Daily News of Los Angeles, Sunday, May 29, 1994

Last year, the always stimulating Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an article for the American Scholar titled "Defining Deviancy Down." His provocative thesis was that in this country the way we deal with our growing epidemic of deviancy is simply to define away the problem by lowering the threshold for what we define as normal. In such a world, for example, an exploding illegitimacy rate is less social disintegration than "another lifestyle choice."

When I read Moynihan's thesis, a thought immediately struck me. First of all, he was undeniably right. And second of all, what barriers were there still to fall? What did we have left that was still taboo? We are so tolerant of practically anything in this country from severing people's sex organs to hitting people in the head with bricks, what deviancies did we still have to define away? And then it hit me - kid sex.

When I was growing up in the '50s, kids were not supposed to have sex and largely did not. Nowadays, our kids are under pressure to get in on everywhere they turn - MTV, sex education, movies of the week, and now most recently from the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose Gay and Lesbian Education Commission recently sent out brochures to junior and senior high school students advertising "Free condoms! Free dental dams! Free lube!"

Dental dams? As in oral-anal sex? And what is the purpose of lube? Fourteen-year-old kids don't need to be lubed for sex; they're pumped to the gills with hormones, fizzing with estrogen, boiling over with testosterone. Lube is for anal intercourse. Is that what we really want to be teaching kids? I can understand (though I don't agree) how one could make a plausible case for handing out condoms, but when you start advertising dental dams and lube as well, that's gone way beyond sex education to encouragement and facilitation.

For that matter, now that I mention it, why this mania for condoms at all? I can understand why some highly sexually active adult gays might need them. But we give out condoms to everyone, including innocent young kids who are hardly more likely to catch AIDS than they are to be struck by a meteorite. My 9-year-old son comes home from school telling condom jokes, which is fine. I'm glad we're not uptight about condoms, and it's better than leering about them. I just don't understand this mad desire to make sure everyone has condoms in their pants or purses.

If you really want to stop disease, you tell kids to abstain from sex till they know what they're doing-- that's 100 percent effective. Most kids will listen (at least through junior high school). Some won't. In the long haul, we'd still be far ahead of the game. But any time anyone suggests that, they're hooted out of hall like a raving lunatic, a sappy Nancy Reagan clone with her "just say no" crusade (which I personally happen to think was far more effective than anything her enemies ever dreamed up).

You can't tell a 14-year-old kid to abstain from sex on the one hand and then hand him a condom on the other. You might as well just write him a permission slip to have sex early and often, because that's really what the message is. Forget AIDS prevention. This condom mania has never been for that. That's a facade, a smoke screen, a Trojan horse for another agenda.

The truth is, there is a segment of adult society that wants kids to engage in sex as soon and often as possible. They think it frees them up emotionally, releases their inhibitions, gives girls a leg up in a sexist world and otherwise undercuts that last bastion of reactionary patriarchy--the traditional family.

This, I believe, is the reason you see so much ridicule of the notion of abstinence. These people don't merely hate the notion of abstinence--it positively drives them wild. In their minds, it reeks of Ozzie and Harriet, moralistic priests, sexually frustrated nuns and sweaty right-wing fundamentalist preachers thundering from the pulpit against lust and sodomy.

This is the reason every time you complain that condom distribution is implicit permission for having sex that they invariably trot out that old "you-can't-turn-back-the-clock" argument. I don't know how many times I've heard someone say you can't put the cork back in the bottle, the toothpaste back in the tube, turn back the clock, push a string upstairs or whatever the metaphor of the week happens to be.

But that's absurd. These things ebb and flow throughout history. The middle classes were more restrained in Victorian times; they were wilder in the Roaring Twenties. The Greeks had carnal knowledge of everything from adolescent boys to small barnyard animals, and the Puritans threw you in Walden Pond just for having lust in your heart.

The age of first intercourse is not a one-way street. It moves up and down as a function of the economy, protein in diet, the health of the culture and the availability of cheap cotton underwear. People who say we can't turn back the clock have, in my opinion, a vested interest in seeing kids engage in sex as soon as possible. But rather than make the case so blatantly, they simply pretend they are objective observers of a phenomenon over which they have no influence or control.

Well, they do have control. They've just chosen not to exercise it.

When I lived in San Francisco, there were people who were going to bath houses and having sex six and eight times a night. Now, those places are closed and many of the former patrons are lifting weights, eating macrobiotic foods and taking long walks on the beach to get to know their partners first. In short, their behavior has gone from fatally promiscuous to commendably restrained. If the behavior of that segment of the gay community, which practically lived in the gay baths, can change in just a few years, why is it so hard to believe that the behavior of teen-age kids can't change as well?

It's not going to kill kids not to have sex the second they reach puberty. They only think it will because we push sex at them from every direction from the time they can read or watch TV. The department store lingerie ads in the newspaper with their full page close-ups of firm thighs and swelling mounds are at least as erotic as anything I ever saw in Playboy as a kid. And now they're in the paper every day right next to the ads for Nintendo and rollerblades.

You can't fight the mass culture. It's like railing against the rising tide. A couple of years ago there used to be blue jean ads on TV showing 7- and 8-year-old kids jumping out of their seats when the teacher turned her back to burst into spontaneous bump and grind.

And it's not just TV. Three or four years ago, I took my two young boys to a Christmas show at the local community building expecting to see Santa Claus and sing carols. Instead, we found ourselves in the middle of a Christmas-with-Lolita dance revue. They brought out a troupe of pre- and post-pubescent girls in spare, sheer, skintight costumes that revealed every nook and cranny of secondary sexual characteristics that some of these kids didn't even have yet. Then the floodlights came up, the music came on and these girls, some of whom were only 8 or 9 years old, proceeded to trot it out, dust it off and toss it around till our socks flew off.

Someone once said that as societies rise and fall they go through five separate stages. Well, we're in the one labeled terminal decay.