Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Teens Experimenting with "Bisexuality"

Is "sexual orientation" inborn? (How is this term defined, anyhow?) Is "bisexuality" inborn? Read the article (linked below) and then answer those questions.

The latest chic thing is for young teens to say they're "bi". We hear that many of the 9th-grade girls at a west suburban Boston high school are claiming this identity -- "to get attention," say the slightly older girls who are our sources. And we've witnessed 13 to 14-year-old girls wildly making out (with each other, not with boys) in public, at a "safe" teen club in southern New Hampshire. It's the latest chic thing. (Needless to say, adult authority figures are nowhere to be found when this is going on in the school or club settings.)

A "bi-clique" is detailed in "The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School," from New York Magazine. This is where sex ed and homosex ed have brought us. Excerpts (with emphasis added):

[Students at the school] are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open....

Their sexual behavior is by no means the norm at their school; Stuyvesant has some 3,000 students, and Alair’s group numbers a couple dozen. But they’re also not the only kids at school who experiment with members of the same sex. “Other people do it, too,” said a junior who’s part of a more popular crowd. “They get drunk and want to be a sex object. But that’s different. Those people aren’t bisexual.” Alair and her friends, on the other hand, are known as the “bi clique.” In the social strata, they’re closer to the cool kids than to the nerds. The boys have shaggy hair and T-shirts emblazoned with the names of sixties rockers. The girls are pretty and clever and extroverted....

It’s true that girls have always experimented, but it’s typically been furtive, kept quiet. The difference now is how these girls are flaunting it. It’s become a form of exhibitionism, a way to get noticed at an age when getting noticed is what it’s all about. And as rebellions go, it’s pretty safe. Hooking up with girls won’t get them pregnant. It won’t hurt their GPA. It won’t keep them out of honor societies, social groups, the Ivy League....

In the end, the Stuyvesant cuddle puddle might just be a trickle-down version of the collegiate “gay until graduation.” On the other hand, these girls are experimenting at an earlier age, when their identities and their ideas about what they want in a partner are still being formed. Will it affect the way they choose to live their adult lives? ...