Roswell - bad, bad, bad, bad thing

I’m watching this TV show – Roswell– on the netflix. If you’ve not seen it, it’s a Vampire Diaries-type thing but with aliens instead of vampires. It aired about 15 years ago. A lot of the main characters are attractive teen-agers.

So, in this episode (“Disturbing Behavior” season 2, episode 13), there’s a young woman, about 17 or 18 years old, who’s gone off with a young man to deal with “alien stuff,” but her mom doesn’t know about the alien stuff. Her mom is so mad and upset and terrified that her daughter is going to have sex. She’s talking with her daughter on the phone and bawling and yelling and threatening. Like it’s a horrible, awful, evil, shameful, bad, bad, bad, bad thing. 

This is such a common idea in our culture: parents being scared and angry that someone would have sex with their post-pubescent child, at a time when their bodies are screaming at them to have sex; and parents threatening violence toward the similarly-aged young men wanting to have sex with their daughters. That’s crazy. It’s extremely unhealthy in the attitudes that it conveys to these young people about sex. 

Of course, by the time they’re old enough to have sex, they’ve certainly already been messed up by our mixed up, crazy, damaging cultural attitudes about sex. And I’m fairly sure that any parents who would react that way to the possibility of their child having sex will have already made sure to convey the nightmare apocalypse that is normal human sexual activity.