RULE 27

Your sexual organs were not meant to engage in higher-order thinking or decision making.

You knew this, didn’t you? Except you still listen to them as if they made sense, and if you are a sixteen-year-old boy, you are probably listening to them … all … the … time.

There’s a reason for this: adults are reluctant to bring this up, and maybe some of them have forgotten, but sex is fun. It feels very, very good, and unless you live in Upper Mongolia, you are being inundated with messages pushing you to hook up and get your groove on.

Cheerleading for the glamorous and active sex life, popular culture has given your Wild Willie a megaphone, a billboard, a network, and about a thousand Web sites. Turn on MTV, click through prime-time television, or open any popular magazine, and you’ll get the impression the entire world is in heat. Pull into a convenience store, and you might run into a display for “Horniest Goat Weed: sex stimulant pill for men and women.”110 Go online, and you’ll find ten thousand porn sites where people do things your grandparents didn’t even think were anatomically possible. And it is all completely sincere: your sexual organs sincerely want what they want, and they want it now.

To resist all of this requires a considerable amount of something you might not have been taught: self-control.

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A study of children by the London School of Economics found 57 percent of nine-to-nineteen-year-olds who go online at least once a week run across pornography. (Parents are clueless: only 16 percent think their children have seen porn online.)111

A generation ago, the average boy used to sneak his father’s Playboy magazines into the bedroom to take a ride on the wild side of the hormonal tornado. Hugh Hefner’s fantasies did the trick for Dad, but the average video on MTV would have put him into cardiac arrest. To be sure, hormones rioted in the ancient days of your parents’ youth, but there were limits. Even in the legendary Summer of Love, most guys went to bed alone and frustrated, which is why so many baby boomers are haunted by the thought that they missed out on something. For a lot of them, Viagra makes up for the disappointments of the sixties and seventies.

For generations, guys tried a variety of lines on young women, including eloquent pleas to let them show their love and “This is my last night before D-day,” but girls often drew the line, and results were mixed. A few guys even tried to convince girlfriends that oral sex wasn’t really sex, but nobody ever bought it until Bill Clinton came along. Your parents would probably be shocked by the whole idea of “friends with benefits.”

Some studies suggest that one out of every three girls has had sex by the time she is sixteen; two-thirds have had sex by the time they are eighteen, about the same ratio as boys, although boys are more likely to lie about it. In other words, a generation that seldom heard any grown-up tell them no is having a hard time saying no to one another, even though the consequences are often brutal.

Pundits with pretensions to seriousness like to say that poverty leads to teenage pregnancy. But this, of course, is absurd: teenage pregnancy is caused by horny teenagers. It takes a special kind of journalist–policy wonk to think that economics trump hormones.

But it is true that one of the best ways to become poor is to get pregnant. Girls who get pregnant as teens are more likely to drop out of school, to not attend college, and to end up on some sort of welfare. And that’s just for starters.

Young people who begin having sex at an early age are more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or to become depressed, and are even more likely to attempt suicide. Their babies tend to have lower birth weights and to do badly in school, and statistically are more likely to be abused and neglected. According to one study, the sons of teen moms are 13 percent more likely to end up behind bars. Daughters of teen moms are 22 percent more likely to become teen mothers themselves—a good argument for condoms, but an even better one for holding off, unless of course you like playing Russian roulette with your future.112

Delaying gratification requires not merely self-control but a willingness to respect yourself and your partner—a good habit to get into before you try to sort out the whites from the red underwear together at the neighborhood Laundromat.

A corollary rule here: self-control+trust+dependability=freedom. “Being yourself” does not mean that you have to be a slave to “I want.” You don’t liberate yourself from your parents or teachers by being unable to control your moods, angers, hungers, or lusts. In the past, most thoughtful grown-ups cautioned young people against being dominated by their passions and letting emotions run wild. The process of civilization could even be defined as teaching the art of self-control. This art is not necessarily the same thing as “following your bliss,” which often appears in the guise of a tight pair of jeans.

In the meantime, by all means, do whatever you like with a consenting adult in the privacy of your own bedroom, provided that you are also an adult, are married to the other consenting adult, are paying for the bedroom, are using protection, are up-to-date on all the latest information on STDs, have health insurance that covers OB-GYN and pediatric services, and understand how child support works. Otherwise, keep your Wild Willie parked.