Articles about teenagers are as painful to read as the teenage years are to live. And if, as a teen, I found most of my classmates absurd, I find it even more absurd when an adult journalist takes teens seriously — studying their habits with an ethnographic vigor, and treating their confessions as accurate source material. Those two impulses are, in some sense, the same: journalists can only be so naively credulous of teens’ blustery confessions if they treat teen culture as foreign — intuitively understood by its natives and, so, best visited using native tour guides.

But, this Other-ing of teenagers, studiously pursued in magazines and newspapers, takes teens seriously only to the extent that their “foreign” or

A Side Point
What’s the real meaning of the article’s accompanying photo (shown above)? Is half-on, half-off, a metaphor for puberty? Are the nuzzling feet meant to represent two friends “with benefits”? Is the Converse a stand-in for fake innocence, and the sockless foot a stand-in for teens’ newly-uncovered (thanks, NY Times!) sex lives? Or, is the sockless foot a simple signifier of unprotected sex?

“unfamiliar” behavior can be portrayed as seriously alarming. The media reduces teens to the function of push buttons — triggering parental anxiety (or, in a cyclical fashion, assuaging the anxieties encouraged by the preceding month’s articles).

The NY Times Magazine’s current cover story — Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall, an examination of the rising popularity of casual sex and “hook ups” amongst teens — is a case in point. The writer, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, introduces adults to “foreign” expressions (”friends with benefits,” he explains, are “basically, friends you hook up with regularly”) and accepts teeenagers’ accounts of their sexual exploits without any second-guessing (“When [Adam] lived in Florida last year, he lost his virginity to a friend who threw a condom at him and ordered him to put it on.”).

And so, a strange, symbiotic relationship emerges. On the one hand, we have a cultural anxiety about teenage sexuality that is often either 1) a PR stunt on behalf of “family values,” or 2) a thin excuse for constant, voyeuristic accounts of sexual behavior. And then, on the other hand, we have insecure high school sophomores trying to make their sexual exploits worthy of the NY Times. It’s mutual masturbation; both hands get sticky. Teens desperately want to tell stories about their sex lives, and journalists desperately want to believe them.

Among the results: a breed of articles freakishly immune to fact-checking. According to the NY Times,

[A] college girl online … invited Emcho and a friend over to a party at her apartment. ”I was online writing my senior paper,” Emcho said, ”and this girl instant-messages me and says, ‘Hey, I saw your picture on facethejury[.com].”’ She invited Emcho over that night. They had sex in her bathroom, Emcho told me, and met up a few more times, but he says he cut it off when she started talking about wanting to date him.

I imagine that even high school gossip has stricter standards for inclusion.

Here, some choicer quotes from the article, loosely grouped according to my personal opinions:

High school boys are both pathetic and very scary.

• ”Down in Key West, high-school girls are crazy,” Adam said. ”Girls were making out with each other on the beach. Lesbians are cool!”
• A soccer player with shaggy blond hair and a muscular body, [Adam] likes to lift his shirt at inappropriate times (like now, to the Hooters waitress) and scream, ”I’ve had sex!”
• Brian, a 16-year-old friend of Jesse’s, put it this way: ”Being in a real relationship just complicates everything. You feel obligated to be all, like, couply. And that gets really boring after a while. When you’re friends with benefits, you go over, hook up, then play video games or something. It rocks.”
• As Haris put it, ”City girls are cool, but suburban girls are crazy cool!” (Meaning, Haris explains, that suburban girls are ”easier.”)

Never go down a slippery slope.

• “A lot of guys get in relationships just so they can get steady [expletive],” Haris told me. ”But now that it’s easy to get sex outside of relationships, guys don’t need relationships.”
• As one Boston teenager told me, ”Who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?”

Girls get tricked by modesty into giving blowjobs.

• According to Jesse, Caity set the ground rules. ”Caity told me, ‘Adam knows he’s not going to get in my pants, but I might get into his.’”
• ”People assume that if the guy’s older, he’s the one making all the moves and using the girl,” Ashley told me. ”But trust me, I was definitely the aggressor. I got into his pants. He didn’t get into mine.”

What does it mean to say, knows “better”?

• Many of the teenagers I talked to told me that no one they know uses condoms during oral sex, only during intercourse.