Okay, I’m a tad too prudish when it comes to this topic so I’ll let the reader get the specifics from this Salon.com article. It directly relates to my previously-published posts on those Gloucester High Girls Gone Wild and to the promiscuous inclinations of today’s kids: http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/05/21/teens_oral_sex/.
It’s tough to label them kids anymore since that designation brings to mind children playing with Barbies and watching Sesame Street. Then again, twelve-year olds haven’t engaged in those innocent activities for quite a while, if ever. And I’m certainly not referring to all kids engaging in what used to be called adult pleasures, but it’s difficult if not impossible to know how many are. Should we trust any percentages offered by “experts” since what pre-teens and teens are doing nowadays isn’t usually practiced in public and how many of them would fess up, anyway?
We’re told that 60 is the new 40 and that 70 is the new 50. That may apply to some adults but definitely not all and most definitely is far more a psychological more than a physical experience. It once was called arrested development, fundamentally, a refusal to concede to the reality of aging.
Among the young, however, we’re witnessing a reversed phenomenon.
Most kids just can’t wait to grow up. That’s been a kid trait for eons, growing up and having the freedoms and independence their parents and other elders enjoy, with nary a thought about those same parents’ angst which always attaches itself to their freedom and independence, things such as job and career worries, financial and mortgage worries, and progeny worries.
Those same progeny are experiencing that reversal with mixed results. They don’t count the years in decades as with adults; they simply don’t have and can’t have that perspective so far down life’s road. Only the very rare twelve year old wants to be 32 but they sure want to be 15 or 17 or even 21. And, again, that usually does not reflect a physical but a psychological/ mental “preparedness.” Put another way, many teenagers want to think they’re older even if biology says otherwise, but many haven’t even studied biology and want to follow their importuning sensual urges rather than what their brains dictate.
As noted in previous posts, today’s kids may have a ton more of life’s tangibles–such as cell phones, iPhones, and other requisites of modern society but they also have more pressures and stresses that their elders never experienced. Aside from the obvious, our sex-oriented society and media and their tainted role models, within the last year a new and very negative influence has become a factor: Many kids now have to wonder where they will be living next month or next week due to parental bankruptcy and foreclosures on their homes: http://money.aol.com/news/articles/real-estate/_a/children-caught-up-in-foreclosures/20080709154309990001.
Much of the above may seem like an introduction to a treatise on The Defense of Lascivious Teenagers, which is the farthest thing from the truth. In subsequent articles, I hope to present more details and, most importantly, some thoughts on reversing the trend.
The bottom line is that if our young end up in a moral gutter, can America be far behind?