Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (41 page)

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About half of the Dutch interviewees, and most of the lower-middle- class interviewees, live in the Eastern City’s outskirts or in the bedroom communities that surround them. They mostly inhabit the relatively new developments (
nieuwbouw)
built on the ever-expanding border between city and farmland. In these developments, families typically occupy tidy and comfortable houses of moderate size that, like the vast majority of dwellings in the country, are attached on both sides to other houses. Most homes are adorned with small, well-kept gardens, or, at the very least, with a plant box or two, that serve to distinguish each from its otherwise identical neighbors. Little brooks and tree-lined paths for pedestrians, dog- walkers, joggers, and cyclists of all ages crisscross the blocks of pale-tinted brick structures. The modern design, the orderliness, and the sheer number

of housing units planted amidst the green pastures with their black-and- white dairy cows render that blend of tranquility and population density that is so typical of Dutch life outside the city centers.

Two hours away by train, on the other side of the country, lies West- ern City. With its 110,0000 inhabitants and its world-renowned university, Western City marks the heart of the
Randstad
, the corridor of large and medium-sized cities which have long shaped Dutch politics, economics, science, and art. Despite the students and faculty it draws from all over, its proximity to the excitement of Amsterdam and the political power of The Hague, and its increasingly multi-ethnic character, Western City remains oddly quaint. Outside of its centuries-old center, the city’s streets quickly become completely residential, blending gradually into neighboring bed- room communities. In the center of Western city lies the School for Classi- cal Education, one of city’s oldest public secondary schools with a reputa- tion for academic excellence. At its southern border lies Ferdinand College, drawing a more economically and ethnically diverse population.

Most Dutch parents who live in or near Western city are parents of SCE children. They belong to professional middle-class households where at least one parent has a master’s degree or equivalent. More likely to be em- ployed in the professions—science, architecture, medicine—than in com- merce, these parents are part of the country’s cultural, rather than eco- nomic, elite. Even so, mothers rarely work more than twenty-five hours a week. The Dutch teenagers attend both the SCE and Ferdinand College. Neither set of Dutch teenagers is likely to live in Western city itself— although a few do inhabit charming, turn-of-the-century red-brick houses in the vicinity of the school. Indeed, most Western City families live in the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of the surrounding bedroom commu- nities. Consequently, twice a day, the Western City teenagers join the steady stream of cyclists who make their way to and from school alongside city traffic, highways, and canals.

NO TES

CHAPTER ONE

All names of people and places, and some occupations, have been changed to pre- serve anonymity. All translations from Dutch are mine.
The words “sexuality” and “sex” have multiple meanings: The word “sexuality” can be used to refer to the wide range of feelings, experiences, identities, and behaviors that are part of one’s experience of oneself and relationship to others. In a second definition, the words sex and sexuality are used interchangeably to refer more nar- rowly to sexual behaviors and experiences per se, which one engages in with another person or alone. The final meaning is the narrowest, and it refers exclusively to acts of (vaginal) intercourse. In this book, when I talk about “adolescent sexuality” and sexual experiences, I am referring to teenagers’ sexual feelings and the range of sex- ual behaviors in which they do or will engage. However, when I use demographic data on having “sex” and being “sexually active” or “experienced,” unless I specify otherwise, I will be referring to heterosexual vaginal intercourse. (Although surveys in both countries are increasingly collecting data on multiple sexual behaviors and on same-sex partners, data on experiences with heterosexual intercourse are typi- cally the most internationally comparable.) And when, in discussing the interview material, I use the expression, “having sex” or “going to bed with,” I am referring to vaginal intercourse, since this is what interviewees usually mean.
Michaud 2006.
This is especially true for classical (psychoanalytically informed) developmental psychology and evolutionary developmental psychology, in which separation from parents is a critical element of the individuation process. See also notes 55 and 56.
Sociological classics on adolescent peer groups and status hierarchies include Waller 1937 and Coleman 1961. Contemporary sociological studies of adolescent net- works and peer groups include Bearman and Brückner 2001; Bearman 2004; Ander- son 1999; Eder, Evans, and Parker 1995; Bettie 2000; and Pascoe 2007.
See for instance Bettie 2000; Fine 1988; Nathanson 1991; Tolman 2002; Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon 2003; Vanwesenbeeck, Bekker, and van Lenning 1998; and Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006.
Abma et al. 2004; de Graaf et al. 2005; Darroch, Singh, and Frost 2001; and Mosher, Chandra, and Jones 2005. More than half of American and Dutch seventeen-year- olds (both girls and boys) have had oral sex with a same-sex and/or opposite-sex
partner. Among seventeen-year-olds, a little under half of American girls and boys, 45 percent of Dutch boys, and six out of ten Dutch girls have had vaginal inter- course (Mosher, Chandra, and Jones 2005; de Graaf et al. 2005).
Bozon and Kontula 1998.
Jones et al. 1986; Berne and Huberman 1999; and Rose 2005.
Laumann et al. 1994, 198 and 326.
Finer 2007.
The Gallup poll statistics come from Smith 1994.
Petersen and Donnenwerth 1997.
Abma, Martinez, and Copen 2010; Abma et al. 2004; 2010.
Kost, Henshaw, and Carlin 2010.
In 2007, the birth rate was 5.2 for Dutch teenage girls and 42.5 for American girls (Garssen 2008; Hamilton, Martin, and Ventura 2009). The table below shows abor- tion and pregnancy rates for the latest available year.

Table 1.1 Pregnancies, births, and abortions per 1,000 women, ages 15–19
US (2006)
NL (2006)
Pregnancy rate
a
61.2
14.1
Birth rate
41.9
5.3
Abortion rate
19.3
8.8
Abortion ratio
b
31.5
62.4
Sources
: Kost et al. 2010; van Lee et al. 2009.
a
Pregnancy rates exclude estimations for fetal losses.
b
The abortion ratio is the percentage of pregnancies (excluding those resulting in fetal losses) that are terminated.
In both countries, teenage pregnancy rates are higher among economically disad- vantaged groups. In the United States, non-Hispanic white girls, and in the Neth- erlands, girls who are themselves and whose parents are native-born have lower rates of socioeconomic disadvantage, and they also have lower pregnancy rates. By comparing these two groups, we still see a strong difference between the two coun- tries. Note that the two groups are not strictly comparable because Dutch rates are grouped by immigration status rather than by race and ethnicity.
Table 1.2 Pregnancies, births, and abortions per 1,000 white/native-born women, ages 15–19
US (2006)
a
NL (2007)
b
Pregnancy rate
c
37.6
11.1
Birth rate
26.6
5.2
Abortion rate
11.0
5.9
Abortion ratio
d
29.3
53.2
Sources
: Kost et al. 2010; van Lee et al. 2009.
a
Non-Hispanic white women.
b
Includes all races and ethnicities, but woman and both her parents must have been born in the Netherlands.
c
Pregnancy rates exclude estimations for fetal losses.
d
The abortion ratio is the percentage of pregnancies (excluding those resulting in fetal losses) that are terminated.
During the early 1990s, Dutch teenage pregnancy rates were comparable to those in recent years (van Lee and Wijsen 2008). But early 1990s American rates were signifi- cantly higher than those in recent years, and the contrast between the two countries in teenage pregnancy rates was even starker than in the tables above. During the sec- ond half of the 1990s, the Dutch teenage pregnancy rate increased, before steadily decreasing again after 2002. But in 2000, the Dutch teenage pregnancy rate was still approximately four times lower than the American rate.
Evert Ketting (1983; 1994) has attributed the low Dutch teenage pregnancy rate to the use of the pill primarily and to emergency contraception secondarily. In 1995, 63 percent of Dutch secondary school students always used the pill with their last sexual partner, and 42 percent always used condoms (another 31 percent sometimes used condoms) (Brugman et al. 1995). That same year, a quarter of American fe- males and a third of American males, ages fifteen to nineteen, who had sex three months prior to being interviewed by the National Survey of Family Growth, used the pill at last intercourse. Thirty-eight percent of American females and 64 percent of American males used a condom. Since then, condom use among sexually active youth has increased in both countries. Indeed, as the table below shows, condom use at first vaginal intercourse is relatively high in both countries. However, pill use and dual protection (condoms and hormonal methods combined) are much higher among Dutch teens than they are among American teens. International com- parisons of contraceptive behavior at last vaginal intercourse among sexually active fifteen-year-olds have found a similar pattern (Currie et al. 2008; Santelli, Sandfort, and Orr 2008; Godeau et al. 2008).

Table 1.3 Use of contraception at first vaginal intercourse among males and females, ages 15–19
Dutch females, %
American females, %
Dutch males, %
American males, %
Condom
78
68
75
82
Pill
a
59
20
53
22
Dual methods
43
14
38
19
Sources
: Abma et al. 2010 for U.S. rates; Ferguson, Vanwesenbeeck, and Knijn 2008, who used de Graaf et al. 2005 to calculate Dutch rates.
Note
: U.S. data collected between 2006 and 2008 and Dutch data collected in 2005.
a
For the Dutch teens, the percentages of “pill” use also include other hormonal methods and diaphragms. However, only 1% of females and 0.2% of males categorized as pill users use a method other than the pill. For American teens, the percentages of “pill” use also include other hormonal methods
and
emergency contraception. Almost a quarter of the American females and one in ten males categorized as pill users use methods other than the pill.
See tables 1.1 and 1.2 in note 16.
See Thompson 1990; Thompson 1995; Martin 1996; Tolman 2002; Carpenter 2005; and Pascoe 2007.
Abma et al. 2004.
Albert 2004.
Meier found that the majority of teenagers do not experience negative mental health effects after first sex. However, some groups of girls do experience such effects, which depend on their age and relationship status during and after their first intercourse
(Meier 2007). On the relationship between first romance and conflict with parents, see Joyner and Udry 2000.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dutch policymakers and the organization of fam- ily physicians, who provide the bulk of primary care in the Netherlands, made a concerted effort to make contraception easily accessible to unmarried women, in- cluding teenage women (Ketting 1990). During that same period, Constance Na- thanson argues, the majority of American physicians shied away from the issue of teenage sexuality and pregnancy prevention. Indeed in 1970, Nathanson reports, the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates, the organization’s principal policymaking body, rejected the recommendation by its Committee on Maternal and Child Health to adopt a policy “permitting physicians to offer contraceptive advice and methods to teenage girls whose sexual behavior exposes them to pos- sible pregnancy” (1991, 39). Policymakers also struggled with the issue: Nathanson argues that “neither Nixon in 1972 nor Carter in 1978 was prepared publicly to endorse birth control for unmarried adolescent women” (57). And teenagers’ legal right to access contraception was, according to Kristin Luker, “very ambiguous” in the mid-1970s (Luker 1996, 65). Individual health-care providers and pharmacists were often hesitant to provide contraceptive services to minors because it interfered with traditional notions of parental authority (Luker 1996, 66). Meanwhile, starting in 1972, Congress began advocating for the inclusion of minors in the population served by federally funded family planning clinics, and when in 1977 it reautho- rized Title X, which provides most of the federal funding for public contraceptive services, it made explicit that minors were a group eligible for funding (Luker 1996, 69). Today, many states permit minors twelve and up to consent to contraceptive services. However, concerns about confidentiality and costs still constitute barriers to adolescents’ obtaining reproductive health care (Lehrer et al. 2007; Ralph and Brindis 2010; Guttmacher Institute 2010).
D’Emilio and Freedman 1988, 342.
See Ward et al. 2006 and Steele 2002.
See Irvine 2002 and di Mauro and Joffe 2007.
Kantor et al. 2008. While the recent health-care reform act has included federal funding to schools that teach about contraception and contraception, it also allo- cated funds to support abstinence-only programs.
See Lindberg, Santelli, and Singh 2006; Darroch, Landry, and Singh 2000; and Fields 2008.
Since the mid-1970s, the General Social Survey has found that at least four out of five Americans support sex education in schools.
Sex Education in America
2004.
See
Sex Education in America
2004. Using 2002 NSFG data, Mosher and colleagues (2005) report that by age sixteen, the majority of American teenagers have engaged in some sexual contact—which could include oral sex or intimate touching—with another person (either same or opposite sex).
See Ravesloot 1997.
Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 2003.
Bozon and Kontula 1998; Ravesloot 1997; and Wouters 2004.
Kooij 1983.
Ketting 1990; Ketting and Visser 1994. See also note 23. Schnabel (1990) has ar- gued that there was wide support among the Dutch population for the changes of
the sexual revolution, and that change was certainly not confined to a small group of students.
Jones et al. 1986, 178. Historian James C. Kennedy has also argued that during the 1950s and 1960s, Dutch religious leaders, especially within the Catholic Church, went much further than bishops in other countries in fundamentally changing doctrine and practice, replacing a morality based on individual compliance with an ethics based on universal human compassion and service to others (Kennedy 1995). The Dutch sociologist Kooij (1983) has also pointed toward the role of re- ligious leaders in opening up discussions around sexuality in Dutch society of the 1960s and 1970s. It is notable that the new moral discourse did not only pertain to heterosexual couples. In his “De Kracht van de Moraal: De Doorbraak in het Emancipatieproces van Nederlandse Homoseksuelen” (“The Power of Morality: The Breakthrough in the Emancipation Process of Dutch Homosexuals”), Dutch soci- ologist Bram van Stolk (1991) argues that the remarkable progress in the position of homosexuals in Dutch society between 1960 and 1975 can be in large part at- tributed to the moral claims made first by progressively minded psychiatrists and re- ligious thinkers and later adapted by members of the (mainly male at that time) gay movement itself. Van Stolk argues that it was the power of the moral claims rather than movement activism that was responsible for the breakthrough in the “eman- cipation” of homosexuals. But while religious leaders, intellectuals, psychologists, and medical professionals helped shape the new cultural climate, the changes in sexual morality were supported by broad segments of the Dutch population, argues Paul Schnabel (1990).
One group that played an important role was the Dutch Association for Sexual Reform (NVSH), which in the mid-1960s had more than 200,000 members. The NVSH was a strong advocate for family planning and sex education—including through the media—and it helped shape government policy as well as public opin- ion (Ketting and Visser 1994; Hekma 2004a).
Dutch policy long kept commercial radio and television broadcasting illegal, and allocated air time to different political and religious nonprofit groups—whose membership roughly corresponded to the political, class, and religious population segments into which Dutch society through the 1960s was divided. Even as the seg- mentation of Dutch society broke down in the 1970s and 1980s, the Dutch govern- ment followed the policy of supporting “a pluralistic public broadcasting system built along social and cultural lines,” write Kees van der Haak and Leo van Snip- penburg (2001). They note moreover that even after the legalization and expansion of commercial broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s, the government was “intent on keeping the public part of the whole broadcasting system as strong as possible in a context of national and international competition in commercial broadcasting” (2001, 210).
Jones et al. 1986, 154. Survey research in the 1980s did not find strong effects of factors such as gender, class, religion, or urbanization on attitudes toward sexuality among the Dutch population (Van Zessen and Sandfort 1991).
Ketting 1994.
Ketting and Visser 1994 and Hardon 2003. Hardon describes the legal parameters and public sentiment: “Over age 16, patients are considered autonomous in de- cisions on health care, including contraception. Between ages 12 and 16 parental consent is needed, but if parents do not give consent and the minor wants treat-
ment (e.g. contraception), a doctor can provide it if not doing so would have seri- ous, negative consequences for the minor. The extent to which the Dutch respect the autonomy of minors is reflected in a recent survey in which 75 percent of respon- dents thought a doctor should prescribe contraception without parental consent if that is what the minor needed and wanted” (61).
That confidence was challenged when Dutch teen pregnancies and abortions rose notably between 1996 and 2002. But the Netherlands’ role as “guide country” with regard to teenage births and abortions remained intact, writes Joop Garssen, and was strengthened by a sustained decrease in those rates between 2002 and 2007. Especially notable were declines in the birth rates of first- and second-generation immigrant girls and young women (Garssen 2008).
Brugman et al. 1995 and Vogels and van der Vliet 1990.
Cremer 1997 and Ravesloot 1997. Vanwesenbeeck and colleagues (1998) found that gendered patterns had persisted among Dutch college students of the 1990s: girls were likely to take a defensive approach to sexual interactions, while males were more likely to take an active, “go-get-it” approach.
Rademakers and Ravesloot (1993), for instance, state: “Sexual contact is a situation of negotiation in which both partners have an equal position [
gelijkwaardige uitgang- spositie
]. . . . Youths must learn that they are not victims of circumstances. Particu- larly, for traditionally oriented girls it is important to emphasize more clearly the shared responsibility in sexual relationships. Sexual education ideally has an eman- cipatory character, such that teenage sexuality is discussed in an open and matter- of-course manner. That way the threshold for girls is lowered as much as possible to take their own initiatives in sexual behavior and contraceptive use. Moreover, it is important that sex education orients itself to the interactive competencies of youths. Learning to talk about sex and contraception is particularly important, but also learning to negotiate in general” (277).
De Graaf et al. 2005.
Lewis and Knijn 2002; 2003.
Lewis and Knijn 2002, 687. But curricula are also adapted for religious audiences. An example of such adjustments included the emphasis on faithfulness over con- doms and the exclusion of passages on masturbation and orgasm for a textbook used in schools of the Dutch Reformed Church (SOAIDS 2004).
In their analysis of fifteen nations, Kelley and de Graaf (1997) use a variety of mea- sures for religiosity. They characterize the United States as an extraordinarily devout modern society and the Netherlands as a relatively secular one.
Goodin et al. 2000.
Singh, Darroch, and Frost 2001.
All of the American parent interviews informed the analyses and calculation of par- ents’ answers to the question of the sleepover. However, only Corona and Tremont parents are quoted in this book. For quotes from the interviews with Norwood par- ents, see Schalet 2000.
Michaud 2006 and Nathanson 1991.
Steinberg 2004.
American psychoanalytic developmental theory places a great emphasis on separa- tion and on sexual development as one of the motors of separation (Erikson 1950; Freud 1958). For a fascinating analysis of how American psychoanalytic develop- mental psychology has been shaped by Anglo-American cultural traditions that em- phasize, among other things, self-reliance, resulting in an emphasis on separation
as the marker of psychological health, see Kirschner 1990. Socio-biological evolu- tionary perspectives also place an emphasis on the necessity for separation between parents and adolescents (Collins, Welsh, and Furman 2009, 634).
See, for instance, Risman and Schwartz 2002, and Carpenter 2005.
Martin 1996. The term “antagonistic gender strategies” comes from Thorne 1993.
See Fine 1988 and Fine and McClelland 2006.
See also Tolman 2002. 61. Foucault 1977; 1978.