Shari Thurer

Don’t get me wrong. I am not critical of this new research in and of itself. In fact, as a social science study, it is unusually rigorous. Containing a larger and more representative sample of children than most prior research, it goes a long way toward improving upon the faulty data that is often used to prop up the cherished myth that exclusive, full-time mothering is an ideal.

But the perpetual game of research one-upmanship played by developmental psychologists and child-rearing gurus obscures an important fact: It is next to impossible to prove that observable, measurable parenting behavior has a predictable impact on children’s well-being. To date, our scientific investigatory tools are not up to the complexity of the task. Even Harvey’s study suffers from an unavoidable woolliness with regard to its methodology — it does not, for example, control for quality of child care. This does not necessarily disprove its findings, but it does leave the field wide open for future obfuscating — which will undoubtedly occur, given the strong wish of many to find Harvey wrong. Yet lost in all the research and counter-research is the simple truth that a mother’s working outside the home (or not) has never been shown to be more than a weak predictor of anything in her child.

The fact is that even our most cherished beliefs about child-rearing do not rest on scientific proof but on fashion and politics. On the mommy front, sentiments holds sway. Only last year we were told by grandmother Judith Harris, in her widely publicized book “The Nurture Assumption,” that a child’s peer group, not his or her parents, has a more powerful influence on the child’s development. Before that, MIT historian Frank Sulloway resurrected the old chestnut about the importance of birth order in child development.

Twenty years ago, when I was in the throes of child rearing, maternal bonding was presumed to be the preeminent determinant of later mental health. I dutifully schlepped around my daughter’s “security blanket,” a ratty old stuffed rabbit supposedly symbolizing me, lest she be traumatized by its — my — absence. My own mother would have summarily thrown the thing out because it was undoubtedly full of germs. In accordance with the expert advice of her day, she took care not only to avoid germs, but to avoid “smothering” or “castrating” her children. (Remember the fate of Mrs. Portnoy!) Yet my mother’s mother was more concerned with daily bowel movements and good posture. All of these ideas about proper maternal behavior were purportedly bolstered by hard data but, strangely, so-called objective science has suspiciously managed to affirm the prevailing public mood, however it has swung.

I happen to agree with Harvey’s conclusion that children of working mothers suffer no permanent harm, but not because of her study. Rather I agree because in the 25 years I have been practicing in-depth psychotherapy, I have not come across a single patient who was damaged specifically by maternal employment. I have encountered many patients who were hurt by their mothers’ grotesque behavior: by extreme emotional unavailability, excessive preference for another sibling, outright abuse or neglect. But those characteristics may be present in a mother whether she works or not. It is not working per se that is the issue, but the quality of parenting — and, unlike most studies, I include fathers here — over the long haul.

Besides, today’s working mothers are doing what mothers have always done. Surely if this arrangement were as harmful as some claim, it would be incontrovertibly apparent by now. Throughout most of human history, mothers have devoted more time to other duties than to child care and have delegated aspects of child-rearing to others, except for a brief, affluent period after the Second World War. Fleeting as it was, that period was ossified in a number of TV sitcoms (a new rage in the 1950s), like “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet” and “Leave it to Beaver,” so that now we still think of the breadwinner-housewife family pattern as natural, good and right, the way things were since time immemorial.

This idealization of the ’50s is especially acute among political conservatives, who have never warmed to mothers who are otherwise engaged, especially when they don’t have to be. Of course, many of these same people also believe that welfare mothers should work. When a middle-class mother leaves the hearth, however, she is deemed selfish, callous and greedy — qualities ironically similar to those attributed to lazy, selfish welfare mothers who don’t go out and work. But the decade of the ’50s, with its labor-intensive ideology for good mothering, was the exception, not the rule. Mothers had never been so exclusively preoccupied with their offspring before, nor have they been since. In the ’60s, some mothers returned to work because “women’s liberation” gave them permission, but many more worked out of economic necessity.

The briefest glance at history will dispel the notion that there is but one correct way to mother. Your grandmother may have bottle-fed your father on a rigid schedule and started his toilet training at the tender age of 3 months, practices that some people might regard as absurd today, if not abusive. Yet he managed to grow up. Children tend to survive their parents’ bungled efforts to raise them properly — be it wet nursing, Watsonian behaviorism, Spock permissiveness, Israeli kibbutzim, round-the-clock empathy, aggressive cognitive stimulation, or any other parenting styles. All these shifting methodologies — compared to which maternal employment might seem mild — were considered ordinary in their time. There is no data showing that the incidence of mental illness was greater or lesser during any of them. In fact, what seems most evident is that there are many good ways to raise children.

Perhaps it is our ever-present anxiety about our “goodness” as parents — fostered by impossible standards perpetrated by the media and an avalanche of pseudo-scientific narcissim about our chosen lifestyle — that dulls our perception to the virtue of other ways. But it is time we stopped focusing on the obviously small difference between the well-being of children whose mothers work outside the home and those whose mothers do not, in the service of endorsing our own particular preference for parenting.

Such hairsplitting diverts our attention from the real problems of children in America: crumbling schools, poor health care, drug addiction. One in eight youngsters actually goes hungry. There is a painful irony in educated parents’ lavish outpouring of attention on their own children and their obliviousness to the children of others. If we are to feel guilt about our performance as parents, let’s derive that guilt from an appropriate source — our treatment of the nation’s poor children. A more democratic allocation of our time, resources and concern across the entire population of young people would probably benefit everyone.

Of all the revelations that emerged from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, this transformation in sensibility — this sexual generation gap between young women and their mothers — is one of the most interesting. As we slide toward the end of the millennium, various sexual practices are taking on different meanings. What was deviant for middle-agers has become mainstream for their offspring. Phone sex, casual transvestism, computer sex — it’s all OK. And the genders are leaking into each other. Each is playing with each other’s toys, mimicking each other’s icons; this is the age of G.I. Jane and Mr. Mom. With these transformations, the significance of various bodily orifices has changed as well. Contact with one or the other may variably signal intimacy, contempt, hipness, commitment or any combination thereof — or not much of anything at all. Among many young people, fellatio is notably banal. Think of the scene in the film “Chasing Amy” where two of the main characters boast about their fellating techniques, as if oral sex was as neutral an act as shaking hands.

But for boomers, it is not like shaking hands. Oral sex means something — or it used to. My over-40 male patients, for example, take for granted they have “scored” when they get a woman to perform fellatio on them outside of a relationship. (To do so within a relationship means something else, especially when it is in the course of making love.) In these men’s salad days, good girls — the kind of women with whom you had conversations — did not do that sort of thing sans souci.

To male boomers, the practice of oral sex involves the reduction of a woman into a desiring body (or, more accurately, a body part) available for servicing them. The word “score,” of course, speaks volumes. As illustrated in Woody Allen’s recent movie “Celebrity,” in which access to blow jobs was portrayed as one of the perks of being an alpha male, unilateral oral sex is a power trip for middle-aged men. Swallowing is the ultimate victory. Even President Clinton must have understood this, for in an uncharacteristic gesture of gentlemanly concern, he resisted using Monica Lewinsky in this manner. His consideration turned out to be gratuitous, however, for Lewinsky has said that, far from feeling used, she regarded it as a measure of his trust. Therein lies the generation gap.

The view of my middle-aged women patients is consistent with that of their male peers. Veterans of the ’60s sexual revolution, these women might well have engaged in casual sexual intercourse in their youth, but they tended to reserve oral sex for a relationship in which they felt safe. To most of them, fellatio was somehow more serious than intercourse. It was a privilege of intimacy. A loving, enduring relationship would allow these women to find pleasure in a range of activities that might shame them otherwise. In “giving head,” a woman assumes a subordinate position (sometimes literally down on her hands and knees) — it was understood that she was performing this act in service of her passion for a man and that no decent man would exploit her. Moreover, he should be willing to return the favor in kind.

In retrospect, the era of free love was not quite as free as it was billed, at least with regard to one’s oral cavity; the 1972 porno film “Deep Throat” would not have been such a threshold event had it been otherwise. When John Updike included oral sex in his 1960 novel “Rabbit,” it was quite sensational. In an interview last year on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” he explained that it was a way of indicating a special bond between two people in an adulterous relationship. “Fellatio,” he asserted, “is more intimate than intercourse because it involves one’s head.”

Updike’s statement echoes what anthropologists have observed — that the human body is universally employed as a symbol. The upper body represents high culture, reason, power and privilege, while the lower signifies raw, unprocessed, vulgar passion; the former is the province of the elite, the latter relegated to the swinish rabble. According to culture critic Laura Kipnis, our gaseous, fluid emitting nether region is embarrassing — an area continually defying the strictures of social manners and instead governed by one’s gonads and intestinal tract; a region threatening to erupt at any moment. In standard heterosexual intercourse, two dark underbellies meet, more or less democratically, but in fellatio, the smutty lower half of one body is juxtaposed against the higher half of another, thereby sullying an elevated site. Symbolically speaking, this may be seen as corrupting one’s higher-minded self and, by extension, the social order. In other words, blow jobs are transgressive, requiring a sense intimacy — or so the boomers thought.

Their children have a different take. In a study reported earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a majority of college students attending a major Midwestern university did not define oral sex as having “had sex” — and, for the most part, these were students who identified themselves as politically moderate to conservative Republicans. The journal’s top-ranking editor, Dr. George D. Lundberg, was demoted for publishing the study just as Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial was getting under way, in a move thought to be motivated by politics. But I suspect his dismissal was also motivated by the conservative medical establishment’s anxiety over its dicey content, which challenges the status quo.

Just why has oral sex become less transgressive to the younger generation? Certainly, it has to do with the AIDS epidemic and the popularization of terms like “bodily fluids.” After short-lived hand-wringing about what to call the substance that stained Lewinsky’s blue Gap dress, the media brought the word “semen” out of the closet and injected it into the daily news. Now the public appearance of semen — once a symbolic violation of society’s taboos about dirt, order and hygiene — has become little more than a cinematic sight gag: hair gel in “There’s Something About Mary” and a doggie treat in “Happiness.” Our recent obsession with exposure and propriety violations, our seemingly relentless “tabloid mentality” cannot help but desensitize us to what was once subversive.

Undoubtedly, a number of young women engage in fellatio rather than intercourse in order to maintain “technical virginity” or in the mistaken belief that they are practicing safe sex. But for them, oral sex may also be emotionally safer sex — it is a way of performing a sexlike act without having to take off one’s clothes and thereby reveal one’s imperfect self. That is far from the whole story, however. Many deliberately embrace “bad girl” sexuality — call it grrrl power — taking pride in their erotic doings and bragging about them to their friends — much as Monica Lewinsky did. And unlike their fathers, the young men I see today do not necessarily disrespect them for it. While virtually all my 40ish patients of either sex think Lewinsky was either a mixed-up or conniving fool, a number of those in their 20s admire her pluck. Indeed, at one point, she became a poster girl for overweight young women. Articles about how to perform oral sex have proliferated in magazines targeted to Gen X females, replete with information about the caloric content of semen, thereby addressing two sources of young adult female anxiety — sexual adequacy and body image — in one fell swoop.

A paradoxical outcome of ’70s feminism is that today’s young women exult in their seductive power even though the seduction is often not reciprocal. Mimicking male bravado, some of my young female patients now regard “giving good head” as an accomplishment, an end in itself, yet they are really boasting about what they “give,” while males have historically bragged about what they “got” — the power differential still holds. In a misguided attempt to appear liberated, I believe many young women are allowing themselves to be exploited this way, participating in sex that is unilateral, usually in service of the male’s orgasm. In effect, they are doing what desperate women have always done — using their sexuality to lure a man into a relationship while deluding themselves into thinking otherwise — that, for example, they are doing it for the thrill. But the thrill of what?

Of course, sexual expression has always been a kind of “Rashomon,” a social and subjective construction. Its meaning is perpetually slippery, varying from person to person, culture to culture, historical period to historic period — not to mention from moment to moment
during the act itself. To be sure, I am not arguing against young people engaging in oral sex, but I wonder if they understand their own and their partners’ motives.

So the Clinton-Lewinsky convergence of bodies was actually a cultural collide, with each side of the generation gap bringing to the act its own set of assumptions. To parents’ horror, the gap may be expanding to a chasm as the behavior of young women and men seems to be trickling down to the preteen set. Recently the Washington Post reported that a growing number of middle-schoolers are engaging in oral sex in an effort to avoid pregnancy and AIDS, to hang on to their virginity and to become popular. Pressed by her parents about the significance of doing so, one girl quoted in the article shrugs, “What’s the big deal? President Clinton did it.”