Thirteen, Alfie? I’d almost given up on sex by the age of 13

Fergus Pickering

All that you say is true. WEell, I wouldn't know about the preteen heterosex, not being working class, until you come to the bit about why no abortion. Why noabortion - because the baby is a career choice for the girl not available in Holland. Simply, if we cut down on the beenfits, increse child poverty in Labourspeak, then it is my guess that the number of teenage, preteenage pregnancies will go down. I would add that the sex education given to my two daughters was so comprehensive they knew more about it than I did by the time they had got to Chantelle's age. If they had got themselves pregnant it certyainly wouldn't have been through bloody ignorance. One thing we MIGHT do is to encourage teenage homosexuality. You can't get a catamite up the duff. Oh, and put the fear of God up the girls. THAT should keepthem pure.

cuffleyburgers

Is Rod your real name? phnarr phnarr.

I think the broken britain sobriquet refers not so much to 3rd form sex behind the bike sheds but more to knifings, gangsterism, drug dealing and shootings.

In a way rod your tale of teenage fumblings is very sweet.

Your point would have been better made had you first knocked over a tobacconist to pay for a fix of heroin, shagged the girl then shot her parents, knifed her brother and tortured her rabbit to death.

I think it's idle to deny that there is a widespread behavioral problem amongst teenagers, in my view caused largely by weakness in the education system which is
run by a generation who themselves were brought up sloppily.

Marc O'Polo

That last line, Rod. Aah well, at least it was a shag. ("Djer love me? Corse I luvs ya - shags ya dunni?!") Ooo sed the corse of troo luv never run smoov?

BigFatTwat

Sex is everywhere - girating, pouting, thrusting, etc. Ever seen a music video these days? Nice once in a while, but can you imagine a diet of that stuff? In a young mind? I don't think it has much do with my parants, teachers, or institutions - more to do with the thrust and cheapness and crassness and immorality of profit as it molds are minds and lives.

David Short

Spectator sub-editors (or lack of them) strike again with 'neither fish nor foul).

RL was lucky, wherever he lived. In my young days in the North East, only the 'bad girls' did it, even at 16 never mind 13, and there weren't enough bad girls to go round.

I think it was the double threat of shame and pregnancy - it was pretty difficult to get hold of contraceptives in the 60s. Even the 70s, it wasn't easy and coitus interruptus was a common method.

But perhaps RL was brought up in the South East, where the girls were more accommodating, as I later found out.

The paradox we have now is that the easy availability of condoms and abortions has produced more not fewer teenage mums....

DinahA

This cannot have taken place in the early Spring of 1973 if you were listening to The arrows "A Touch too Much". My Guinness Book of Hit Singles informs me that the song was a hit in May 1974. I reckon you popped your cherry a year later than you think.

Non Gradus Anus Rodentum

How did twelve year-old Alfie get to pull a fifteen year-old girl anyway? When I was twelve you were doing well to get even a girl of the same age to look at you. To have pulled a fifteen year-old would have been like winning the football pools. Besides, you'd have needed an orange box on which to stand to kiss her!

David Lindsay

Posh girls do get pregnant too, you know.

And posh boys make them pregnant.

But they have abortions.

If that is what the screeching pseudo-conservatives prefer, then they are truly the heirs of Margaret Thatcher (who also gave this country massively increased benefit dependency) and her reign of moral chaos, not least including the legalisation of abortion up to and including partial birth.

As for the Netherlands, it is because the north is still staunchly Protestant and the south is still devoutly Catholic that there is so little teenage pregnancy there and that Dutch teenagers have their first sexual experiences so much later.

Forget Amsterdam and all that. Most Dutch people, who were never asked about this any more than about the importation of Islam on a massive scale, wish that they could indeed forget about it.

David Short

Pretty difficult age to forget, the day you lost it. I was pissed off that mine happened a few weeks after a birthday or I could have though of myself as a real Jack the Lad.

So the music memory must be the mistake.

Mark Solomon

You lucky, lucky b*****d!!

The only shameful thing about the 13 year old family thing is that it becomes an option these days because the UK is stupid enough to have established a system that makes it viable - benefits for people who have never worked.

I live in Spain and refute your suggestion that lingering church morals restrain people - laughed out loud at that one! Teen pregnancies have always happened a great deal here, even under Franco - when previously the girls would be sent abroad on a 'language course' - with abortion thrown in!! - they can now have them here, no questions asked.

The difference with the UK is that there is no housing benefit, no supplementary benefit (or whatever it's called now) and unemployment benefit is only payable if you have worked, for a limited time. You want to be a young single mum? Well, that's your personal choice and the state will not treat you any different so you have to work and house and feed yourself.

Not surprising then that this route is not seen as a career choice as it is in the UK.

DinahA

Except that both participants in the event recall The Arrows being played! I conclude he lost his virginity a year later than he thinks.

Mel Stringer

I loved this article. What brilliant writing. Incredible.

Archie

Thirteen? Good grief! I thought I was a randy little git, but even I couldn't get a shag until I was sixteen - or was it seventeen? Mind you, this was in semi-rural Northamptonshire, so should make allowances!

Alistair White

"Neither fish nor fowl" would look better, Rod.

Fiber Fervidus

Erm... OK, squire - I guess we have to come clean :-)

Don't remember the Litmus paper bit - we were supposedly to drink some concoction or other and pee green - same old 'willies' I suppose :-)

Julian Fruppapoipepauppioioip

"A Touch Too Much" by The Arrows was in the spring of 1974, not 1973. "Honaloochie Boogie", however, was in the spring/summer of 1973.

Paul

Yes, it was the fact she had the child that I find so disgusting. Obviously, it would be preferable if they weren't having sexual intercourse but it's because they've added another burden to the state and increased our excessive population that I was angered.
Ideally, no under 16 year-old would become pregnant but I'd rather 20% became pregnant and all had abortions than 5% became pregnant and only 4% had abortions.
Abortion is not a desirable form of contraception but it's better than teenage mothers.

Mary

I'm a posh, well-educated girlie - same school as Gail T actually - and I dumped my virginity at the age of 15 during Easter 1973, in Southwold. Wasn't the first of my friends, wasn't the last under-ager either - in fact it was a bit of a point of principle amongst us to Do It before one's 16th birthday (I blame Honey magazine.) However, as the frontline warriors of the sexual revolution, we ALL used condoms, and we ALL went on the Pill when we got to university.

I really, really hope that my own daughters didn't do any of this sort of thing!

Kevin

Since you brought up the subject, by what
criteria do you judge that your friend is
"fine" right now? I am not suggesting that
she is not happy. I just wonder if you have considered that she may have a different perspective on happiness than she otherwise could have had if you had refrained from satisfying her appetite that night.

By analogy, her parents might have brought her up on a diet of pizza and chips so that now she enjoys nothing better than a deep-fried Mars bar and complaining when asked to pay for two seats on an aeroplane.

The alternative for that (hypothetical)
child being that she could have grown up to
be healthy and attractive.

Or are alternatives not worth thinking about?

Russell

You're right. When I was a teenager "protection" consisted of locking the car doors and waiting until the windows had fogged up before taking her bra off!

David Taylor

Rod- its 'neither Fish nor Fowel' not Foul.( half way down the 3rd column! I fear a million folk will have already told you) Keep up the good work