eclipse1966
Active VIP Member
I have lived in Europe for several years. The Dutch society is one of the most open societies you will find on the continent. I support a lot of their ideologies but some are a bit too extreme even for me and even other EU countries.
ok, finally finished the whole article. Like how it ended.
Her book is as much about intimacy as it is about sex, Schalet says, citing that Dutch surveys find that by age 14, 90 per cent of Dutch boys say they have been in love. “Clearly it’s not the kind of love a 25-year-old feels,” she says. “But that is how they describe their feelings.” Even in the U.S., many boys say they don’t want to have sex until they’re in a relationship, she says. “But they feel that makes them different than what boys are supposed to feel. So they feel isolated.” Isolation is a theme surrounding teen sex and relationships, Schalet observes. “And that’s very sad.”
She’d like to see the end of the myths that girls are only supposed to love and are never given any legitimacy for their sexual desires and that boys are vessels for biological impulses and aren’t credited with any emotional desires. Dutch teens said they enjoyed togetherness as much as sex, she notes.
Rayne doesn’t believe the divide between parents and children is as big as it appears. “Parents all say that they want their children to have a healthy sex life, to be sexually balanced—not now, but in the future,” she says. “But it’s not like children get this magical knowledge at age 18.”
Adolescents, like all human beings, have “skin hunger,” the need to be touched and to touch, Rayne says. “But many teenagers have only one model for this: intercourse. So having conversations about sensuality rather than sex can go a long way.” And parents want to forge close bonds with their teenagers, and to have influence over them, she believes. “But they do all of these controlling things that put them at odds with their teenager rather than drawing them in closer.”
That’s what motivated Redgrave seven years ago. Allowing her daughter’s boyfriend to sleep over wasn’t simply about condoning sex, she says, it was about helping her to make an important transition to adulthood. “It’s about respecting intimacy, developing it at an early age and learning to appreciate it.” And that requires communication, as Schalet observes, which begins with starting a conversation many parents don’t want to have.