«CHow about accompanying me one of these evenings when I go to pick up my daughter from the disco? The crazy proposal, which comes from a friend, the mother of two teenage girls, sounds a bit to me as if she had said to me: “Are you coming with me to the dentist to have two molars removed too?”. And in fact I look at it in a significantly dissuasive way.
«It’s a shame», she replies: «Do you know how many things you would learn about these little women?». His question, at this point, becomes a provocation. “For example?” I ask her, acknowledging that she has intrigued me. «Do you know what the current fashion is among young ladies who go dancing?». Obviously I don’t know, and I can’t even imagine it. And she: «Kiss as many strangers as possible».
My first reaction comes from post-Covid hypochondria: «And mononucleosis?». I could have added the flu, cold sores, cytomegalovirus but even meningococcal meningitis, and everything that is transmitted through saliva. But that didn’t seem like the case to me.
Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Also because we, as teenagers, risked much more. Our challenge (challenge, ed), because that’s what it was about yesterday, like today, it was more like Russian roulette. It was about having first sex without getting pregnant. In short, life was at stake: ours and that of any potential creature. Rarely that of the partner, who often disappeared.
How we went from this madness to the “game of kissing the stranger” can perhaps be explained by the no longer consider sex as a great taboo to be broken as soon as possible. The new generations are in no hurry to have sex because they no longer consider it a challenge. And they certainly don’t venture there with the risk of an unwanted child. So much so that hormonal contraception is increasingly widespread among adolescents.
However, the use of condoms is decreasing, with a consequent increase in the risk of sexually transmitted infections. This is the same underestimating attitude that underlies the “kissing the stranger game”. Something unthinkable for us, teenagers at the time of the maximum spread of HIV. Something to face today without anxiety and with adequate sexual education.
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Antonella Baccaro’s articles on I Woman and on Corriere della Sera.