We are one sexually confused nation!

Do we or don’t we condone putting high school students in sexually-charged situations that place their nude bodies on display? It’s hard to tell.

Colorado high school students may face felony child pornography charges for exchanging nude photos of themselves via text, while a high school in Illinois will be forced by the federal government to allow a boy to shower with girls in their locker room, because he self-identifies as female. 

We are one sexually confused nation. We apply harsh laws intended for sex offenders to punish teens for garden-variety sexual impulses, while our schools are being used to encourage voyeurism and raise sophisticated sexual questions.

It doesn’t stop at the Nevada border. In Clark County, the school board says it will move toward a more progressive sex education program that includes such exotic subjects as transgenderism. Angry parents with pitchforks were unable to persuade the board that sex education should be confined to its original mission – helping to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Schools say yes, parents say no.

If you don’t think our sexual schizophrenia is affecting young folks, check out New York Magazine’s October piece called “Sex on Campus,” in which reporters interviewed college students about their bedroom activity. The resulting story would be comic, if it weren’t so sad. In it, we learn that some young adults wish to be liberated from the language of sexual identity. The editors helpfully include a glossary to untangle declarations like these:

“… I am agender. I’m removing myself from the social construct of gender,” says one of the featured students.

Another says, “… I’m an agender demi-girl with connection to the female binary gender.”

And how about this? “I identify as panromantic, asexual, agender — and if you wanna shorten it all, we can just go as queer.”

Thank God I’m not employed by a university, where I would no doubt be accountable for understanding the linguistic nuances, and for properly using these terms in my work-related communication.

Equally unsettling are the heterosexual kids in the New York Mag story, who convey not only a disdain for traditional sexual relationships, but a striking absence of sexual passion. (Remember passion?) The takeaway is that relationships are hard, so why have them? But these young folks also hint at yearnings beyond the strictly physical, which they sadly seem unable to name.

A 20-year-old who says she’s a “bisexual queer ciswoman” does the best job of summing it up.  “… it’s still really lonely, hard, and confusing a lot of the time. Just because there are more words doesn’t mean that the feelings are easier.”

Ah, yes. All of us remember the emotional stew pot in which young adult sexual stirrings occur.

Adult identity was never a light switch that clicks on the moment you leave high school. It develops slowly, over time. It’s carved by pain and loneliness, and by accomplishment and happiness, too. It includes sexual identity, and it’s influenced from our earliest moments.

The grownups remember grasping for identity. We know, and yet we are failing to ease the path. I’m a hopelessly straight ciswoman from an earlier generation, but I know confusion when I see it. It’s my generation that’s sowing the confusion.   ###