August 23, 2022

"Sweating in the sun, two dozen teenagers spread themselves across picnic blankets in a grassy park... Emma Rose Smith, 17, rose from the blankets, tucked her pale-blonde hair behind her ears...."

Interesting prose style for the Washington Post article "After Roe, teens are teaching themselves sex ed, because the adults won’t."

The accompanying photograph shows four 17-year-old girls, slouching together in a line, with glum faces and bared midriffs. 

What is the message? What I'm getting is: "the adults" had better school these kids.

48 comments:

Lucien said...

Does “after Roe” mean “since 1973”, or “after Dobbs “?

RideSpaceMountain said...

"After Roe..."

Oh stars and garters. Odds and bodkins. Heavens to Betsey.

Clutch your pearls grandma...bless your heart.

gilbar said...

teens? haven't been taught sex-ed? Color ME unconvinced

Dave Begley said...

How does this story happen? Do these girls have a PR team?

Reddington said...

oh give me a break. it's a lie.

Sebastian said...

"the adults won’t."

Have they ever?

"What I'm getting is: "the adults" had better school these kids."

Could be misinterpreted. Or are you saying that the article . . .?

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Adults should school young adults on the forces of whore-moans. The birds and the bees.
If not - they will find some creepy hollywood hot tub little boi rapist or Teen Vogue to do it.

Nancy said...

"Interesting"? How about "prejudicial"?

JK Brown said...

Seems the problem may be that sex ed was taken over by the schools and has gone the way of most school subjects with students losing the initiative to learn on their own. So really it is good that teenagers are starting to seek out information on their own. The first factor of studying is to discovering "some of the closer relations the topic has on life" and having a specific purpose for studying.



"In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar "school helplessness"; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks."

--How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry

It's an old problem

"The imitative or memorizing faculties only are cultivated, and little or no attention is paid to the thinking or reflective powers. Indeed it may almost be said that a child of any originality or with individual characteristics is looked upon as wholly out of place in a public school. ... To skate is as difficult as to write; probably more difficult. Yet in spite of hard teaching in the one case and no teaching in the other, the boy can skate beautifully, and he cannot write his native tongue at all."*

* Charles Francis Adams, Jr., "Scientific Common-school Education." Harper's Magazine,
November, 1880

Randomizer said...

Aren't these teenagers supposed to be experts on accessing information on the internet?

It always starts with an article like this showing earnest and conventional teenagers yearning for practical information on birth control. Eventually, we get creeps teaching 8 year-olds about dental dams and anal sex. We seem to have a problem finding the middle ground.

Randomizer said...

Aren't teenagers supposed to be digital natives, expert at finding information on the internet?

It always starts with an article like this showing earnest and conventional teenagers yearning for practical information about birth control. Somehow, it always ends up being a creepy clown teaching 8 year-olds about dental dams and anal sex. We have a hard time finding the middle ground.

gilbar said...

What I'm getting is: "the adults" had better school these kids.

isn't THAT, The Definition of Grooming ?

Leland said...

Does “after Roe” mean “since 1973”, or “after Dobbs “?

Maybe after Casey? It's hard to know. Not sure what the Roe or Dobbs ruling has to do with teaching sex ed? Maybe sex ed to WaPo is learning how to get an abortion, and then not worrying about anything else like STD's or UTI's. Perhaps the WaPo's parents never taught them sex ed?

tommyesq said...

You had me at "bared midriffs."

Dave Begley said...

Hey. Teachers. Leave us kids alone!

tim maguire said...

The message I got is that the Washington Post is trying to get more clicks with the bare midriffs of teenage girls.

Barbara said...

I don’t for a moment think anything about this is journalism.

Barbara said...

I don’t for a moment think anything about this is journalism.

Misinforminimalism said...

Terrible headline. "After Roe..."? What's that mean? From 1973 on? After Roe was reversed?

Also, this smacks of anecdote-as-culture news. Might as well read Teen Vogue.

Birches said...

Rich girls have connections to press to try and add something to their college resume since they're all white.

Ann Althouse said...

"Could be misinterpreted. Or are you saying that the article . . .?"

I don't know the intentions of the NYT writers and editors. I am just guessing about the implied message. I found the prose creepy. The words excerpted for the post title are at the beginning of the article, near the photo. I thought the photo, with those words, was too invasive of the personal privacy of minors.

Mike Sylwester said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
typingtalker said...

I recall (possibly in error) that some decades ago the complaint was that "teens" knew more about sex than their parents.

Tina Trent said...

Yes, the article and images are invasive. Not, like, abortion invasive, or chopping off 15-year old girls' breasts and putting them on hormone blockers invasive, but invasive.

More to the point, where is the proof this set of Emma Roses aren't getting sex ed? And if their parents are worried, why not do it themselves?

This is just victim-mongering. Rich white girls need to demonstrate they are victims of something to get on in college.

Mike Sylwester said...

This article argues convincingly that all abortion laws should again be made by a five-member majority of the US Supreme Court, not by the state legislatures.

PM said...

"Hey you guys, you know that thingie Todd has? Well Gretchen told me it has a tiny baby in it and if he shoots it at me I have to carry it. So gross."

Mike said...

Geez back in the late 1950s I had to walk to school 10 miles in the snow, uphill both ways. {Which was sort of hard to do in sunny San Diego}. And I had to learn sex ed all by myself with the help of a certain young lady who tucked her blonde hair behind her ears. And I didn't get any help during school hours! The horror of it all.

h said...

This was our plan: Use sex education in public schools to cover indoctrination into leftist ideology (pro-abortion, sexual revolution, radical feminism). That worked fine until parents found out what we were doing. Then, instead of just getting rid of sex education, those parents insisted that we use it to cover indoctrination in right-wing ideology (sex differences are real and genetic, random casual sex is destructive to young people, good outcomes for children are associated with being reared in two-parent families). Now the students themselves are trying to recreate the leftist approach by rebelling against the parental reforms.

Yancey Ward said...

Oh, for fuck's sake. Kids today know far more about sex than even people in my generation did at that age, and I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. The internet is everywhere and so is Pornhub.

Seriously- why do journolisters have to pretend to be so fucking stupid? It would embarrass me to write an article like this because everyone who read would be having exactly my reaction to it.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

By sophomore year, Carly, who is now 18 and uses they/them pronouns, began searching for a way to become better informed — and discovered the Planned Parenthood Teen Council program. The initiative, begun in 1989 in Washington state, trains teens to teach other schoolchildren sex education...

Ah, there it is. Your tax dollars at work, hope you like it.
Remember when the GOP had majorities in both the House and Senate and couldn't get around to removing federal funding for Planned Parenthood? Got those tax cuts through, though.
Anyway, good for them, Girls Get It Done, the wisdom of youth (with a slight assist from multimillion dollar activist groups and a tiny boost from the New York Times).
Inspiring!

Just for fun imagine how the Times would cover a phenomenon exactly like this but for a cause/idea they didn't like: imagine it was grassroot movement to teach kids how to 3D print firearms at home, say, and it was financed by some ammunition manufacturer. Same tone to the story, you think?

Mark said...

The Post-Roe Generation is a LOT more pro-life than the children of the sexual revolution. Young women especially are embracing their womanhood as a blessing, not a curse, including the blessing of being able to generate new life.

This new generation does not see a "right to kill" as the great treasure that it has been marketed to be. In fact, they see it as rather degrading of women.

SGT Ted said...

I don't buy the premise of the article in the first place. Not one bit.

Lurker21 said...

The president wants to know more about this, but wonders if you could make Emma Rose about ten years younger.

gilbar said...

Mike said...
with the help of a certain young lady who tucked her blonde hair behind her ears.

not sure what font your browser's set to, but Please use capital T when writing TUCKED in this context
lower case t's look All Too Much like lower case f's. My keyboard is now soaked with coffee

Static Ping said...

Considering public schools have gotten bad at teaching almost everything other than woke theology, I am not sure why we are supposed to be surprised.

Fred Drinkwater said...

Randomizer and Tim M. have it right.

And forget about "Teen Vogue". That photo is a throwback to "Seventeen" magazine. WaPo does not want us to have any stray voltage memories of their, and the NYT, previous articles on sex, gender, and youth.

This form of short-term memory holing is a staple of contemporary media. (I almost wrote "journalism", but caught myself in time.)

Jupiter said...

WaPo refuses to indoctrinate me if I won't pay for it, and I won't, so we are at an impasse. No midriffs for me.

But maybe someone can tell me; are all of these two dozen midriff-baring teenagers spread across picnic blankets in a grassy park female? In my experience, teen-age girls will spontaneously congregate, but not in numbers much above four. Something wrong there. Anyway, if they could find a boy, they could do some experiments. Or, as others have pointed out, they could read about sexuality on the internet 'til they know more about it than I do.

Mark said...

The Post is trying really hard to make people think that in our pervasive hyper-sexualized culture it is the 1950s-60s all over again.

Although, I can believe that kids are not taught about any necessary connection between the inherently reproductive nature of sex and the potential for pro-creation. In fact, they are taught that there is and should be a complete disconnect notwithstanding the transmission of pro-creative genetic material in the culmination of the sex act.

Jupiter said...

So wait. Is the premise of this article that two dozen teenage girls have gotten together in a park, on a sunny afternoon, to try to come to terms with the abject dearth of useful sexual information which has suddenly descended upon them like a choking cloud of volcanic ash as a result of a recent Supreme Court decision? Was this article by any chance written by one or more women? Somehow, I just don't see a "Jared" on the byline of this concoction. Let alone a "Tom" or "Bill".

tim in vermont said...

Sounds like the start of a letter to the old Penthouse Forum.

tim in vermont said...

https://twitter.com/Super70sSports/status/1562130307251306498

rehajm said...

What’s fun about these Roe panic stories is the SCOTUS decision isn’t going away any time soon but there’s still all the traditional leftie reaction, as if we just all fight harder the whole nightmare will be over come next November or, heaven forbid, the next Presidential November. But it isn’t. Even if the stars align and the decision is reversed in the future, most of you won’t be here to see it. That’s a good feeling…

n.n said...

Transphobia, trans/social, pronoun confusion, sexism, diversity [dogma], titillation per chance grooming, perhaps rape... rape-rape with the burdens of evidence aborted and sequestered in darkness are a few of the diverse things that progress with WaPoo in Roe's regrets, Ruth's remorse, post-Cecile's cannibals, Gosnell's gullets, Democrat heroes world.

n.n said...

The most expensive education product with progressive returns on the planet.

Joanne Jacobs said...

I'm happy to see emphasis swing to preventing unwanted pregnancy.

There's nothing new about peer sex educators. They tend to be effective because teens believe other teens. They're "influencers."

That said, there's an enormous amount of information about everything available online.

Marc in Eugene said...

Althouse's comment at 0917 excited me by implying that I'd be able to read the article itself (which in the post is attributed to WaPo, to which I don't subscribe) at the NYT. I was sadly disappointed alas to find that the original article is indeed at WaPo.

This is of course very bad sarcasm but I'm just done being on the telephone with 'the government' for 104 minutes and am not in a very good mood.

walter said...

Wauwatosa school board is on it!
An STD that will spread to other areas in WI.

Biff said...

Dave Begley said...
How does this story happen? Do these girls have a PR team?

Bingo! Virtually nothing appears in major news outlets without being pitched or directly manufactured. It's a near certainty that one or more of the girls is related to an abortion activist, a Democratic party strategist/consultant, or a Democrat politician.