Young Chilean Teenagers Experiment with Sexuality

Chile was once known as one of Latin America’s most morally and sexually conservative countries, however, the culture and activities have drastically changed in as quickly as four or five years. At Bar Urbano, teenagers as young as fourteen are dancing, grinding, and making sexual advances while dancing with other teens among the crowd. “Chile’s youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct,” said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile’s Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.
In particular, a website called Fotolog, allows young teenagers to “trade suggestive photos of each other and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,500 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society” (Barrioneuvo). Today’s Chile’s population is at 16 million and there are 4.8 million people in Chile with Fotolog accounts. Moreover, children age 12-17 hold 60% of the accounts! “Party promoters use Fotolog, as well as MSN Messenger, to organize their weekend gatherings, inviting Fotolog stars — the site’s most popular users, based on the number of comments they get — to help publicize the parties and attend as paid V.I.P.’s. Many of the partygoers use their online nicknames exclusively, and some of the wildest events are dominated by teenagers who call themselves the “Pokemones,” with their multiple piercings, angular and pressed hair, and devil-may-care attitude” (Barrioneuvo). The photos that are placed on the website are very provocative poses.
In response to the allegations of teenagers experimenting in their sexuality, Michele Bravo, 17 responds: “We are not the children of the dictatorship; we are the children of democracy. There is much more of a rebellious spirit among young people today. There is much more freedom to explore everything.”
Years ago, under Augusto Pinochet’s harsh dictatorship, many Chileans fought hard to bring their children and grandchildren the freedom they deserve. The country just “legalized divorce in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging and the pregnancy rate among girls under 15 has been on the rise, according to the Health Ministry” (Barrioneuvo). The newfound freedoms that Chile has found have given them advances on surfing explicit content from the Internet. Children from Chile (ages 6-17) are actually surfing the Internet more than other South American children.
Chile also has a stable, market based economy that has aided them in consumer spending and credit in the country. Chile has also become “Latin American’s biggest per-capita consumer of digital technology, including cell phones, cable television and Internet broadband accounts, according to a study by the Santiago consulting firm Everis and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Navarra in Spain” (Barrioneuvo).
This was actually seen at Club Urbano one afternoon. It was documented and revealed: “A 17-year-old boy, Claudio, danced with Francisca Durán, also 17, whom he had just met, and soon the two were kissing and rubbing their bodies together. They posed eagerly for photos, sucking each other’s fingers as Claudio put his hands under the girl’s T-shirt. Within minutes they separated and he began playing with the hair of another girl. Soon, they, too, were kissing passionately. Claudio, who declined to give his last name, made out with at least two other girls that night” (Barrioneuvo).
Mr. Munoz and his brother actually defend the clubs as good, clean fun. At the Cadillac Club, there is no drinking but smoking is allowed and heavily active. Security guards throw out boys that offend and grope girls.
Nicole Valenzuela, 14 spoke out about the clubs when taking a break from dancing at the Cadillac Club: “Everything starts with the kiss. After the kiss follows making out, and after that, penetration and oral sex. That’s what’s going on, sometimes even in public places.”
However, her mother, Danitza Geisel, a 34-year-old sex therapist, said in an interview that she “did not worry about her daughter’s attending the parties and, expressing a somewhat contrarian view among academics here, she said the current generation of teenagers was no more promiscuous than previous ones. But Ms. Geisel lamented the dearth of sex education in Chile” (Barrioneuvo).
What’s important to note is that sex education was never received by most adults in Chile. In 1973, Pinochet actually ordered the government to destroy materials related to sex education. Not until 1993 did sex education reenter public schools. Yet, by 2005, “47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with the avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet” (Barrioneuvo).
So what is to become of these sexual teenage youngsters that thrive off dance clubs and “sexual gurus”? Perhaps we will find out as soon as when time goes on whether these clubs are pure fun or purely definite ways of sending the country of Chile into a sexually chaotic situation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html?_r=1&ref=americas&oref=slogin