Free Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex by Amy T. Schalet

Herder’s younger son Paul is quite open. “It’s not that he is always talking about it, but. . . . Well, when [Paul] sees a cute girl on the television, then he immediately says, ‘Oh, that’s a good-looking girl.’ And then he talks about her beautiful breasts and so forth. . . . Yes, he definitely notices all of that.” How does Loek feel about the way he talks about sex? “The way he talks about it? I think that is fine, I quite like it.” Anne van Wijngaarde says she knows exactly how far
    her son has gone: “Harm tells me, ‘now I French-kissed’ and then we be- come weak with laughter because he tells me what he did with them. That is nice. It’s so innocent and open.”
    In illustrating the normality of sexuality in their family, Dutch parents often make an explicit comparison with the way they were raised them- selves. Doing so, they demonstrate that normal sexuality is as important for what it is not as it is for what it is. Normal sexuality is not secretive ( stiekem ). Marga Fenning thinks it is a very good thing that young people these days “ask and tell everything at home”: “You know, I did not think that was good at all about the way it used to be, that everything had to be done so stiekem.” Hannie de Groot agrees: “I experienced it as very unpleas- ant in the past, that it was all so impossible and that it was all so mysteri- ous ( geheimzinnig ). It was really something dirty, disgusting. That is how it was conveyed. I don’t think that was conscious, but that is how things used to be.” It is a good thing, Karin Meier believes, that sex is becoming more “ gewoon , less secretive.” 9 In Dutch society today, “there are very few taboos you know, in that area,” says Trudy van Vliet. “It is very open.”
    But parents are not always as at ease with talking about sexuality as the mandate to make sexuality gewoon suggests they ought to be. Indeed, Ada Kaptein was reluctant give her daughter Madeleine sex education: “About condoms and stuff . . . we haven’t really talked about that.” In fact, when her daughter went on the pill to regulate her menstruation, Ada told her, “I hope you don’t yet see the pill as contraception.” But when it came time to educate Madeleine’s younger brother, her daughter took the lead. In doing so, she cajoled her mother into a more normalized approach. Madeleine explained menstruation to her brother and then called over her mother to tell him “the rest.” So, “there I sat telling him the rest,” Ada recalls. And in spite of having given evidence to the contrary, she concludes saying: “Re- ally it never was a problem. We can talk gewoon about that.”
    Normal sexuality dictates that parents accept their children’s sexual re- lationships. Parents are wise to adjust themselves to their children’s pace of development, so a common line or reasoning goes, lest they lose touch with the reality of their children’s lives. Corinne van Zanden says she hopes her children’s relationships progress gradually, but “it is going to happen any- way at some point. We’re pretty open about that.” And even Ada Kaptein, who told her daughter not to treat the pill as a contraceptive method too early, believes that “you can’t forbid it. Then they will start to do it stiekem . We used to do it stiekem .” That kind of secretiveness Ada wants “to avoid that at any cost.” Should her son Laurens request to sleep together with a
    girlfriend at home, Christien Leufkens says she would definitely acquiesce. “I’d rather have them do it here,” she explains, “when I am here, than that they do it stiekem . Because when you start to forbid, it doesn’t mean that they don’t do it. It just means that they don’t do it under your eyes.”

Relationship-Based Sexuality
    At the heart of the relationship-based conception of adolescent sexuality lies the assumption, taken for granted by all Dutch parents, that teenagers can be in love. Unlike