EARLY on in Kids - well probably around the time teen stud Telly is waxing lyrical on the subject of how much he likes to make love (my expression not his) to virgins, to "little baby girls" - you begin to think sexual repression wasn't such a bade thing after all.
By the time he's finished seducing his second, 13-year-old virgin at the end of one long, hot, New York day, your thoughts have turned darkly to short sharp shocks and worse. And when Casper (the Butthead to Telly's Beavis) rapes the unconscious Jenny, an earlier victim of Telly's, you start to ask yourself: At what point exactly did I turn into a clone of outraged-Catholic-mother-of-ten?
In an age when sex has perhaps never been more scary, many of us still believe firmly in the gospel of good sex. Good sex can cure everything from acne to ageing, we're told, even if it's also true that wild, promiscuous, unprotected sex can kill.
Trying to distill this message for teenagers isn't easy. Like our own parents, we want to say no, or at least, not yet, but we want to say it only in the most positive way. Like all parents, everywhere, we worry about the unpredictable combination of teens and sex. So we want to be conservative and liberal at the same time.
But even the most liberal of parents would be unhappy at the idea of their young teenagers screwing around with the abandon of the kids in Kids. The signs of parent panic are all around.
In England, Tories (who introduced many of us to exotic sexual practices - remember toes, oranges?), try to ban sexually explicit teen mags like Sugar. Here, people get upset about lesbian scenes in soaps, kids "getting off" at discos, even at the idea of discos for 12-year-olds.
It's obvious that some youngish Irish teens are sexually active, from available statistics about teen pregnancies and STDs; one-third of those attending STD clinics in Dublin are teenagers. Children who get hooked on drugs and drink early are obviously high risk. But some, adults journalists are particularly guilty here get a little frenzied about the idea of schoolchild sex.
It does seem unlikely that the average Irish teenager shares the Kids lifestyle. But it's true that in our hypersexed world, kids are under a lot of pressure over sex from a very early age. (In Kids. even 11-year-old boys are teased for being virgins. Just how young would a boy have to be for virginity to be okay?) But what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen here?
It really was simple for most of our own parents: somebody else had written the script, and if they or their parents provided any guidance on sex at all, it was "don't get pregnant", "don't get caught", "don't", "no", "stop". No one cared much if this put you right off the whole idea of sex, as long as you kept the rules.
Then came the sixties. And whether or not the sexual revolution directly touched your life, - in Ireland, the AIDS backlash began before it had much time to get off the ground - it changed attitudes fundamentally. Now, even the Catholic church says that sex is good, not List that messy business needed for making babies.
Many of us want to undo the damage, we believe was done to us by giving our children a positive message about sex .. . just as long as they understand we want them to wait, if not until marriage, then at least until they've done the Leaving, or even a college degree, to find out for themselves.
A lot of people put their faith in sex education, and it's true that nowadays, our kids just can't afford to be sexually ignorant. But it is naive to think that sex education alone will make teens behave sensibly about sex.
PSYCHOLOGISTS and teen counsellors say that most of all, kids need parents who love and support them, and give them enough self"esteem to help them resist pressure to do anything they're not ready for.
This, and constant vigilance, seems to be the key. The most striking thing about Kids is the absence of parents, who just don't seem to figure in their children's plans.
Repression Oh, it probably wouldn't work anyway. But scare tactics might back in the 1970s, Spanish films like VD - The Curse that begins with a Kiss, and My Baby. My Life (a girl throws herself under a train when she gets pregnant) had brief success here. Not forgetting Helga, the German sex education film that had grown women fainting in the aisles in the Savoy.
If you want to put your daughters, whatever about your sons, right off sex, Kids is the 1990s movie to do it.
