Books |
What Your Mother Never Told You
by Richard Dudum
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Self Help
What Your Mother Never Told You
Richard Dudum
“Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls.” There’s a headline that gets a parent’s attention. And if you are a parent reading The New York Times report, you can’t dismiss those findings. Chlamydia and Trichomoniasis — okay, they’re not major. But HPV can lead to infertility and cervical cancer.
In the federal study that generated these figures, almost half of the African-American girls tested had a sexually transmitted disease; among white teens, about 20% were infected. Extrapolating from these figures, researchers estimated that 3.2 American teen girls have sexually transmitted diseases.
Forget the infection rates. Consider just the sexual activity. The clear suggestion: Teen girls aged 14-to-19 are having more sex than parents may realize. Or may want to realize.
Back in the day, I heard versions of “Just say no” — and those messages didn’t stop me or stop any girl I was fooling around with. The calls to chastity and purity don’t seem to be working better now; we see the highest rates of teen pregnancy in Bible Belt states.
So what might make a teenager cautious?
Peer-to-peer communication, I’d bet. But where is the teenage girl who will step up and tell her sisters what boys really want and how they’ll be incredibly nice, manipulative or outright criminal to get it? If she’s written a book or made a video, I’ve missed it.
Which leaves us with books by grownups. You can know that a parent is the author just by opening the book. Do you see a sanctimonious bromide? There you go. And there the teenager just went.
After reading the Times article, I looked for a book I might recommend to teenage girls. Most seemed seriously out of touch. One writer seemed to get it — Richard Dudum, a San Francisco lawyer who’s fathered two sons and two daughters.
I have reservations about Dudum’s “survival guide” for teenage girls. In the age of text messages, 240 pages — just too long. And the message is annoyingly repetitive. “Respect yourself” and “You don’t owe him Jack” make a ton of sense, but when they’re the point of chapter after chapter, I can only imagine that the reader is rolling her eyes.
Still, I like Dudum for his bluntness and awareness. Kids do stuff. Drugs. Sex. Liquor. Boys, mostly, but girls too. And while the girls may not play with fire for the same reasons that boys do, they’re the ones who pay the price. So they must be the ones who learn to say no. Or, at least, not now.
No, but to what? Listen to Dudum.
On flirting: “It’s OK if you kiss a boy. The problem starts when you kiss so many boys that they start comparing notes and talking smack about you. How many boys do you think you can kiss before the comparisons start and the bad reputation kicks in?”
On girls who drink: “Never take a drink from someone you don’t know, and never pour yourself a drink from the punch bowl. If you go to a party and leave your drink on a table, never, and I mean NEVER, drink from that cup again.”
On sexual obligation: “Never feel pressure to give something in return just because a boy says or does something nice. You are being played! Your body is not merchandise. You can’t be bought. You don’t have to kiss him. You don’t owe him anything!”
On dealing with parents: “Sometimes you might get into trouble with your parents and you have absolutely no idea why. It could be because you gave attitude earlier and your parents are getting mad about it much later. Last night you rolled your eyes or jumped at them when they said something. Watch out. It doesn’t take much to trigger the delayed consequences of attitude. Don’t let pride blind you. Don’t get angry or defensive with people who love you and are trying to help you. Give them a chance. You can be the most beautiful girl in the world, but if you’ve got attitude, you may find yourself all alone.”
“You’re special,” a boy will tell a girl he’d like for sex. Dudum says, “That’s bullshit.”
“What will you get from giving a blow job or having anal sex?” Dudum asks, in a chapter heading, no less. [I told you he was blunt!] Well, you’ll get actual sex, not a modest facsimile. And maybe disease.
Dudum is not a hardass. Kids will have sex; he’d just prefer that girls wait until they’re with a guy they know well and really like. Because girls are, finally, special.
With caveats, here’s a book you can give to a teenage girl — and, if you’re a parent, you can profitably read yourself.
To buy “What Your Mother Never Told You” from Amazon.com, click here.
