KEY POINTS:
A young friend, now in her 30s, once told me that one of the best things her mother ever did was to give her permission to invoke her name whenever she was pressured to do something she wasn't comfortable with.
Use me, her mum said, blame me. And my friend did, frequently. Amazingly, her friends always accepted the "my mum won't let me" line.
These days it's not so easy to play the scary, conservative mum, though I do my best. I've told my teen daughter to forget sex till she's at least 30, but she thinks I'm joking. Apparently, modern mothers provide condoms and make themselves scarce (that'll be the day.)
What's a mum to do? It's tough to preach the virtues of abstention when there's so much expectation, even encouragement, to embrace one's inner slut, unhindered by social stigma or negative judgment. Indeed, we applaud such exploration. It's good to be bad.
Ask Sharon Stone, who last year publicly shared her advice to teenage girls who kept asking her what they should do if pressured for sex. Aunty Sharon told them to offer oral sex instead, because it was so much "safer" than the other kinds.
Still, while Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are doing their utmost to behave as badly as the boys, there's increasing evidence that many young women are disenchanted with the sexual world they've inherited from the free love 60s.
It turns out that girls aren't having that much fun, and sexual freedom is nowhere near as pain-free as 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 daughters of the sexual revolution, 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 woman 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 and convince ourselves that it isn't so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved."
In her just released new book, Girls Gone Mild, American writer Wendy Shalit 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," Shalit 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 a 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 2006, 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 Shalit, 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 Institutes of Health in the US, found that among nearly 19,000 teens, girls were about four times more likely to be depressed if they experimented 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".
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
