Once upon a time, not very long ago, my mother had a conversation with a friend about teaching children about sex. My mother had just signed a permission slip for me to watch a video about puberty presented by my health teacher and my mother’s friend was shocked Mama Snob had allowed this transgression to take place.
“But if you teach them about it they’ll want to do it!” she shrieked to my mother’s dismay.
And she wasn’t the only parent shrieking.
I was 12-years-old at the time. In my young life I already knew the difference between a so-called “slut” and a “virgin.” Most of my peers cursed like sailors, but largely for show. The boys and girls had been separated on the playground because two boys and a girl decided to play “doctor” on the hooded part of the plaground equipment. Most of my peers had seen all the R-rated movies I wasn’t allowed to see (if Disney didn’t make it, I didn’t watch it in the 80s). And everyone giggled when someone said “sex.”
My mother, not wanting me to get my sex-ed from the playground, taught me about puberty and basic sexual function when I was only nine years old. She wasn’t exactly worried about me having sex because I knew what a penis was and the proper terms for body parts. She was worried about all the pressure and misinformation floating about among my peers. She wanted to empower me with correct information. This was part of her extensive, sometimes painful plan (for me) to ensure that none of her daughters got pregnant out of wedlock.
The plan must have worked pretty well. Though all the Snob sisters are grown and single-to-mingle, none of us have kids. (We’re ages 35, 31 and 28 respectively.) All of us have information though. Enough information that we’d honestly have no excuses if we got knocked up. It’s not like by age 15 we didn’t have an armada of facts and figures telling us how to say no and how to protect ourselves. Not to mention a mother who had “a plan” that worked all too well.
(That plan included no R-rated movies until the oldest sister was old enough to chaperone us to them. A limited amount of television. An overload of books. Not being allowed to go to sleep overs and not being allowed to date until we were 18 and even then she had to know both the boy and his parents. This was all topped of with a constant push of how we were all going to college and pregnancy could really mess that up.)
But too many people didn’t have a plan. And that’s why my friend’s mother was of the mindset that somehow watching a video about puberty would harm her son. And it shouldn’t shock anyone that her son wound up impregnating another girl when he was a teen. After all, they never talked about sex, but sex was everywhere to be found. On TV. On the radio. Amongst our peers. Sex was everywhere and unavoidable.
Black children start sexual activity on average earlier than other children. In a study of inner city teens it was found that black girls average age of first sexual intercourse is around 13. The national average is 17. Black girls also have a higher rate of STDs than their counterparts. A recent study found that half of black teens between the ages of 14 to 19 were infected with some form of STD. For white teenagers it’s 20 percent.
I believe these figures are so high due to an overall lack of sexual health education in the black community, especially among our youth, but it crosses over into adults as well who were also never educated properly.
There has always been sex, but as far as I can tell, there has never been a true “sexual revolution” in thinking among many blacks. There is a twoness of either you’re chaste and virginal or you’re promiscuious with a voracious sexual appetite and there is no inbetween. You could blame it on the music, but black music going back to blues has always had an overtly sexual under and overtone to it. There’s always been a level of raunch whether we’re talking about bump n’ grind, R. Kelly style, or bump n’ grind, old dirty bluesman style. Whether we’re having “Birthday Sex” or “Strokin’” with Clarence Carter.
There is a celebration of the most lascivious in that can be seen gyrating in rap videos or in the braggadocio of a Jay Z lyric. Sex often appears apropos of nothing in our pop art as if we’ve never escaped the Mandigo/Big Black Buck/Hottentot Venus/Black Wench stereotypes we were given after we were used to “breed” and make more slaves as part of the “Peculiar Institution.”
Living on a diet of sexual laden music and television can take a toll on the psyche.
(H)eavy exposure to sexual content on television related strongly to teens’ initiation of intercourse or their progression to more advanced sexual activities (such as “making out” or oral sex) apart from intercourse in the following year. Youths who viewed the greatest amounts of sexual content were two times more likely than those who viewed the smallest amount to initiate sexual intercourse during the following year (see figure) or to progress to more-advanced levels of other sexual activity. In effect, youths who watched the most sexual content “acted older”: a 12-year-old at the highest levels of exposure behaved like a 14- or 15-year-old at the lowest levels.
But realistically, our children aren’t having an academic discussion, processing the images they see and aligning them with history. They’re just consuming them as pro-sex endorsements, symbols of adulthood and liberation, devoid of responsibility and consequences. And while music and media do play a role in influencing views of sex on impressionable youth, the real motivator has always been other youth.
In a study presented at a meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), researchers at the University of Kentucky followed 950 teenagers at 17 high schools in Kentucky and Ohio from 9th to 11th grades. They found evidence that teens who have intercourse tend to think their friends are too, even if they’re not. “You’re 2.5 times more likely to have sex by the 9th grade if you think your friends are having sex — whether or not they really are,” says Katharine Atwood, assistant professor at the Kentucky School of Public Health. Plus, teens tended to overestimate how many of their friends were sexually active. Only 33 percent of kids in the study had had sex by the 9th grade, but 31 percent said that most or all of their friends had had sex. “If you can persuade them that fewer are having sex than they think,” she says, “that can have a significant impact on their behavior.” (Psychology Today)
There is a confusing crudeness in how many blacks view sexuality. It’s depicted as bad on one hand, and you have parents afraid of engaging in talks about sex with their children as if their off-spring lived in a bubble. On the other, you have the former BET show “Uncut” that played what passed for softcore porn on cable television in long-video form. You have rapper Snoop Dogg selling commercially friendly products to youth and you have the same Snoop Dogg who once hosted a porno. We seem to have the worst of America’s love-hate relationship with sex in the black community where you can proudly see it all hang out, while another side desperately tries to tuck it back in and no one ever cracks opens a book and learns how their bodies are supposed to work in the first place.
There’s no sexual revolution in black America, just sex. Confused, fun, dangerous, illicit, guilt-filled sex. Very few people are acting from a place of maturity and confidence, not in themselves or their sexuality. We’re living in a place where it’s become acceptable to have a kid or several out of wedlock and act like it’s impossible to make it to 30 without this happening. We’re silent about the AIDS epidemic disproportionately ravaging black women. No one wants to talk about sex, but everyone seems to want to do it, desperately, without protection and in seductive ignorance of the cruel realties of their undertakings.
I was in the mall once and a man, about my age, began to flirt with me and asked me if I had any kids. I said no and he was taken aback. He wondered if I liked kids. Then he wondered how I’d managed to make it to 31 and not get pregnant. I was taken aback and looked at him and said, point black, “Um … it was pretty easy. Birth control. Don’t have sex. Condoms.”
He smirked and conceded that I had a point. Of course, he had kids and they had seemed unavoidable for him. I’m sure they were when you choose the short-lived joy of unprotected sex over a revolution of thought.
Live Your Best Life. 
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