I'm by no means done with either my grading or my Christmas shopping, so I still don't have as much time to post as I would like.
For some reason, the term "do-overs" has been ringing in my head this weekend. I've been thinking about "do-overs", sex, class, and culture (in a disconnected way) while racing off to Christmas parties and giving Matilde her dust baths.
A "do-over" refers to taking an action that allows you to undo most or all of the unwanted consequences of a prior action.
Here's what I've been thinking about:
In my Women's Studies class, I assign journals. This semester, I had an unusually high number of students write about abstinence and virginity. Though I never ask direct questions about students' sexual experience, in my decade of teaching gender studies I've never had so many "volunteer" the information that they were still virgins. Though most who shared this were women (most of the students in these classes are female), two men did so as well. I have to wonder -- are the abstinence programs beginning to have an impact, or was this one anomalous class?
But what really struck me was that with only one exception, every one of those who announced that they were "staying virgins" was an ethnic minority. My native-born white students, as a group, seemed much less likely to extoll the virtues of purity than my Latin, Asian, Armenian, or African-American students. What was more even more interesting was the reasoning behind their decision. A few cited parental and cultural pressure; a few noted that it was primarily a matter of spiritual obedience. But a number of them made the case that forgoing sex was a kind of investment in their future. This is verbatim from one journal that I am quoting with the student's permission; I'll call her Jeanine:
It's not that I don't want to have sex. But I know that having sex could make me a mother before I'm ready. I want to get a college degree so badly. No one in my family has ever graduated before!! I know so many girls who have babies and drop out, and I hear so many STD stories. Sex just is too big right now for me, I need to focus on school and my own life.
I read that with genuine mixed emotion. So many of my kids are first-generation college students -- I am humbled by their ambition, their work ethic, and their eagerness to break multi-generational cycles of early motherhood and concomitant poverty. How can I not be proud of young women like Jeanine? I salute her.
But I can't help but feel as if that Jeanine and others like her are operating within the confines of a faise dichotomy: virginity=success, early sex=failure and poverty. I grew up in a comfortable, secular environment in the mid-1980s. Though kids often lie about such things, and I wouldn't want to guess at a percentage, I feel reasonably safe saying that most of the kids in my high school class were no longer virgins by the time we all got our diplomas. We certainly never got abstinence lectures in school! (We did get visits from the Monterey chapter of Planned Parenthood, who distributed pamphlets and gave us basic information.)
We had plenty of nominal Christians on campus, but few who really believed. We had a tiny group of Young Life folks, whom I'm sorry to say we either patronized or ignored. (At that age, I was an atheist. I was once voted "most likely to move to the Soviet Union -- and like it.") But there was certainly no spiritual revival present at Carmel High School in the early 1980s!
What we did know was that we were all going to college, and nothing was going to stand in our way. We were great believers, I realize now, in "do-overs." I had several friends, dear to me, who did get pregnant in high school. (By several, I mean eight -- and those were only the ones I knew about with certainty in a graduating class of 180.) Of course, none carried the pregnancy to term. Abortions were arranged, and all the young people involved headed off to college without delay. Our liberal social values and our relative affluence guaranteed that an unintended pregnancy was not a life-altering event. (Or to be fair, not a "plan-derailing" event. The emotional repercussions of abortion can be tremendous, and I ought to acknowledge that. But whatever the private pain, on the outside, lives didn't change.)
Knowing that contraception and abortion were legal and widely available meant that most young people I grew up with and went to college with made no connection between sexual activity and their own long-term success. We could experiment freely, knowing that we could "do things over" if we made mistakes. I suppose we were quite naive. Most college students are. But I also think that we were quite fortunate to grow up in an environment which encouraged us to explore our sexuality, and reminded us that we would be at least partially immunized against the consequences of that exploration.
It wasn't until I started teaching at the community college that I realized how different things were for people of different religious backgrounds. I realized that a faith in the availability and advisability of "do-overs" was not universal! My classes were filled with women in their 20s, 30s, and older who had gotten pregnant young, and had not done as everyone I knew from high school had done. They had had children, had struggled as single mothers, had endured deprivation and difficulty, and were coming back to school at long last. I had tremendous admiration for them. But at the same time, I bemoaned not their choice to have sex so young, but their decision not to avail themselves of the abortion franchise. As a pro-choice activist -- which I was at the time -- I believed that we needed to do a far better job of making birth control and abortion available and acceptable to folks in all communities. That, I was convinced, was the solution. Real liberation, or so I was certain, lay in extending that right to a quick "do-over" to everyone!
In more recent years, I've become less certain about things. As I've written before, I've begun to doubt that "experience is the best teacher." I've become more aware of how the emotional consequences of poor decision-making in one's youth can haunt one in one's later years. (Vague, I know, but I'm not going to disclose more.) And my students, most of whom come from more conservative social backgrounds than my own, are increasingly teaching me. I haven't jumped on the abstinence bandwagon yet, not by any means. When it comes to human sexuality, my faith, reason, and experience all tell me that God's plan for human sexuality is far richer and more complex than most have previously imagined. I don't like cookie-cutter solutions, and "no sex till marriage" remains both overly simplistic and absurdly unrealistic to me.
But as I think about Jeanine and the world she lives in, I wonder what my goal as a pro-feminist mentor ought to be. Do I say "You go, girl! Stay a virgin, work hard, get that degree!" Or do I say, gently, "You know, there are other ways to look at this. Perhaps you don't have to choose between pleasure and success", and then nudge her towards Planned Parenthood? If I merely support her uncritically, am I not reinforcing the misleading notion that "sex is dangerous"? If I expose her to other options, amd I being disrespectful both towards her goals and her cultural background?
My life would be radically different if it weren't for the "do-overs" I had when I was young. I am where I am today because (of course) God's grace. But one of the reasons (besides dumb luck) that I got a tenure-track job at 26 was because I had been protected in countless ways from the consequences of immature decisions made in high school and college. Should it not be my goal to try and extend that "do-over protection" to as many people as possible? Or should I be advocating something else, something more, something deeper?
I am rambling. Time for a run, and then, more grading.
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