The Bold & The Lame
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Family on Tuesday, March 08, 2011 3:00 PM
Simcha Fisher has a thoughtful post up at the Register today.
It’s about de-funding Planned Parenthood, but along the way she makes an important observation about how adolescents actually think.
I can still remember that a girl who looks very hard, very sophisticated and bold in sexy clothes and elaborately made up eyes is still just a little girl, no matter how dirty she acts or how cold or sassy she talks. Teenage girls want security, above all. They want back-up. They want to know that they’re not alone, and that they’re not weird for feeling scared. What they need is for someone to give them permission to say no.
Teenagers don’t want to be told, “You’re in charge—you know what’s best for you.” The one thing that teenagers know, deep down, is that they don’t know anything—and that thought is dreadful. They don’t want someone to say, “Say, you look like you’re already in way over your head, so let me shove you even deeper down!”
I believe I can pinpoint the precise moment I lost my faith in high school, and it was for this very reason.
It was in Sophomore year Morality class at the local Catholic girls’ school (now closed)—which I attended as an Evangelical because it was the strongest school in our neighborhood academically.
It was the ‘80s, not a banner decade for Catholic catechesis, and religious instruction poked many holes in my evangelical faith, replacing it with nothing.
We were in the midst of discussing Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development when one of my classmates asked the teacher point blank if pre-marital sex was wrong.
The teacher hemmed and hawed and sputtered something about well, you really need to be mature.
You could tell he didn’t want to give permission, but he did not say it was wrong. He based it on maturity—and what teenage girl thinks she’s immature?
With a flash of intuition I understood this girl was not posing an abstract question. She was being pressured by her boyfriend and looking for back-up.
I don’t think the teacher was trying to give bad moral advice; he was afraid of being thought not relevant, of being “lame.”
Yet by giving her what she asked for with little understanding of what she actually needed, he’d sold her out.
The heart went out of Christianity for me for about six years at that moment.
It was not the only reason, but it was the culmination of a thought process that concluded from observation that no one actually lived by anything Christ taught. My agnostic Jewish father was kinder, more just, and less gossipy than any Christian adults I knew. Evangelicalism didn’t hold up intellectually, my Catholic friends could not answer any questions I had about their faith, and Catholic authority, as exemplified by this teacher of morality (and we’d have gotten much the same from any other religion teacher in the school at the time), was weak and would never have my back if I tried to live by its tenets. I can’t tell you how betrayed I felt. If your Christian MORALITY teacher won’t defend your purity, who will? I lost hope, and with it, faith.
I think it’s common for kids—adults too in many circumstances—to ask a hypothetical question that in fact has deep personal relevance. “Is homosexuality really wrong?” might actually mean, “How should I think about my older brother?” And requests for permission might be pleas for rescue.
Didn’t you ever feel relief as a kid when your parents forbade you to attend a party where you knew there would be misbehavior? Kids need grown-ups to be lame so they can save face. “I wish I could, but my stodgy ol’ folks won’t let me.”
Years ago a priest friend of mine observed that the more he dealt with sexual sins in people’s spiritual directions, the more he saw that sexual impurity directly undermines the virtue of Faith. People stuck in adulterous relationships or fornication or use of pornography are not combating lust alone. Over time, having repeatedly used their bodies to lie and be lied to, they become profoundly cynical about the existence of true love, to a point where they can’t believe in Love itself.
The culture of death instinctively understands this, as evidenced by testimony given at a UN conference by a representative of the National Education Association advocating that children be taught how to reach sexual climax in schools.
Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” “Gender identity expression and sexual orientation are a spectrum,” she explained, and said that those opposed to homosexuality “are stuck in a binary box that religion and family create.”
Most people are nothing like that kind of ideologue. I’m sure most members of the NEA have zero idea their union rep is saying these things, as most people who support Planned Parenthood just want to do something about unwanted pregnancy and STDs.
Nevertheless, Simcha’s right, we really are giving our children stones when they ask for bread by giving them contraceptives as they pass through puberty and always playing the part of the cool young teacher who isn’t lame when matters of sexual congress come up. People need to know someone believes in them, and the answers we give must convey hope more than they convey the quick fix that sells hope out.
Kids need adults to tell them the real truth, and to see past their abstract questions to the real lives they are leading. They may not listen or follow right away, but the fact that someone told them the truth will sink into their consciences and be a source of hope that Truth and True Love exist on the day they’re ready to hear it.
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