Risky business

In my paper, in my usually leftist town, underage drinking and sex were referred to as "risky behaviors." As someone who had quite safe sex as a teen, I wonder why we insist in looking at teenage sex as an inherent danger. Thus, I felt in good company today, when I read William Saletan's column in slate.com. He writes that, given that the onset of menarche in the US is about 12 and a half, we need to stop punishing teens for having sex: it's, given the conditions of their bodies, a fairly normal response. He writes,

For more than a century, states and countries have been raising and standardizing the legal age of consent. Horny teenagers are being thrown in with pedophiles. The point of this crackdown was to lock up perverts and protect incompetent minors. But the rationales and the numbers don't match up. The age of majority and the age of competence are coming apart. The age of competence is fracturing, and the age of female puberty is declining. It's time to abandon the myth of the 'age of consent' and lower the threshold for legal sex."

In Romeo and Juliet, a play about youthful passionate sexuality, Juliet is not yet 14. In many pre-Victorian cultures, the age of consent was in the early teens. The age of consent and the age of marriage were much younger than we are comfortable with and I think it is perhaps that coupling, that one should be married to have sex, that makes us obsessed with celibate teens.

Perhaps, if we were more focused on safe sex for teens, rather than no sex (and sometimes, jail) for teens, we would have fewer abortions, and fewer sexually transmitted diseases.