It's a Bratz country

You see today's front-page news about venereal disease among American teenage girls?:

The first national study of four common sexually transmitted diseases among girls and young women has found that one in four are infected with at least one of the diseases, federal health officials reported Tuesday.

Nearly half the African-Americans in the study of teenagers ages 14 to 19 were infected with at least one of the diseases monitored in the study — human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.

The 50 percent figure compared with 20 percent of white teenagers, health officials and researchers said at a news conference at a scientific meeting in Chicago.

The two most common sexually transmitted diseases, or S.T.D.’s, among all the participants tested were HPV, at 18 percent, and chlamydia, at 4 percent, according to the analysis, part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Each disease can be serious in its own way. HPV, for example, can cause cancer and genital warts.

Among the infected women, 15 percent had more than one of the diseases.

Naturally, Planned Parenthood says the problem is insufficient sex education. According to the account in today's Dallas Morning News (which is heaven knows where on our difficult to navigate website; I gave up and am just typing it in from the actual paper):

Dr. [John] Douglas [director of the CDC's STD prevention unit] said the "extraordinary" racial disparity can be attributed mainly to lagging health insurance coverage in the black community. That leads to poor access to health care and difficulty in stopping the spread of diseases, he said.

Bull***t. Of course he says that, because it's uncontroversial and doesn't involve a value judgment. Here's the abstract of a 2002 study from the Journal of Pediatric Psychology:

In the United States, the average age for first sexual intercourse among adolescents is 16; however, the mean age for sexual debut among inner-city youths is 13 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2000). African American adolescent girls tend to initiate sex earlier than Caucasian or Latina teens, and they are more likely to initiate sexual activity prior to age 13 than Caucasian teens (CDC, 1999). African American girls who initiate sex at an earlier age are more likely to have a greater number of sexual partners and are less likely to practice safer sex, placing them at increased risk for pregnancy, STDs, and HIV (Coker et al., 1994).

So, black teenage girls are having sex earlier than whites and Latinas, having more sex, and having less safer sex. Read this study abstract, and you'll see that family and culture have a lot to do with it.

But you will never, ever hear that from public health authorities, or any authority. You will hear from very few people that the toxic culture in which we're raising our children of all races is destroying them. The facts from the new study are pretty shocking for all Americans. What is it going to take for adults to realize how badly we are failing the younger generations? We're going to keep on and keep on sexualizing little girls, acculturating them to the idea that they are sex objects. We are not, apparently, going to raise any effective objection to the increased sexualization of our culture by taking concrete and proactive measures in our own families, churches and communities to be countercultural in this regard. We're simply going to assume there's nothing we can do, or even blame the Other (it's the right-wingers who fight comprehensive sex ed; it's the left-wingers who are turning the culture trashy) instead of asking ourselves what we can and should do to build up a healthy and morally sane self-image in girls and boys.

The 1999 PBS Frontline documentary "The Lost Children of Rockdale County" is a cultural touchstone for me, as longtime readers know. Investigating a syphilis outbreak in a prosperous white suburb of Atlanta revealed a subculture of extreme sexual decadence among middle and upper middle class teenagers. From the show's transcript:

NARRATOR: Noel and her colleagues constructed a chart tracing the sexual histories of each infected teenager. As the investigation progressed, the number of contacts named by the kids multiplied and multiplied again.

CYNTHIA NOEL: What we were told by a lot of the kids was that there was a lot of sexual activities with multiple partners, a lot of risky sexual activities. These girls were not just having regular intercourse, they were having every kind of possible sexual act that you could do.

NARRATOR: State health officials, fearing a widening epidemic, called in Claire Sterk, a Dutch-born professor at Emory University's School of Public Health. It was to Sterk that some of the children began to reveal the details of their sexual activity.

Prof. CLAIRE STERK, Emory Univ. School of Public Health: It was not uncommon, when all the young people would get together, to engage in group sex. There was group sex going on in terms of one guy having sex with one of the girls, and then the next guy having sex with the same girl. There was group sex going on in terms of one girl having sex with multiple male partners at the same time, multiple females having sex with each other at the same time. I would say that the only type of group sex that I did not hear about in this overall context was group sex between just guys.

NARRATOR: In the end, 17 young people tested positive for syphilis. More than 200 others were exposed and treated. Approximately 50 of them reported being involved in extreme sexual behavior.

CYNTHIA NOEL: You don't expect to see a 14-year-old with 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 sex partners. You expect that of someone who is more into the line of being a prostitute or something. And these girls were not homeless. They were not abused in any way. These were just normal, everyday, regular kids.

The show goes on to depict a community in which the parents were disengaged from the lives of their children. It wasn't material poverty that led to this tragedy; it was cultural and moral poverty. And I'm certain it doesn't stop at the Rockdale County line.

The usual suspects will call for the usual "solutions" -- more sex ed, mostly -- but it's cant. Nor do I believe that abstinence education is the answer. Unless abstinence education occurs within a social and familial context in which chastity is reinforced as the moral norm, and has been for a teen or adolescent's entire childhood, it's virtually useless. You can't raise your kid on the junk food diet of American media and commercial culture, and suddenly, when he or she turns 12 or 13, start telling them about abstinence and chastity. Nor can you expect your church to do it alone -- but it's not wrong to expect the church to be a help instead of avoiding the subject entirely, like many churches do.

Yes, I'm all in favor of "comprehensive sex education," but I mean something very different by that. I mean it's time for parents and families to educate themselves about the role media and popular culture play in sexualizing kids -- and to get involved in a positive and intelligent way in the emotional and spiritual lives of their children, from an early age. The culture is actively hostile to children's best interests in this regard, and parents are the only advocates and protectors kids have.

It starts early: from preschoollearningonline.com, a hoochie Bratz coloring sheet you can print out for your preschooler. James Lileks tipped me off a couple of years ago to the prepubescent skankiness of Bratz. From his blog:

“It’s just a commercial, daddy. Oh! Look!”

I froze. The Bratz are now Baby Mommaz. Yes, the hooker-in-training dolls have children. Bratz are the main reason I do not keep a supply of bricks around the house, because everytime the commercials come on I wish to pitch something kiln-fired through the screen so hard it beans the toy exec who greenlighted these hootchie toys. The Baby Bratz are as bad as you can imagine: “Bottles with Bling.” Judas on a stick, why not just refit the Bratz so they have Real Oozing Gonorreal Flow Action?

“They know how to flaunt it, and they’re keeping it real in the crib.”

What exactly is the penalty for failing to keep it real in the crib? Someone busts a cap in yo Pamper? I know I am old and so out of step it’s a wonder I don’t just appear as an indistinct smear, but was it really necessary to push the Age of Sultry Hussyism down to the infant stage? And who, exactly, are the Babyz flaunting it for? Are we going to see a commercial with Elmo in sunglasses, sitting with his legs sprawled, spanking some pliant Babyz with one hand while gumming down some mashed crack?

If we abdicate our roles and responsibilities, we're abandoning our daughters and our sons. I'm not willing to do that. And while I'm not willing to let sex-educrats have access to the imaginations of my kids, they do have a point when they criticize parents who don't want their kids to have sex ed in schools, but who ignore the very real need for same at home. The thing is, "sex education" is never only about genital contact. It has to do with educating for self-respect, respecting others, self-discipline and respecting God. It's all part of a package.

I've gone on way too long in this post, but this is an issue I'm passionate about. I'll close with this bit from a Peggy Noonan column written after the 1999 Columbine massacre:

Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by--all are waves. The fish--your child--is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I'll limit to only one source, the news:

. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . said that he turned and said, "You better put some ice on that" . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . . which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiancé . . .

This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody...

Everybody. That's you and me too, not just people in the inner city, or in Rockdale County, or somewhere that the Bad People live. It is everywhere.

But it is not inevitable.