Teens and Sex in Europe

An American puts together a slideshow illustrating -- by means of ads, video clips, survey results, and interviews -- that Europeans have a much less hypocritical approach to young people screwing than America does.

Not much that will be surprising here, but still it's encouraging to see Americans looking across the pond for lessons in this particular area of social policy, in which the States does just about everything wrong...

Comments

[Ligia]

The slides and study are very interesting. But as "europeans" for this survey we can imply "northern europeans". I don´t thnik the approach for sex matters in, e.g., Portugal would be that "open and liberal". Meanwhile I´m wondering how am I going to talk about the suggested subjects from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N7Fjt1xzDk to my daughter in the near future. Kids nowadays are getting smart so early that I might skip the Stok baby story...

[M. Möhling]

@influx
> "apply some old-fashioned standards to it" Now,
> what would that be? The US has the highest
> teenage birth and abortion rate in the
> Western world

And yet their birthrates aren't as ..cked up as are Europe's--talk about sustainability. I don't necessarily care about hypocrites not being up to their standards (so eschewing Andrew's point, as I'm wont to do), I care about these standards' demographic effects. See, Andrew and I might expect our, um, remarkable intellectual legacies to leave an imprint on time and future generations, but we now better, really. We've got no kids (lest Andrew hides his under the sofa) so when the demographer says "it's our kids or theirs" it's theirs. Here's Geoffrey Miller, one of these evolutionary psychologists whose quirky inquisitions Andrews seems to enjoy occasionally. He speculates on Fermi's Paradox[1] and posits that consumerist nihilism--we're amusing ourselves to death--and ensuing demographic attitudes might be to blame.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.” [emphasis MM]

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an “irrational” Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left. Their concerns about the Game of Life will baffle the political pollsters who only understand the rhetoric of status and power, individual and society, rights and duties, good and evil, us and them.

This, too, may be happening already. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our creative-class dreamworlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.

1. Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that life had evolved quickly and progressively on Earth. They figured our galaxy holds about 100 billion stars, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extraterrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, “So, where is everybody?”

[Anonymous]

In some ways, the Europeans do have a more relaxed and less hypocritical view of sexuality, including among young people, than do Americans--and not only in the Bible Belt.

In other ways, not.

You can't possibly assume, without making a fool of yourself, that sexual inhibitions and taboos do not exist in European society and that you have entered a sensual garden of earthly delights, set foot at last on a continent of honesty and openness in sexual relations, and that you are, at last, freed from the Puritan darkness of a sexually repressive United States.

You are in a different cultural zone with its own rules; the rules differ in some respects but are basically the same; just try to ignore those rules and see what happens in the new Europe of Gender Mainstreaming.

You already did, in fact, several posts ago: and the response you got sure was a shock, wasn't it, Tex?

[influx]

"apply some old-fashioned standards to it" Now, what would that be? The US has the highest teenage birth and abortion rate in the Western world.

[Alex]

I think this the most famous german TV-Ad for condoms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1EtCcb2NOI
I really liked it.

[M. Möhling]

> Europeans have a much less hypocritical
> approach to young people screwing

...making less babies, lowering our ecological footprint wisely and putting pressure on pensions funds and social security, which is commendable, as the systems stink and need, um, creative destruction. Hypocrite US government is clueless, screwed, must do something--ads, video clips, surveys, interviews, subsidies and/or awards to enlightened expat bloggers, whatever helps.

OK, snark off--I posit that US youngsters have as much fun screw-wise as we do, but apply some old-fashioned standards to it, which prevents the US from becoming a federal nursing home. Maybe 'em morons are onto something, again--fortuna audaces stultos juvat. GWW: "Dumm ..... gut."