When you go off to college, all of the moments from high school fall into the teenage years and you’re suddenly an adult (“adult”). We adapt to the independent life pretty quickly and forget how, just a few years ago, things were pretty different. Mom did our laundry, and we had to ask permission to do stuff. When you stayed at home by yourself for a weekend you were both excited and slightly terrified that a serial killer was going to find you. Getting into R-rated movies when you turned 17 was one of the coolest moments, and going to the grocery store was awesome. Sometimes we revert back to our old teenage ways, like when Smart House is on TV or when we’re sick and need to be taken care of. It’s fun to look back and reflect on all those teenage moments.

We pulled some of our favorite teenage moments from Teenager Posts and it took us down memory lane. These should be a nice flashback for you too… Read More »

After undergoing a week long sex-education unit in my seventh grade health class, my creepy health teacher passed out two promise cards for us girls to sign, which stated that we promised to remain abstinent until marriage. While we were told to sign one for ourselves to keep in our purse, we were also expected to leave our John Hancock on one of the cards to turn in as an assignment – no questions asked. As my classmates complacently signed their names on the dotted lines, I remember thinking how ridiculous this task seemed – why was my stance on virginity anyone’s business? If only my feminist hero, Jessica Valenti was around then!

Feminist blogger (Feministing) and author of Full Frontal Feminism and He’s A Stud, She’s A Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Women Should Know, Jessica Valenti’s latest book The Purity Myth tackles the issue of “how America’s obsession with virginity is hurting young women.”

And it truly is.

Let’s get real. Regardless if you believe in saving sex for marriage or not, it is very alarming in a disparaging way to see girls only being granted value or worth for staying sexually pure instead of for their character. Why should sexuality (in the sense of remaining abstinent) be highly coveted over a teen girl’s qualities or accomplishments that make her unique? In a society that continues to worship abstinence (with virginity programs across the nation and federally funded purity balls), Valenti points out that while virginity is acceptable, having sex is also okay because at the end of the day, a young woman’s choice should not decide her existence as being morally up to standard or not.

From the get-go in The Purity Myth, Valenti confronts the definition of “virginity” and how for such an abstract idea, the concept controls and impacts girl culture today immeasurably: “The Purity Myth is for women who are suffering every day because of the lie that virginity exists, and that is has some bearing on who we are and how good we are.” Read More »

When I was in high school we passed our time driving around and prank calling boys. High School kids today are pretty much the same, except replace “driving around” with “choking themselves to  get high” and change “prank calling boys” to “sending naked pictures to boys.” Was high school really that long ago or am I just a hell of a lot smarter than today’s teens?

I’m pretty sure high school was only about four years ago, so I’m left wondering what the hell is going on with teenagers? I don’t mean to sound judgmental or high-and-mighty, because we’ve all been there. We all lived in that place where everything was the end of the world, where drama ran high and there was never, ever enough glitter. But come on, things have gotten a little out of control lately.

Whether high school was the best time of your life or a time you’d rather forget, it’s still a time that we can vividly remember. That being said, I do not remember “the choking game”  being a fun after school activity. I also don’t remember blowing anyone on the back of the bus nor witnessing anyone else performing oral sex on the back of the bus. It just wasn’t happening when I was a teenager.

Teenagers are not my favorite group of people, so I have no problem calling them idiots. Seriously, what are they thinking? Not only are they becoming a group of mini faux-celebretards, but they aren’t doing anything even remotely smart or safe. Read More »

A 14-year-old New Jersey girl was arrested after posting nude pictures of herself on her Myspace profile in an attempt to tease her boyfriend. The charge? Distributing child pornography.

Three Pennsylvania teens face similar charges after sending some seriously dirty texts.

Yikes! I’ve been known to send what I suppose some could classify as a dirty text every now and then, and while it’s not illegal being I am an adult who can do whatever she pleases with her unlimited text plan, I can’t help but sympathize with these girls.

We all make stupid decisions when we’re in love…or lust. Read More »

In my group of friends, I’m one of the few people without any tattoos, not because I don’t want one, I do, but because I just can’t think of something I really care enough about to get scarred into my flesh for the rest of my life.

I can’t stomach the idea of having a cutesy fairy tattoo or, god forbid, a dolphin tattoo, and honestly I can’t understand why girls get tattoos like that in the first place.

I realize that tattoos have become sort of a rite-of-passage for teens when they come of age, right along with buying a pack of cigarettes and going into a porn shop. I get it, it’s about rebellion, or asserting one’s adulthood. I just fear that in everyone’s haste to use tattoos as a symbol of maturity, or badass-ity, or whatever, that they don’t really think about the lifelong implications of a tattoo and what said tattoo really says about it’s owner. Read More »

While so many parents out there seem to be overwhelmingly concerned with keeping their teens’ Myspace pages private and making sure their Walmart-bought CD’s are equipped with “Parental Advisory” stickers; their teens are still getting into trouble.

We know this because we were teens not too long ago. The more you are protected by your parents, the sneakier you learn to be. It’s no accident that some of the worst kids you knew in high school came from some of the “best” families. Teen girls rebelling is about as natural as shopping or gossiping. If all of their parents only knew what they were doing at all those “sleepovers”….

Well, what it seems like they’ve been DOING…are the boys from school.

At least one in four girls out there between the ages of 14-19 has a sexually transmitted disease. This alarming study has brought a lot of attention to the fact that teens ARE, regardless of what we want to believe, having sex. Read More »

One is not born, but rather becomes, a dude.

This, at any rate, is the conclusion suggested by a recent report in The Journal of Adolescence, which seems to show that teenage boys are more interested in emotional connection than in sex for its own sake.

The report concerns a survey of 105 tenth-grade boys, who answered questions about dating and sex, along with several more general questions of health and lifestyle. When asked about their reasons for pursuing a relationship, over 80% of the boys responded that they did it because they “really liked the person.”

When asked about their reasons for having sex, the boys were as likely to say that they did it for love as they were to say that they had been motivated by pure physical attraction or curiosity about sex.

This evidence flies in the face of the common stereotypes that young men are supposed to be interested in sex rather than relationships (whereas girls, of course, are believed to prize relationships over sex). And so, not surprisingly, some people refuse to believe it.

Tara Parker-Pope, in her New York Times column on the subject, pointed out that, in her experience, the majority of the backlash to these findings came from grown men, several of whom commented on her original blog post to insist that the boys must have been lying. (As far as I can see, these men failed to provide any realistic explanation as to why the boys would have done so – my own research confirms that the “free pizza if you fake interest in a relationship” strategy is usually ineffective.) Why are these grown men so invested in denying the emotional life of teenage boys?

Well, why wouldn’t they be? Read More »

Surprise!

Kids our age aren’t as downright angry at the world as everyone previously thought! We aren’t totally disaffected and kind of care about the world! AND we REALLY love our microwaves!

I haven’t quite decided if this MTV/AP poll that was just released is dead on about our generation (or the way 13-24 year olds think in general) or total bullshit. They only polled around 1,300 of us, making the margin percentage error about plus or minus 3%.

There are a bunch of different news articles that are using the survey to make a general consensus of what makes us happy… that are parents do and that money does not. But, after reading through the WHOLE thing, this is what I found most interesting:

Drinking makes us very happy, somewhat happy and neither happy nor unhappy…which means, we like to drink! (SURPRISE!)

Sports, sex and religion make us happy! So do our parents!

We are somewhat unhappy with the way things are going in the world. (Finally a generation that gives a somewhat of a shit about the world.)

We’d be happier if we had more money, like hanging out with small groups as opposed to large ones and aren’t really religious but believe in a higher power. We participate in school clubs and activities.

We believe that there are things we can control that contribute to our happiness.

But when asked how happy socializing online makes us, 2% of people gave the answer very unhappy. Uh, isn’t that something we can control? Read More »