I didn’t plan to devote any time to analyzing the Gloucester, Massachusettes “pregnancy pact” debacle, especially since it’s questionable whether or not the sudden exponential rise in teen pregnancies at the suburban school is anything more than a cluster of teenage idiots. Frankly, I found the whole thing rather fishy. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. Having been a teenage girl, I can attest to the impressive levels of dumbfuckery that abound in high schools, especially when it comes to sex. However, I have a hard time believing that 17 girls could get along well enough to form a pact of any kind. It’s been my experience that if you put more that 4 girls together in any given situation, it will inevitably result in a cage match. In order to ensure peace among a group of young women, you pretty much have to establish a hierarchy, ranking them in order from “hot” to “fugly”. As long as the chubby one knows her place, it might be alright. In the rare case that the degree of cuteness is too close to call, start with the blonder girl and work your way down. At any rate, there’s no way that, at a coed high school, you can get a group too large to sit at the same lunch table to make major life decisions together. This is not the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Still, I do have a thing or two to say about teenage girls and sex. Entering puberty is like developing super powers. You’ve been going through life, a mere mortal child, knowing that you are just one of many, then one day, you wake up and you notice that you are capable of manipulating the minds of men. It’s impossible to control at first, so you tend to misfire - emabarrassing yourself in front of the boys you like while setting fire to the ones you don’t. When you finally do learn to focus, the power is intoxicating. Like many of our favorite mutants, you don’t start out a hero. That heat vision, that that hip-swing that freezes time - how could you not be tempted to pull a Peter Parker and use them in the selfish persuit of revenge, money, and love? Usually, a girl will realize the responsibility that comes with power before she does more than break a few hearts, but every once in a while, it’s too much too soon. These unseasoned hands foolishly unleash something too big for them to hold - they create life.
Like super heroes, mothers have incredible strength and can achieve extraordinary feats, but they pay the price, sacrificing their personal lives. They have to carefully craft this public identity to protect the ones they love. They can never really relax, ever vigilant of some hurtling meteor, foreign invasion, or madvillain. That constant struggle of want-to vs. must-do is probably too almost always too much for a young girl to grasp. But when you’re 15 and you find out you can fly, you can’t really see it that way.
It’s hard. It’s complicated. Adults usually aren’t helpful. In fact, most of them will only make it worse by sending mixed messages. Who do you think came up with the blondeness scale?
