David Gaffney SJ sees cultural changes to have made young people vulnerable and fragile, sometimes leading them down a self-destructive path.
Young people most enjoy themselves during time spent with friends “doing rowdy, loud, crazy, wild things and having a fantastic time” [Maureen Gaffney, Irish Times, 22/9/03]. They certainly love to party; yet much of this can be a front. Underneath, “the biggest fear of young people is that they will be left at home, undesirable, uncool, rejected”. They feel anything but brave – so on goes the bravado. Sometimes quaking and fragile at the core, “they need an irrational surge of psychological energy to go out into the adult world and claim their place…
“The exuberance and risk-taking of adolescents are really just the outer forms of more heroic qualities that are needed to grow up: bravery and courage…Parents have to try to inject their own experience of the world into this fantasy”.
Child means the world to parents
The interplay between parent and child at this level is on sure ground, because it takes fragility as the starting-point: “Each young person has to fashion a sense of uniqueness. Who am I? How am I the same or different to those around me? What is expected of me?” And Maureen Gaffney sums up by quoting a psychologist who says “that what young people most need is someone who finds them `somehow special, especially wonderful and especially precious’”. Could there be any better definition of a parent’s role?
If this parent-child bond has been created, then the foundation has been laid for that sense of “emotional safety” on which the growing child will need to call, as he or she enters the world of sexuality – and later…”Sex is most satisfying when we’re emotionally safe. For then it feeds the needs that go way beyond physical desire. Sex without commitment may seem cool…. But it is something very different from the passion borne of sexual love, where the soul is satisfied along with the body, and we are, for a little while at least, at peace with the world. And for that you need a couple who have taken each other on, for better or for worse, and forever” [Patricia Redlich, Sunday Tribune, 9/3/03].
A sense of “emotional safety” will have two results in the life of a boy or girl reaching adolescence. First, a child will know in her bones that she is “precious” – uniquely loved – and will have a deep feeling of worth: she will not give herself to the first would-be taker. (Some youth groups sport T-shirts with the Text-language slogan, “UR worth W8ing 4”).
Learning to postpone pleasure
Second, a child will not need to live a thrill-a-minute existence – he will know that each daily reward or “treat” has to be the result of effort; he would not even respect himself if he got everything handed on a plate. He knows how to postpone pleasures.
In contrast, so often nowadays (according to psychologist Marie Murray, quoted in Sunday Tribune, 20/4/03) “there is nothing for young people to anticipate…They can drink, go dancing, have sex. There are no boundaries…Every need is instantly gratified…They have nothing to look forward to when they grow up”. “This is a generation deprived of nothing except their parents’ time and their love,” writes Marie Murray herself in the same paper; “They wait for nothing, look forward to nothing and do not know how to tolerate a moment of frustration or an instant of denial”.
The same observation is borne out by a journalist writing about teenage suicides: “I know a woman who boasts that her teenage children have never heard the word ‘no’. And she is hugely proud of them; they are, she says, perfect teenagers. But what will happen when somebody does say `no’?” [Emer 0’Kelly, Sunday Independent, 28/9/03] – And the answer is all too tragic: “They kill themselves because somebody denies them their own way…They kill themselves because life is not perfect…
“Nobody ever points out that even the emptiness of pop and modelling fame can only be there for a tiny percentage of people; and we have young adults so bereft of contentment and a goal in life that they kill themselves for no better reason than the impossibility of emulating Madonna or Victoria Beckham”.
Perhaps that word ‘perfect’ is the give-away. Why should a person have to be “perfect” in order to be loved? (Or: Why should a person have to be a celebrity in order to be loved – for, who else besides a celebrity is “perfect”?) Why can you not be loved as the person you are? Why do you have to reach for such a distant (celebrity) standard?…Could it possibly be that the message never got through to you from nearer home; that the people at home never managed to convince you that you do not need to be perfect in order to be “precious” – in their eyes and in your own?
Is oblivion the top kick?
Suicide is one way out of the anguish of being imperfect. There is a more popular way, however, for young people to escape reality. That is, to party until it’s completely out of sight.
“Mid-teens now boast, as a badge of achievement, of how many times they vomited after a hard night” while, as they would say, they were out of their head. “I’m told that girls of 16 or even younger are having full sex on the dance floor, with maybe two or three different partners in one evening”: one more way of being “out of it”? Is the deepest meaning of “being out of your mind”, then, the sensation of achieving oblivion? Is this the ultimate “high”, the top kick which today’s teen culture is aiming at?
It would seem so – if we are to believe these testimonies (or – otherwise – hope that they report only the wilder fringes of youth entertainment): “I had found a way to live in the world, to cope, to fit in”, explains a girl who began serious drinking when she was twelve; “a way to make the madness go away. I had found a way to be me”. [From Lorna Hogg’s Irish Independent interview with Catherine Barry, author of The House That Jack Built 27/4/01].
Brutal “scoring”
“Sexual encounters seldom happen without brains first being addled with alcohol”, says Patricia Redlich. “The sexes find it hard to forge any common ground other than quick clinches…. The resulting lack of inhibition, emotional vulnerability and careless behaviour undoubtedly add to the basic brutality which shapes so much of today’s social togetherness” [Sunday Independent 22/4/01].
Another observer of the present scene is Dr. Derek Freedman – as the country’s leading authority on sexually-transmitted diseases, he is surely no prude: “Sex has become a consumer item. Four gins, four shots and a bang. You have the alcopops culture; the 13 to 15-year-olds going to discos very scantily dressed. The reaction of any normal young man would be to grope. It’s easier to have sex than to talk to someone” [Justine McCarthy, Irish Independent]. Adds one teacher: “There is no shelter for either girls or boys who want more from sex than the modern equivalent of a handshake” [Breda O’Brien, Irish Times 27/9/03].
“What they are seeking is not merriment, but total oblivion”, Patricia Redlich drives home the message [Sunday Independent]. “Eight drinks are the definition of a good night out for our 15 – 17 year olds…When we have poor self-esteem, little belief in ourselves; when we lack proper self-love or sufficient self-respect, we want to leave consciousness”.
Blotting out reality
On the contrary, continues this writer, “Sex is most satisfying when we’re emotionally safe” (i.e., in a committed relationship) [Sunday Tribune]. But those who, instead, feel deeply unsafe and insecure, will tend to lash out: they sometimes have a short fuse, and may smash up stuff in fights; they may chase sexual “highs” to get away from things; they may over-indulge in alcohol in order to blot out reality. For them, “it’s no longer enough to be average, normal nice looking, you have to be exotic. It’s the MTV influence…They think that to be accepted and loved, they have to be outrageous”.
That essential “emotionally safe” experience of being accepted and loved was not always so difficult to come by: Fun “wasn’t about trying to get out of your head…. When I was young, back in the late 70s, we were basically good kids. We were good friends, we cared about each other and our parents. We had ambitions” [Further quotes from Lorna Hogg article].
Although some older people may complain that today’s kids are out of control, things may not be all the children’s fault. In so many cases, one must ask: Just how much time did the parents devote to these children when they were growing up, so that the youngsters felt they had a secure home base? The parents may complain that the children are out of hand and cannot be “held back”; but the young people may often wonder how often they were simply “held” – given enough time and attention for appreciation and “acceptance” to become an experience.
As impersonal as McDonald’s
Whatever the causes of it, the present epidemic of free-for-all sex is setting off alarm-bells in quarters which were once thought to be its main promoters. Believing that “junk sex” is now as casual as picking-up junk food (a take-away in McDonald’s), one writer says that the ‘McSex culture’ or “takeaway coupling leaves you feeling empty and slightly nauseous. This soulless sex can cause lasting emotional damage as women move from partner to partner seeking little more than instant gratification”.
Is this some priest sounding off about the evils of the present age? – No; these words [according to The Irish Catholic 18/9/03] come from the woman editor of Britain’s 462,000-circulation Cosmopolitan magazine, long-time promoter (up to now) of sexual “liberation” !…Maybe I should have entitled this article: “What They Preach In The Papers”.
This article is by David Gaffney SJ, a lecturer in the Milltown Institute, Dublin.
