Airport Reading: Of BJs and Bike Seats

I’m sitting here at LAX about to board a flight to Boston to bring my 16-year-old daughter home from school for Christmas. Next to me is a bagful of reading I’ve been meaning to catch up on, including yet another study showing that young women are “tearing down sexual taboos,” “are far less prudish”, and are “having sex at a younger age”.

Help me out readers: What’s a (theoretically) enlightened mother of two teenage daughters to make of this information? On the one hand, it’s clearly a good thing that, over the course of the five decades the study spanned, “feelings of sexual guilt plummeted, especially among young women”. I’m certainly all for guilt-free sex -- but not for kids. Especially mine! I mean, young girls are now, on average, starting to have intercourse at 15. 15! The study also shows a skyrocketing increase in oral sex. According to the co-author of the report: “Oral sex has become so popular. In previous generations, oral sex was considered disgusting. Now young people see it as another way of being sexual.” I get it: “friends with benefits”. Oh. My. God.

Reading this report, my first instinct was to go online and Google “chastity belts”. Luckily, my catch-up reading bag also included this New York Times article, showing that bike seats can seriously affect sexual prowess. According to a urologist who has studied the problem: “There are only two kinds of male cyclists -- those who are impotent and those who will be impotent.” It was a Eureka moment: so, from now on, my teenage daughters will not be allowed to date a boy who doesn’t put in at least 75 miles a week on his ten-speed.

P.S. Does anyone have Sheryl Crow’s number? There are a few questions I want to ask her…