Middle school confidential

LAST MONDAY, the California Supreme Court struck down a state law that required anyone who’d had consensual oral sex with 16- or 17-year-olds to register as a sex offender. The law, which dated to 1947, was found to be unconstitutional given that the penalty for having consensual intercourse with the same teenagers would be less harsh.

That’s a relief. Now high school seniors who date sophomores and juniors won’t have to proceed directly from the prom to the courthouse. But it’s probably small consolation to parents, many of whom have been collectively breathing into paper bags since at least 2003, when Oprah devoted an entire program to the question “Do You Know What Your Teen Is Really Doing?” Since then, countless news programs, editorials and parent associations have been on the oral-sex case.

In January, the Atlantic Monthly published an 8,000-word piece by writer Caitlin Flanagan that discussed, among other spicy concerns, a young-adult novel called “The Rainbow Party.” The title refers to a custom in which a group of girls, each of whom are wearing a different color of lipstick, summon a group of boys and -- how shall I put it? -- embark on a sort of body art project that the folks at Revlon probably did not have in mind when concocting smudge-proof products. Needless to say, mayhem ensues -- as does gonorrhea.

Back in the less rainbow-like playing field of real life, American teenagers are apparently reorganizing that classic hierarchy of physical intimacy once known as “the bases.” If kissing is first base and intercourse is “all the way,” oral sex now seems to have been promoted from left field to some indeterminate point between third base and home. Or maybe that’s optimistic. If we are to believe the buzz, teens are substituting oral sex for plain old making out. As if braces weren’t a drag already.

That “Oprah” segment, which aired long before the publication of “The Rainbow Party,” was perhaps not the program’s most rigorous journalistic endeavor (her guest’s research was composed of 50 teens and their mothers). And for all most of us know, rainbow parties could be as mythical as unicorns. Still, a report released last fall by the National Center for Health Statistics concluded that just over half of 15- to 19-year-olds have had oral sex. More alarming is a California study conducted last year among 580 ninth-graders. Twenty percent said they’d engaged in oral sex, and a third said they planned to try it in the next six months.

True, this is a small sample, but we’re talking about 14-year-olds. And when I asked a 16-year-old who attends a large public high school in the San Fernando Valley, she characterized oral sex as “a middle-school thing.” (In other words, by high school, most kids are having “actual sex” -- they’ve adopted the Clintonian distinction.) Still, this student, despite being notably “with it,” had never heard of rainbow parties, nor did she personally know anyone who aspired to host such an event. She did, however, have some interesting things to say about what happens when old-fashioned female gossip collides with newfangled female aggression. “It’s just girls bragging and competing,” she said. “Guys exist in the background. They stay quiet about it. It’s the girls who start the rumors.”

This whole business, although worrisome for parents and ratings-generating for the media, could be easily chalked up to sensationalism if not for the disturbingly high stakes for both parties. Girls might be putting their self-esteem on the line, but boys in some cases risk their entire futures.

Last month in Georgia, Genarlow Wilson stood trial on sexual assault charges stemming from a party in 2004 at which a group of teens got drunk and videotaped themselves having sex. The jury took less than an hour to acquit Wilson of a rape charge (as unsavory as the whole scenario was, the video showed there was no force involved) but was required under the law to convict him of aggravated child molestation for receiving consensual oral sex from an apparently sober 15-year-old (Wilson was 17 at the time).

It was only after the verdict was read that the jury learned the conviction came with a mandatory sentence of 10 years, followed by lifetime registration as a sex offender. As a result, Wilson, an honor student who’d had a clean record and several offers to play college football, sits in prison for engaging in an activity that, if we’re to believe the hype, is a common rite of teenage passage.

But just as love can be blinding, sex can be utterly confounding, and it’s possible we’ll never know whether this “epidemic” represents deep-seated cultural dysfunction or just more adult paranoia. What we do know is that even though the specific problems endemic to adolescence change with every generation, the solutions stay the same: study hard, earn good grades and get the hell out of high school (that is, if you can make it through middle school).