Mother regrets her promiscuous youth

by Erin Roach                                                                                                                                                    Vol. XXIV, No. 9, October 2011

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, a woman acknowledged that her promiscuous past now is a troubling obstacle in her quest to raise a daughter.

"So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn't), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don't know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily," Jennifer Moses wrote. "We're embarrassed, and we don't want to be, God forbid, hypocrites.

"Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I don't know one of them who doesn't have feelings of lingering discomfort regarding her own sexual past. And not one woman I've ever asked about the subject has said that she wishes she'd 'experimented' more."

Moses' column was titled, "Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?" and dealt mainly with the sexualization of girls.

"Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this -- like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves -- but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?" she wrote, leading to the conclusion that perhaps she and other parents assume they lack the moral authority to prohibit such behavior.

"It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, 'If I could do it again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?'" Moses wrote. [BP]