SEX IS DEATH. (Kids do the darndest things)

I came to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lusts. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. —St. Augustine, Confessions

Golly, Mom, I'm gonna be in a magazine!

New York magazine is a prime repository of SEX IS DEATH material. But don't fool yourselves, kiddies. This nonsense doesn't just happen in Sodom on the Hudson. The children in Podunk have also been indoctrinated in the cult of orgasm über alles.

The whole thing makes for bleak and dreary reading. That, and the fact the webpages' download is maddeningly slow, have forced me to only post my favorite bits.

BTW, I am fairly sure I know why all the children in this story fail to recognize the despair constantly pouring out of themselves and their friends, but what excuse does the writer have?

The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School
Researchers find it shocking that 11 percent of American girls between 15 and 19 claim to have same-sex encounters. Clearly they’ve never observed the social rituals of the pansexual, bi-queer, metroflexible New York teen.


Alair is wearing a tight white tank top cut off above the hem to show her midriff. Her black cargo pants graze the top of her combat boots, and her black leather belt is studded with metal chains that drape down at intervals across her hips. She has long blonde curls that at various times have been dyed green, blue, red, purple, and orange. (“A mistake,” she says. “Even if you mean to dye your hair orange, it’s still a mistake.”) Despite the fact that she’s fully clothed, she seems somehow exposed, her baby fat lingering in all the right places. Walking down the sterile, white halls of Stuyvesant High School, she creates a wave of attention. She’s not the most popular girl in school, but she is well known. “People like me,” she wrote in an instant message. “Well, most of them.”

Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.

I know what you are thinking.
"Where are the teachers and administrators?"
You are hoplessly naive.

Their friend Nathan, a senior with John Lennon hair and glasses, is there with his guitar, strumming softly under the conversation. “So many of the girls here are lesbian or have experimented or are confused,” he says.

Ilia, another senior boy, frowns at Nathan’s use of labels. “It’s not lesbian or bisexual. It’s just, whatever . . . ”

Since the school day is winding down, things in the hallway are starting to get rowdy. Jane disappears for a while and comes back carrying a pint-size girl over her shoulder. “Now I take her off and we have gay sex!” she says gleefully, as she parades back and forth in front of the cuddle puddle. “And it’s awesome!” The hijacked girl hangs limply, a smile creeping to her lips. Ilia has stuffed papers up the front of his shirt and prances around on tiptoe, batting his eyes and sticking out his chest. Elle is watching, enthralled, as two boys lock lips across the hall. “Oh, my,” she murmurs. “Homoerotica. There’s nothing more exciting than watching two men make out.” And everyone is talking to another girl in the puddle who just “came out,” meaning she announced that she’s now open to sexual overtures from both boys and girls, which makes her a minor celebrity, for a little while.

Ha! Andy Warhol, call your office.

When asked how many of her female friends have had same-sex experiences, Alair answers, “All of them.” Then she stops to think about it. “All right, maybe 80 percent. At least 80 percent of them have experimented. And they still are. It’s either to please a man, or to try it out, or just to be fun, or ’cause you’re bored, or just ’cause you like it . . . whatever.”

"To please a man..." When will the so-called feminists get it? Women are slaves to men when they behave like men at their worst.

With teenagers there is always a fair amount of posturing when it comes to sex, a tendency to exaggerate or trivialize, innocence mixed with swagger. It’s also true that the “puddle” is just one clique at Stuyvesant, and that Stuyvesant can hardly be considered a typical high school. It attracts the brightest public-school students in New York, and that may be an environment conducive to fewer sexual inhibitions. “In our school,” Elle says, “people are getting a better education, so they’re more open-minded.”

Wow. People actually believe that? That's pretty stupid. Even for an adolescent. (I wonder how many degrees Aleister Crowley had?)

That said, the Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger. And this is a conservative estimate, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell who has been conducting research on same-sex-attracted adolescents for over twenty years. Depending on how you phrase the questions and how you define sex between women, he believes that “it’s possible to get up to 20 percent of teenage girls.”

Of course, what can’t be expressed in statistical terms is how teenagers think about their same-sex interactions. Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. “It’s not like, Oh, I’m going to hit on her now. It’s just kind of like, you come up to a friend, you grab their ass,” Alair explains. “It’s just, like, our way of saying hello.”

These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

Congratulations. We've officially destroyed childhood. Hell, even I used the word adolescent earlier in this post.

To some it may sound like a sexual Utopia, where labels have been banned and traditional gender roles surpassed, but it’s a complicated place to be. Anyone who has ever been a girl in high school knows the vicissitudes of female friendships. Add to that a sexual component and, well, things get interesting. Take Alair and her friend Jane, for example. “We’ve been dancing around each other for, like, three years now,” says Alair. “I’d hop into bed with her in a second.” Jane is tall and curvy with green eyes and faint dimples. She thinks Alair is “amazing,” but she’s already had a female friendship ruined when it turned into a romantic relationship, so she’s reluctant to let it happen again. Still, they pet each other in the hall, flirt, kiss, but that’s it, so far. “Alair,” Jane explains, “is literally in love with everyone and in love with no one.”

Yeah, it's complicated. That's what's wrong with it. If only people could get rid of love, jealousy, memory, fear, and conscience we could all get some teenage girls.

Relationships are a bitch, dude.”

Alair is having lunch with Jane, Elle, and their friend Nathan at a little Indian place near Jane’s Upper West Side apartment. Jane has been telling the story of her first lesbian relationship: She fell for a girl who got arrested while protesting the Republican National Convention (very cool), but the girl stopped calling after they spent the night together (very uncool).

“We should all be single for the rest of our lives,” Alair continues. “And we should all have sugar daddies.” As the only child of divorced parents, Alair learned early that love doesn’t always end in happily ever after and that sex doesn’t always end in love.

This little Alair babe has clearly internalized the message rich and powerful older men have been peddling for several thousand years: The courtesan is the pinnacle of womanhood.

Senator Murder and King Goober II, call your respective offices.

Maybe everyone ought to ask their daughters right now if they aspire to be expensive whores...

Nathan looks across the table at her and nods knowingly. He recently broke up with a girl he still can’t get off his mind, even though he wasn’t entirely faithful when they were together. “I agree. I wholeheartedly agree,” he says.

“I disagree,” says Elle, alarmed. She’s the romantic of the group, a bit naïve, if you ask the others.

“Well,” says Nathan. “You’re, like, the only one in a happy relationship right now, so . . . ”

Alair cracks up. “Happy? Her man is gayer than I am!” (Jane, the sarcastic one, has a joke about this boy: “He’s got one finger left in the closet, and it’s in Elle, depending on what time it is.”)

“But at least she’s happy,” argues Nathan.

“When I’m single, I say I’m happy I’m single, and when I’m in a relationship I seem happy in the relationship. Really, I’m filled with angst!” says Elle.

Nathan rolls his eyes. “Anyone who says they’re filled with angst is definitely not filled with angst.”

He’s got a point. In her brand-new sneakers and her sparkly barrettes, Elle is hardly a poster child for teenage anxiety. She makes A’s at Stuyvesant, babysits her cousins, and is engaging in a way that will go over well in college interviews...

Due to time constraints, we now move to further action...

“The interesting kids kind of gravitate towards each other,” Elle had explained earlier. “A lot of them are heteroflexible or bisexual or gay. And what happens is, like, we’re all just really comfortable around each other.”

Still, among her friends, Elle’s ideas are the most traditional. Her first kiss with a girl was at Hebrew school. Since then, she’s made out with girls frequently but dated only guys.

“I’ve always been the marrying type,” she says to the table. “Not just ’cause it’s been forced on me, but ’cause it’s a good idea. I really want to have kids when I grow up.”

“Have mine,” offers Alair.

“I will,” Elle coos in her best sultry voice. “Anything for you, Alair.”

Jane blinks quickly, something she has a habit of doing when she’s gathering her thoughts. “They will probably have the technology by the time we grow up that you two could have a baby together.”

Ahhhh...smell the freedom granted to us by the magical technology fairies...

“But, like, if Alair doesn’t want to birth her own child, I could.”

“I’ll birth it,” Alair says, sighing. “I just want you to raise it and pay for it and take care of it and never tell it that I’m its parent. ’Cause, I mean, that would scar a child for life. Like, the child would start convulsing.” Everyone laughs.

Speaking of parents, let's meet the wacky bunch of terminal adolescents (that word again!) for whom these precocious perverts are merely tax deductions.

“You’d be an awesome mom, I think,” says Elle. Her own mom puts a lot of pressure on her to date a nice Jewish boy. Once, Elle asked her, “ ‘Mom, what if I have these feelings for girls?’ and she said, ‘Do you have feelings for boys too?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And she’s like, ‘Then you have to ignore the ones you have for girls. If you can be straight, you have to be straight.’ ” Elle asked to go by a nickname because she hasn’t told her mother that she’s not ignoring those feelings.

Even as cultural acceptance of gay and bisexual teenagers grows, these kids are coming up against an uncomfortable generational divide. In many of their families, the ‘It’s fine, as long as it’s not my kid’ attitude prevails. Some of the parents take comfort in the belief that this is just a phase their daughters will grow out of. Others take more drastic measures. Earlier this year at Horace Mann, when one girl’s parents found out that she was having a relationship with another girl, they searched her room, confiscated her love letters, and even had the phone company send them transcripts of all her text messages. Then they informed her girlfriend’s parents. In the end, the girls were forbidden to see each other outside school.

Even Jane, whose parents know about her bisexuality and are particularly well suited to understanding it (her mother teaches a college course in human sexuality), has run up against the limits of their liberal attitudes. They requested that she go by her middle name in this story. “My mom thinks I’m going to grow up and be ashamed of my sexuality,” she says. “But I won’t....”

Alair is one of the lucky ones whose parents don’t mind her bisexual tendencies. Her dad is the president of a company that manages performance artists and her mom is a professional organizer. “My parents are awesome,” she says. “I think they’ve tried to raise me slightly quirky, like in a very hippie little way, and it totally backfired on them....”

Au contraire, Alair! Your parental units have exactly what they want. And deserve.

“My mom’s like, ‘Alair, I don’t understand you. I want to be a parent to you but I have no control at all . . . As a person you’re awesome. You’re hilarious, you entertain me, you’re so cool. I would totally be your friend. But as your mother, I’m worried.’ ”

“I can’t say I was pleased,” her mother tells me about first learning of Alair’s bisexual experimentation. “But I can’t say I was upset either. I like that she’s forthright about what she wants, that she values her freedom, that she takes care of herself. But I have all the trepidations a parent has when they learn their child is becoming sexually active...”

I can totally relate, Mom. It's not like you can teach her to put one of those magical condoms on her tongue. Or can you???

...Alair and Nathan want to go to the same college, wherever that may be.

“You do realize,” Alair tells him, “that, like, we’re two of the most awesome people in the school.”

“We would room,” Nathan says. “We would totally room.”

“Fuck yeah. But I’m gonna need a lock on my door for like, ‘I’m bringing these five girls home, Nathan. What are you doing tonight?’ ” She mimics his voice, “‘I’m reading my book.’ ”

“Ouch!” Nathan scowls at her.

“It’s the Kama Sutra!”

“Oh, right, right.”

“I’ve actually read the Kama Sutra,” Alair informs the table. “Some of that shit just isn’t gonna work.”

“I know!” says Jane. “We have three editions at my house.”

Hmmm...intellectualoids...and clever ones at that. America's future is secure!

“Like, I’ve tried it. You need a man that’s like ‘Argh!’ ” Alair pumps her arms up above her head. “I’ve got one of those guys, actually.” She’s talking about Jason, the boy she was hanging out with last night, another frequenter of the cuddle puddle. “He’s so built...”

Programs! Programs! Get your program! You can't tell the players without a program...

It practically takes a diagram to plot all the various hookups and connections within the cuddle puddle. Elle’s kissed Jane and Jane’s kissed Alair and Alair’s kissed Elle. And then from time to time Elle hooks up with Nathan, but really only at parties, and only when Bethany isn’t around, because Nathan really likes Bethany, who doesn’t have a thing for girls but doesn’t have a problem with girls who do, either. Alair’s hooking up with Jason (who “kind of” went out with Jane once), even though she sort of also has a thing for Hector, who Jane likes, too—though Jane thinks it’s totally boring when people date people of the same gender. Ilia has a serious girlfriend, but girls were hooking up at his last party, which was awesome. Molly has kissed Alair, and Jane’s ex-girlfriend first decided she was bi while staying at Molly’s beach house on Fire Island. Sarah sometimes kisses Elle, although she has a boyfriend—he doesn’t care if she hooks up with other girls, since she’s straight anyway. And so on...

Of course, the definition of “hooking up” is as nebulous as the definition of “heteroflexible.” A catchall phrase for anything from “like, exchanging of saliva” to intercourse, it’s often a euphemism for oral sex. But rules are hazy when you’re talking about physical encounters between two girls. As Alair puts it, “How do you define female sex? It’s difficult. I don’t know what the bases are. Everyone keeps trying to explain the bases to me, but there’s so many things that just don’t fit into the base system. I usually leave it up to the other girl.”

Elle elaborates by using herself as an example. At a recent party, she says, she “kissed five people and, like, hooked up with two going beyond kissing. One of them was a boy and one of them was a girl. The reason I started hooking up with the guy is because he was making out with this other guy and he came back and was like, ‘I have to prove that I’m straight.’ And I was standing right there. That’s how it all began.” The guy in question became her boyfriend that night; even though the relationship is all of a week old, she calls it her second “serious” relationship. “At least I’m intending for it to be serious.” (It lasted eleven days.)

The cuddle puddle may be where a flirtation begins, but parties, not surprisingly, are where most of the real action takes place. In parentless apartments, the kids are free to “make the rounds,” as they call it, and move their more-than-kissing hookups with both genders behind locked bathroom doors or onto coat-laden beds. Even for bisexual girls there is, admittedly, a Girls Gone Wild aspect to these evenings. Some girls do hook up with other girls solely to please the guys who watch, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the behavior of someone who is legitimately sexually interested and someone who wants to impress the boy across the room. Alair is quick to disparage this behavior—“It kinda grosses me out. It can’t be like, this could be fun . . . is anyone watching my chest heave?”—but Jane sees it as empowering. “I take advantage of it because manipulating boys is fun as hell. Boys make out with boys for our benefit as well. So it’s not just one way. It’s very fair.”

She’s not just making excuses. These girls have obliterated the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” stranglehold that has traditionally plagued high-school females. They set the sexual agenda for their group. And they expect reciprocation. “I’ve made it my own personal policy that if I’m going to give oral sex, I’m going to receive oral sex,” says Jane. “Jane wears the pants in any relationship,” Ilia says with a grin. “She wears the pants in my relationship, even though she’s not part of it.”

Har dee har har har! The writer seems almost giddy, as if these confused and ignorant children are a combination of Kinsey, Hefner, and one of the Clintons all rolled into one.

When the girls talk about other girls they sound like football players in a locker room (Q.E.D. - F.G.) (“The Boobie Goddesses of our grade are Natalie and Annette,” or “Have you seen the Asian girl who wears that tiny red dress and those high red sneakers?,” or “Carol is so hot! Why is she straight? I don’t get it”), but there’s little gossip about same-sex hookups—partly because the novelty has by now worn off, and partly because, as Alair puts it, “it’s not assumed that a relationship will stem from it.” It seems that even with all the same-sex activity going on, it’s still hard for the girls to find other girls to actually date. Jane says this is because the girls who like girls generally like boys more, at least for dating. “A lot of girls are scared about trying to make a lesbian relationship work,” she says. “There’s this fear that there has to be the presence of a man or it won’t work.”

Yep. Somebody's got to pay for the movie tickets. And the weed. And the food. (According to Kinsey, butch lesbians are notoriously cheap. Of course, he only interviewed two.)

But dating gay girls isn’t really an option either, because the cuddle-puddle kids are not considered part of the gay community. “One of the great things about bisexuality is that mainstream gay culture doesn’t affect us as much,” (Read that one again, kiddies. But sit down first or you'll get dizzy. - F. G.) says Jane, “so it’s not like bi boys feel that they have to talk with a lisp and walk around all fairylike, and it’s not like girls feel like they have to dress like boys.” The downside, she says, is that “gays feel that bis will cheat on them in a straight manner.” In fact, there’s a general impression of promiscuity that bisexual girls can’t seem to shake. “The image of people who are bi is that they are sluts,” says Jane. “One of the reasons straight boys have this bi-girls fantasy is that they are under the impression that bisexual girls will sleep with anything that moves and that’s why they like both genders, because they are so sex-obsessed. Which isn’t true.”

Ow! Poor Fyodor's old head hurts from trying to make sense out of the above pile of crap.

On the other hand, it's good to know high school kids are still dumb as dirt.
What's worse, having a couple of underage beers or rampant sodomy?

The more things change...

If "Why?" is smacking the back of your eyes witha 2x4, desperately trying to get your attention, get a load of this:

If you ask the girls why they think there’s more teenage bisexual experimentation happening today, Alair is quick with an explanation. “I blame television,” she says. “I blame the media.” She’s partly joking, giving the stock answer. But there’s obviously some truth to it. She’s too young to remember a time when she couldn’t turn on Showtime or even MTV and regularly see girls kissing girls. It’s not simply that they’re imitating what they’ve seen, it’s that the stigma has been erased, maybe even transformed into cachet. “It’s in the realm of possibilities now,” as Ritch Savin-Williams puts it. “When you don’t think of it as being a possibility, you don’t do it. But now that it’s out there, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that could be fun.’ ” Of course, sexy TV shows would have no impact at all if they weren’t tapping into something more innate. Perhaps, as research suggests, sexuality is more fluid for women than it is for men. Perhaps natural female intimacy opens the door to sexual experimentation at an age when male partners can be particularly unsatisfying. As one mother of a cuddle-puddle kid puts it, “Emotionally it’s safer—it’s difficult in this age group to hold onto your body. You’re changing. There’s a safety factor in a girl being with a girl.” Then, laughing, she asked that her name be withheld. “My mother might read this...”

Due to time constraints, we now move to further action...

...(Jane) is in a particularly good mood today, quick to smile, and even more quick to drop into conversation the name of the boy she recently started dating, a tall, good-looking senior and one of the most popular kids at Stuyvesant. Later, while rummaging for silverware, she casually mentions that they may start dating exclusively.

“Ugh!” Alair exclaims, grabbing her by the hips and pulling her away from the drawer. “What about me?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Jane counters, grinning and snatching up a fork. “I’m not interested in any other guys.”

Still, it’s clear that Jane really likes this guy. And Alair seems a little rattled. Her fortune cookie reads, “You are the master of every situation.” Except perhaps this one.

Women. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em. (Thanks to Al Bundy for that classic bit of tv-cana.

I feel your pain, Alair. I really do.

Later, after the lamps have been switched on and the takeout eaten, both girls are on a love seat in the living room, leaning into each other, boys and dirty dishes strewn about. Jane starts showing off what she can do with her tongue, touching her nose with it, twisting it around, doing rolls. Everyone is impressed.

“My tongue gets a lot of practice,” she says.

See gratuitous prophylactic joke above.

“Why don’t you practice on me?” Alair demands. “I’ll hook up with you.” It’s clear that she means more than kissing.

Jane blinks a few times. “I’m scared I’m going to be bad at it,” she finally says. She’s being coy, just putting her off, but there’s a bit of sincerity to her nervousness.

“You won’t be bad at it,” Alair reassures her. She pulls Jane between her legs and starts giving her a massage, running her hands up and down her back, pushing her hair aside to rub her neck. When the massage is over, Jason comes over to Alair, grabs her hand, kisses it. For the rest of the evening, he stays close to her side, but she stays close to Jane.

The next day when I meet up with Alair on her way to choir practice, she tells me that nothing ever happened with Jane that night. She’s decided to give up on her. Jane’s with someone else, it’s official, and there’s no room in the relationship for her. “But you know what,” she says, mustering a smile. “They’re, like, monogamous together, and I’m really happy for them. And being their friend and seeing them so happy together totally beats a fling.” She pauses. “It really does.”

May God have mercy on all their poor souls. And ours.

(Memo To Alair: Iggy Pop is so over. I mean he stinks out loud. Always has, always will. His ignorant exhibitionism, lack of talent, sexual stupidity, and self-destructiveness...huh?...yeah, I see what you mean. Maybe that is the point. Good luck, babydoll.)


Part 1: SEX IS DEATH. (Stories for Boys) is here.
Part 2: SEX IS DEATH. (Distaff Death) is here.
Part 3: SEX IS DEATH. (Joyously dispensing death) is here.
Part 4: SEX IS DEATH. (Sex is depression) is here.
Part 5: SEX IS DEATH. (When self-pleasuring becomes self-destruction) is here.
Part 6: SEX IS DEATH. (Sex is theft) is here.
Part 7: SEX IS DEATH. (A review of Bareback Mountain) is here.
Part 8: SEX IS DEATH. (What is the ultimate penalty?) is here.
Part 9: SEX IS DEATH. (Haven from reality) is here.
Part 10: SEX IS DEATH. (Sin-redemption-reasons-reason) is here.
Part 11: SEX IS DEATH. (Mommy loves you) is here.
Part 12: SEX IS DEATH. (George Gilder offers a clue) is here.
Part 13: SEX IS DEATH. (Post-killem depression) is here.
Part 14: SEX IS DEATH. (Whither womanhood) is here.
Part 15: SEX IS DEATH. (Saving psychology 1) is here.
Part 16: SEX IS DEATH. (Saving psychology 2) is here.
Part 17: SEX IS DEATH. (Fear of the boomers) is here.
Part 18: SEX IS DEATH. (The battle continues apace) is here.
Part 19: SEX IS DEATH. (Hot for teacher) is here.