Uppity-Negro.com

1. re: laura vs. tacitus

aside from the overweening hubris of naming oneself after the great roman military historian -- it kind of reminds me of the "anarchy dude!" posters who name themselves "kropotkin" -- it strikes me as funny that laura would say "i don't really give a damn what this guy thinks" on her own blog, then to have this guy go to the trouble of surfing over and posting in the comments that "the feeling is mutual" -- uh. DEWD. LIKE. SO WHAT ARE YOU. LIKE. DOING THERE.

2. re: teen pregnancy

my wife used to work for a teen pregnancy program in a high school. primarily it was designed to keep the moms in school while taking the social pressures of dealing with their peers off of them, get them hooked up with jobs and job training, deal with legal and emotional issues, take care of the health and nutrition of their babies and themselves, babysit for them while they were in class, etc. all in all a really good program, and naturally it had been created by a teen mom rather than "the system", had to scramble for funding outside of the continually shrinking city/state/fed funds, etc... the interesting bit of information i wanted to mention that she learned from this place, is that while there's a lot of talk about teen mothers in our society, no one seems to want to talk about the fact that THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE FATHERS ARE MEN IN THEIR TWENTIES, THIRTIES, OR EVEN OLDER. when it isn't, for another example, the girl's uncle. or father. and i just always wondered why no one ever wanted to talk about that. so there ya go.

My feeling about Tacitus is Do Not Feed The Troll.

It's kind of funny, because the ANSWER question had actually been thrashed out pretty thoroughly by some of the people he "called out" long before the march. But figuring that out would require an attention span longer than two minutes. (I mean, geez, calling Oliver Willis a commie stooge? Really ...)

I'm Not Talking about that other thing either, because it just makes me mad. (Including the part where assholes not from my state tell me how barbaric all my friends, including the ones who volunteer as escorts at Planned Parenthood, are because, y'know, they're *Texans*, who are all neurotic or something.)

Ginger, I'm not from Texas but I'm *so* with you on the getting sick of people trashing everyone from Texas. It's quite like the people who specifically trash people from Kentucky as all being backwards, uneducated, hillbillies and more generally who trash every other state in the south for the same things.

Overgeneralizations are tired. Please stop.

R@d@r, part of what you said is not quite true.

"...while there's a lot of talk about teen mothers in our society, no one seems to want to talk about the fact that THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE FATHERS ARE MEN IN THEIR TWENTIES, THIRTIES, OR EVEN OLDER."

The statistics simply don't hold that up. It is true that there are a lot of babies fathered to under-18 mothers by over-18 men. But the age gap is usually not that large. Typically, it's less than 10 years; most often, it's less than 5 years. We're often talking about 16 year old girls with 20 year old guys, or 18 year old girls with 25 year old guys... in short, people at very similar emotional ages, if not at very similar political/legal ages in the eyes of our culture.

There simply isn't an epidemic of teenaged girls being predated upon by 30-40 year old men. Over the past year I've been doing preliminary research for a book I want to write about statutory rape and age of consent law, which has, logically enough, led me to look pretty hard at the statistics about under-18 pregnancies and who is attributed to be fathering those pregnancies.
The "epidemic" that a lot of people (liberal and conservative) like to trumpet about just isn't showing up.

Do we have a lot of teenagers fucking legal adults? Yes we do, usually in the 10-year age range from 15 to 25. Do you get a lot of unplanned pregnancies amongst underaged women from that sex? You bet your ass. Is it epidemic, or substantially a larger group than under-18 women who are impregnated by more immediate age-peer males? Yeah, somewhat, but not to the degree that it's sometimes made out to be.

Judith Levine takes this topic on in brief in her "Harmful to Minors," if you're curious; I've done some very preliminary writing about it as I've been working on my own book-writing thoughts but haven't published on it yet.

I do agree that it's problematic, and I do agree that there are too many people (of all age groups) having too many unwanted and unplanned pregnancies happen to them. It's one of the reasons I'm a sex educator... to try to help alleviate some of that.

But one of the other reasons I'm a sex educator, and a historian, and a researcher, is that I think it's really worth analyzing issues of sexuality carefully and sanely, particularly where it impacts public health and the potential political machinations of social conservatives to try to further reduce access to information. Because this is relevant: the notion that "children" -- as the conservative press likes to term anyone under 18, regardless of age, when it suits their purposes -- are being impregnated by predatory adults at a dizzying clip has been and is still being used as ammunition to preach abstinence-only to teenagers, to go further and do more to remove access to birth control and sexuality information on the grounds that 'if they know about it they'll do it,' and so on.

I don't want teenagers to end up pregnant if they don't want to be either. But I'm also not convinced that there's anything new, or even anything terribly wrong, about people between the ages of 15 and 25 having sex with one another, on the most generalized level.

I do know that age-peer partners of teen girls are no more likely to be socially or financially responsible if their partners become pregnant than older partners, though perhaps for different reasons. Limiting teen girls to age-peer sex by going after legal-adult/legal-minor sex isn't going to solve that problem. And I think it's pretty clear by now that the "just say no" approach is not exactly going to meet with uniform success either, so we're back to square one... which is that we have a lot of young women who need information, education, and help so that they have the best chance to make good choices about sex and contraception so that they're less likely to end up pregnant or bearing children they do not want.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this:

Blaming an at least partly-mythological older male perpetrator isn't going to solve the problem of underaged pregnancy (even in places with the most aggressive and privacy-invasive statutory rape reporting programs in the country, the vast, vast majority of adult/minor sex is still *way* under the law enforcement radar, and likely always will be).

Trying to ban adolescents from having sex won't work, either. It ain't never worked. Might as well try to stop a tsunami with a chain link fence.

What we need here is less hysterics, less finger-pointing, and more assistance, education, services, and care given to the women who are at risk for getting knocked up and who do get knocked up. Which I know you support -- as does Mrs. R@d@r, I take it -- and that's great. 'Cause it's embattled as hell right now. And it's the only thing that's actually been found to work.

I'll chime in with everything Hanne has just said and note that my findings over the years on that subject have been identical.

I'd also suggest reading "Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy" by Kristin Luker if you haven't already and want more reliable information on the topic. It's an excellent book, and debunks an awful lot of the propaganda and false information we tend to be fed when it comes to teenage pregnancy.

While we're Not Talking about Kristin Luker, I recommend Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood highly. It's somewhat dated now--I read it when I was in college--but still very worthwhile as a historical perspective. It's also probably better mentioned under the On Language post, for reasons that are obvious if you've read it.

Michelle, will I get in trouble if I say my best friend is from Kentucky? (He is. He stood for me at my wedding. He also has a Ph.D. in physics and is a smart and sophisticated man. Even if Aaron does disagree with him about the import of comics sometimes.)

R@d@R one small correction - the guy who said that the feeling is mutual was everybody's favorite, DC Thornton. But yeah, Tacitus is about equally as bright, as you can see from his more recent comments there.

hanne, i appreciate your diligent and careful research on this subject, and your intelligent response. i guess what got me into trouble is that my info is all anecdotal, which is a terrible place to make generalizations from, but i do still think it is an issue worth considering (as i get the impression you agree) that young men need to be educated not only about their responsibilities regarding birth control but also their responsibilities as parents, potential or actual. also, i pause at your suggestion of an emotional equality between a high school age minor female and a college age man...again, simply from personal and anecdotal evidence...while i agree with you that early sex education all around is far more beneficial than some kind of hypocritical moralizing, and that our society is too uptight and litigious regarding certain issues of sexuality, i would just tend to feel that if i had a early-20's son or nephew who was getting it on with a high school girl and knocked her up and felt like it wasn't his problem, i would tend to want to take him out behind the shed. i suppose this is reactionary of me. i am curious to read the books you cite and will seek them out, and i would love to hear more about your own research. it makes me wonder if the community in which my wife worked with teen mothers was somehow statistically aberrant, which i suppose is possible.

I absolutely agree that men need to be educated (and challenged!) on their part in the proceedings. I realized later, after writing what I did above, that I'd kinda left that part out, and I do think it's really important. A big part of challenging the environment that leads to this kind of stuff happening means challenging men to change. (And for what it's worth, sometimes I think that does occasionally mean taking 'em out behind the shed for a good whuppin'...)

I've actually just begun reading a piece in a legal journal that does a good job (so far) of summing up a lot of the research and issues involved in age-disparate sex as it relates to teen pregnancy, and particularly some of the sociological and psychological issues behind why younger women might deliberately choose older partners. Once I get a chance to finish it, I'll post the info, since it seems to be very solid so far and the bibliography has been impressively coherent as well. I'll try to get that up tomorrow.

And, for what it's worth, I do get the feeling (although I haven't yet been able to do the research to substantiate it) that there are big statistical bubbles in terms of age-disparate versus age-peer sexual activity. There seem to be populations which trend toward greater (and lesser) incidence of age-disparate sex: some studies which have been limited in demographic/geographic scope have indicated higher ratios of age-disparate to age-peer sex than one would presume from broader studies. I don't know enough there yet to say anything more than that bubbles are almost certainly there... not enough to tell you why or where they're likely to happen.

News as it happens, like they say on the teevee...