Age of the Understatement: a social criticism about sex, love and teen pregnancy addresses the sad reality of the Gloucester Pregnancy Pact girls and the Gen Xers who have a thing or two to learn about love, sex and motherhood. A fantastic blog post about it sparked my interest to write this critique and I suggest it as an introductory read.
Age of the Understatement has recently been published on TEW. Hence, I’ve pulled it off my “feature” page.
Here’s an excerpt:
So these Gloucester girls who made unwise decisions may have come from a place where their support for each other is so strong, whether the pact idea is true or theoretical, because they are, as Randazza said, “from theyah”. They’ll most likely never leave the town as the realities of motherhood will show themselves within 9 months. Their decisions will change their dreams as they give up who they never had the chance to become so that they can nurture a new life. This is powerful and big stuff here. The topic isn’t pregnancy, an overused term, almost an understatement. The topic is the responsibility and the value of not only creating another being, but maintaining that being in an environment of goodness, with the right tools to succeed in a world they were, as Sartre said, “thrown into being”. I never realized how much of our concepts are shaped by conditioning. And so it’s time to recondition.
We argue too much about the rights and wrongs of abortion yet we have millions of kids unloved or cared for. The adoption process is so intense and expensive that rarely do enough people gain the benefits of such options. At the same time American culture doesn’t prepare teens for the realities of life, glamorizing sexuality via media representations while like “good parents” a majority keeps abstinence in the forefront. Until society pulls away from its own hypocrisy these girls’ kids don’t have a great chance of success and will continue to breed dysfunctional individuals. That by default logic creates a pretty messed up society.
There’s nothing wrong with teens having sex though I don’t encourage it. What’s really wrong is not preparing them for the consequences of such natural curiosity. It is ridiculous to try to stop a teen from being curious enough to try it especially when sex is plastered everywhere they look.
The full essay can be found here.
