THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607130040
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Sex education: How is it working?
Last in a series
SOURCE: Vanee Vines, Matthew Bowers, Philip Walzer, Lorraine Eaton,
staff writers Valerie Carino, correspondent
LENGTH: 279 lines
On a spring day in May, a class of Virginia Beach sophomores is told that the best way to protect themselves from AIDS is to just say no. Condoms are not mentioned. That same day, headlines in teen magazines like YM scream out, "Guys want you- 100 hotties say why."
Today's teenagers are coming of age sexually in a culture packed with powerful influences and conflicting messages. A report released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that students having sex usually start at age 14. Five local teenagers spoke with us - on condition of anonymity - about the decisions that have made regarding their own sexuality. a word of caution: The stories may be offensice tosome readers. 1.
This 17-year-old Portsmouth student is a virgin - still on her own island and proud of it, thank you very much.
To her, sex is sacred. Something that should take place only between a wife and her husband.
Moreover, she said, teens these days would be doing themselves a favor if they postponed sex until they were married - which is what she has vowed to do.
Sure, premarital sex may seem cool or fun to many teens. But it's truly a risky business, she said.
``I have seen some consequences of premarital sex,'' she said. ``I feel like I don't want to do that at all, because I don't want to end up in that situation'' - being a teenage mother or catching a sexually transmitted disease.
``When you wait longer,'' she added, ``you'll respect yourself, and you're allowing yourself to be respected by a gentleman. I feel that if you give yourself up too early, (your partner is) not going to think much of you.
``If you're just around giving yourself up to everybody, everybody will know you and nobody's going to want you, because they know you've been with everybody.''
Her parents, especially her dad, always told her it was best to postpone sex until marriage.
A born-again Christian, she recently promised God that she would remain a virgin until saying ``I do.''
``It's just something I wanted to do,'' she said, explaining a chastity pledge she and several other youngsters made before her church congregation this year.
``I like to be different. I like to stand out,'' she said. ``I'm not afraid to let people know that that is what I believe in.''
Her friends, even those who say premarital sex is OK, don't pressure her to give up her virginity or tease her in any way, she said.
And her boyfriend, also a virgin, understands, she said.
Temptation is out there. Still, she's certain that God will give her the strength to hold out.
``I just feel confident that He will keep me so I won't try to get into things like that,'' she said.
``Yeah, I think it will be hard, because you get older and your parents start letting you go more places by yourself. Things can get to a point where you might think you would not be able to control yourself.
``But . . . I won't go that way. I'll be able to control myself.''
- Vanee Vines 2. The 18-year-old from Norfolk didn't set out to have sex with all these girls - six of them in two years.
None was what he considered more than a friend - some were barely casual acquaintances.
And he doesn't plan to repeat this behavior - especially after worrying that the last partner, the only one with whom he had sex more than once, might be pregnant. He recently found out that she wasn't.
``I rolled a seven - I threw away the dice,'' said the college-bound 1996 high school graduate. ``I've got too much going on for me right now. I've had enough. . . . Sex is pleasurable, yes . . . but it's not worth it.
``You can have the best sex of your life but die in six years. You can have the best sex of your life and you can go blind. You can have the best sex of your life but have a child-support bill for 18 years. . . . There's no excuse.''
He admits that this is hindsight and that he was lucky.
He first had sexual intercourse the week after his 16th birthday. She was a former girlfriend, 15, and, like all but the last of his partners, not a virgin.
``It was going to feel right, it was going to feel good, and you were curious about it,'' he said. ``Curiosity, that was my main thing. It wasn't being affectionate.''
The second time, eight months later, it was in a car with a girl he worked with, after he had gotten high on marijuana.
Then it was another girl in another car. Then a girl who walked home from school with him. Another girl, at his house, who up to then had been a platonic friend. Each a one-time liaison.
He had sex four times with his last partner. They liked each other, but neither wanted a commitment. ``We dodged the relationship, but we didn't dodge the sex,'' he said.
Family Life Education, starting in middle school, didn't help much, he said. Many in the class already were sexually active, particularly the girls who dated high school boys.
``It was more like watching a Discovery Channel program,'' he said. ``It was, like, `gonads and zygotes,' and it was, like, `Excuse me?' . . . It confused me.
``The teacher was reading from a booklet, as if she didn't know. . . . It was like a clown trying to rob a bank - it's hard to take it serious.''
He learned some basics from his mother but got most of his information from older buddies and by reading sex scenes in novels and men's magazines.
He was careful to use condoms - bought at 7-Elevens or Wal-Marts because they were fresher - particularly after a simple bug bite on his leg scared him into thinking he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.
``A condom is intelligent,'' he said. ``I'm not saying teenage sex is genius, but a condom shows a little bit of responsibility.''
Now, he wishes his teacher had discussed with the class some of the emotions surrounding sex, not just the biology.
``Also, they didn't tell us it was wrong,'' he said. ``When you're telling a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old, about sex, you should at least stress it's not in your best interest.''
- Matthew Bowers
3.
Being a gay teen makes
acceptance especially hard
He first knew he was different at age 6. He was just ``messing around,'' kissing some boys his age. ``It was playing around, but it felt natural.''
In the ninth grade, in a big city outside of Virginia, he began having sex with both boys and girls. Mostly boys. Heterosexual sex ``felt unnatural, fake; I didn't enjoy it.'' Gay sex was ``nice and fulfilling.''
He bounced from partner to partner, never staying with one for more than a month. He got depressed, started taking LSD, snorting coke, smoking pot. His grades went into a tailspin. He didn't want to face the truth.
It was like that line from Nine Inch Nails: ``I am denial, guilt and fear.''
``You start to hate yourself after a while if you can't accept it,'' he said.
There was one guy he went out with for a week in the fall of 1994. They didn't have sex. ``He annoyed me. He was everything I did not want to be. He was gay, and he was ultra-feminine. Have you seen `Bird Cage'? He was like Robin Williams' husband - very outrageous, queenish.''
Then last summer, before his family moved here, he got a wake-up call from the band Korn. They sang about coming out of the closet, about learning how to fight to defend yourself.
``I could actually say that I was gay without having to go to a psycho ward,'' he recalled.
After he moved here in November, his grades improved. He cut down on the drugs. He's dated three guys - no girls - since then, including a 23-year-old ``Navy boy.'' For over a month, he's been seeing a 14-year-old. They always use condoms.
His mother, who's divorced, and twin brother, who's straight, are OK about his homosexuality. He has straight friends - male and female - at school. But he still gets more grief here than he did before he moved to Virginia.
His first day at school in Norfolk, he was wearing a David Bowie T-shirt and a guy started laughing and screaming, ``Hey, it's Boy George.'' For a while, he got taunted daily with names like ``faggot'' and ``queer.''
As he was discussing how he is treated, a straight male friend walked into the house. They exchanged cigarettes. They've been buddies since January. The friend said, ``Everybody's like, `You don't want to be his friend.' ''
When a group gathers, some guys will talk right past the gay teen.
``They'll ignore that I exist,'' he said.
But the gay teen is dealing with it now. No more angst. With guys like that, ``if I'm not worth his time, he's not worth my time.''
His friend interjected, ``Spoken like a true man.''
- Philip Walzer
4
Losing relationship can be
the cost of refusing sex
Her mother always told her to wait.
Wait. Save yourself for your husband.
So far, she's followed her mother's advice. She's still a virgin.
But she admitted that it's hard. Especially when your boyfriend expects sex.
Last year at a dance, the college sophomore met a guy who lived in a nearby dorm. They dated for six months and were sexually active for the last four. In their case, ``sexually active'' meant everything except sex.
At first, they just made out, mostly kissing. After two months, they were undressing each other and sleeping in each other's dorm rooms. There was oral sex, fondling, masturbating, anything but penetration. There were plenty of times when it could've gone further. Plenty.
But the relationship, both quickly realized, was skin deep.
``The attraction was mostly physical,'' she said. ``We got along, but we didn't really talk about anything important.''
They didn't talk about having sex either. In fact, she said, being intimate was their primary means of communication.
``There was pressure (to have sex) but it wasn't verbal,'' she said. ``Each time he'd try to touch me a little further. Afterward I felt waves of guilt crashing through me. We'd be going really fast.''
She paused for a moment.
``I don't know if it's possible to stay a virgin anymore, because a lot of guys want that sexual compatibility,'' she said.
On her boyfriend's 19th birthday, she considered offering him her virginity as a present but never revealed her thoughts.
Having sex would've meant going against her Catholic upbringing. Her conscience. Her parents' advice.
She's heard it over and over again from her mother: ``You should stay a virgin, because your husband will treat you like a princess. And you deserve to be treated like the most special person in the world.''
So she decided not to have sex.
When she finally told her boyfriend that she wasn't going to have sex with him, he dumped her.
``When I finally said out loud, `I'm not going to have sex with you,' it ended,'' she said. ``It wasn't immediately afterward, but that's when the distance started.''
``The next thing I knew, he was kissing another girl,'' she said.
The breakup forced her to think about the relationship between love and sex and how the strong physical attraction never developed into anything more.
``I cared for him, but it wasn't the love that I really wanted, this true love, this ideal in my mind,'' she said. ``After that, I knew that I didn't want to share intimacy with someone who I thought was cute at the time.
``When I share it (intimacy) next, I want it to be real. I don't want to settle for less.''
- Valerie Carino, correspondent
5
Setting out with purpose
of losing her virginity
The lists were drawn up weeks ago - four guys on one and 15 on the other.
The time has come. The summer of '96 will be special. Soon she will lose her virginity and become one of the crowd, and finally be on even ground with her two best friends.
The names on the lists are guys who might be suitable for the job, selected when the 18-year-old and her two best friends sat down at a dining room table and simply asked each other, ``Who's hot?''
If they muster the courage, one day soon one of the girls will call one of the guys and ask, ``Will you do it?''
``It's not all that uncommon,'' the attractive honor student said. In fact, about eight of her 10 closest middle-school friends lost their virginity that way after entering high school. One freshman girl did it on a dare. She asked the guy between classes, left school and was back an hour later, proud and thinking she was grown up. ``All I want to know is, did it hurt and how long did it take,'' she remembers asking the freshman.
``Yes, and 10 minutes,'' the girl answered.
``That's sad,'' she said. ``You could have stayed in school and gone to math class.''
But now that she is on the verge of entering college, this seems like the most efficient way of taking care of the situation. She is tired of being burdened with a label that she says makes her less desirable to the opposite sex, tired of lurking in the social shadows of more willing friends.
``Guys know I'm a virgin, guys talk,'' she said.
One best friend in particular has persuaded her to lose the virginity label. She's the promiscuous one, the one who ``is always half dressed'' when they go out dancing.
``When we go clubbing, I get my fair share of attention,'' she said, ``but she's the one who goes home with the phone numbers.''
After those nights at the dance club, she'll think to herself, ``I'm going to be like her, I'm going to be like her.''
But after a few days, she feels herself getting ``weak,'' losing her resolve to lose her virginity. And she's not so sure she'll be able to go through with it anyway.
There have been ``lots'' of episodes when she had precious few clothes left on her slender body and the guy was completely nude. Things were happening fast. But always at the last moment she recoiled.
``I think to myself: `Would I want to have a kid with this person? Would I want to get AIDS from him?' ''
And because she doesn't carry condoms - a sort of way to protect herself from her desires - she hasn't gone all the way.
``I've only known one guy who was worth the risk,'' she said, but the relationship never went that far.
While the guys don't swarm around her like they do her friend, they can be pretty aggressive once a relationship gets started. ``It makes me mad,'' she said. ``Because I'm a virgin, guys try harder.''
The pressures are constant and varied.
In school, teachers say, ``Just say no.'' Her closest guy friends tell her not to cave in. Her boyfriends press her to go further and further. And her flamboyant best friend makes her feel like a pariah.
``People like her make it hard for people like me,'' she said.
- Lorraine Eaton ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by John Running/Tony Stone Images [Couple
with hand in back pocket]
KEYWORDS: SEX EDUCATION SERIES by CNB