San Francisco Chronicle (USA), April 4, 2004
It's hard to gauge the hormonal habits of young people, especially if you read the contradictory messages about their sex lives.
Teens are having sex as early as 12 or 13, one recent report says, while another asserts that young people are increasingly practicing abstinence. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies sexual health, recently reported that teenage pregnancy rates across the country have been declining for 10 years in a row -- in part because of decreased sexual activity, but mostly because more young people are using contraception when they do decide to have sex.
But a report released last month suggests young people don't even do that with any regularity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in connection with AGI, reported that people between the ages of 15 and 24 accounted for half of all new sexually transmitted diseases in the country -- about 9.1 million each year. Young African Americans have the highest STD rates in the nation. Despite the declining teenage pregnancy rate, black women still have a higher birth rate than their white and Latino peers.
As confusing as the printed matter on urban youths and their sexuality can be, if you can't believe what you read, believe what you see. "This Is My Reality: The Price of Sex," a 187-page report and videotape that details the sexual attitudes and behavior of low-income black youths, offers a candid view of sex from the perspective of the young and marginalized. They speak in nonchalant tones about having multiple sex partners, sometimes using protection, but not always, and various other adult situations they find themselves in before they are ready. Sex education at school has not made much of a difference in their lives, it seems: They don't want to get tested for STDs because neighborhood clinics do not offer the confidentiality that would make them feel safe. Besides that, they feel as immortal as most teens and don't "think it will happen to me."
In focus groups conducted at 80 community-based organizations around the country, Motivational Educational Entertainment of Philadelphia identified disturbing trends among youths ages 16 to 20. The "Just Say No" message of abstinence-only campaigns has been lost on this group of young people, who grew up during an era when the hip-hop sensibility of getting cash and clothes did not incorporate values of conscientious sexual behavior or social responsibility. Rappers who mingle with glamorous-looking half-naked women rarely mention contraception while they're listing the number of compromising sexual situations they've been in lately. Channels like the Viacom-owned Black Entertainment Television often market alcohol and sneakers to young people (76 percent of the youths surveyed in the report said BET was their favorite channel) and youths are rarely exposed to healthy and positive images of themselves in the mainstream media.
From Oakland to Baltimore, young people said media was just one factor in their decision to have sex. Joan Morgan, author of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost," once wrote that the hip-hop generation has largely parented itself; this may be especially true for children of the hip-hop generation who have found themselves with parents close enough to them in age to relate to them as peers. Some said their parents don't always speak to them appropriately about the realities of being sexually active. Others said that as a result, they don't talk to their parents about sex. They often say, in retrospect, that they've been pressured by their friends to have sex before they were emotionally ready.
As a result, black urban youths, already marginalized from their mainstream peers because of class, race and cultural differences, have sex early and for the wrong reasons, including an irresponsible media, narrow approaches to sex education in school and stressful home environments. Although "This Is My Reality," released earlier this year, is subtitled "An Inside Look at Black Urban Youth Sexuality and the Role of Media," the findings say more about the unraveling social fabric of black family structure than they do about the hip-hop videos and music that some youths look to as guidelines for their sexual behavior.
There are lots of images and lyrics in hip-hop that objectify women and glorify materialism, says James Walker, a program coordinator for the California Prevention and Education Project, who conducts local workshops in high schools and juvenile facilities to promote safe sex and HIV prevention.
"That's what we've deemed the American dream," he said from his office in downtown Oakland. "The more you have, the better you are. But if you can't afford a few cars and you happen to look good, women can take the place of those cars."
But changing the often misogynistic culture of mainstream hip-hop is only one part of the solution, Walker added. Adults need to begin to reach out to youths in a more effective way, which can be tricky. The problem is not that young people are not aware of the dangers of STDs; they just have other things to worry about. "If you have to deal with violence -- Mom is cracked out, your uncle might touch you at night, all that," Walker said, shrugging his shoulders, "STDs and HIV become very low on your list of priorities. Those are intangible and less immediate dangers."
The gender gap between young African Americans is also less tangible but no less perilous. Many young women are dating much older men, looking for father figures or financial support.
"A lot of the relationships are material," said Tina Raine, a physician at the New Generation reproductive health clinic in San Francisco, which provides health care services for youths from ages 12 through 24. "If you don't have two parents, sexual partners become your means of support. The other huge impact on African American urban centers is the number of African American males who become a part of the criminal justice system," who sometimes return to the community with STDs. Because African American women tend to have a limited pool of potential partners to choose from, they stick with men who are in and out of the jail system and put themselves at a greater risk for disease.
Young males, on the other hand, feel as though "commitment is a game," and express their masculinity by having a number of "shorties," or casual sex partners. For young black men, there are dozens of ways to refer to women, many of them negative -- hood-rat, skeezer, flipper -- for girls they consider easy to have sex with and pass on to other male friends afterward. There is just one term of endearment across the board for women -- "wifey" -- the main sex partner and one for whom young men show respect. They all expressed a desire to get married and have a committed relationship in the tape, too, but many seemed hopeless about how to achieve that relationship.
Some girls, according to Dr. Maisha Hamilton Bennett, a clinical psychologist quoted in the report, turn to same-sex relationships because they feel devalued in heterosexual relationships with black men. Young men in Richmond and Oakland said in the video that they had seen the trend among girls in their neighborhoods. It seemed easiest for young people to seemingly protect themselves by "fronting" or detaching their emotional selves from the physical sexual act. In the words of one Richmond teenager, "Everyone wants to be the player and not be the one getting played."
"We know that happens, especially in poor communities," Brown said, adding that sex is transactional and viewed without intimacy among many low-income youths because of low levels of education and limited economic opportunities. "Why would we be surprised that women see having a baby or sex as a commodity? We have more judgment about it in inner-city communities because it's more pronounced. There's probably no one who likes to see young girls pregnant, but we haven't really been doing much about it."E-mail Joshunda Sanders at jsanders@sfchronicle.com.
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