Okay, okay, use condoms, I got it. But, why, Dad? I thought women could choose when they can and can't get pregnant?"

"Oh ho ho," I laughed heartily at the youth's ignorance. "No, son. And don't say that around women, it's very offensive. See, they have no control over it - unless they get raped."

"Really?" He seemed confused, but I could understand why. No one had really thought that way until Senator Akin, many years earlier, had brought light to the scientific fact.

"You see, son, when a woman really gets raped, she secretes a certain secretion and keeps herself from getting pregnant."

"What do you mean, "really" gets raped? And aren't you thinking of ducks?"

"Well, to answer the second question first, we all used to think so, but a very smart man named Todd Akin, who was a Senator in Missouri, showed us all we were wrong using testimony from a real doctor. When he first said he heard that from a doctor, even I thought he meant like, a chiropractor, or maybe someone whose last name just happened to be "Doctor," but no, it was a real, actual doctor. And he taught us all a valuable lesson about how women get pregnant. If a woman is forced into having sex, she can't get pregnant."

"But - how does that work? If babies come from sex . . . "

"Ah, but going back to your first question, a woman's body is an amazing thing. If she doesn't want it, her body will shut down the baby-making stuff and she'll be alright. That's why, thanks to Senator Akin, we outlawed the morning after pill. It was just one more way for women to think they could have sex without consequence."

"Wait a second," my son said, mulling that over in his teenage head, "there are other ways to prevent pregnancy and we outlawed them?"

"Of course," I said, "sex is a huge responsibility, and making it safer for everyone involved just encourages more of it. Since we know women who are legitimately raped can't get pregnant, it means that all those women who had abortions or took emergency contraception were lying about being raped in the first place. And that's terrible son, rape is a horrible crime and those women are bad people for lying about it."

"Is that really true?" He seemed more confused than ever. I felt bad for him - I knew this was a lot to take in, and a young, hormone-addled mind could become overwhelmed by all the science.

"Hey, Senator Akin was on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, so I trust him to know what he's talking about. It was thanks to him that we finally got rid of birth control being covered by health insurers and passed that Constitutional Amendment banning all forms of abortion."

"So, so . . . " I could hear the gears turning in his head as he tried to wrap his head around it, "women have no right whatsoever to choose when they want to start a family? If they want to have sex, it's all up to luck?"

"Luck and condoms, son," I told him solemnly, "luck and hovercondoms."

"But . . . Dad, that sounds really, really unfair to women."

I shrugged. "I used to think so, too," I recalled, "because no matter how strongly I felt we should be focusing on making a nation where women had enough options that they'd never feel like abortion was all they could do with an unwanted pregnancy, I knew at the end of the day, it wasn't my choice to make. But since Senator Akin made it clear that way of thinking just encourages women to lie about rape, I had to change my mind. That's why you wear a condom, son, every time." 

That wasn't the whole truth, though, and if nothing else I wanted this talk to be thorough. "But," I started to clarify, "if you maybe find a girl with enough money to pay for her own birth control, then it's okay not to use protection."

"Really? But . . . aren't there like, diseases that come from sex?"

Now, this was an important question, and I wanted to make sure that my son and I were on the same page here. I looked him square in the eye, putting my hand on his shoulder. "My boy," I was using my "serious" voice again, "you know I'll love you no matter what, right? No matter what, I'll always be proud of you, and I'll always support you." He nodded, though he was clearly confused. "Son, are you gay? Or . . .hoversexual?"

"No," he said, shaking his head, "I know I like girls. I mean, I REALLY like girls."

"Good," I breathed a sigh of relief, since that made this next part of the talk a whole lot easier. "In that case you've got nothing to worry about, since you can't get AIDS through heterosexual sex."

"Is that true?!" He exclaimed, looking more surprised than ever.

"It is," I assured him. "If you were gay, we'd have to talk about all kinds of safety precautions and preventative measures, but as long as you stick to girls you'll be okay."

"Wow," he was trying to process everything he'd just learned. He took the box and looked it over, the flush of embarrassment coming back to his cheeks. "Okay, okay," he said, his teenage irritability surfacing, "I think I get it. Can I go now, Dad?"

"Alright son, but remember everything I said today."

"I will, I will!" He dropped down to the floor, scooping his game off of the dresser. He stopped at the door, looking back at me with a smile. "Hey," he offered meekly, "thanks, Dad."

I smiled as he walked back out into the hall. Parenting is a big challenge, but knowing I'm sending my kids out there with the right information made me feel pretty darn good about myself.

When it comes time to tell my daughter how it is, though, I think I'll leave that up to her mother.

Peanut Relations Lead to Peanut Babies

When I was in the seventh grade, I lived in Atwater, California and I was required to take a quarter-long class called Teen Skills.   We learned about peer pressure I think, and drugs, and being awkward.  I remember specifically a story about a boy who tripped over his own damn feet in the middle of the quad and leaped up, raring to fight whoever tripped him, only to find out that puberty done it.  At the time I remember looking around my class as the teacher assured us that our horrible, life-ruining awkwardness would pass, and thinking, "We're not that awkward."

But this isn't about how I was blissfully unaware of our boy/girl height ratio, our pimples, our gangly limbs, despite my teacher's telling reassurances. This is about peanut babies, and I how I really didn't get that.

We had a project in which we had to choose one or two peanuts, draw some faces on them, and call them our children for a period of a week or so. This, I suppose, was meant to teach us how hard it is to have tiny edible children that do pretty much nothing, and thus deter us from the sexual activity that I didn't know we were having.

I had done this project once before, in the second grade, with a potato. I left it on the swing set in my backyard overnight once and was horrified when my mom informed me that if it was a real baby it would have died.  I do not know why this was a lesson I needed to learn in 2nd grade, except that it was Kentucky and I went to a Catholic school.

Regardless of the life lessons I may or may not have taken away from my time in Kentucky, we were doled out our peanut babies  and told it was our responsibility to keep them alive(?) and happy for the period of the project.  I named mine Sherloch and Zaidee and put them in a shoebox with most of the furniture from my dollhouse, and my friend Becky put hers in a Barbie convertible with a rubber dog.  Then Becky, envious of my sweet household arrangement, kidnapped my peanut babies and we spent the rest of the next period (Science? Literature? I clearly learned nothing in middle school) passing ransom notes back and forth and driving her Barbie car up and down the bars of our desks.

I said this isn't about awkwardness, and it isn't about the failure of the California school system to properly teach sex ed; it's about the fact that when I was in seventh grade, I was a child.   My barbies may have been awfully sexually active, but I was gripped in terror (and a little bit disgust) at the thought of kissing a boy.

I played house, I ran around outside, I ate my weight in donuts and pizza and never gained a pound.  I was still growing.  I had baby teeth. I was a kid.  I did not have sex.

I didn't think about sex as a thing that my friends or I should (or could) do; I didn't wonder about it, I didn't want it.  It didn't occur to me that people my age might be having it. But lo and behold, many years later, I learned that they did.  Kids I knew were having consensual sex with other kids I knew, gangly limbs, sparse pubic hair, mosquito-bite boobs and all, in the seventh and eighth grade.  Maybe I lived a charmed life, in which I was never pressured and didn't have close friends who were sexually active that young, but I still don't understand it.  Sex complicates things far more than necessary at any age, but at an age in which people are only just beginning to begin to learn about themselves, their beliefs, their feelings, their egos, and their bodies, I can't imagine the emotional consequences.  Also, OMG AWKWARD CITY.

I don't understand it, I doubt I will ever understand it, and that terrifies me in the event that my future child or student or Little Brother/Sister will decide to become sexually active as a pre- or early teenager.   I, having no experience and little empathy for this, would most likely freak out and do none of the things they tell you to do in order to be the kind of parent or parental figure your child feels comfortable approaching for help in situations just as this.

Children should be allowed, by their parents, by the media, by each other, to be children, and being an awkward, geeky, underdeveloped late bloomer saved me in that way.  I was impervious to the world because I lived in my own, and I didn't care (actually was a little proud, if I'm remembering right) that I was unpopular and had no dates to dances.   All children don't have that nerd shield, however, and I don't know how to deal with that.  It makes me a little sad, a lot confused, and very worried for kids everywhere.

Sex should just not be on the table if you are a child, physically or emotionally.  It should not be on the table if you are not ready, regardless of how old you are or the state of your virginity.  Teenage sex is so glorified in a way, in media and pop culture, sung about and acted out by people in their twenties.  But the reality of the situation, and the fragile, volatile state of pre-pubescent ids and egos, is so much more important to know, and teenagers don't have the presence of mind to think about it. I know, I was one. You were (are?), too.


The most important thing I learned from peanut babies was that I still had time to play; adult activities could wait. And they did. And I don't regret it, even a little bit.

Where I Went to High School: SoMD*

When I was in high school mine was one of three in the county; it's one of four now. It had been built five years before my freshman year, and by the time I got there it was already overflowing with 200 more students than it was built to hold, and it had sank into the swamp about a quarter inch. Welcome to Calvert County.

The personalities of our three schools were predetermined: the northernmost school was built in the 70s with the ideology that windows are distracting and detrimental to the learning process, so the inside was dark and lit only by flourescent lights; the middling school (our rival) was the first high school of the county and built in the late 19th century, so there was constant construction and peeling paint; and the southernmost school (my alma mater) was built in the 90s with the new-age ideology that windows and open spaces are actually good for the learning environment. So my high school was, in a word, gorgeous; it was compared to a shopping mall by visiting students. It was also an extreme waste of space and money, so there were unusable seats in the auditorium and half-funded lab tables in the science wing.

I had the usual awkward high school experience I think, with high periods of silliness and notoriety (I got fired from the morning announcements and it is sometimes still brought up in conversation when catching up with old high school acquaintances), peppered with the occasional dramatic breakup or un-friending (before facebook!). My friends and I didn't drink or do drugs, a prevalent pastime in small-town America, so my high school memories are of parking lot dance parties after one of the thirteen-billion afterschool activities I was enmeshed in, bayside (or riverside, I can never remember which side of Solomons Island is which) picnics, a lot of loitering, and a LOT of driving around aimlessly.

I don't think my experience as an awkward, dramatic, self-centered, oddball teenager is in any way uncommon, but I often find that Hollywood seems to think so, and that irks me. Teenagers played by twenty-somethings often come off as smooth and experienced, but I am almost positive no teenager is without awkwardness, regardless of experience.

Obviously not every high schooler had "fairyland," an extensive playground in someone's backyard next door to the school, a popular class-skipping or sports team-running break hangout; or "the ghetto," the group of class trailers in the front parking lot put in place after the school ran out of room for trailers out back; or a school-wide inside joke about our crazy one-term Principal, who announced at the end of a long-winded speech on his first day that, "You don't mess with Libby, 'cause LIBBY DON'T PLAY," but everyone was sure awkward as hell, and that's kind of nice.

Comforting, even, knowing that some of my weirdest, most awkward moments ever can be retold and laughed [with] in the knowledge that everyone's got a story, like the time I asked a boy out by ambushing him and yelling that I was going to the movies (by myself) and did he want to go. Or the time my girlfriends and I skipped school to go shopping and I announced (loudly) in an upscale shoe store, "WHAT, DO THEY ONLY HAVE ONE OF EACH KIND??" Or the time my running buddies and I bowled each other over in a mad scramble to leap into the bushes and hide before the lacrosse team saw us all red-faced and sweaty. And the list goes on.

Oh, and to any former teachers who may come across the blogosphere and read this, I totally learned stuff, too. Like from my football coach/calculus teacher who punched holes in walls when he got excited about math, and my history teachers who made us climb under our desks and threw "shrapnel" at us to teach us about WWI and stole me from another class to put me on trial at a Red Scare hearing (and turned on the news on 9/11 because they knew how important it was, despite or to spite the administration's mandate to keep tvs turned off.) And the theatre teacher who made me realize what I wanted to do with my life, and the English teacher who still invites us over for tea every year. There's a whole other post in what some of my high school teachers did for me as a person, so I'll leave it at that.

My high school experience was a fitting metaphor for teenagehood, with awesomeness interspersed with absurdity and pain, and an overwhelming sense of relief that it's all over. Calvert County high school: God Bless Y'all Real Good.


*SoMD is what the natives affectionately call Southern Maryland, sometimes going a step further to call themselves SMIBs, or Southern Maryland InBreds. Clearly no one else is allowed to call us that but us.

The End of an Affair, or How I Became Disillusioned with My Favorite TV Show

What do Charlie Bartlett, the Lifetime Movie Network, Juno, Jay and Silent Bob, the national tour of Spring Awakening and the musical stylings of Aubrey “Drake” Graham and Cassie Steele have in common?

If you said Degrassi: the Next Generation, then you are correct. If you somehow made some other unrelated connection, then I mean, congratulations.

I am a bit too young to have been a fan of the show the first time around in the 80s, but I have followed the reincarnation with increasing emotional investment since 2000. I own almost every single season since 2000, and I have seen most of those episodes a countless number of times. I know the actors' names and histories, and am suddenly much more interested in whatever media I happen to catch one. I gained a good friend and roommate through Degrassi: upon his first visit to look at our spare room, he casually noticed my six seasons proudly displayed on the mantle and said, "You guys watch Degrassi, too?" and that's all it took. He was in. Because I am, in a word, obsessed.

So it is with relative authority that I feel I can speak on the subject of its demise.

The thing that I love(d) about Degrassi is that, given its cheesiness, its overt drama, its often (but not always) terrible acting, there is always a real, pressing issue rooted in each episode. Degrassi addresses subject matter most television shows with a pre-teen target audience would not touch with a ten-foot pole: drugs, violence, sexuality, abuse, illness, religion, hormones. There are very few clear-cut answers and not every storyline ends happily, though some do (and others are just hilarious.) Regardless, there is always some forbidden door opened, some pandora's box unleashed, allowing viewers to confront, at least in a third party way, some of the most pressing, least talked-about issues that face teenagers today.

Or I suppose I should say there was.

Because the past several seasons of Degrassi, or what one may call the Weird Half Generation Now That Everyone Interesting Has Left the Show, have been crap. Complete and utter crap. One may as well be watching Hannah Montana or The Hills for all the social mores they have tackled. I am not the only die-hard who has noticed this, and it shows in the numbers: from 2002-2004 it was the top-rated Canadian drama for teens and adults in several age ranges covering 13 to 54. In 2006 it was the highest rated digital cable series in the US. Then in 2008, season 7, also known as the last season that meant anything to me, started losing its fanbase. Viewer numbers dropped and kept dropping throughout that season and the following two. (Note: most of my information I get from Wikipedia but you can double check it if you really feel the need.)

The first two episodes of season 7 dealt with date rape, the use of roofies in particular, and they held much potential to spark conversation on a subject so taboo the American television station refused to air it at first. (This is not the first time that station refused to air controversial material; the third season contains several episodes not seen by American audiences until the season was released on DVD, about a fourteen year old who chooses to have an abortion after consensual unprotected sex.)

However, instead of accurately portraying the effects of rufilin to educate and open up the subject to an extremely young, ill-informed demographic, the show's producers (or whoever) chose to go The Hangover route and used the drug as a throw-away plot point. The actress, Shenae Grimes, was lauded for her portrayal of a physically and emotionally wrought young woman trying to keep her terrible secret to herself, which is redeemable, certainly, and does in some way address this awful subject, but it was not at all accurate or educational on the matter of the extremely dangerous (especially so since no one seems to know what its real effects are) drug referenced. Season 7 was also nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Best Drama Series, which is always good. But just not good enough.

Because even by the end of season 7 the plot had become like an absurd mix of Saved by the Bell and Passions. Record label contracts, stem cell research and modeling replaced the plain old everyday unresolved teen drama that made me love this show so much.

Season 7 also saw the end of silly throwaway references to an unseen character I had grown to know and love with the introduction of Holly J, sister of oft-referenced-but-never-actually-seen Heather Sinclair. Heather Sinclair was like the bigfoot of Degrassi, sometimes allowing us a glimpse of her elbow or her nose at the edge of the screen. Once we saw her whole back. More often she was simply mentioned in passing, and never with a positive note. She was just That Girl Everyone Passively Hates; you know the one. And the sly introduction of her inherently evil sister made her a specific character, immediately and permanently ruining all the fun.

The other greatest-thing-about-Degrassi-that-no-one-else-had, besides its accuracy at pinpointing teenage social issues, was its accuracy at portraying the look of real teenagers. The actors were cast within a year or two of their characters' ages, pimples be damned (and largely unmakeuped), and each actor was given a wardrobe that varied and changed with his or her respective character's socioeconomic status and homelife. One of the characters literally wore the same dirty hoodie for three seasons in a row, because that's what kids do. They have acne and don't always know how to deal with their hair and they find one clothing article that they love and they never leave it.

But here we are again in the awful present, and the past two seasons have been full-to-bursting with professional makeup and perfect coifs and designer clothes. It's like suddenly the producers realized it was a popular show, gave it a budget with a capital B, and, oh, fired everyone that ever made it awesome. Or hypnotized them. Or full-on body snatched them, I don't know.

I don't watch The Hills because I don't care about spoiled teenagers with designer nails who are treated like CEOs. Degrassi was great because it was interesting, and ground-breaking, and, despite the sometimes cheesy script, it rang true. I knew these kids because I went to junior high and high school with these kids. They were confused, and rash, and hormonal, and they did stupid things to their hair. They were funny without meaning to be, and, every once in awhile, funny on purpose. They thought they were adults but they very definitely weren't.

Without those true things, those reflective "I get that" moments, Degrassi: the Next Generation is just one more trash program about two-dimensional adolescents clogging up the airways. Degrassi needs to, in the immortal words of GOB Bluth: shape up or ship up. My advice is for the show to take off the polish, go back to its ridiculous-enough roots, STOP GIVING ITS CHARACTERS MODELING CONTRACTS, or just get off the air. For a disgruntled fan I know I've given a lot of time and energy to this show post-heyday, but now I've finally said my piece.

Maybe now I can rest.

If It Weren't for Those Pesky *Teenagers*...

Like it or not, we are defined in a very big way by our teenage years. Whether we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture or distance ourselves from them, there it is. There is something about the hormones, the rapid growth and change, the rollercoaster passion and despair of teenagedom, from which we do not easily recover. The term has only been around for about sixty years, but isn’t it true that most major wars and revolutions before then were propogated by people under twenty-five? Hormones, man.

As it stands, teenagers as a socio-political entity, as a marketing term, have been around just under as long as film, and that fact has only deepened teenagers’ ability to affect us long after our twentieth birthday. I’m talking, of course, about teen movies. Serious, comic, serio-comic, some teen films have captured or defined whole generations at a time, and continue to do so long after their intended audience grew up and produced teenagers of their own. So I’m going to go through, decade by decade, and discuss some of the greatest teen movies of all time. Movies that somehow managed to perfectly capture their moment in time or define how the rest of the decade would look, all within the allotted hour-and-a-half-to-two-hours.

Now, I will readily admit my bias in that, of all the teen movies in the world, Clueless and Mean Girls are in a dead heat for first place in my heart. Then again, you probably knew that. Strong female characters and great costumes in a smart, satirical comedy with some slapstick mixed in. And everyone is friends in the end! At this point in my development I’m not sure if I was drawn to them because of my personality, or if my personality was intrinsically shaped because of those movies. Either way I don’t care, because they’re brilliant. Clueless came around when I was nine, just on the precipice of that oh-so-coveted teendom, and taught me how teenagers dressed, talked, and acted. Mean Girls caught me on my way out, at eighteen, when I could look back at my high school experience, still so fresh in my developing heart and say, “oh my GOD they’re right!”

I am at the moment an officially grown ass woman but a large part of me still wants to look like Cher and learn my life lessons from the safety of my couch. And in a world in which I am still adjusting to not having anything in common with teenagers, going back to those movies is comforting. Young people look different already, and I am just not ready for that. So I’m going to go back, back, back in time and try to glean those movies that defined generations with the brilliance and humility of something taken much more seriously than mere entertainment, or teenagers themselves. I’ll start in the fifties, with the advent of “teenagers” as we know them today, and work up from there.