The first time I heard a mother of girls talk about the teenage oral-sex craze, I made her cry. The story she told me — about a bar mitzvah dinner dance on the North Shore of Chicago, where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered bus from the temple to the reception hall — was so preposterous that I burst out laughing. The thought of thirteen-year-old girls in party dresses performing a sex act once considered the province of prostitutes (we are talking here about the on-your-knees variety given to a series of near strangers) was so ludicrous that all I could do was giggle.
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Somehow these girls have developed the indifferent attitude toward performing oral sex that one would associate with bitter, long-married women or streetwalkers. But they think of themselves as normal teenagers, version 2005. For a while, whenever I passed groups of young girls, I looked at them anew. Were these nice kids — the ones playing AYSO soccer and doing their homework and shopping with their moms — behaving like little whores whenever they got the chance? It was like some weird search for communists — was the sweet, well-spoken daughter of a friend actually a blowjobber? I looked at the small girls in my children’s schoolyard — as cosseted and protected and beloved a group of children as you will find anywhere on the planet — and tried to convince myself that in a matter of five or six years they would be performing oral sex on virtual strangers.
Powell’s Books – Review-a-Day – Rainbow Party by Paul Ruditis, reviewed by The Atlantic Monthly.