Horny and Hormonal

Young People, Sex and the Anxieties of Sexuality

Nick Luxmoore

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784502782
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de la salud y la sexualidad

Ellis's mother is angry because he's been watching porn. Sheron says she hates her body. Mitchell's upset because Jack doesn't want to have sex with him...

Sex affects everything. It may not be the single most important thing in a young person's life, but it's always important and a crucial means by which young people try to understand themselves, whether they're in sexual relationships, on the brink of sexual relationships or watching from afar. Yet sex and sexuality are subjects that many adults (including parents, counsellors, teachers and other professionals) are wary of talking about with young people.

This book is about helping young people feel less anxious about sex and sexuality. It's also about helping professionals feel more confident. Weaving case material with theory and discussion, Nick Luxmoore describes vividly the dilemmas faced by so many young people and suggests ways of supporting them effectively at such a crucial and sensitive time in their lives.

1

INTRODUCTION

ELEANOR’S THIRTEEN. APPARENTLY she copes perfectly well with academic work, yet stays at home saying she’s unwell and refusing to go to school.

‘I think the real problem isn’t bullying or anything like that,’ says her teacher. ‘I think it’s anxiety… Any chance of you seeing her?’

As a counsellor, I see lots of young people who say they’re suffering from ‘anxiety’, that they’ve had panic attacks, that they can’t sleep, that they’ve been to the doctor and that the doctor says they might be ‘depressed’. I know nothing of what’s been going on in Eleanor’s life, of her relationships at home or of what might have happened in the past. I do know, however, that when young people say they’re ‘anxious’, they’re usually describing a conflict – often an unconscious conflict – between how they feel and how they must behave, between wanting to remain a child and having to grow up. ‘Anxious’ usually involves having mixed feelings.

When we meet, she talks incessantly about her animals. She has all sorts; they all belong to her and they all need looking after. When I ask about her friends, she says she doesn’t have any. Well, not really. At least, not any friends she sees out of school.

‘My rabbit might be pregnant, though! I left her out in the garden but I think one of the wild rabbits might have got in through the fence…’

She tells me about the incubation period for rabbits and everything I’d ever need to know about baby rabbits. And baby guinea pigs. And hamsters. And mice. She doesn’t talk about friends but seems to be using her animals the way other young people use their friends to explore the dilemmas of growing up. Two geckos don’t like the third one she’s put into their cage. Her grass snake might be lonely. Her new fish thinks he’s the boss of the tank. For Eleanor, animals are evidently safer than people. She remains in control of the animals, apart – that is – from predatory male rabbits who sometimes get through garden fences intent on impregnating unsuspecting females. (Two years ago, Eleanor’s mother left suddenly, going off with a local man.) Eleanor presides over a peaceable kingdom of animals who need feeding and cleaning out and who, she claims, rarely quarrel or fight or get jealous or break friends.

They do breed, though. Eleanor is clearly perturbed to think that she might not have adequately protected her female rabbit. I ask about boys at school.

‘They’re just silly,’ she says. ‘I don’t take any notice of them.’

But you do worry about them, I think to myself. You probably worry about what they’re capable of, Eleanor, and worry about how to control them in the future: whether to stay at home in your hutch, keeping well away from them, or whether to find some way of controlling them, some garden fence to keep them out. And what if they were to get through a fence, however well fortified? Could a fence ever be made impregnable? And what if one day there was a really nice rabbit out there somewhere who wanted to come in and play but couldn’t get through the fence?

This book is about adults helping young people make better sense of sex and sexuality in order for those young people to feel less anxious and therefore less likely to act out their anxieties at their own or at other people’s expense. However naïve Eleanor may appear to be, I’ve never worked with a thirteen-year-old person for whom sex hasn’t been an issue affecting everything at some level: affecting everyday relationships with parents and peers, affecting a sense of worth, a sense of agency… Eleanor stays at home with her animals, anxiously cocooned, hoping that the world will go away but knowing that it won’t. There are other thirteen-year-old young people who report that, unlike Eleanor, they’re never at home, that they’re always out with friends, sharing secrets with friends, breaking up with friends, making up with friends, ganging up on friends, helping friends with problems, arguing, getting bored, moving on, making new friends… Eventually one friend fancies another friend. They talk a lot and, before long, it’s official: they’re a couple. For two weeks. Then they break up and everything starts again.

‘The paradox of sexuality’, writes Phillips (1995), ‘is that it both links us to other people and makes us feel at odds with ourselves’ (p.91). There are young people like Eleanor who become aware of the sexual possibilities of life and keep their distance, approaching obliquely. For them, sex is somewhere up ahead, something to wonder and worry about on a long list of things to wonder and worry about. But there are other young people for whom sex is already happening. It’s entertaining and exciting but also banal, risky and fraught with difficulty. This book describes the ways in which different young people get stuck and, with help, find ways of moving on.

‘My cat doesn’t like my rabbit! I think she’s scared of it. But it’s weird because she’s got used to all the other animals and doesn’t bother trying to get into their cages any more.’

Knowing cats, I express my surprise.

‘As long as she’s got someone to love her and stroke her, she’s happy,’ says Eleanor, intent on keeping our conversation away from the subject of people. ‘She just doesn’t like other animals getting too much attention!’

Eleanor is the eldest of three siblings. ‘Your cat was your first ever pet,’ I remind her. ‘She’s bound to be jealous of the other animals. She probably sees you looking after them and hates them getting all the attention!’

‘No, I think she likes the other animals.’

‘Okay, maybe she hates them a little bit…’

‘Maybe a little a bit.’

‘Maybe it took away her confidence, Eleanor, when you started getting other animals? She was the eldest, after all. Maybe she became a bit of a solitary cat?’

Eleanor’s not sure what ‘solitary’ means.

‘I mean, maybe she decided that she was better off on her own? Not trusting other people?’

‘You mean, not trusting other cats!’

I apologise for my mistake.

Like other developmental processes that young people must negotiate and survive, sexuality is unavoidable. In L.P. Hartley’s famous novel The Go-Between, Leo is thirteen, like Eleanor, happily trying to please his friend’s beautiful older sister until he discovers that she’s merely using him to set up sexual trysts with the local farmer. Leo’s childhood effectively ends with this discovery. ‘I felt utterly deflated and let down: so deep did my disappointment and disillusion go that I lost all sense of where I was, and when I came to it was like waking from a dream’ (Hartley 1953/1997, p.102).

Eleanor’s mother is still living with The Man and Eleanor is waking fearfully from her own dream. Staying away from school is like trying to stay in her dream, in control of all her relationships, organizing the world so that people can’t get hurt. For her, going to school would mean engaging with a world of betrayal, powerlessness, rivalry and sex (see Chapter 2). A world in which mothers run off with local men.

My experience of young people’s struggles with sex and sexuality began as a teacher. Then later as a youth worker I tried to provide opportunities for young people to address these issues through informal conversations and structured group work. I remember doing my first condom demonstration. At the time, I couldn’t get hold of any proper health education equipment, so I’d ordered a vibrator from a mail order company. But with anxious boys in mind and not wanting to make the boys feel any more inadequate than they might already be feeling, I’d ordered the smallest vibrator in the catalogue.

An opportunity presented itself. A group of thirteen-year-old boys were in the youth centre, joking about sex. I asked if they knew how to put on a condom. They looked at each other and giggled, meaning that, no, they hadn’t a clue.

I fetched the box with the vibrator. They all watched anxiously until they saw it, then relaxed, visibly reassured. I felt pleased with myself.

I unwrapped a condom, emphasizing to the boys the importance of squeezing the teat ‘So that the spunk stays tightly trapped inside and doesn’t leak out anywhere…’

They nodded, all understanding.

I squeezed the teat and rolled the condom down onto the vibrator. Except that with the fully unrolled condom flapping against the sides of the vibrator, it dawned on me that this particular vibrator was far too small for demonstration purposes and, in fact, I’d gone and given the boys a whole new anxiety. Immediately they asked, ‘How’s the spunk supposed to stay in the teat?’

Sex is never the single most important thing in a young person’s life, never the Freudian key that unlocks everything. But sex is always important, always a crucial means by which young people try to identify and understand themselves, regardless of whether or not they’re in sexual relationships or on the brink of sexual relationships. Whatever their cultural background, young people find themselves surrounded by sexual images, by talk of sex, by other people’s sex lives. Their bodies are changing in readiness for sex (see Chapter 4). Adults are increasingly reacting to them according to this new-found sexual potential and yet… And yet sex and sexuality are subjects that many adults (including counsellors, teachers and other professionals) are wary of talking about with young people. ‘For clinicians, sexual love presents a special challenge,’ writes Chodorow (1994). ‘It is a fulcrum of gender identity, of sexual fantasy and desire, of cultural story, of unconscious and conscious feelings and fears about intimacy, dependency, nurturance, destructiveness, power, and powerlessness’ (p.71). Most young people don’t initiate conversations about sex any more than they initiate conversations about other difficult subjects. Instead, they rely on adults to anticipate and understand and do the asking. This book is about the dilemmas faced by those adults, especially by counsellors (as Chapter 8 describes), in trying to give young people opportunities to talk about and make better sense of their sexual experiences. It’s a book about the pleasures and pitfalls of these conversations. It’s about some young people like Eleanor who’ll talk about sex obliquely, tentatively, while other young people will be raucous and rude (see Chapter 3).

Of course it depends on what we mean by ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’. As Foucault (1990, 1992) makes plain, our ideas about sex are culturally and historically determined. Attitudes change. Sexuality isn’t a ‘thing’, is never fixed in stone and is always – in part – socially constructed (Nitsun 2006), its meaning shifting, with neuroscience shedding more and more light on the ways in which our sexual identities are formed, not only from biological predispositions, but from the impact on us of relationships (Hiller 2006). As Chodorow (1994) points out, ‘…men and women love in as many ways as there are men and women’ (p.71). Nowadays, it might therefore be more accurate and inclusive to talk of ‘sexualities’, with words such as ‘gay’, ‘straight’ and ‘bisexual’ becoming unhelpful if, in fact, human beings are always positioning and repositioning themselves on a sexual continuum. Nowadays, our assumptions about gender are less fixed than they used to be (Hines 2007). Nowadays, the scene in which a thirteen-year-old girl called Juliet wakes up in bed with an older boy called Romeo would certainly be very different:

ROMEO: It was the lark! I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

JULIET: What are you on about?

ROMEO: If I get caught with you, I’ll be done for underage sex!

JULIET: You never asked how old I was…

ROMEO: Yeah, because you looked older!

JULIET: And you knew I wasn’t on the pill…

ROMEO: No, I didn’t! You never said!

JULIET: I shouldn’t have to say! You should have used a condom.

ROMEO: They split!

JULIET: Yeah, ’course they do, big boy! Now I’ve got to go and get one of those emergency pills.

ROMEO: Where from?

JULIET: How should I know! Friar Lawrence maybe? Or some apothecary on the high street…?

For the purposes of this book, I take ‘sexuality’ to mean sex in its broadest sense: all the ways in which we relate to each other and express ourselves. I take it to mean our attractiveness to each other, the longing and sometimes repulsion that we feel for each other. ‘Sexuality’ might describe our psychological as well as our physical and social experience of each other, our ‘biopsychosocial’ selves (Hiller 2006), whereas ‘sexual orientation’ has a much narrower focus, describing only our attraction to one gender or another. Or both.

Adolescent sexual experiences are as formative as any other adolescent experiences. Some young people move confidently into adulthood but others take years to recover from the shame or the hurt of adolescence. As Chapter 9 describes, some get stuck, and with no help available, find themselves endlessly re-enacting their adolescent experiences, unable to m...