Final Draft by David Carr

Author:David Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Oral Exam

july 16, 1999

AFTER HE BOUGHT the Washington Post at auction in 1933, Eugene Meyer penned a set of principles for his new paper. Numbers 3 and 4 promised:

3. As a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman;

4. That what it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as the old.

Guess last week’s story about suburban preteen blowjobs wouldn’t have made it onto his front page. But Meyer probably never reckoned that a sitting president would introduce the casual hummer to the national discourse. Given that much of a contemporary paper’s information—whether it be news, entertainment, or gossip—derives from unholy congress, a journal intent on reflecting the experience of its readers will probably have to drop its pants every once in a while. And there is no more burning question in the minds of many newspaper-buying American parents than “What is that alien in the upstairs bedroom going to spring on me next?” With that key piece of market awareness in mind—and a dubious smidgen of evidence that your kids are on the verge of becoming mini-Monicas—the Post was off and running.

On July 8, Style writer Laura Sessions Stepp used a year-old incident among middle-schoolers to suggest that twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids had a Clintonian disregard for the intimacies that generally accompany oral gratification. Headlined with the teasing “Parents Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex,” the story was debated in the newsroom for months before it ran—and debated by readers for days after it finally did.

Stepp’s piece, at the very least, isn’t an example of the Post’s infuriating tendency to write up trends only when the government anoints them with an official report. As her article indicated, federal health officials had declined to survey this very aspect of teen sexuality because they didn’t think Congress would fund research into such an unspeakable topic. So she did the honorable work for them—absent the scientific technique but accompanied by lots of alarming pronouncements about what your little Tricia or Mandy might be doing at her first boy-girl party. The piece came off as Soccer Mom’s Worst Nightmare instead of a peek into an unlighted place. It was transgressive, all right, but not gratifying.

To begin with, Stepp recalled an incident at Williamsburg Middle School in Arlington where the principal held a meeting for a dozen parents and told them that their kids were having casual sex parties off school grounds.

“The news dropped like a bomb just over a year ago in the mostly upper-income community of elegant brick homes, leafy sycamores and stone walls, where wealth is acquired by working long hours at top professional jobs,” she wrote. “These parents were unaware of a disturbing pattern of middle-schoolers’ adopting an ‘anything but intercourse’ approach to sex. Eager to avoid pregnancy and hold on to virginity, an increasing number of teenagers are engaging in oral sex, according to school and health officials.” Upon that narrow, unsturdy template,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.