Teenagers, sex and culture

[naama]

No: HPFGUIDX 8121

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Ebony " <ebonyink at h...> wrote:
 
<big snip>
> LOL!  As for hormones... spend a day or two with modern kids the 
same 
> age as the HP characters.  I'll admit, not *all* kids in the
> upper range of the 10-14 age bracket are obsessed with the opposite 
> sex... but some are.  According to my older students (the eighth 
> graders), they think it's extremely unrealistic that the HP 
> characters are still in the "latent stage" at 14-15.  I did counter 
> with the arguments that have been batted around here (wizards live 
> longer, they have to control their emotions/magical powers, etc.). 
 
> But one of my students summed up their attitude about it this 
> summer. "Yeah, well, they're not space aliens, Miss
> Thomas."
<huge snip>

I'd like to point out that American teenagers are quite likely to be 
different from teenagers from other cultures. The fact that they are 
all going through a similar biological change doesn't make *them* 
necessarily similar. The culture you grow up in determines to a great 
measure the way you view this biological change. And cultures vary 
enormously in the view they inculcate of body, sex, puberty. It 
seems to me that in American culture (which filters over here via TV 
and movies) body-sex-puberty is something different than in British 
culture. 
The fact that for (some) American teenagers sex-romance is of 
such central importance that they can't imagine it being otherwise, 
doesn't mean that we have to accept this as a universal truth. Sexual 
urges can be dealt with and thought about very differently. In the 
Middle Ages, for instance, sexual urges were viewed as so alien to 
the self that they were sometimes demonised (incubus, succubus). So, 
the fact that the biological process is the same, doesn't at all 
guarantee that the responses to it are the same. I think that 
this tendency to flatten a person to his/her "hormones" is a) very 
demeaning and b) is itself a cultural construct.

Naama