There were a couple of teenagers on the bus talking. From what I could gather they were at a 16-19 college doing vocational courses.
They have a friend Bianca who is in the Christian Union. They are resolutely not in the CU. Bianca is having a lot of problems from CU for being friendly with them. The reason is that they talk to boys. As far as I could gather, they talk to boys because they're there, for the sake of conversation, and why not. I detected nothing in the conversation that suggested that they were sex-obsessed. In fact there was nothing of any sexual nature in their conversation, except for the fact that CU regard it as inappropriate for Bianca to mix with them because they talk to boys.
When I was at University I had a lot of good friends who were in the Christian Union; they had friends who were, in my opinion at the time, Born Again nutcases. I had spent seven years at an all girls Christian school. At that school, we did joint productions, fund raising and social events with our equivalent boys' school. Some of their pupils even attended our school for specific lessons. I sense that by the time my brother was at the boys' school (he's seven years younger) there was even greater integration. This was actually a contradiction of the rule that we were not supposed to talk to boys when in school uniform*. But that was never enforced; indeed I often travelled with my classmate and her twin brother. We had known each other since we were toddlers.
My Christian Union friends and their 'bible bashing nutter friends' were of the view that there was a great deal of inappropriate sexual behaviour on campus and in wider society (oh, how I wished...!). They were very much of the view that as responsible adults who had god in your life, you must relate to other members of society in a non-sexual way. Until you met your future husband/wife. In my student days and at work up to the present day, in my spare time activities such as politics or blogging, I have mixed with women and men. In the days when I had many friends, when I was single, before they dropped sprogs, before I got ill, I would say that I had a far greater number of male friends than female ones, however you define friend. I have had occasionally had crushes on certain male colleagues or men in the outer-circle of friends, although I have found that those crushes disappear when you get to know the person. I have found these male friends, just as I have my female friends, to be wonderful company, good laughs, great intellectual sparring partners, and dispensers of emotional support and practical advice when needed. Sex. No.
So I find it perplexing and depressing when I hear of some nutter Christian group brainwashing a young and presumably vulnerable girl into dumping her friends because they talk to boys. I suppose the idea is to protect her from inappropriate promiscuous sex with those boys. Even though, in the twenty minute bus journey I got no real sense that these girls particularly interested in sex. I can't help wondering - if teenagers are discouraged form platonic relationships with the opposite sex, some of which may change into romantic liaisons based on something more substantial than beer goggles, isn't there a danger they might become homosexual? Or not be able to cope with negotiating a situation that arises in the big wide world away from the protecting arm of college and the ubiquitous Stazi of the Christian Union.
I found as I progressed through my teenage years and increasingly mixed with boys for social, but not particularly sexual purposes, I became more able to understand male behaviour - if this generalisation isn't too sweeping - and thus became more self-confident, which, in turn, made me better able to negotiate and not to suffer misunderstandings. For most of our working lives most of us work with both genders, above, level with and below us, and we have to be able to deal with them as people not as giggle-giggle a boy!. How can we learn to work with people if we are not supposed to socialise with them.
Why is it so many of these of these religious nutters so obsessed by sex, whilst most of the rest of us get on with lives treating sex, at best, as a side issue?
* yeah, we made that joke, too..
