We couldn’t resist when he offered us two inches for the price of one…
I knew that some of you would feel that way, but I’m telling the truth. Truly, it makes a big difference. Sexual exploration doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Teenage hormones are teenage hormones, but the whole atmosphere brings the degree of activity down several dozen notches. I’d bet that you could choose ten random Yeshiva/Bais Yaakov high school senior classes and not find a single person who has so much as touched a member of the opposite sex that’s not a relative or a doctor. Or a member of the same sex in a sexual manner.
I think you seriously misunderstand the issue. Gay teenagers who kill themselves don’t do it because they’re gay–they do it because the people around them convince them that they’re horrible, hellbound perverts unfit for the love, respect, and society of right-thinking people and they don’t have the perspective and emotional maturity to realize that that’s bullshit. That is what the IGB project is about.
Crazy Cat Lady, I do get that, but it doesn’t change my point that the only teenagers who will be made to feel that way by the people around them are those who have sufficiently explored their sexuality to determine that they’re gay. Teenagers who don’t think of themselves as gay will not be driven to suicide by the hellfire lectures of anti-gay people.
What’s to explore? You either think about dudes when you’re rubbing one out or you don’t. Whether or not you’re willing to admit it to yourself or anyone else, that’s pretty much it.
Do you ever wish you had more time to spend with each kid? I have four kids, and I feel like with work, etc. I don’t spend as much time as I would like with each one. Do you ever do one-on-one things with them?
As a computer programmer, how do you manage to work at home with 8 kids? Do you get interrupted a lot or does everyone respect the boundaries?
Do you work a 40 hour week, or do you work longer hours? How do you find the time to spend on the Straight Dope?
With four, my wife and I are driving them constantly to extra-curriculars (play practice, dance, soccer, baseball, etc.). Do you feel the same way with eight, or aren’t they involved in extra-curriculars?
I am not Chaim, nor do I have eight kids, but I’d point out that the school day is much longer in Orthodox schools than in public ones, meaning that the kids are out of the house for more time, but tend to have less time for extracurriculars. Obviously schools vary, but I had school starting at 8:30, running until 3:30 through third grade, 4:45 through ninth grade, and 5:30 for the rest of high school. During the school day, there’s no homeroom, band, etc., and generally the legal minimum amount of gym, because they’re trying to pack in the full secular curriculum plus an equal number of Judaic studies classes. I found my fairly elite college easier than high school in many ways - the individual classes were often harder, but there were so few of them.
We do make a point of having one-on-one (or two-on-one, me my wife and the kid in question) time with each on occasion. It’s good for each of them to feel individually special.
It’s not the easiest thing to do. I get interrupted pretty frequently, and I work longer hours to compensate. The important thing is that I meet my deadlines. Sometimes I even need to pull an all-nighter. But then again, that’s quiet time.
Of course, during most of the workday, the majority of the kids are in school. I’m not being interrupted by all 8 kids during the entire day.
A little break from work here and there to peruse when I’ve spent too long looking at a block of code, or when my code is building. Of course, this thread is a bit more time-intensive for me than my SDMB usage usually is.
They aren’t that into extra-curriculars. Son # 2 plays Little League Baseball, but that’s just twice a week (once for practice, once for game) and only for three months a year. My 2 oldest girls took ballet or gymnastics at various times, but that was also only once a week. And we often carpool. Bar Mitzvah classes I did with the boys myself, so no driving necessary.
When you say they “have sufficiently explored their sexuality,” do you mean when they are actually having sex? Because I knew I was gay many years before my first sexual experience. If anyone had found out before then, and if I lived in a homophobic environment like yours, I would not have been emotionally mature enough to deal with it. Suicide would have been a possibility.
The fact is, there’s a point at which naivety and denial are indistinguishable from willful ignorance. Over the years I have known several gay men and women from your community, and each of them said there were many more like them. Of course they have to keep it well-hidden, and that’s why you don’t know about them. But they do exist.
I had promised myself that I would not get angry in this thread, but I do tend to get angry when faces with willful ignorance.
No, I don’t mean that they necessarily had sex. But I do mean that they live in a social environment where sexual coupling (from full social dating down to innocent little expressions like a boy offering to carry a girl’s books home from school) generates some degree of pressure to prompt attention to sexual attraction and attractiveness in the forefront of one’s mind. Someone in a co-ed high school full of cheerleaders vying for football star’s attention, where a prom is the anticipated end-of-year event, where a loner sitting amongst couples stands out - will feel like he (or she) is lacking something if they don’t have suitable companionship. In this sort of environment, even one who has no intention to actually have sex is forced to think about who he’d enjoy being a couple with, and certainly those whose desires tend them toward members of the same sex are forced to come to grips with the fact that they would not particularly enjoy staring into an opposite-sex face every Friday night.
When activities like that are totally off the table, the sexual attractiveness aspect of social relationships are greatly de-emphasized. Such exploration and feelings come to the fore later (and, one would hope, in a more mature and well-rounded) when, as adults, you are dating other people with marriage in mind. I’m not saying there aren’t some out there who have been thinking that way since their teens, but it’s not nearly as pervasive as amongst teenagers in the prior sample environment.
Naivety and denial are not a one-way street. Just as it’s possible that Orthodox Jewish teenagers as a class are more sexual than I think they are, it’s equally possible that the milieu in which you grew up has blinded you (to some degree) to the notion that in certain environments, teenagers are capable of living through their teens without having given serious thought to sexuality.
I don’t doubt that they exist. I also don’t question the fact that they feel the need to keep their desires hidden from other Orthodox Jews. It can’t possibly be an easy burden to live with. But the fact that some number of them exist doesn’t mean that what I said above is not true for the overwhelming majority of Yeshiva/Bais Yaakov teenagers.
The IGB project is designed to prevent children borne of religious indoctrination (or simply otherwise-oppressive parents) from feeling like there’s something wrong with them if they happen to be gay.
You don’t get it. When you were a youngun (what, 12-13 or so) and had your first hardon, did it make you think about a guy or a girl? A girl. What if your son found it was caused by thinking about a guy? That’s not something you had control over, or that he would have any control over.
BTW, sexuality is not something that needs to be physically expressed to be true. Before you lost your virginity, I’m quite sure you knew you were attracted enough to the way women looked to want to have sex with only them. Do we think that heterosexuality has to be proven in the bedroom before we take it as writ? No, we trust that people are aware enough of their own desires and fantasies to know their own orientation. Though I wouldn’t trust your kids to feel safe coming to you if their own orientation was anything other than straight-and-narrow.
I actually think it’s plausible to believe that being raised in an environment where the only people of opposite sex you are around much is your siblings is conducive to being later to realize your own sexual preferences.
It will not be true of every person, but the odds are much better. The kid seriously might not realize (given not watching any tv other than dvds, and going to a fairly sheltered, single sex school) that their thoughts are related to any sort of condemned behavior. After all, the thoughts are not condemned (as keller made clear), just actions, and the actions wouldn’t be considered yet. Kids at that age do have a lot of hormones, but they usually aren’t thinking long term about their lives. No one’s being permitted at their age to do anything sexual.
Boys in that sort of situation, who have thoughts (of other boys while aroused, as mentioned above) that might lead a typical young teen boy to decide he’s gay, may think that it’s because the only people they really know their own age are their sisters and boys, and that it will change when they get older, for example. Girls may think that their crushes on other girls are from admiration or wanting to be like them, rather than a difference of sexuality. Since I grew up in a situation way less restricted and still met many people who had thoughts like that, I can’t imagine naivete has suddenly lost all its power, especially over young teens.
I can see where not having the pressure of dating could keep some teenagers in denial for longer about their sexuality. After all, some gay teenagers do feel that they will be fine once they just meet the right person of the opposite sex.
What interests me is the thought that in this culture the adolescents don’t think at all about future relationships. Do they not imagine getting married and having a family in the future? I would have thought with the emphasis on family life that children would grow up expecting to marry and would therefore have some feelings and fantasies about their future lives and what life with a spouse would be like. Are you saying that before being married you never imagined what your future wife might look like or be like (even discounting any sexual thoughts)?
Does the prohibition against same-sex activity only apply to those of you who are “believers,” or does it extend to others? For example, the prohibition against murder would apply to all people, so you’d condemn a murderer, no matter his faith (or lack thereof). But on the other hand, I’ve never heard of observant Jews condemning other people for not following dietary prohibitions.
So which kind of prohibition would same-sex activity fall under?
Well, sure they do, but (for most) it’s so much more fleeting and abstract because it’s practically a different world. It’s like, the world of their parents, which they know they’ll someday join, but they don’t feel “connected” to it as kids, not even as teenagers who may only be three years or so away from joining (well, amongst the girls, that is). Even when older siblings or cousins, who had been peers to some degree, start dating and getting married, there’s a sense of privacy that leads you to not express what curiosity you may have, so you sort of shelve the whole matter in your mind. You may see a girl who you think is pretty, or you and your buddies might talk about what girls of mutual acquaintance you can see yourselves marrying, but it’s much the same attitude as if the subject of conversation was inventing a teleportation machine.
Most Yeshiva boys and Bais Yaakov girls come out of high school with only the vaguest idea of what they want in a spouse. In this, I can speak not only of my own personal experiences, but having been asked by others to try and find a good potential match for people. For the most part, their desires start as generically “should be nice, have good manners, decent looks…” Sometimes if someone has a lot of friends who’ve already been married, or married siblings, they have a clearer picture, but even then, not by much. It’s usually not until they’ve started actually meeting people for dates - which is certainly after high school, for boys not until their early 20’s, for girls, high teens - that they start to analyze what qualities they liked or disliked in the people they’ve dated that a more serious image - or fantasy, if you will - of the ideal spouse starts to form.
panache45:
Judaism does consider same-sex activity (at least between males) to be prohibited for gentiles as one of the seven Noahide laws.
I’m one of 7 (although one set of twins died shortly after birth, because they were premature), which my mother had within 6 years of each other. My mother said she expected to continue to have kids right up to the last minute, but she didn’t count on having uterine cancer at age 29. I wonder how many siblings I might have had if things had worked out?
In total honestly, no. We have seen in numerous families how poisonous child-favoritism can be, going back as far as the Biblical story of Jacob and Joseph and his brothers. We strive very hard to avoid any appearance of favoritism (though of course, all kids at one point or another feel that they’ve been treated less fairly than others).
I hope that your mother’s health had made a full recovery since making that awful sacrifice.
cmkeller - My mother was actually pregnant with me when they discovered the cancer. She had me, then a hysterectomy. She recovered fully, and also recovered from breast cancer later in life.
Of course, I told my siblings that my parents didn’t have to keep trying once they got it right with me. I don’t suffer from low self-esteem.
