Tuesday, July 29, 2008 Obenieta: A horny issue By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
GUESS who can hold a candle to a lighthouse keeper. Try those guidance counselors, for starters. Consider how they loom ascendant and lonely over the tempestuous and dark waters of teenage troubles. For instance, the slimy matter of sexuality that leaves parents, teachers, and pulpit-pounding vanguards of moral values out in the limbs of an octopus.
Their task must be such a handful to tackle, so much so that their job description takes two words to emphasize the deep end of their dependability—to guide, to counsel. Even a president is expected only to preside, right?
The bad, the ugly, anything that smacks of recklessness. These are grist for the mill of the guidance counselor, like the campus rumpus in Argao after a clique of students allegedly deemed it better to cut classes and breeze it out at a seaside hangout for booze and sex. If what their guardians—at home and at school—could dish out would be half as heady as that illicit and potent mix of pleasure, would these young people behaved more prudently perhaps? If being young were as tidy as that, guardian counselors would just have to contend themselves scraping their cuticles and tending to the aquarium in their cubicle.
But, sorry to say, guardian counselors do have their work cut out for them.
More so when a tidal wave of perversity has whipped and lashed at that isle of innocence on which the young are supposed to cavort before coming to maturity.
When youthful curiosity, susceptibility, and an appetite for delight amount to no more than a sponge in an ocean of scum, guidance counselors might as well be citizens of Atlantis. And they might as well swim against the current if what David Walsh, a psychologist and author of the teen-behavior book “Why Do They Act That Way?” wrote does hold water: “The brain is wired to develop intense physical and emotional attraction during the teenage years as part of the maturing process.”
That’s bad news, if we reckon how that maturing process gets enmeshed in the net of something as harmless-sounding as entertainment, particularly the sort peddled through popular culture.
Teens who view television programs containing a lot of sexual content are twice as likely to become involved sexually at a younger age than teens who watched less, according to a study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Even if a show talks about sex, rather than reveal it explicitly, the outcome is just as pronounced. “Both affect adolescents’ perceptions of what is normal sexual behavior and propels their own sexual behavior,” psychologist Rebecca Collins said. And so this recent news comes like a sorry postscript: More than three million teenaged girls in the US have at least one sexually transmitted disease.
See or hear, and it wouldn’t take a third eye or a third ear to cotton onto the culture of free-floating information and other subliminal tonics steeped in the acid of self-gratification: Songs shrill with orgasmic innuendo. Movies, TV, and video shows that sum up and dilute the notion of romance and intimacy with easy-does-it insouciance. Headlines awash in the ooze of scandals and crimes of passion. These, by the way, are created by adults who are supposed to know better.
If even some of us who wear maturity down to our soles can’t resist stomping along the swell of these rowdy stimulants, why do we expect the youth not to rock the boat? Say “holy mackerel” but, hey, we’re all in this together.
Guidance counselors, indeed, are all we need. One for each of us who can do no better than shake or scratch our collective head.
