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When sex is bad for you - Tapu Misa NZ Herald July 18, 2007


Sexual freedom leaves some teens unhappy, even suicidal


It turns out that girls aren't having fun, and sexual freedom is nowhere near as free as in Sex and the City made out.


In a Sunday times article this year entitled, "Casual Sex is a con: women just aren't like men" Dawn Eden described herself as one of the dissatisfied daughter of the sexual revolution, and a new counterculture of women who are realising  that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead".


Eden 37 and single, was "born into a world which encouraged young women to explore their sexuality.  It was almost presented to us as a feminist fact".

Eden became a groupie, embracing "the sex loving feminist icon" Germaine Greer's "call to men's arms" with evident fervour.  Unfortunately, lust wasn't the way station to love and marriage she'd believed it was and eventually she concluded that the "misguided hedonistic philosophy" which urges young women into this kind of behaviour hurts men as well as women.


"Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I've tried their philosophy - that a women can shag like a man - and it doesn't work.  We're not built like that.


Women are built for bonding.  We are vessels and we seek to be filled.

"for that reason, however much we try to convince ourselves that it isn't so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain we are loved."


In her just released new book, "Girls Gone Mild', American writer Wendy

Shallit chronicles the same growing disenchantment among young women who complain that old fashioned dating has been replaced by "hooking up", involving casual, commitment free sex - an arrangement 'in which the cards are all stacked in favour of the guys", and the girls are considered pathological if they admit to wanting more.

"Often parents don't realise that their sexual revolution has become the entrenched status quo" Shallit writes.


"today many young women feel oppressed by the expectation that they  will  engage in casual sex, just as their mothers once felt oppressed by the expectation that they would be virgins until marriage.


"Parents in the grip of the notion that they need to be 'cool' want to show that they understand that the kids are ‘going to do it anyway'.  Ironically, this adds to the pressure."


The notion of casual sex, unencumbered by emotional entanglement, is so entrenched that the mere idea of having a conversation with one's prospective sexual partner has been repackaged as something called PSD.


"PSD stands for 'pre-sex discussion'.  As [another writer] glowingly reports, the  sex therapist Roger Libby has recently discovered that if you get to know the person you're about to have sex with, even a little bit, the sex itself is improved."


Yet is all this sex making our teenagers any happier? Evidently not.  Shalit cites a study of 279 female adolescents published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in June 2005, which found that 41 per cent of girls aged 14 to 17 reported having 'unwanted sex', most because "they feared the partner would get angry if denied sex".


Even when sex was wanted, participants tended to regret it soon after, especially the girls.


The more sexual experiences teens have, writes Shallit, the more likely they are to be depressed and commit suicide - and this is particularly true for girls.

In May 2006, a study backed by the  National Institute of Health in the US, found that among the nearly 19,000 teens, girls were about four times more likely to be depressed if they experiment with sex.


Another study done in 2005 by the Pacific Institute for Research concluded that "sex drugs and alcohol among teens actually precede - and apparently lead to - the onset of adolescent depression".


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