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>> 63 4 The Hypersexual Teen Sexy Bodies, Raging Hormones, and Irresponsibility As I have tried to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, parents do not view their own teen children as sexually agentic, desiring subjects but instead see them as young, naïve, and not interested in talking about sex. Parents think this way partly because they believe teen sexual activity is highly dangerous, linked to deviance and lack of proper adult guidance. But parents also stated in no uncertain terms that, because of their youth and raging hormones, teenagers are incapable of handling the responsibilities of sex, a belief shared by many Americans. In thinking this way, parents create a binary between adult and adolescent sexuality: adult sexual activity is safe, responsible, and mature; adolescent sexual activity is unsafe, irresponsible, and immature. This chapter examines how and why parents come to construct this binary, focusing on how their beliefs link to larger social discourses and inequalities that establish the boundaries of “normal,” acceptable sexual expression. In doing so, I am influenced by scholars who urge us to consider how categories of difference are created and their consequences for the reproduction of inequality.1 64 > 65 Parents are not alone in this regard, as discourses and images of raging hormones and sexualized youthful bodies dominate U.S. culture. For instance, during the Texas State Board of Education meetings I attended to observe local debates over sex education, one speaker after another described teenagers as potentially sexually hedonistic and in need of social constraint. They differed only on how best to control teenage sexuality; some advocated information on contraception and others argued that teens should abstain from sex until marriage or adulthood. One speaker, in attacking the abstinence -only position, compared a teenage body to “a shiny red sports car sitting in the driveway. Do you tell them they can’t drive it ’til they’re married? No! They’re going to want to drive that car.” In this sense, teens are not only naturally motivated to have sex, but the motivation stems from the signals they receive from their attractive, youthful bodies. In Harmful to Minors, Judith Levine observes that, while Western culture was framing young people as innocent and without desires, “it [also] constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object”: the innocent child.4 Indeed, in advertising and elsewhere, youthful bodies are often portrayed as the cultural epitome of sexiness reflecting, Levine argues, adults’ “erotic attraction to children.”5 Following a similar thread, Casper and Moore contend that popular television programs about pedophiles do not just depict children as vulnerable to sexual predation, they revel in children’s vulnerability while playing up their desirability precisely as vulnerable innocents;6 the implication is that their predation is not only inevitable, as in damsel-in-distress stories, it is also titillating. In these ways children are not simply deemed innocent but are constructed as profoundly desirable precisely because of this innocence. These dual associations in turn magnify adults’ fears about child and teen sexuality, as well as their children’s sexual safety.7 And make no mistake about it: parents are very fearful about their teenage children’s sexual safety. As we have seen, some of these fears center on disease, pregnancy, and deviance. But parents also think about teen sexuality in terms of hormones, hedonism, and irresponsibility. Running parallel to a notion of teenagers as young and sexually naïve is a dominant understanding of teenagers as sex-crazed because they are teenagers. School officials, educators , media, and other adults frequently construct teens as both too young to know about sex and too sexually driven to be trusted with sexual information : teens are discursively “made up” as sexually innocent but at the same time as hormonally fueled and sexually driven.8 These polarized discourses are accompanied by heightened concerns about child sexual abuse and sex predators.9 66 > 67 Just as young children cannot be trusted with candy, Sylvia and her husband believe that teenagers cannot be trusted with their bodies. Teenagers, parents told me, ooze desire and desirability; their bodies are sexy and desirable as well as hypersexual and desiring. This understanding among parents fuels a perception of their teens’ vulnerability and the sense that teenagers are dangers to themselves. Of course, parents are not alone in this way of thinking; sex educators and other adults also hold this belief. Decrying her students’ presumed risk taking, Ms. Fox—the health teacher at Taylor High—frequently chided them, “You...

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