Oral Sex Is The New Goodnight Kiss

Many hip parents have confessed when they see their young daughter dressed in little wisps of clothing, gyrating in front of the TV while singing along with the Britney Spears song If U Seek Amy, it gives them pause. I often hear comments such as, "I don't want to be a prude, but it's really unnerving to see her be so sexual."

I sincerely appreciate how difficult it is to watch your child try on their sexuality - especially when it's so in-your-face.

Yet, it's probably the same way your parents fretted when you listened to Madonna, Led Zeppelin, Elvis or whatever music or movie you were into at the time.

Kids figuring out their sexuality is an age-old parent/teenager dilemma.

It certainly doesn't help that at least once a year, headlines blare about the latest thing that will compromise your daughter's sexual morality. (Please note: there's rarely anything in the news about your son's sexual morality. Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong here?)

Just recently, Sharlene Azam got a lot of press with her book, Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss (thenewgoodnightkiss.com). She writes about an "alarming" trend in middle class Canadian families, where "teenage girls are trading sex for ... just about anything."

The problem is Azam's findings are not based on any research or scientific data. Rather, they're based on her investigative journalist skills, as well as what she captured in her documentary film of the same name.

How many times have I come across a story or book that can have such a profound impact, which is based on nothing but potenitally biased observation? Unfortunately, the average fearful parent gobbles up this type of story, thereby perpetuating harmful and unfounded dogmas.

The result becomes another generation of parents who are unnecessarily paranoid about their children's sexual conduct. And, thus, yet another generation of young women carry a ton of shame about their sexuality ... for the rest of their lives.

Then again, I'm a bit zealous about women's sexual rights.

To get a balanced perspective, I spoke with sexologist Brian Parker, PhD, who has been teaching sex education in high schools and universities for many years. I asked him if kids are more sexual and/or more sexually active than they were 10 years ago.

He replied with an emphatic no, adding: "Studies show today's teenagers are no more sexually active than teenagers of the last few decades. The average age of first intercourse is 16."

Parents would undoubtedly argue that we are living in a hyper-sexualized society. That kids have more access to sexual information than any generation before them. (By the way, every generation of parent has probably said something similar.)

Parker agrees, and cautions parents about two things. The first is to be age appropriate. "If a seven-year-old is provocatively dancing to Britney Spears, they probably don't understand what they're doing. If it's an eleven-year-old, they probably do. It's important to ask your child, ‘Why are you doing that?'"

Parker adds a second gem: "During your ongoing conversation about sex, make sure your kids understand what your morals and values are. Don't assume they will mirror what you want or believe. And don't just say ‘That's inappropriate' - tell your kids why."

Sex education starts at age 0 and goes until your kids are out of your house. You must cram the maximum amount of information into their heads before they turn 13, when their friends become their reference point.

Appreciate that as much as you would like to protect your teenager from getting a sexually transmitted infection, becoming pregnant or earning themselves a bad reputation, they will most likely have sex with or without your knowledge.

Take heart - research proves a comprehensive sex education will keep them safe and help them to make the best choices for themselves, their bodies and sexual self-esteem.

In the end, I don't know why I bother battling against this prehistoric belief system. It's an emotional, not a logical, issue. The "teenage girls trade sex for ... just about anything" type of headlines will forever fuel parental insecurities.

I can't help but wonder, though, what would happen if we trusted our youth and guided rather than interfered with their normal sexual development.

-Trina Read is a motivational speaker and writer with a doctorate of human sexuality.

Goodbye to Innocence

Canadian filmmaker Sharlene Azam tells Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran how middle class girls in Canada are being recruited by their teenaged friends and trafficked for sex.
 
At a time when parents and politicians in India continue to voice their regressive opinions about why Sex education shouldn’t be taught in schools, Canada-based author and film maker Sharlene Azam’s documentary and book “Oral Sex Is The New Good Night Kiss” has the West waking up to a shocking reality: Teenage girls, as young as 13 years, are casually trading sex for goodies. And we are talking about girls belonging to affluent families, here.

In an email interview with Bangalore Mirror, the 38-year-old South Asian from Canada, who is also the author of Rebel, Rogue, Mischievous Babe (Harper Collins, 2001) and has been featured in popular shows including ABC’s Good Morning America and The View, talks about the documentary and the hypersexual culture kids live in today.  Excerpts from the interview :

1.  Oral sex is the new goodnight kiss. Interesting title that. Given that your film talks of 13-year-olds from good families trading sex for goodies, question is when it comes to sex have the lines of age, class, gender blurred today?
If you are asking me if 13-year-olds are having sex and trading sex for the things that they want (clothes, jewellery, drugs) - Absolutely. If you think about it, if kids are making and distributing pornography of themselves – sexting – why wouldn’t they also be capable of prostituting themselves and each other?

2. How did the idea come about? And during the filming, did some of the responses make you go—- whoa?
I was at a high school in Canada researching sexual attitudes for a film I was working on when I was asked to talk to the students in the Flex Program. The Flex kids have been out of school for various problems. In that class, I met a lovely blonde girl with perfect make up and a Louis Vuitton bag who seemed completely out of place. I asked the teacher about her and was told that she had been recruited by a girl at the school and trafficked to a small town where she was kept in a motel. That was the beginning of my research into teenage recruiters and the middle class girls they target. This was a new kind of predator.

3. A significant amount of your work is centred around teenagers and sex issues. What got you into it?
Actually, this is my first book on teens and sex. However, I have always been interested in the lives of teenage girls and the subculture of teens.

4. All the work and interactions you have had till now for the film, your book, your magazine et al… some key learning you have gleaned and can share?
We are in the midst of a cultural meltdown, the likes of which we have never seen before. I hope my book will serve as a warning. Who is going to save our girls?  Who is the voice for our girls? Is it the media? Is it the boys’ opinions of them? Is it the negative images of themselves that they have created from advertising imagery? Parents have to be the voice for their daughters. They have to help mitigate the influence of pornography in their daughters’ lives.
  
5. Five year ago and now...What do you think has changed for the generation today? What are they missing out on that we had five to 10 year ago maybe?
The Internet has changed everything. Images of sex and the most degrading kinds of sex are readily available and are being downloaded by kids aged 12 years on their phones. For many of the girls I interviewed, giving oral sex in the boy’s bathroom is as benign and as acceptable as kissing. This is what our culture has become. Think back to the 80s when girls would blush when talking about their first kiss. We are way past that point with blow jobs. The real question is, “What’s next?”
 
6. Do you think the girls have gone and behave way beyond their age compared to boys? Are they more emboldened? What spurs them, in your view?
Girls and boys live in a hypersexual culture. Girls are bombarded with images (from music, TV, online, magazines) of girls as porn stars, strippers, hooters girls, girls gone wild. Those are the dominant images of girls in the Western culture. We are seeing girls model their behaviour on those ideas and images because there is nothing out there countering the “Girls Gone Wild” culture.

7.About boys, is there a sense that they have been left behind? Where I come from, while girls are taking on roles that were traditionally done by the boys, the boys continue to do what they have been doing since Neanderthal times?
Boys are becoming sexually callous. The culture is grooming them to be users, takers, pornography makers (playground pimp, pimp squad).  Check out the first Google hit for “porn”. It’s hardcore and the girls look very young. I don’t think boys are being left behind. They are very much a part of the behaviour that girls are engaging in - they share nude photos of their girlfriends with other boys (sexting), they encourage girls to act out scenarios from pornography and Girls Gone Wild. In cases here where they have been caught receiving oral sex at school, their parents will come to their rescue and say, “boys will be boys”, but that’s just an excuse for poor parenting, since these boys will also experience an inability to have trusting, full relationships in the future. You can’t see girls as being interchangable and disposable during your adolescence and suddenly develop respect for your wife or girlfriend.

8. The movie has everyone stunned. Did you expect this reaction? What next?
I am definitely surprised by how quickly my book and film have been embraced by the media. I have been working on this in isolation for so long (four years) that I think I forgot how shocking it is. I hope it gets the attention of parents who might be dealing with some of these issues and not know where to turn for help. I think the fact that people are “stunned” has a lot to do with how normalised pornography has become. It is all around us and it seems acceptable, but when young girls start trading their virginity for $1000, we can assume that this is the result of the culture we have created.

Aired on Good Morning America May 28, 2009
By CLAIRE SHIPMAN and COLE KAZDIN
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/Story?id=7693121&page=1

 
They don't give their names, but viewers can see their faces plainly and what these teens are saying is shocking parents. "I ended up having sex with more than one person that night and then in the morning I was trying to get morning-after pills," one of the girls said. "I was, like, 14 at the time."

It's just one of dozens of stories from teenage girls in a new documentary by Canadian filmmaker Sharlene Azam that aims to shed light on the secret, extremely sexual lives of today's teens.

After four years researching for the documentary, Azam told "Good Morning America" that oral sex is as common as kissing for teens and that casual prostitution -- being paid at parties to strip, give sexual favors or have sex -- is far more commonplace than once believed.

"If you talk to teens [about oral sex] they'll tell you it's not a big deal," Azam said. "In fact, they don't consider it sex. They don't consider a lot of things sex.

Evidence of this casual attitude may be seen in the fact that more than half of all teens 15 to 19 years old have engaged in oral sex, according to a comprehensive 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics.

'Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss' In the documentary, "Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss," girls as young as 11 years old talk about having sex, going to sex parties and -- in some extreme situations -- crossing into prostitution by exchanging sexual favors for money, clothes or even homework and then still arriving home in time for dinner with the family. "Five minutes and I got $100," one girl said. "If I'm going to sleep with them, anyway, because they're good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?"

Another girl talked about being offered $20 to take off her shirt or $100 to do a striptease on a table at a party.

The girls are almost always from good homes, but their parents are completely unaware, Azam said.

"The prettiest girls from the most successful families [are the most at risk]. We're not talking about marginalized girls," she said. "[Parents] don't want to know because they really don't know what to do. I mean, you might be prepared to learn that, at age 12, your daughter has had sex, but what are you supposed to do when your daughter has traded her virginity for $1,000 or a new bag?"

For some of the girls, the sexual favors are not about clothes or money, but used to keep a relationship together in a chillingly objective way.

"I think there's very much trading for relationship favors, almost like 'you need to do this [to] stay in this relationship,'" one girl told "Good Morning America."

"There's a lot of social pressure," said another. "Especially because of our age, a lot of girls want to be in a relationship and they're willing to do anything."

The girls laughingly admitted they never talk to their parents about their sexual activity.

"I mean, we're not looking for our future husbands," one girl said. "We're just looking for, maybe like ... at our age, especially, I think all of us, both sexes, we have a lot of urges, I guess, that need to be taken care of. So if we resort to a casual thing, no strings attached, it's perfectly fine."

Azam said she thinks the "no strings attached" romances could be a defense mechanism against a greater disappointment.

"A lot of girls are disappointed in love," she said. "And I think they believe they can hook up the way guys do and not care.

"But unfortunately, they do care.

CELIA MILNE FOR METRO CANADA May 26, 2009 12:58 a.m.

Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss by Sharlene Azam documents the stories of Canadian girls being recruited for prostitution.

Right under our noses, girls are trading oral sex for pretty shirts and sex for money. For her new book and film Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss, Canadian journalist Sharlene Azam interviewed teenage and pre-teen girls about sexual attitudes and found many who use sex as currency.

Even in middle-class Canada, girls are being recruited — often by other teens — to provide sexual services to groups of men and boys.

“I was most surprised to learn that there are girls recruiting other girls,” Azam told Metro. “It is chilling to sit across from a teenage girl who talks about targeting a pretty, popular girl at her school because she thinks she has everything and is jealous of her.”

Parents often believe that their daughters are safe when they are at school, at the mall or chatting on the Internet. But Azam found girls as young as 12 were actually giving oral sex to groups of boys and telling their parents they were hanging out with friends. All the boys had to do was say they “want a piece” of her, and she’d perform oral sex while the others watched, reports Azam, who splits her time between Los Angeles and Vancouver. She also interviewed girls who were willing to pose nude on their webcam and get paid to send the pictures to anonymous men.

“There is very little education or awareness of what is happening to girls because the problem is so new and it is well hidden.”

Why are girls today more promiscuous than in the past? “The Internet has sped up teens’ sexual willingness and behaviour,” says Azam. “Girls are surrounded by a hypersexualized culture where they are being groomed and encouraged to think of themselves as: Hooter’s Girl, Stripper, Porn Star. Exposure affects behaviour.”

Girls who are looking for attention know that a sexy video or picture can give them power and launch them into fame.

This behaviour can have long-term health effects. It could affect the girls’ ability to trust men later in life and to have normal, living relationships, says Azam, who is married with a young daughter. In addition, many girls are getting STDs. One public health nurse told her that at the four schools she visits, hundreds of kids have Chlamydia.

Azam suggests that parents pay close attention to their daughters during their teen years and have regular conversations with them about sex. “The parents that I interviewed wished they had paid attention to the warning signs. When you learn that your daughter has traded sex for $60 or has sold her virginity for $1,000, your whole life stops,” she says.

A revealing read
• Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss by Sharlene Azam is available through www.thenewgoodnightkiss.com and Amazon.

Author/filmmaker finds Canadian teens casually trading favours for cash
Apr 24, 2009 Trish Crawford - Living Reporter
 

Middle-class Canadian girls are giving oral sex after school to pay for sweaters and handbags.

Worlds away from the poverty, neglect and drug abuse that are the hallmarks of prostitution, teenagers who appear bright and well- adjusted are prostituting themselves without batting an eyelash.

According to independent filmmaker Sharlene Azam's documentary and book, Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss, the normalization of oral sex as an acceptable teenage activity has led vulnerable girls to use it as a way of becoming socially accepted.

For some in Azam's film, this ultimately leads to payment for sex because, after all, if they are doing it anyway, why not get paid for it?

Azam, 38, a former columnist for the Toronto Star, interviewed Canadian girls (and their parents) who had been discovered by school officials to be involved in sexual activity with groups of boys, as well as girls charged by police. This includes a prostitution ring at an Edmonton high school.

Parents, she says, were not paying close enough attention to their daughters.

Azam is married, with a 3-year-old daughter, and splits her time between Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Q: What sparked this documentary and book?

A: I was at a high school in Burnaby, B.C., researching sexual attitudes for a film I was working on when I was asked to talk to the students in the Flex Program. The Flex kids have been out of school for various problems. In that class, I met a lovely blond girl with perfect makeup and a Louis Vuitton bag who seemed completely out of place. I asked the teacher about her and was told that she had been recruited by a girl at school and trafficked to a small town where she was kept in a motel. That was the beginning of my research into teenage recruiters and the middle-class girls they target. This was a new kind of predator.

Q: You were able to get parental permission to film the girls who were under age. How?

A: Getting the releases was not difficult because the parents wanted to talk about this. There is no forum for them. There is no counselling. There is no social group for a mother whose teenage daughter is having sex with five men a night. The difficulty ... is for the mothers to finally take responsibility for what has happened to their daughters.

The girls were okay talking about giving oral sex to a number of boys – they didn't stumble with the words or appear shy or ashamed. The reason they speak about it unflinchingly is because it has become as benign and as acceptable as kissing. This is what our culture has become. Think back to the '80s when girls would blush when talking about their first kiss. We are way past that point with blowjobs. The real question is, "What's next?"

Q: A lot has been written about rainbow oral sex parties. What do the girls get out of it sexually?

A: I think Heather, 16, explains it best. "I began to associate my own personal power with giving a man pleasure. I liked hearing them make noises because it made me feel powerful to be able to affect someone in that way. I didn't know I had so much power."

Q: Has feminism failed young girls?

A: We failed our girls. What's happened to our girls? We have let Girls Gone Wild and the media culture define them.

Q: What is the boys' role in all of this? Did any of them have to deal with the consequences?

A: It is important to remember that the responsibility lies with parents, teachers and adults. Your question suggests that another adolescent should take responsibility for what is happening. Boys are downloading pornography on their cellphones. This is how they are learning how they are supposed to treat girls.

Q: What are the lessons learned?

A: It is not as much a lesson as it is a warning. Who is going to save our girls? You asked me about feminism. I interviewed Gloria Steinem, who was a voice for women. Who is the voice for our girls? Is it the media? Is it boys' opinions of them? Is it the negative images of themselves that they've created from advertising imagery?

ZOSIA BIELSKI

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

April 23, 2009 at 8:40 AM EDT

Heather spent her teen years on Protection Island in Nanaimo, B.C. Blond and sun-kissed, the daughter of a geologist father and biologist mother grew up on Narnia books. But at 16, Heather was recounting another story. By 14, she was routinely blacking out on drugs, having sex with multiple partners at her house and partying with "Navy guys." At the start of Grade 9, she was sleeping with a 21-year-old drug dealer and heroin addict. Soon after, she was recruited to trade sex for clothes and drugs.

It sounds like an overblown cautionary tale for parents, but teen prostitution is an emerging middle-class phenomenon in Canada, says journalist and documentary filmmaker Sharlene Azam in her new book Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss (which is accompanied by a DVD).

One prostitution ring saw more than 15 girls aged 12 to 16 from several Edmonton middle and high schools offering their bodies to older men who gambled in a townhouse; another involved 15-year-old high-school girls charging college guys $20 for oral sex in Kelowna, B.C. In Surrey, B.C., pimps recruited 12-year-olds at their local mall.

Over four years, Ms. Azam tracked her subjects down through news stories, reaching them through school principals, counsellors and their arresting officers. The book is a series of interviews with the girls, their mothers, vice cops and pimps, as well as brazen teenaged women who recruit more inexperienced girls into prostitution from their communities.

The author argues that father absenteeism, ineffectual sexual education classes, Internet porn and a hypersexual, "poisonous culture" that promises status through the accumulation of luxury goods are to blame.

Ms. Azam, who splits her time between Vancouver and Los Angeles, spoke to The Globe and Mail about the book.

How did you gain such access to these girls?

Typically I would meet a girl at school, at her [guidance] counsellor's office. I would tell her what I was doing and give her my number. It depended on where she was in her story. I always got parents involved early. Once I found one girl at a school who was maybe trading sex or having oral sex at school in the bathroom, she then would introduce me to a couple of friends who were doing the same thing.

How does it go from some oral sex in a high-school bathroom stall to joining a prostitution ring?

It snowballs very quickly after being bullied or disappointed in love. Some of the girls I met just thought they were being sweet, generous girls by giving a blowjob to a guy, and then they're the go-to girls for anything sexual. And then a recruiter will say to them, "You can make $50." Once she gets $50 for something that in her mind only took two or three minutes, even if she was disgusted by the guy, she is addicted to that money.

You describe "luxury fever" as something that compels these girls to prostitute themselves.

They all feel this pressure to be able to go to the mall and buy something. Brands are so important now. It matters that you have money to burn.

Nearly all of the girls were living with single moms. What role do absent fathers play?

They're completely absent. And in a way, so are their mothers. What I saw a lot of was poor judgment. The mothers were so busy with their own lives. A lot of them were involved in their own romances. They just bury their heads because they don't know what to do.

You also point to the Web, teen dating sites like Nextopia, guys quietly setting up late night dates through MSN chat, and Yahoo.com and Craigslist.com linking to underage "cam girls" who advertise their services and then link to online gift registries like Wishlist, Amazon and Felicite.

Once a girl sees something like sending a couple of nude photos [in exchange for] a CD as benign, it snowballs very quickly for them. [For instance] with sexting, young boys are becoming the new pornographers, but the girls are also taking photos of themselves.

All of the girls talk about feeling 'empowered' by male attention, however dubious or short-lived it was. For example, Heather talks about experiencing 'personal power' when she made men 'make noises' during oral sex.

She really began to believe that being a sexual object was her identity. She became divorced from her body. Anything she could do to get attention made her feel good and powerful, even if she didn't know the guys' names.

You write that none of the girls, not even the recruiters, are willing to call what they do prostitution, even when cash is exchanged. They say 'hooking up' and 'one-night stands.'

It's become so twisted in their minds. [There was the] notion of 'I can be any kind of woman I want to be, including a prostitute.'

Is sex education failing?

Sex ed can't always do the job it's intended to because it just isn't current enough. If you don't know where to start you should probably start by talking to a public health nurse. They're informed and a little more progressive around what kids are doing because they see the diseases and statistics and they talk to kids, as opposed to a teacher doing a sex ed class who may be more uncomfortable. I guess you can learn by these parents' example, learn what not to do. It's not something you can recover from: Your family is destroyed.

How do the guys fit in?

Parents have a responsibility to teach boys not to use girls. But how do you do that? If you're just starting to look at what your kids are watching and trying to make them media literate at 12, it's kind of too late. Parents [can't] really keep up with the amount of sexual content their kids are seeing, and they don't really understand how deeply their kids are affected. You actually have to talk about sex. You have to clarify values and know what healthy sexuality is, versus porn sex. They need some way to critique their own experience against what people are telling them. They see something and mimic it at a party. [The boys] have this idea of what sexy is and it's a total fabrication. It has nothing to do with the girls that they know, but it's really influencing how they treat girls. They will have an inability to relate to a girl in a normal, healthy relationship. Girls have no expectations for their relationships — there's no 'the ideal relationship would include trust, friendship and not being coerced or manipulated.'

You write that Heather, now 19, emerged after seeing a therapist. But she told you, 'I still shift between not really valuing my body, not minding if I'm with more than one guy and freaking out if a guy even touches me.' How is it affecting intimacy later on in their lives?

This is going to be a huge problem. Right now, they're just too young to reflect on what it means to be in a bathroom giving oral sex to four or five boys. The girls always felt they could also have sex without any consequences or hook up without caring, the way they feel boys do. It's a badge for them but they always regret it. There's always a feeling of emptiness.

What's next for these girls?

Heather will probably be okay and will be one of those few lucky girls who can chalk this up to a wild youth. Her parents had enough money that they could try many treatment [options]. But for the girls whose one parent isn't very involved, like a father, and whose mother is very busy, after the interview with the cops and a little bit of intervention by a social worker, that's it. You just have to be okay, because there's nothing else.


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090423.lsexweb24/BNStory/lifeFamily/home

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