Teen Sex by the Book by Patricia Weerakoon

TEEN SEX BY THE BOOK

An Imprint of Anglican Youthworks

First published September 2012. Reprinted 2013. Second edition published June 2016. Third edition published March 2019. Reprinted 2020, 2021, 2022.

Copyright © Patricia Weerakoon 2012

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Managing editor—Julie Firmstone

Managing editor (third edition)—Cassandra Cassis

Theological editors—Marshall Ballantine-Jones, Jodie McNeill

Cover design—Bethany Abbottsmith

Internal Design—Andrew Hope

Acknowledgement

For the two most important men in my life: my husband, Vasantha, for his love and encouragement and, above all, his courageous acceptance of being the spouse of a sexologist; and my son, Kamal, who went through theological college explaining to his colleagues that his mother ‘worked in sex’. Kamal is now my consultant for all things biblical —thanks son.

Introduction

Teenage years are a time of excitement, fun and challenge. It’s the time you wriggle out of parental control and spread your wings in an exciting new world. You want to be independent—to be yourself, develop your own identity, and experience all the different activities that assault your senses and beg to be watched, touched and consumed.

But sometimes, you find that this newfound independence is not all it was promised to be.

As you struggle to find out who you truly are, you come into conflict with friends, parents and, at times, your own beliefs and values.

You don’t know who or what you want to be. How can anyone else understand?

In the teenage years, bodies change in weird and wonderful ways. Some of the changes are fun and make you feel good. Others make you want to run away and hide. As if to further confuse you, your brain goes off on tangents that make you moody, angry or anxious, and sometimes all of these at the same time! What is happening? You don’t know where to turn. Maybe Google has an answer. Or Reddit or Tumblr. But you end up even more confused.

To cap it all off, the adults around you say contradictory things. ‘Grow up’, they tell you, ‘you’re not a child anymore’. So you make a decision to do something and then they groan and say, ‘You’re too young for that’.

Welcome to the wonderful years of teenage. And then there’s sex. You might love the idea of it—or hate it. It’s sensational—and scary. It invades your whole life and surrounds you. Television, comic books, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, Omegle, YouTube and even video games all shove sex in your face.

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Teen Sex by the Book

Your friends talk about it constantly. Your schoolteachers tell you about your body and how not to get pregnant. Maybe your parents and church talk about it (and if they don’t, they should!). Maybe you want to try it—everyone else seems to be into it and it sounds like so much fun—but you’re scared as well (because of all the stories of disease and pregnancies, or a feeling that you’re just not ready). No-one really explains dating … sexual desire … pleasure … orgasms … or what’s so bad about porn.

This book is about teenage sexuality

This book will explore these and other questions about teenage sexuality and relationships. The discussion is frank and, in some parts, explicit. Above all, it calls you to consider who you are and what you stand for, and to join young people everywhere in God’s new sexual revolution. We invite you to discover how living God’s countercultural lifestyle leads to healthy, pleasurable sex and intimate, satisfying relationships that last a lifetime. The fact that you’re reading this book shows that you’re willing to consider living God’s way in your sexual life. If you are already living this way—good for you. Use this book to encourage others to join you.

This is a book for teenagers but ...

The adults around you play a significant role in your life. They can be immensely helpful to you, even though they sometimes seem only to be interested in stopping you from having fun. This book will help you see all this adult interference for what it often is: love and concern expressed by teaching and supporting you, helping you to make wise decisions ... and being there to pick up the pieces if things go wrong. Therefore, the information in this book will also be useful for parents, teachers and youth leaders. So, once you’ve read it, pass it on to them. Reading it will help them to understand that young people like you are

Teen Sex by the Book

in an awesome and wonderful phase of life, and how they can best help you to grow into the person God intends you to be.

This book is in two parts

Part One starts with the age-old question, ‘What is sex?’ It goes on to explore changes in the teenage body and brain, and how these lead to the exhilarating and sometimes anxiety-causing feelings a sexual teenager often has. We’ll explore what scientists have discovered about our brains and look at how this compares with what God tells us in the Bible. The first couple of chapters are like the warm-up in the gym—the aerobic exercises. The chapters then increase in intensity as we move through the topics of sexual desire, falling in love and arousal, and then into dating, mating and living ‘happily ever after’. Consider these chapters as the high-intensity workout. You may find yourself a little breathless and light-headed, but it’s stuff that will inform and challenge you.

Part Two takes you through specific hot topics on sexuality and relationships. This is a little like concentrating on developing specific muscle groups through weight training. We’ll explore the effects of new technology on our sex lives and what pornography does to our brains. We’ll discuss how sometimes our sexuality doesn’t neatly fit into what others expect from a boy or a girl. You may find that some of these chapters are not particularly relevant to you at the moment. Read them anyway. You never know when the information will be useful. You don’t want one muscle group wasting away because you ignored it.

One last point about the book: you will find that we talk of sexual activity as being between a girl and a boy. Australian statistics show that about 2–4% of people of all ages are in same-sex relationships. So while we’ll discuss same-sex couples, this book is written for the majority of young people with heterosexual desires and practices.

Why a book on sex for teens?

The information you will read is based on sound scientific research and my personal experience working as a sex educator, researcher and therapist in America, Sri Lanka and Australia for more than 40 years. I have talked to teens in churches and schools in English; and in gardens and tea plantations in my native languages of Tamil and Sinhalese. In the seven years that I was the director of a graduate sexual health program, I learned about the sexuality of teenagers from all over the world.

All this experience has taught me that young people the world over are searching for their own unique identity. While the information revolution and technological advances have made the teen world more consistent, teenagers are feeling the pressure to follow what their peers, the media, internet and social media tell them to be, think and do. To add to this, adults around them are stressed about the sheer volume of knowledge and the cyber-smartness of the digital natives they are raising.

A sense of individual identity and self-worth is very important to all teenagers—and rightly so. At the beginning of the Bible (in the book of Genesis) we learn that we were created to be like God, or as the Bible put it, ‘in his image’. However, man and woman sinned by turning away from God, which messed up that image. Today we need to understand that, even in this sinful state, we are still made in God’s image and therefore we are truly special.

If you are reading this and you are a Christian, then you have the absolute certainty of your identity. It is a sure and certain knowledge that you, as a Christian, do not need the world’s approval. It’s nice to be popular with friends and peers. But you know that, even without that, you are special. You are like a plant with strong roots that can flourish, secure in the knowledge of what Jesus has done for you by dying on the cross. You can have the courage to stand apart, to face the world and be who you are—a special teenager strengthened by the Holy

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Spirit to live your life in joyful obedience to God, not as a blind follower of what the world tells you to be or do.

We’re reminded of this in this quote from the Bible:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1–2)

Now you know why I am compelled to write to you, and what this book will challenge you to be and do. So come on, be courageous and get your friends together. Read the book and talk about it.

‘Wait a minute’, I hear some of you say. You’re not sure if you want to hear all this heavy Christian stuff? Maybe you are not yet a committed Christian. Perhaps you are exploring Christianity or just searching for a better way to live. Please read on. You will find that this book will challenge you to look at life, sex and relationships differently.

So, no matter where you stand with God, get informed and challenged to start a new teen sexual revolution.

Patricia Weerakoon

Part one

What is sex and what does God think about it?

The girls in my class kept talking about hooking up with these guys at a party last weekend. I actually didn’t have a clue what they meant—so I asked. They were kissing and fingering with these boys that they’d only just met. Wow, they allowed these … these strange guys to finger their … their … you know what I mean. Some even talked of giving a guy head. ‘That’s not sex’, they said.

ABBY JOANNA

We had this sex education class. The teacher had all these pictures. So … we now know all about the seminal vesicles and how they nourish the sperm, and how the egg and sperm meet in the fallopian tube. And watch out—you then get pregnant. Hey, we wanted her to tell us what the clitoris was and what it means to have an orgasm. Yeah, right! Like that’s gonna happen anytime soon.

My mates talk about how girls like rough play during sex. Some even allow their boyfriend to cum on their face. That doesn’t sound like fun to me!

I am in love with this guy. And I didn’t want to have sex but I really wanted to make him happy. So we’re doing these other things and then he’s like pushing me to go all the way ... and before I know it he’s doing it and I can’t stop. I was scared. It hurt and I was crying, but I let him do it because I didn’t want to break up.

What is sex and what is it for?

Sex and sexual behaviours are both the simplest and most complex activities you will face in your teenage years.

It is simple because your brain wakes up and becomes sexual in your early teens and starts you off on the sexual journey of a lifetime. Sex comes to you: it’s not something you need to go in search of. It is complex because, for most of the time, sex involves you and another person. And so you have to learn about the meaning of sex in relationships, what activities constitute sex and how you communicate with the opposite sex.

The teenagers in the scenarios above are confused about two areas of sex:

• What is a ‘sexual activity’?

• What is the purpose of sex?

What is a sexual activity?

In the earlier scenarios, Abby, Talia and, to some extent, Zach are confused about what constitutes sexual activity. Abby is distressed that some girls would allow a boy they have just met at a party to touch and fondle their genitals. Talia thinks that doing ‘other things’ is not a real sexual activity. So she allows the boy she loves to have increasing levels of access to her body. She is then shocked and distressed when he goes all the way with sexual intercourse. Zach’s comment shows his confusion at the way his mates treat girls sexually, but also his assumption that sex is mainly about having fun.

In every one of these scenarios, it seems that the only intimate sexual activity that is classified as ‘sex’ is sexual intercourse. In other words, anything other than the penis inserted into the vagina is not considered ‘sex’. This is something I have come across in focus group

discussions with teenagers. It is also borne out in research. In a study with university students, researchers1 asked undergraduate students what activities constituted having ‘had sex’. Almost all agreed on penile-vaginal intercourse (97.4%) and anal intercourse (85.4%) as having ‘had sex’. The proportion who listed other activities was considerably lower. In terms of oral sex, 58.4% said receiving and 57.7% giving oral sex was ‘having sex’. When it came to touching: 38.6% said receiving and 37.7% giving genital stimulation or fingering was ‘having sex’. Only 14% considered breast stimulation and deep kissing to be ‘having sex’.

What do you and your friends think? The list below gives a range of sexual activities from the lowest level of sexual intimacy to the highest: where would you draw the line as to what is ‘having sex’ with someone?

• Sharing sexual texts and explicit pictures

• Holding hands

• Kissing with lips closed

• Touching the body other than the breast or genitals

• Deep kissing (‘snogging’, French or tongue kissing)

• Touching breasts or nipples

• Oral contact (using your mouth to touch) with breasts or nipples

• Touching and stroking the genitals (fingering, mutual masturbation)

• Oral-genital contact

• Vaginal intercourse

We will come back to this discussion in the chapter on ‘dating and mating’. For now I want to leave you with the thought that any act between two young people of the opposite sex is potentially a ‘sexual’

1. Peck, B, Manning, J, Tri, A, Skrzypczynski, D, Summer, M et al. 2016, ‘What do people mean when they say they “had sex”? Connecting communication and behavior’, in Manning, J & Noland, C (eds) Contemporary Studies of Sexuality & Communication: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, Illinois, pp. 3–14.

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1. What is sex and what does God think about it?