response changedAccording to some of my self-styled liberal American friends, they find themselves more and more like their own parents as they deal with their kids. The latest is underage sex, which is apparently increasingly "normal" in the current teenage generation. One of my friends confronted his eleven-year-old daughter who revealed she doesn't actually have sex, she only performs an act on "them" that a certain ex-President also considered to be not sex. The "them" is a group of unemployed youths who sponge off their parents and hang around outside the school socialising (?!) with younger girls.
These parents want to be progressive and cool, but they can't get past the idea that these younger girls are at risk of being taken advantage of by predatory men. And yet their daughters insist that it is consensual and that there is no victim. What to do? It isn't easy for people who were at the forefront of progressive change to find themselves playing a more "conservative" tune. But that's the reality of it.
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1