ThreeSixty is a youth journalism program based at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. It uses the tools and principles of journalism to help Minnesota youth — particularly minority youth — tell the stories of their lives and communities, practice the skills of active citizenship, learn the basics of good reporting and strong writing and pursue careers in journalism and communications.
THREESIXTY
Many young men feel they gain respect by winning girls and moving on
Back in the spring I was listening to my cousin’s phone conversation
with a girl who just told him that she was pregnant by him. Five
minutes later, he was on MySpace trying to get a number from another
girl.
This got me to thinking, why do so many young men like
me and my cousin feel they’ve go to be players and have a lot of girls?
And what about the consequences?
Kenny, a 17-year-old senior
at Johnson High School in St. Paul, has a steady girlfriend. Still, he
finds it easy to get caught up in a player mentality.
“It’s a game, you just gotta play it right,” he said. “It’s like a game to have and hit the most girls without them knowing.”
The player way of life
The player way of life is often
motivated by peers, hip-hop culture, even family members, said Juliet
Mitchell, the program consultant and facilitator of UJIMA,
a teen pregnancy prevention and youth development program that works
out of Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Paul. UJIMA
targets African American youth in the Summit-University area. It is
funded through a state program to improve health in minority
communities.
“If there’s not an example of healthy
relationships in their home, if families are not married, if there’s
not a father in the home, the young men are left to figure out how to
be a respectful man,” Mitchell said.
Some experts believe
that because they lack job and education opportunities, some black
teens see sex as a different kind of accomplishment. Cathy Cohen,
professor of political science and former director of the Center for
the Study of Race and Culture at the University of Chicago, expressed
this idea in a National Public Radio interview in March.
“Sex
works to provide a domain for young black people where they feel like
they are in control and have some success. I think it is substituting
for other opportunities and areas of success that some young people
have access to,” she said.
Intense pressure
The young black men I talked with agreed that the pressure to be players can be intense.
“Hip
hop is like an advertisement to have the most amount of women. They
make that lifestyle look so perfect,” said Keiyon, a 14-year-old
freshman at Highland Park High School in St. Paul. He didn’t want his
last name printed.
Being pressured by friends also plays a
part. “It’s the pressure that push guys to have a lot of females and
have sex with them,” Keiyon said. “You get respected more by your peers
if you have a lot of girls.”
Even uncles – and sometimes
aunties – will tease guys who don’t have girlfriends or stick with just
one girl. They’ll say things like, “Is he funny or something?”
Kenny,
a 17-teen-year-old junior at Johnson High School in St. Paul, agreed.
“You can’t have only one girl because then people are going to start
saying you stuck on her or you whipped.”
Disease and pregnancy
But the game can hurt. The 2004 Minnesota Department of Health’s STD surveillance report said that 56 percent of all new cases of HIV and AIDS
in Minnesota are contracted by 13- to 24-year-old African Americans.
Meanwhile, gonorrhea cases are increasing rapidly among young adults.
In 2000, 15 to 24-year-olds made up 14 percent of gonorrhea cases. By
2004 that number had risen to 57 percent. The rate is higher among
African-American youth.
The Minnesota Organization on
Adolescent Pregnancies, Prevention and Parenting reported that of every
1,000 African American girls ages 15 to 19 in Minnesota, 66 gave birth
in 2005. That was down from 71 a year earlier. Birth rates were higher
among Latina and Native American teens in Minnesota and lower among
Asian and white teens.
Some guys boast about being players.
Eighteen-year-old Stephen Jacobson of St. Paul estimates that he’s
dated five girls over the past year and says he had sex with all of
them.
Having more relationships can mean having more sexual
partners. Jacobsen said he talks to several girls at a time and expects
to have sex with at least one of them.
“I wouldn’t call them girlfriends. I call them friends,” he said.
Jacobson
said that he couldn’t be with only one girl because being a player
“runs through my blood.” He protects himself, though. “That’s the code
of the book, man. If you don’t use no condom, you ain’t got no respect
for yourself.”
Research shows that black teens are more likely
to have sex earlier and with more partners. The Black Youth Project, a
research project underway at the University of Chicago, surveyed nearly
1,600 youth ages 15 to 25. Among 15 to 17 year-olds, 42 percent of
black youth, 32 percent of white and 27 percent of Hispanic had had
sexual intercourse.
The Journal of Sex Research published a
1996 study of adolescents that found that by age 19, black males
reported having had intercourse with an average of 11 partners. White
and Hispanic males in the study reported half as many lifetime partners
by age 19.
The emotional cost
The emotional and physical consequences of the “game” can be life-long for young women and men.
“One
of the deeper issues I think with young men is they don’t realize the
emotional impact they have on our young women,” said UJIMA’s Mitchell.
“It is hurt feelings in the simplest of terms…On a deeper level, loss
of self-esteem. Young ladies are looking for love and they’re looking
for commitment…They’re looking for someone to be close to.”
When
relationships fail, she said, “Their heart gets hurt and their image
gets hurt. Girls still get reputations… All of that is clouding their
head.”
This “game” also can have an emotional effect on young
men because they don’t learn to build trusting, committed
relationships, she said.
Jacobson admitted that he avoids
getting too close to one girl. “I wouldn’t even let it get that far or
let it get too deep to a point where a female could hurt me,” he said.
Isiah Dennis, 17, who works with Mitchell as a team leader with UJIMA, plans on being a virgin until he gets married.
“[Some young men] are trying to find some love because they don’t got no love in their families,” he said.
Change comes hard
Programs like UJIMA
work to reduce the risky sexual behaviors among teens, in particular
black teens. But changing the trend will be tough, Mitchell
acknowledged.
“There is a lot of money being spent, a lot of
efforts. You see it on TV. You see it on advertisements to ‘wrap it
up,’ be responsible, all those messages,” she said. “The media is
sending a lot of good messages, but the hyped up ‘I am the man’
messages seem to overshadow those messages.”
With all these efforts being made, youth workers like Mitchell hope to see a change.
“Unfortunately,
I don’t see it changing soon. I wish I could because I always want to
remain hopeful,” Mitchell said. “I think it might get worse before it
gets better.
“It’s going to be this generation and those
under who make the biggest change. They are going to have to make the
impact and they are going to have to care about life in order to make
that change.”
