Saturday, December 06, 2008

The Twilight of Overt Sexuality

Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd rather any children I have be inundated with trampy archetypes than messages that say too much lust will cause them to die. The Globe reports that kids these days are into romance, not the hit it and quit it messages I was getting as a teenager in the late '90s.

"If [the main characters from Twilight] kiss too deeply, he'll destroy her. It really equates desire with death," said Amy Boesky, who teaches English at Boston College and wrote two of the novels in the "Beacon Street Girls" series under the pseudonym Annie Bryant. "I can see why girls find it enthralling, but I also find it troubling."

You and me both, lady.

I read Pride and Prejudice and The Time Traveler's Wife. I love a good romance. But I don't believe that pushing a moralistic tale or purity rings on children is any healthier than the sexy schoolgirl costume Britney Spears wore to fame when I was in high school. Too much of either school of thought is bad for kids. My theory is that we teach kids the basic mechanics of how sex works, inform them of the risks, and let them make up their own minds.

Nowadays, we have to recognize that teenagers are ultimately the ones who decide what they do with their bodies. Whether they think they'll be made undead by a sexy vampire or beg their boyfriend to hit them one more time is a choice they have to make.

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