"Are You There God? It's Me, Monica"

How Nice Girls Got So Casual About Oral Sex

Caitlin Flanagan,

Atlantic Monthly

The first time I heard a mother of girls talk about the teenage oral-sex craze,
I made her cry. The story she told me — about a bar mitzvah dinner dance on the
North Shore of Chicago, where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered
bus from the temple to the reception hall — was so preposterous that I burst out
laughing. The thought of thirteen-year-old girls in party dresses performing a
sex act once considered the province of prostitutes (we are talking here about
the on-your-knees variety given to a series of near strangers) was so ludicrous
that all I could do was giggle.

It was as though I had taken lightly the news that a pedophile had moved into my
friend's neighborhood. It was as though I had laughed about a leukemia cluster
or a lethal stretch of freeway. I apologized profusely; I told her I hadn't
known.

The moms in my set are convinced — they're certain; they know for a fact — that
all over the city, in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the
leafiest neighborhoods, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral
sex on as many boys as they can. They're ducking into janitors' closets between
classes to do it; they're doing it on school buses, and in bathrooms, libraries,
and stairwells. They're making bar mitzvah presents of the act, and performing
it at "train parties": boys lined up on one side of the room, girls working
their way down the row.The circle jerk of old — shivering Boy Scouts huddled
together in the forest primeval, desperately trying to spank out the first few
drops of their own manhood — has apparently moved indoors, and now (death knell
of the Eagle Scout?) there's a bevy of willing girls to do the work.

When I first began hearing these stories, I was convinced that we were in the
grips of a nationwide urban legend, and the prevalence of stories centered on
bar mitzvahs seemed to me suspicious, possibly even anti-Semitic in origin. But
sure enough, in 2003 a feminist Jewish quarterly called Lilith addressed the
story — not to debunk it but to come to terms with it as a recognized problem
within the Jewish community: "No one is suggesting, even for a moment, that
Jewish teens are leading the oral sex revolution. But they may have earlier and
more frequent opportunities for sexual contact in a supercharged social milieu
than their non-Jewish peers." The authors observe that the oral sex is "almost
always unilateral (girls on boys)".

In talking with people, I found only one verifiable account of a girl servicing
more than one boy at a party. But the army of school administrators and teachers
and parents and girls I spoke with convincingly reported an astonishing change
in the sexual behavior of middle- and upper-middle-class girls.

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. It used to be that a
hopeful recipient of fellatio had a lot of talking to do — to persuade, and very
often to instruct, his partner. (The Sensuous Woman, published in 1969, was
shocking for a number of reasons, but most of all because it gave to its
audience of middle-class woman explicit instructions on how to perform oral sex.
"Now don't turn up your nose and make that ugly face!" says the anonymous author,
"J". Oral sex is the "preferred way with many movie stars, artists, titled
Europeans and jet setters".)

Nowadays girls don't consider oral sex in the least exotic — nor do they even
consider it to be sex. It's just "something to do". A friend who attended a
leadership conference for girls from some of the country's top schools told me,
"Friendships haven't changed a bit since our day. But sex has changed a lot."
One of the teachers, from an eastern boarding school, told the students that
when she was young, in the 1960s, oral sex was considered far more intimate than
intercourse. The kids hooted at the notion. "It's like licking a lollipop", one
pretty girl from a prestigious girls' school said, flipping her hair in
the ancient gesture of teenage certainty. "It's no big deal".

Somehow these girls have developed the indifferent attitude toward performing
oral sex that one would associate with bitter, long-married women or
streetwalkers. But they think of themselves as normal teenagers, version 2005.
For a while, whenever I passed groups of young girls, I looked at them anew.
Were these nice kids — the ones playing AYSO soccer and doing their homework and
shopping with their moms — behaving like little whores whenever they got the
chance? It was like some weird search for communists — was the sweet,
well-spoken daughter of a friend actually a blowjobber? I looked at the small
girls in my children's schoolyard — as cosseted and protected and beloved a
group of children as you will find anywhere on the planet — and tried to
convince myself that in a matter of five or six years they would be performing
oral sex on virtual strangers.

It was crazy! It simply couldn't be true.

Last spring there were glimmers of hope. Ruth Padawer, a senior writer for the
(Bergen, New Jersey) Record, wrote an editorial that was widely syndicated
because of its balm of good news. Apparently there was word around town that
eighth-graders were having oral sex behind the dugout during recess. (One thing
to note about the oral-sex panic is the insistently wholesome locations in which
the sex is said to occur.) But readers should dismiss the gossip: "According to
several well-respected national surveys, the chatter apparently far surpasses
action among young adolescents". A month later David Brooks wrote a very
reasonable New York Times editorial about teen sex, called "Public Hedonism and
Private Restraint", in which he said, "Reports of an epidemic of teenage oral
sex are ... greatly exaggerated. There's very little evidence to suggest it is
really happening."

However, the axe came down in September. 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.

The moms were traumatized anew. "It's like there's a bogeyman in the next room,
and we keep praying for him to go away", a friend who has a seventh-grade
daughter told me. "But he won't".

The conviction that nice girls are engaging in no-strings-attached,
semi-anonymous fellatio is based on a genuine and puzzling change in teen sexual
behavior. It is manifested in a group hysteria in which terrified adults have
projected onto their children superhuman sexual capabilities and technical
prowess. And it is reflective of the fact that the dominant culture in this
country — one forged by the apparently opposed forces of male sexual desire and
female empowerment — has abandoned girls in every possible respect. These three
factors worked their way into literature this summer with a book that historians
may someday regard as the single biggest clue to the cultural anxieties
surrounding the American teenage girl circa 2005: The Rainbow Party, by Paul
Ruditis.

The Rainbow Party, an offering from Simon Pulse, a young-adult division of Simon
& Schuster, takes place on a single day, in which a tough little sophomore named
Gin issues invitations to a party at which she and five of her friends will
perform oral sex on the lucky guests, a group of popular boys. The girls will
each wear a different color of lipstick, so that when a boy has completed the
circuit, his penis will bear the colors of the rainbow. The party is to take
place after school, to last about an hour and a half — including time for
chitchat — and to conclude before Gin's father returns home from work.

In addition to the predictable, outraged criticism that this vile book has
received, there is a question of veracity: as many readers have noted, wouldn't
the different colors of lipstick smear together, destroying the desired rainbow
effect? Not once, however, has another question been posed: How many boys could
successfully receive seven blowjobs in an hour? Surely even the adolescent male
at the peak of his sexual prime needs at least a few minutes to reload. One
would assume that the first transaction would be completed at light speed, that
the second might take a bit longer — and that by the fourth or fifth even the
horniest tenth-grader might display some real staying power. But asking
questions like these will automatically preclude you from entering the current
oral-sex hysteria, which presupposes not only that a limitless number of young
American girls have taken on the sexual practices of porn queens but also that
American boys are capable of having an infinite number of sexual experiences in
rapid succession. It requires believing that a boy could be serviced at the
school-bus train party — receiving oral sex from ten or fifteen girls, one after
another — and then zip his fly and head off to homeroom, first stopping in the
stairwell for a quickie to tide him over until math.

The Rainbow Party has the feeling of true pornography. In particular, it has the
feeling of homosexual-male pornography. The school is called Harding High, and
the prose takes a quickening, vivid leap forward when two boys, Hunter and Perry,
duck into the school bathroom, where Perry services his pal and then wonders if
they might be gay. Otherwise the book is inert, obscene without being erotic,
its slim narrative structure insufficient for the gimmickry of its premise. The
party is eventually undermined by a series of debacles, leaving Gin and her pal
Sandy alone to service the crowd — and then the boys can't even be bothered to
show up. This is clearly a high school humiliation of an entirely new and
apocalyptic order. What if you gave a blowjob party but nobody came? Injury
to insult, Gin gets the clap, victim and catalyst of a school-wide gonorrhea
outbreak.

The book's sole effective literary technique is achieved unintentionally: The
Rainbow Party is so leaden and formulaic, so completely deadened to any of the
possibilities of fiction, that it mirrors the way girls are said to feel about
fellatio — jaded and shockproof. (It's not just Hunter and Perry's high jinks in
the restroom that put one in mind of bathhouse culture. Almost everything about
the current blowjob craze — the randomness of the sexual encounters; the fact
that they're apparently devoid of meaning beyond the immediate gratification of
male desire, that neither party is inclined to say "no", that little
consideration is given to female desire, or even female anatomy — suggests a
strain of gay male sex more than it does traditional male-female relationships.)

It is hard to imagine that a person could read a novel like that and feel
genuine emotion of any kind. In this way it is the exact opposite of the novel
that was for me, and many of my high school friends, the most powerful book of
our young lives. Not since Uncle Tom's Cabin has a single novel by an American
woman prompted so many readers into such radical
action. I speak, of course, about Judy Blume's Forever.

Judy Blume, who has sold more than 75 million books, been awarded the National
Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,
and been called one of the most banned writers in America, began writing for
children in the 1960s. She married young, established housekeeping in suburban
New Jersey, and promptly had two children. She loved the kids but loathed the
housewifery, and as a creative outlet took a class in children's literature.

Blume describes her childhood as one in which she was "dying with curiosity"
about sex, but there was nowhere in the 1940s and 1950s for a nice girl to get
any information. The memory of that burning curiosity led her to write a novel
about a twelve-year-old waiting to get her period, Are You There God? It's Me,
Margaret. Before the publication of this seminal work, a bookish girl interested
in the emotions and practicalities surrounding menstruation would be nudged by a
sympathetic teacher toward the diary of Anne Frank, which sure enough addresses
the subject with candor, but the general mood of the book — what with the
Holocaust and all — did not generate much enthusiasm for the menses. The dearest
book of my childhood, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, includes Francie's
first period, but again, the novel's no upper: shortly after first blood Francie
is assaulted by a pervert in a tenement hallway. I was in seventh grade when The
Exorcist was released. No one my age was allowed anywhere near it, but we were
well versed in the plot (the implications of which were clear, if unspoken, to
all of my friends): a prepubescent girl — a girl our age, on the cusp of the
same event we were — was overtaken body and soul not by the Kotex cartel but by
the devil himself. At twelve I knew a few basic facts about menstruation — it
somehow involved babies and shedding a lining and blood everywhere — and was
possessed by an unholy fear of it.

And then I went to Naomi Zimmerman's birthday party, and while the other girls
slumbered through the night, I stayed up and read one of the presents, a
brand-new copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. By dawn I was a new girl.
Here was a character on the brink of getting her first period, but she wasn't
being hunted by sex fiends or Nazis or Beelzebub. She wasn't frightened by what
was about to happen — she couldn't wait. And her wonderful family couldn't wait
either.

Reading Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret for the first time in thirty years
meant realizing anew that the world of my childhood is as distant and
unrecoverable as that of the Etruscans. Margaret and I were young during a time
when little girls dreamed of getting the courage to ask their mothers for
training bras, attended carefully supervised dances, eagerly wore clothes that
the modern preteen would sooner die than put on. ("Should I wear my velvet?"
Margaret asks her mother when she learns she's been invited to a boy-girl supper
party. "It's your best", her mother replies.) In Margaret's world the boys can't
be counted on to maintain a grown-up demeanor for these events: they disappoint
the girls by stomping on their toes during a PTA-sponsored square dance; at the
supper party they throw their sports coats in a pile and shoot mustard at the
ceiling through drinking straws. But it is also the boys who are responsible for
introducing the first glimmerings of sex to the group. When a boy suggests that
they turn off the light and play Guess Who — "the boys line up on one side and
the girls on the other and then when I yell Go the boys run to the girls' side
and try to guess who's who by the way they feel" — the girls put on the brakes
immediately. ("'No, thank you', Gretchen said. 'That's disgusting!'") The girls
agree to a game of Spin the Bottle, however, and that night Margaret gets her
first thrilling, fleeting kiss. The novel ends in triumph: three drops of blood
on Margaret's underpants, discovered the day of the sixth-grade farewell party,
mean that she has left childhood behind.

Through all of these events Margaret's parents are by her side, helping her to
negotiate her excitement and her fears, congratulating her on each of the steps
she makes toward womanhood. And if they give her plenty of support when she gets
her first period, by the time she's ready — at age seventeen — to have her first
sexual experience, they practically stand by the bed and take photographs to put
in the family scrapbook. For despite the fact that the protagonist in Forever is
named Katherine, she is really Margaret a few years older, still living in
suburban New Jersey, still a good girl with good parents. Forever is the first
mainstream novel written for American teenage girls that is not only sexually
explicit but also intentionally erotic, and that gives them the exact
information — practical as well as emotional — to initiate a satisfying sex life.

Again, consider what had come before. As a teenage girl in the early 1970s who
was as desperately curious about sex as Judy Blume had been in the fifties, I
read everything I could lay my hands on. I turned to novels for information
about sex not because I'm a reader but because when I was young they were among
the few places a nice girl could find any. (Love, American Style was risque, but
it was hardly explicit.) To my parents' dismay I read Valley of the Dolls more
times than I could count, but Jacqueline Susann's attitude toward human
sexuality was of a piece with her prose: whorish and dirty. Goodbye, Columbus
commanded my attention, but you don't turn to Philip Roth if you want to learn
how to go all the way with a really nice boyfriend.

Adults were quick to stick you with The Bell Jar, which you were supposed to lap
up with zesty gratitude because of its racy subject matter, but I smelled a rat
from the get-go. Even at sixteen I could tell that the book was overpraised,
a stealth weapon of grownups eager to appear progressive in their literary
suggestions for teenagers but secretly dying for you to get an eyeful of
Esther's first sexual experience: recovering from a suicide attempt,
on furlough from a psychiatric ward, she does the deed with an older
man and almost hemorrhages to death.

The only books I'd seen that placed sex where I wanted to find it — in the
middle of a committed relationship, with the boy treating the girl as if she
were a fragile piece of glass, and their love so powerful that it threatened to
blot them both out — were the pregnancy-scare books that had been passed from
hand to hand among the girls at my Catholic junior high. Written in the 1960s,
they invariably involved a supersmart girl (family: respectable, middle-class)
and a really neat, ambitious boy (his people would be working-class; their great
dream would be for their son to become a college boy). Always they would make a
terrible mistake one night; always it would turn out to have been one shot with
a bullet: dead rabbit and hell to pay. They would grapple with the most serious
kinds of decision-making, and always (this is why we devoured these books and
dreamed about them) the couple ended up married at sixteen, living in garage
apartments or guesthouses. Books like Too Bad About the Haines Girl and Mr and
Mrs Bo Jo Jones were supposed to frighten us away from sex, lest we become
tragic girls ourselves. But they were so clearly built upon a commonly accepted
and deeply stirring code of male honor — an almost chivalric set of principles,
handed down through the centuries, and still in practice in the American suburbs
of the 1960s — that we were dazzled by them, and regarded them as the greatest
love stories ever told. Which, in a sense, they were.

And then: Forever. If Hollywood movies of the 1930s taught my parents how to
kiss, Forever taught me how to have sex. This was sex the way girls wanted to
read about it, the way they wanted to experience it: immersed in romance.
Katherine and Michael are college-bound high school seniors from nice families.
Katherine's parents are so exquisitely in tune with the physical and emotional
progress of her relationship that one wonders if they've planted a wire on her.
The grandmother who in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret? sent sweaters with
labels that read "made expressly for you ... by grandma" now sends Planned
Parenthood brochures with a note reading, "I don't judge, I just advise".
Katherine's mother leaves a New York Times article about teen sex on her
daughter's pillow one night, and they rap about it the next morning. "A person
shouldn't ever feel pushed into sex", Katherine tells her mom. "Or that she has
to do it to please someone else ..." "I'm glad you feel that way", Mom says
approvingly. Was Mom, Katherine asks, a virgin when she got married? No, but
she's had sex only with Dad, and she waited until they were engaged.

Where Margaret offered highly specific information about sanitary pads and belts,
Forever takes us straight to the birth-control clinic, and it doesn't flinch.
("Then he slipped this cold thing into my vagina and explained, 'This is a
vaginal speculum. It holds the walls of the vagina open so that the inside is
easily seen. Would you like to see your cervix?'")

Armed with birth-control pills, with a code of sexual ethics that center on a
girl's cautious willingness and a boy's patient and full commitment to her,
and with a final health clearance (Michael admits that the previous summer he
contracted VD from his only other sexual partner, but he's fine now), Katherine
and Michael are off to the races. Anyone who rereads Forever and expects to find
it much tamer than she remembers is in for a shock: "This time Michael made it
last much, much longer and I got so carried away I grabbed his backside with
both hands, trying to push him deeper and deeper into me — and I spread my legs
as far apart as I could — and I raised my hips off the bed — and I moved with
him, again and again and again — and at last I came".

The question is this: How, exactly, in the course of thirty years, did we get
from Katherine to Gin? How did we go from a middle-class teenage girl (fictional
but broadly accurate) who will have sex only if it's with her boyfriend, and
only if her pleasure is equal to his, to a middle-class teenage girl (a gross
media caricature reflective of an admittedly disturbing trend) who wants to
kneel down and service a series of boys? Katherine and her mother (who still
enjoys a pleasurable sex life with her husband) represent two points on a
continuum. In the mother's generation sex was contained by marriage; in the
daughter's it was contained by love and relationships.

The next point on this
progression ought to be a girl who feels that nothing save her own desire should
control her choice of sexual partners. Instead we see a group of young girls who
have in effect turned away from their own desire altogether and have made of
their sexuality something that fulfills all sorts of goals, but not the one
paramount to Katherine and her mother: that it be sexually gratifying to
themselves.

Tracing the story of the writing and publication of The Rainbow Party requires
an examination of two forces: the genuine and perplexing rise of oral sex among
teenagers — specifically of oral sex performed by young girls on boys — and the
media-fueled hysteria of girls' parents, which has prompted tales of orgiastic
tween encounters suggesting that every ninth-grade noodlehead is leading an
erotic life worthy of the NBA all-stars. The story does not begin with a million
moms opening their coat closets as one, only to watch in horror as their
pre-teen daughters tumble out alongside tumescent chums from chess club. It
begins — is nowhere safe? — with PBS. In 1999 the network broadcast an episode
of Frontline that became legendary. Called "The Lost Children of Rockdale County",
it centered on a teen syphilis outbreak in Conyers, Georgia, an exurb of Atlanta
where vast acres of farmland have been converted into subdivisions of large,
handsome houses, and where the three local high schools, flush with tax dollars,
are among the best in the state. The show became a sensation, was repeatedly
rebroadcast, and was featured on Oprah, where it was called a "must see for all
parents".

"The Lost Children of Rockdale County" is a bizarre program that takes isolated
teen depravity, anxious adult voyeurism, and an ever important dash of venereal
disease and blends them into a vividly yellow piece of public-service journalism
- one that typically exaggerates the what, and in so doing just as typically
overlooks the why behind a less sensational but far more pervasive concern.
The tale is told largely by middle-aged women who are at turns clinically
matter-of-fact about and pruriently fascinated by what happened in Conyers.
A small group of white girls from stupendously troubled families (the kids are
described as "cherubic" for maximum effect) began meeting in one of the girls'
houses after school - and sometimes in a motel room — to do drugs and service
two groups of rough trade, one of local white boys, the other of
African-American boys (a recent prison inmate among them) who commuted from a
different part of the county to avail themselves of the girls. Oral sex wasn't
the half of it — 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). With the kids in Conyers exploiting
virtually every known opening for sexual transmission, an outbreak was not
unlikely. It spread to seventeen kids, who were treated and who recovered fully.

But the show also contains interviews with kids who had nothing to do with this
horrifying and aberrant episode, kids who seem adrift in the increasingly
isolating family culture that was being born in the nineties. They speak of
family members who have televisions in their own rooms, who never eat dinner
together, who live with one another in the sepulchral McMansions of Conyers the
way people live together in hotels: nodding politely as they pass on the stairs,
aware of one another's schedules and routines but only in a vague, indifferent
manner. These are kids — girls especially — who have developed a dull, curiously
passionless relationship to their own sexuality, which they give of freely. The
girls seem sad that their easily granted sexual favors (including oral sex) have
not earned them boyfriends, and completely unaware of how they could have
negotiated the transactions differently.

The producers ingeniously and dishonorably encourage the viewer to meld these
two different stories together, that of the diseased, freaky girls and their
multi-pronged campaign of self-destruction, and that of the sad, sexually
precocious normal kids — in short, to link the activities of the latter with
the outcomes of the former. And thus the oral-sex hysteria was officially born.
The belief that casual oral sex in a middle-class school community was an
invitation to a teenage public-health threat of epidemic proportions gave the
media license to talk about it endlessly and in the most graphic terms
imaginable — following the silence = death formulation created during the height
of the American AIDS crisis, which encouraged frank public sexual discourse in
the hope of saving lives. It's a no-miss formula: descriptions of young girls
performing oral sex that are so luridly specific as to seem pedophilic in the
adults' retelling, coupled with stern warnings to parents that their daughters
are in harm's way. All of which misses a less alarming but more poignant fact.
What's most worrisome about this age of blase blowjobs isn't what the girls
might catch (one can contract an STD through oral sex alone; however, the risk
is lower than for most other forms of sexual transmission), it's what the girls
are almost certainly losing: a healthy emotional connection to their own
sexuality and their own desire. In this context all the unflinching
medico-sexual naughty talk is but a cowardly evasion of a more insidious problem
— one resistant to penicillin.

Four months after the "Frontline" documentary aired, Talk magazine published an
essay called "The Sex Lives of Your Children". Its author, Lucinda Franks,
described an upper-middle-class white world in which oral sex began at age
twelve, and said — in perhaps the first published use of the term — that train
parties abounded. For the sake of journalistic accuracy she reported a
twelve-year-old girl's description of the taste of sperm, and during an NPR
radio interview about her essay she referred to the Conyers incident in the
wildly inaccurate way in which the episode had quickly passed into the national
consciousness: in Rockdale County, Georgia, "a whole town — the kids came down
with syphilis".

Two years later Oprah invited Dr Phil to her television show to address the
topic. "There's an oral-sex epidemic", Oprah told the audience point-blank.
Teary mothers related their horrifying stories: "A year or two ago she was
playing with Barbies and collecting Beanie Babies. And then now all of a sudden
she's into casual oral sex!" Wide-eyed young girls spilled the beans on their
slutty classmates, and intimated that they themselves weren't so different. That
the entire subject is ugly and fraught was underscored when Dr Phil decided to
confront a young blowjobber about the error of her ways. She was sitting in the
front row next to her mother, who was apparently hoping that public humiliation
on a global scale might reform her daughter.

Dr Phil, who has the vast, impenetrable physique of a pachyderm and the
calculated folksiness of a country-music promoter, employs a sychotherapeutic
cloak of respectability to legitimize his many prurient obsessions. "When you're
saying 'It's just friends', let me tell you", he raged at the poor girl,
"a friend doesn't ask you to go in the bathroom, get on your knees in a
urine-splattered tile floor, and stick their penis in your mouth. That's not
what I call a friend." (Poor Howard Stern has spent years alternately outraged
and heartbroken about the FCC's refusal to sanction women's talk shows the way
it does his morning show, and episodes like this make you realize he has a point.)

As the audience roared its approval (whether for chastity or obscenity was
unclear), the girl looked stricken and angry. "That's not what happened to me",
she whispered audibly to her mother, who whispered back, "Tell him". But the
girl was understandably cowed by the specter of Dr Phil on one of his verbal
stampedes, and she said nothing, leaving him clueless about a major aspect of
the oral-sex craze. No boy had forced the girl anywhere. In all likelihood she
herself had been the initiator, the location scout, the one who had decided that
this was indeed an activity that could take place between two "friends".
(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.)

In 2003 Oprah addressed the topic again: in an article in O magazine that she
also featured on her television show. "Parents, brace yourselves", Oprah said.
Teenagers are leading "double lives" — and we all need to get hip to the code
words they use. The journalist who wrote the article got right to the point:
A "tossed salad", for example, was "oral sex to the anus". A "dirty" girl was
a diseased one. And a "rainbow party" was a blowjob party where the girls wore
different-colored lipstick.

Apparently taking a break from her toil in the vineyard of belles lettres —
relaxing, in fact, by watching Oprah — was Bethany Buck, a Simon & Schuster
editrix who smelled a winner. She contacted Ruditis (one of whose previous books
was The Brady Bunch Guide to Life); they created characters and an outline; and
he was sent off to type the thing up.

The oral-sex craze — and in particular girls' insistence that blowjobs "aren't
sex" ? has often been blamed on Bill Clinton and his semantic calisthenics
during the Kenneth Starr investigation. But even if teen girls were looking to
the White House for personal guidance, was it really Bubba they were trying to
emulate? Girls' private lives are always much more influenced by First Daughters,
or even First Ladies, than they are by any pasty politico. Furthermore, and more
damning to the blame-Clinton argument, the events chronicled in "The Lost
Children of Rockdale County" occurred two years before it was revealed that
Monica Lewinsky (hardly an aspirational figure to the young girls of America,
who wanted neither to fellate middle-aged men nor to wear beastly Gap
suit-dresses) had flashed her XXL thong at him and got out her "presidential
kneepads". And anyway, what culture had Monica emerged from that she was eager
merely to give the great man a blowjob — that her highest sexual ambition was
not to become his Mrs Bo Jo Jones but simply (read the federally funded Starr
report, if you must) to have him ejaculate in her mouth? Indeed, to hear Monica
tell it, the meanest thing Bill did to her wasn't to refuse her phone calls and
give her a dorky book of poems. No, in Monica's world Bill was a big creep
because at the critical moment he withdrew the presidential organ and jacked off
over the sink —± a sexual decision that might once have been considered sort of
thoughtful (remember the three biggest lies, anyone?) but in the new order is
somehow a mark of disrespect.

Blowjob nation has also been blamed on "abstinence only" sex-education programs.
In this line of thinking the evil Republicans have made such a fetish of the
intact hymen that teenagers — parsing the term "sexual abstinence" with
Jesuitical precision — have decided to substitute oral sex for intercourse,
thereby preserving their technical virginity. I'm no fan of these programs. In
light of advances in birth control and the economic advisability of delaying
marriage until after the college years, sexual purity seems a goal best advanced
by those religions that advocate it, not by our public schools. But even if
"abstinence" is at stake, why would girls voluntarily turn to giving blowjobs?
Whatever happened to the hand job? Whither the dry hump? Why do girls prefer the
far more debasing, uncomfortable, and messy blowjob? And why are they apparently
giving them out so indiscriminately? These are questions that none of the usual
suspects can answer.

Wherever there's a girl gone wild, there's a gender-studies professor not far
behind, eager to blame her actions on the patriarchy. One of these is NYU's
Julian Carter, who says that oral sex among young teen girls is part of a
complex power dynamic, one that is familiar to people who know how Carol
Gilligan's influential book In a Different Voice has dominated feminist thinking.
Says Carter: "It's precisely at this age of early adolescence that ... girls'
sense of self-worth changes dramatically ... this is when they are finding out
they have less power within a patriarchal system ..." According to Carter's
theory, the girls are apparently suffering from a severe form of Stockholm
syndrome, and have reacted by performing oral sex on their wily captors.

The problem with this idea is that surely the patriarchy was far stronger and
more oppressive in the 1950s. But you don't find Betty — or even Veronica —
cravenly servicing Archie and Jughead. Indeed, during the very years that the
patriarchy has been most seriously eroded, we have seen a cult of mortification
of the flesh take root among teenage girls. The anorexia and bulimia that swept
the teen population in the eighties, the "cutting" fad of the nineties, and now
this strange new preference for unreciprocated oral sex all evolved as the
patriarchy was being crippled, as new and untested roles were being offered to
the country's girls.

One might expect that Planned Parenthood would have nothing to say on this
subject; oral sex may have many risks, but parenthood isn't one of them.
When I recently logged on, I learned a lot. The organization — which receives
32 percent of its funding from the federal government — had on its home page a
lengthy description of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's "Strategy to Gut Roe",
but I quickly drilled past that, straight down to the Teen Wire department,
where the "experts" have helpfully answered all sorts of teen questions, from
"Can I lose my virginity if my boyfriend fingers me?" to whether the insertion
of "objects" during masturbation is recommended. (The experts said it was all in
good fun, but as a nervous mom I couldn't help wondering what kind of objects.)
Leaving behind reproductive matters entirely, the site also indulged in
unabashed sexual advocacy, offering a 411 on oral sex. For example: "Oral sex —
using one's mouth on a partner's sex organs — feels good to many people. There's
nothing wrong or nasty about having oral sex whether a person is receiving or
giving it. Both girls and guys may want to perform oral sex on their partners
because they enjoy giving it." And "Some people enjoy giving oral sex whether or
not they are being stimulated at the same time. Some people can only enjoy
giving oral sex when they are being stimulated at the same time. And some people
[frigid cranky Mormons? Laura Bush? Total losers?] do not enjoy providing or
receiving oral sex at all."

Parents could click on a helpful report from Rutgers University's "Oral Sex Lady",
Nora Gelperin. She digs her job, which involves providing teenagers with
information about oral sex, an activity for which she's sort of a booster.
She does offer some tips for those who want to curb the oral-sex trend: they
should have bull sessions with groups of kids to "illuminate the variety of
teens' opinions about oral sex", in order to "more accurately reflect the range
of opinions instead of continuing to propagate the stereotype that 'all teens
are having oral sex'". In other words, instead of the adult instructing kids in
what is right and wrong and telling them what is expected of them, the kids
themselves should seek direction from each other. A mother concerned that her
daughter has turned to performing oral sex on strangers at age twelve should
bear this in mind: "We must not forget that the desire of early adolescents to
feel sexual pleasure is normal and natural and should be celebrated, not
censored". (DAD: Geez I had a rough day at the office. MOM: Put it out of your
mind, honey. Trudy just told me that we have something very special to celebrate!)

For me, the most shocking moment in "The Lost Children of Rockdale County" —
more shocking even than "the sandwich" — involves three giggly blonde best
friends forever who give an extensive, girly interview while sitting in one of
their bedrooms, surrounded by stuffed animals. At a certain point one of the
producers asks them what kind of music they like, and they all squeal, "Rap!"
"Give me an example", the coaxing producer says to them. The girls decide to
sing for her, and their sweet, piping voices flow easily over the lyrics, which
they all know by heart — three teenyboppers sitting in a suburban bedroom,
singing their favorite song, "Love in Ya Mouth":

I take 3 little bitches and I put 'em in a line

I take 4, 5, 6 and blow 'dem hos mind

It'll take 1 more before I go for mine

7 bitches get fucked at the same time

She eats me, sun she, she can suck a ding dong

All day all night all evenin long

She said she neva done it, she said she neva tried

Shes sittin there tellin a motha-fuckin lie

Now, how many licks does it take to make my dick split

Well, not many licks if the bitch is a good trick

Now, any nigga can talk to a bitch and get the bitch to fuck

But how many niggaz can talk to a bitch and get they dick sucked

Like me a pimp that you neva saw

Now how do you say "manger et trois" [uh, sic]

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. Boomer parents,
remembering their own struggles with their square parents over rock-and-roll,
were lenient about their kids' music. 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). In the summer of 2004 Bill Cosby brought
down a hail of criticism when he lambasted the hip-hop culture as a shameful
squandering of the civil-rights gains that his generation had fought for and won.

But 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. Add to this the countless
other products of our increasingly sexualized teen culture, in which male sexual
fantasy of the type once reserved for prison-yard posturing has been adopted and
championed by very young girls who stand only to be brutalized by it —
emotionally, if not physically.

Ironically, many of the objectives stated in rap lyrics are the same as those of
contemporary American feminism: to encourage girls not to be shackled by the
double standard and to abandon modesty as a goal, to erode patriarchal notions
of how men ought to treat women, and to champion aggressiveness in girls. It was
very possible for a girl in the nineties to have her well-intentioned parents
buy her a CD in which she was urged to suck dick and get fucked, and to have a
well-intentioned teacher (I was one such) tell her to be as intellectually and
verbally aggressive as she could — that aggression for its own sake was a good
thing, because it leveled the playing field in a male-dominated world.

At the same time, actual pornography — once the province of the most
marginalized and criminally suspect performers and businessmen; once a slice of
illicit commerce entirely beyond the purview of decent society — was entering
the mainstream. It became possible to find porn star Jenna Jameson discussing
her trade with the likes of Anderson Cooper on CNN. It was possible, furthermore,
to discover that she was being interviewed not as a fallen woman but as a
successful businessperson. Simultaneously, feminists were turning themselves
into pretzels trying to get together a coherent policy on pornography. Obviously
it was exploitative — unless it wasn't. Because if it was explicit sexual
material made for the arousal of women, then it was somehow ... empowering? And
how to deal with the Jenna Jamesons of the world, who were proving themselves to
be feminist powerhouses, keeping the government out of private decisions about
their own bodies (thank you, abortion rhetoric!) and profiting handsomely from
the results?

When I was in eleventh grade, I invited a new boyfriend to come to my house
after school one day. My mother was outside gardening, or maybe she was on the
telephone, or reading — she was around, but through a glass. The boy and I made
Top Ramen at the stove, and afterward I invited him to come up to my bedroom.
I had never been told not to do such a thing; I seemed then to be lacking a
lot of clear information about what I could and could not do. My parents were
preoccupied at the time with other things. I was the youngest girl in a
daughter-raising project that they appeared to think had gone terribly wrong.
They were no longer giving the enterprise their full oomph.

In the bedroom the atmosphere was charged. I remember that he sat on my Pier 1
wicker chair, and that I showed him my wall calendar, which had a different,
adorable kitten for each month. And then, abruptly, I said that we should go
back downstairs, and he stood — immediately — and followed me. At the foot of
the stairs we found my mother, looking as though she had been close to charging
up.

"Never bring a boy to your bedroom", she told me afterward.

"Why not?"

There was a fumbling for words, and then an answer: "Because he might go to
school and tell other boys what your comforter looks like".

It was a white Dior comforter with yellow rosebuds and matching sheets. The bed
was a Sears four-poster princess bed, a little-girl's bed, but we had taken off
the canopy and added the Dior linens to dress it up for a teenager. I had wanted
pink roses, but the pink had not unexpectedly gone on sale at the El Cerrito
Capwell's. The yellow had.

"That's so stupid", I yelled at my mother. "Just so completely stupid!"
She sighed wearily — the raising-girls sigh, the sigh of bottomless despair.
Why hadn't she thrown herself off the Golden Gate Bridge at last opportunity?
Why had she ever been so foolish as to think it was good news each time the
obstetrician told her she had been delivered of a girl?

But even in my teenage snit I understood what she was talking about: not the
comforter but my reputation. Not the boy himself (who was a very nice person —
anyone could tell it just from meeting him) but the immutable truth about boys:
They want most what we keep private. When it's known, it's lessened.

At the time of my adolescence my mother was too distracted to give me everything
I needed to turn out well. But twenty percent of her attention was enough,
because the whole culture was supporting her. The notion that a girl should not
give her sexuality away too freely was so solidly built into the national
consciousness that my mother didn't have to snap out of her depression and give
me a comprehensive lecture on boys for me to understand what she meant. It was a
period when artists and entertainers and commercial America in general did not
have untrammeled access to the country's youth. Television shows were heavily
censored, as were radio stations. George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on
Television" was hilarious not just for its string of bad words but because of
the context in which he invited us to imagine their use: think of turning on the
TV and hearing the word "fuck"! Sex ed in those days was a little like driver's
ed: a grimly delivered set of facts, copiously illustrated with hideous examples
of what could go wrong if you were foolhardy enough to operate the machinery.
("Is there going to be a test?" a girl asked about the contraception unit. "Your
life is the test", she was told.) At the time, feminists were distracted by the
vast project of American womanhood; they had not yet turned their attention to
the country's girls.

As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common
culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in
a kind of post- apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual
households - individual mothers and fathers — are protecting children from
pornography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a
joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held,
child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the
village but to protect my children from it.

I'm not, however, terrified by the oral-sex craze. If I were to learn that my
children had engaged in oral sex-outside a romantic relationship, and as young
adolescents — I would be sad. But I wouldn't think that they had been damaged by
the experience; I wouldn't think I had failed catastrophically as a mother, or
that they would need therapy. Because I don't have daughters, I have sons.

I am old-fashioned enough to believe that men and boys are not as likely to be
wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual
experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls.
I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in
which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel.
Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert —
or even to acknowledge — that female sexuality is as intricately connected to
kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It's in the nature
of who we are.

But perhaps the girls themselves understand this essential truth.

As myriad forces were combining to reshape our notions of public decency and
propriety, to ridicule the concept that privacy and dignity are valuable and
allied qualities of character and that exhibitionism as an end in itself might
not be beneficial for a young girl, at the exact moment when girls were
encouraged to think of themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy and to
act on an imperative of default aggression — at this very time a significant
number of young girls were beginning to form an entirely new code of sexual
ethics and expectations. It was a code in which their own physical pleasure
was of no consequence — was in fact so entirely beside the point that their
preferred mode of sexual activity was performing unrequited oral sex.
Deep Throat lingers in the popular imagination because it was one of the few
porn movies to trade on an original and inspired premise: what a perfect world
it would be if the clitoris were located in a woman's throat. In a world like
that a man wouldn't have to cajole a woman to perform fellatio on him; she would
be just as eager to get it on as he was. But this was a fantasy; a girl may
derive a variety of consequences, intended and otherwise, from servicing boys
in this manner, but her own sexual gratification is not one of them. 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.

We've made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become
increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood's response to the oral-sex
craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have
worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy — which, despite its manifold evils,
held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary
reasons for existence. And here are America's girls: experienced beyond their
years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance
of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized
cultures in the history of the world. Here are America's girls: on their knees.