Well, to begin with,

JanieBelle — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:42:50 -0800

we're not going to get anywhere until we can begin to change the general attitude that sex and sexuality are somehow bad or dirty (in a negative sense) or activities and attributes that should be hidden from view.

Until we (the royal we, the general public) acknowledge that teenagers have sex, that people have sex, that it's a good thing, to be celebrated in the open, we're going to continue to have insane, medieval laws like the one that put Genarlow Wilson in prison pushed on us by the self hating, reality denying snake charmers that occupy the pulpits of America.

How do we get there from here? We start at home. "Hey Sue, did you hear they finally let that Genarlow Wilson kid out of prison? Geez, what a mess they made of that. It still burns me that teenagers having sex is a crime though. Can you believe that? Why, right here in North Carolina, just the other day..."

Beyond that, I'm torn. As much as I despise the tactics of the repressive right, I'm not sure that waiting around until the Enlightenment arrives in fundy America is a viable plan. Whatever their ideological and mental failings, I have to admit that denigration, ridicule, and marginalization are effective tools in their toolbox. I admit to occasionally borrowing from their playbook in frustration. Then I shower.

The question is meaningless

Lou FCD — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:02:42 -0700

Well, not so much the question as the answer. Bear with me, this gets a little long winded and perhaps more than a little pompous and presumptuous.

People, like everything else in the universe, are a continuum. We tend to categorize things in neat little boxes, but the truth is that those divisions are completely artificial.

Take the issue of heavenly bodies - what exactly is the difference between an asteroid and a minor planet, between a minor planet and a regular ol' planet, a rocky planet and a gas giant, a gas giant and a brown dwarf? These boundaries are our attempt at using language to differentiate between things for which there is no difference. One gram of matter more or less and an object is suddenly something different?

I view sexuality the same way. I don't think it's really accurate to describe someone's sexuality in terms of three or four or five little checkboxes, this one, that one, or the other one. It's more like a sliding scale, a long line with people falling at all points along it. I daresay as well that people fall at different places on that line depending on what day you look.

Children/teenagers/young adults/adults/old farts seem to work the same way to me. As a society, we assign specific numbers of years since birth to apply rules and language to what is really a continuum.

I've had this discussion in different forms with both of my kids. "How come you let her .....when she was my age, but not me?" or "He gets away with.... but you get upset when I do that!"

They're two different people, at different places along the continuum of maturity, and with different aspects of themselves at different places, and in different places on different days.

I don't have a good answer to the question, but I'm not sure there is one, or could ever be one, if all that bloviating makes any sense.

But at the end of the day, we need lines between this and that for practical reasons. Those lines should be based on well thought out and well educated consensus, and I'm of the opinion that in many cases those lines are currently based on nothing more than one or another group's agenda-driven whim.

Case in point - What sense does it make to say that a person is mature enough at seventeen years since birth to make the decision to lay down their life as a member of the armed forces, but in the next breath say that same person is not mature enough to enter a strip club and have a glass of wine and look at naked people? Hello?

Sex In The Public Square - age - Comments

Well, to begin with,

The question is meaningless