8 Posted on 02/10/2000 23:26:56 PST by Askel5
For a really good example of this, I suggest a look at the transcript from Frontline's The Lost Children of Rockdale County about a syphilis outbreak in Conyers Georgia I happened to catch on Tuesday [uh, this was not exactly what I meant to say at the time]. I've lived in New Orleans a long time and really thought I'd heard it all but these interviews with children about sexual practices I thought were wild by lower Quarter standards really stunned me. Mostly, it made me sad ... especially knowing that by 15 or 16, most girls have figured out that sex is something guys enjoy but girls just get used for. Check this out:
PEGGY COOPER: My students were talking to me about the parties that they were having on weekends, and there was one place in particular that they had lots of privacy. The parents were off and gone. And they said that they were watching the Playboy Channel in the girl's bedroom. And there would be, like, 10 or 12 of them up there.I'd say it was insidious if it weren't so blatant that we're being completely desensitized to the best parts of being human. It's all well and good for those of us in our 40's, 30's and even 20's, I suppose, to talk as if some status quo is maintained. Just as unsettling as the interviews with the kids were some of the interviews with the parents ... [...]And so I said, "Well, is everybody watching it?" "Oh, yeah. They're all watching it." And so one of the little guys goes, "And we're getting pretty good at it, too." I said, "Good at what?" So he said, "Well, we- you have to do- the game is you have to imitate what the Playboy people are doing."
And one of them said, "And sometimes it's all mixed up, too. You know, it's just like- there may be three or four of us at one time. And it doesn't matter if you're two guys or two girls or a girl and a guy. It doesn't matter. You just have to do what they're doing."
NICOLE: There was this one time when we were all at a party. There's about 30, 40 people there. And this one girl, she- they had been drinking. They were pretty drunk. And she, like, was going to have- she told everybody she was going to have sex with almost every guy that was there.
And her and her friend went back in the bedroom. Her friend had sex with her boyfriend and came out. And then the girl stayed in there, and it was, like, all the guys lined up. And it was like they were from the door to the front door. I mean, it was a lot of people.
And we brought out the bag of condoms we got from the health department, passed them out. And, like, two guys would go in there, you know, and they were having sex with her. And they were, like, having oral sex and, you know, sex. And all the guys that- most of the guys that were there went in the room and had sex with her.
And then she came out. She was- she thought it was the coolest thing, just that she had just had sex with all them. Or maybe they thought she was cool or whatever. Then she was like, bleeding, and her hair had cum all in it, and it was all over her clothes.
INTERVIEWER: Did any of the girls describe the sex as pleasurable?
Prof. CLAIRE STERK: Initially, they described the sex as pleasurable, and pleasurable in terms of it being physically pleasurable, but also psychologically, like, this was a initiation into the next step of their life. It was part of their development that was taking place. Over time, however, very few of the girls talked about the sex in terms of it being pleasurable at all. It became something that was painful, that in some cases they couldn't even remember what they did anymore. So it became very negative.
Beyond all the arguments I could make against what I (and the Last Poets) believe is a Culture of Death, I'm just not sure that ills enjoy the same sort of entropy that virtues do if left to their own devices over time.
I think it's time to realize that the Summer of Love has a Lord of the Flies ending ... except the part, of course, where the adult shows up and saves the day. [Likely because he's too busy gratifying himself at Lush]
Around the time of the long coat tails,
the only women who wore makeup were
prostitutes, because lipstick and rouge
are ways of simulating high sexual arousal.
The twenties saw makeup move into the
mainstream of youth and it permeates society
today such that, to the 19th century eyes,
women look like prostitutes. A mother of
the 1920's must have recoiled in horror
at what the children were doing in the
privacy of horseless carriages, away from home,
in casual clothes, and looking like hookers.