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 |  Subject: Chile's precocious teens cast aside sexual taboos  Sat Sep 13, 2008 8:04 pm | |
| Parties in Chile encourage teenagers to "poncear," or make out with as many people as they can.
SANTIAGO: It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America's most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaetón beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls aged 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts.
The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to "Poncea! Poncea!": to make out with as many people as they can.
And make out they do - with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the "ponceo," the one who pairs up the most.
Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong against that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile's youth are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.
"Chile's youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct," said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile's Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.
The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties and an explosion of Internet connectivity, especially through Web sites like Fotolog.com, where young people trade suggestive photos of one another and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,000 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile's conservative society.
"We are not the children of the dictatorship; we are the children of the democracy," Michele Bravo, 17, said at a recent afternoon party. "There is much more of a rebellious spirit among the young people today. There is much more freedom to explore everything."
The parents and grandparents of today's teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and escape the book-burning times of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging, and pregnancy among girls younger than 15 is on the rise, according to the Health Ministry.
Underlying much of the newfound freedom is an issue that societies the world over are grappling with: the explosion of explicit content and social networks on the Internet.
Chilean society was shaken last year when a video of a 14-year-old girl eagerly performing oral sex on a teenage boy on a Santiago park bench was discovered on a video-hosting Web site. The episode became a national scandal, stirring finger-pointing at the girl's school, at the Internet provider - at everyone, it seemed, but the boys who captured the event on a cellphone and distributed the video. The girl's parents removed her from the school and even tried to change her name.
Chile's stable, market-based economy has helped drive the changes, spurring a boom in consumer spending and credit unprecedented in the country's history. Chile has become Latin American's biggest per-capita consumer of digital technology, including cellphones, cable television and Internet broadband accounts.
Chileans are plugged into the Internet at higher rates than other South Americans, and the highest use is among children 6 to 17. Therein lies a key factor in the country's newfound sexual exploration, said Miguel Arias, a psychologist with another Santiago consulting firm, Divergente.
Fotolog, a photo-sharing network created in the United States, came to this country barely two years ago. Today Chile, which has a population of 16 million, has 4.8 million Fotolog accounts, more than any other country, the company says. Again, children 12 to 17 hold more than 60 percent of the accounts.
Party promoters use Fotolog, as well as MSN Messenger, to organize their weekend gatherings, inviting Fotolog stars - the site's most popular users, based on the number of comments they get - to help publicize the parties and attend as paid VIPs. Many of the teenage partygoers use their online nicknames exclusively.
Arias did a study of the Fotolog phenomenon, scrutinizing the kinds of photos the teenagers are posting, even the angles and distances of the pictures - all of which are part of an "identifiable" language, he said. "The kids of today are expressing their sexuality in erotic ways for the whole world to see," Arias said.
"Before, someone would meet and fall in love and start dating seriously here; at a party today, you meet like three people and make out with all three," said Mario Muñoz, 20, co-owner of Imperio Productions, which organizes some of the larger 18-and-under parties.
"There are very few kids having serious relationships," he said, an observation shared by some doctors trying to reduce teenage pregnancy here.
On a recent Saturday, about 1,500 teenagers piled into the cavernous Cadillac Club, another city-center disco, for Imperio Productions' weekly event. The partygoers lined up at the bar to buy orange Fanta and Sprite.
Not too long ago, Muñoz and his brother Daniel were teenagers attending such parties themselves. Now they defend their parties as good, clean fun. Alcohol is not allowed and cigarettes are not sold, though smoking was widespread among the teenagers at the Cadillac Club. Security guards monitor bathrooms and regularly throw out boys whose groping crosses the line - if the girls complain.
During a break from dancing at the Cadillac Club, Nicole Valenzuela, 14, said: "Everything starts with the kiss. After the kiss follows making out, and after that, penetration and oral sex. That's what's going on, sometimes even in public places."
The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education. Chile's first public school programs were put in place at the end of the 1960s. But after the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government ordered sex education materials destroyed, and moral conservatism took hold. It was not until 20 years later, in 1993, that a new sex curriculum was finally introduced in the schools.
Even so, by 2005, 47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with an avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet.
"Of course we are not happy with that," said Maria de la Luz Silva, head of the Sexual Education unit of the Education Ministry. She said that the explosion of Internet access has created a "tremendous cultural breach" that is straining the limits of educators, but she added that the ministry was putting in place a new sex-education curriculum this year to better "protect" children.
For now, Chile's teenagers are making decisions on their own.
"This is about being alive," Cynthia Arellano, 14, said after the Bar Urbano party. "It is all about dancing, laughing, changing the words of the songs to something dirty."
And with a slight giggle creeping in, she said, "Well, it's about making out with other boys."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/12/america/chile.php |
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