ShawnCuthill.com wrote:One of the things that stuck out to me was that they were exposing teen terms like "friends with benefits", even more casual is a "hook up" with complete strangers.
Wow. Booooo!
This is nothing new to me working with teens, but it does open the question of how to deter teens from sex until marriage. Fear? Openness? Education?
Fear can be overdone, but you've gotta be open and educate, but the best thing is for teens to have good friends, and good experiences with the opposite sex - I say "good" in terms both of "fun" and "morally good". What gets a lot of teens, as much as the hormones, as well is friends. Are they promiscuous? Then that will mean pressure on those who are not.
I think of one episode of Buffy, 1.4 "Teacher's Pet", was an excellent demonstration of this. Xander (stupid git that he is) was getting hassled by other guys because he hadn't gotten any yet, and out of that pressure decides to go for his substitute science teacher who was really putting it out there. Turns out she was a giant preying mantis who was going to copulate with him and then eat him, so, there was that metaphor for the dangers of inappropriate sex. As well, what I'd like other teenage guys to see, is that the one guy who was hassling Xander the most, who bragged about how many women he'd been with, was also exposed as a virgin by the interest of this she-mantis; I think that's helpful for a lot of guys to know, that the boasts of their peers are mostly lies. Now, mind you, I have real issues for the sexual ethics of Joss Whedon as expressed in Buffy/Angel: sex bad. Fathers bad. But that episode I would show to a youth group before most of the 70s sex ed 80mm filmstrips about Fluffy Bunny, and how you're growing hair where there was no hair before.
