Behind closed doors
May 16, 2009
In a week of public outrage at footballers' sexual behaviour, Debra Jopson and Elicia Murray found past taboos have become a generation's norm.
Any Saturday night in Sydney teenagers are doing it in the dark places - parks, garages, backyards, beaches, schools, the backs of cars. Partying, drinking, drugs and sex, even in trees, according to 17-year-old Tania*, who lost her virginity at 13.
She knows of a girl, 15, and her 14-year-old male lover who had sex in a tree in a North Shore park because lying on the grass made them itchy. "My advice to everyone is they should not walk through a park on a Saturday night or a teenager might fall on their head," Tania says.
The Matthew Johns scandal, involving Cronulla footballers and a woman, 19, in Christchurch, New Zealand, seven years ago has lifted the lid on moral outrage and raised deep questions about consent, power, vulnerability and responsibility. The footballers are required to atone and the woman's behaviour in apparently giving at least limited consent remains a sad puzzle to many.
Shocked as older Australians may be at those sordid details, however, events under their noses are more likely to shake them. Many teenagers and young adults have turned the free sex mantra of the 1970s into a lifestyle, and older generations simply don't have a clue.
Group sex may still be fringe but a fair proportion of sexually active teenagers and young adults the Herald spoke to this week have been involved in threesomes, or know of friends who have.
Oral sex is no longer the exotic addition to the normal repertoire of their parents' generation. For the young who have sex, oral is the norm. For them, it's the equivalent of their parents snogging during courtship. They get pornography, advice and pick-ups over the internet and alcopops evaporate inhibitions.
"I've had threesomes and foursomes," says Lisa, 19. "It's usually at a party and everyone's had a bit to drink. It started with girls kissing girls because that's a hot thing. After that you're just kissing everyone and it goes on from there."
Not that everyone is doing it, of course. The national Secondary Students and Sexual Health Survey in 2002 found that a quarter of year 10 students and half of year 12 students were no longer virgins. Half of school leavers, therefore, had not had intercourse. The researchers at Melbourne's La Trobe University say the unreleased 2009 results are similar, with only a slight shift to permissiveness.
But among the sexually active, stories abound of games at the edge. A high school teacher told us of a girl student caught organising a so-called lipstick or rainbow party. Details extend beyond publication here; suffice to say it involves boys and girls and indiscriminate oral sex, with boys seeking to be marked with the colours of the rainbow.
Moral judgments will no doubt be made about what many of the young now get up to, but listening to them reveals a different sexual story to that of previous generations. The age of first sex has dropped since the 1960s. Young females have become more brazen; males less inhibited. The history of this is based on the behaviour of their elders.
"It is not a clock we can turn back," says Anne Mitchell, an associate professor at La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society.
There has been a continuing shift towards permissiveness since the contraceptive pill wrought a revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mitchell was a young adult. "That is when the gap between puberty and marriage started to grow. You got married to start a sex life in the past. The pill was huge. It made the difference between the shame of having a baby out of wedlock [and not]
The gap between puberty and marriage means there is a lot of territory where you cannot expect everyone to be celibate," she says.
"When we were young, oral sex was part of your fantasy sex agenda. For young people now it is foreplay. They don't consider oral sex as sex." Nor did Bill Clinton, of an older generation, but that's another story.
Eve, 19, says most of her friends were about 16 when they started having sexual intercourse, years after their first experience of oral sex. "People were talking about it and doing it in year 7 [the debut year of high school]," she says.
For girls, she says, there is not the same stigma attached to oral sex as there is to intercourse. "It's a big thing with losing their virginity. They have to wait. But with oral sex, it's like, whatever. It's normal."
Wendy Delaney, a teachers' union representative who works as a school counsellor in the Newcastle area, says she knew of several cases of year 6 students having oral sex. All were reported to the Department of Community Services.
Eve has been to parties where guys lined up for oral sex. A double standard can apply. "For the guys, there's a hero status. But for the girls, most of the other girls will look at them and think it's a bit s**tty. But most of them are so drunk that they don't know what they're doing anyway," she says.
Young women's behaviour shifted during the 1990s as they "became more like the men" - more open about what they had done with their partners, eroding the double standard, says Juliet Richters, associate professor in sexual health at the University of NSW.
In surveys of university students at Macquarie during the 1990s, she found that men lost the 1960s perception of themselves as creatures driven by sexual urges who needed females to control them.
As sexual practices changed, language evolved. Terms such as "friend with benefits" or "f--- buddy" are used to describe someone who is a no-strings-attached regular sexual partner. Encounters are known as "hook-ups" and "booty calls".
Lisa, 19, has two such friends. "We just have sex every time we see each other. There's no jealousy," she says. "Free love, man, free love."
In this atmosphere, are virgins intimidated? Says Mitchell: "There is still a large number of young people who haven't had sex or even a bit of snogging. We know 20 per cent of young people in the school survey haven't had any kind of sexual contact."
Richters says the virgins she surveyed at university "were always amazed because they always think that everyone has had it except them".
Brazen they may be, but many young people regret the circumstances of their loss of virginity. "I should have waited till I was older and more mature," says Tania, who had sex with a boyfriend at 13.
Joan Sauers's Sex Lives Of Australian Teenagers tells many tales of joy, regret and alcohol. "Well, I was really, really drunk and I had a boyfriend but I went to a party and was with three guys," says a Western Australian, who lost her virginity at 15. "It felt really good at the time but afterwards I felt cheated and used."
Tania says some in her group use fake IDs to get into pubs. That's preferable, she says, to the dark spaces where they otherwise party because drunk kids tend to do more stupid things such as going naked.
Her friends have combined ecstacy and alcohol, leading to unwanted sex. The secondary schools survey found an increase in alcohol use and bingeing between 1997 and 2002. More than 28 per cent of girls and 23 per cent of boys reported having unwanted sex in 2002.
Mitchell says "alcopops have had an enormous impact on young women" who previously didn't drink because there was no respectable beverage.
Lara, 19, says group sex - usually spur-of-the-moment and alcohol-fuelled - is common at her university residences, where she has heard of anything from threesomes to encounters with up to a dozen people. "It's the whole dorm-living thing. It goes on a whole lot," she says. "Group sex is mainly involving three guys and a girl, but I have heard of up to nine or 10 guys and two girls
All scenarios are pretty much imaginable."
Lara says that while some female students enjoy the physical act, others find the attention more appealing. "I honestly think that some of the girls do it because the guys will think they're amazing."
But pride can turn to shame once their exploits become public knowledge. "You'll notice a complete turnaround within a week or two, based on what's circulating about them," she says.
Trent, 21, says he has high-fived a mate during group sex but tries to keep emotions out of it. "I don't really want the girl to get too emotionally involved."
Sex these days is even possible without being there, thanks to "sexting". The NSW Government launched an education campaign this month to warn children about the dangers of sending sexual images via mobile phone or posting pictures on social networking sites.
Chris, 16, likens it to fishing:"You chuck a line out and see if anything bites," he says.
Lisa describes the practice as "like a gift to whoever you're going out with". But it has to be "artistic".
"Not like 'here is a vagina'. That's pretty gross," she says.
But she acknowledges that it doesn't always end well. "They'll just forward it to their mates if they're a dickhead. You've got to be careful."
Girls also collect photos of themselves having sex with as many different partners as they can, Lara says.
Tom, 17, says a stash of porno mags under the bed is "old generation". He finds pornography online. There's plenty of it, and it's free.
Chris has been downloading videos to his mobile phone for years. He was caught out by a relative when a huge phone bill arrived but that has not deterred him.
Tania says she and her friends talk about the rights and wrongs of what they do. "We learn morals from other people's experiences," she says.
According to Mitchell, now many sexual rules have gone, young people can develop personal ethics. "We need to understand that kids will have sex when they are not married. Our concern would be to make them safe and enjoy it," she says.
* Young interviewees' names have been changed.
