Dr. Phil’s oral sex after school special

by Kelly McLendon on December 15, 2009

A naive preteen girl, one who still sings along with Radio Disney and worships Hello Kitty is not so innocent once she gets to school. There, she follows a male classmate into the restroom, or hides at recess or lunch and engages in oral sex. This is what Dr. Phil, television’s ultimate family expert, wants parents to think.

Erica, a 19-year-old student, says he’s got it all wrong.

“My first experience wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t happen at school. I was 17 and it was at the house of the guy I was dating. We were just making out and then he asked me if I would do that, but he wasn’t forcing it on me,” she says.

She doesn’t believe what Dr. Phil is saying is entirely true.

“On his show, he says a girl is ‘on her knees in a bathroom, going down on a guy. While I think that has probably happened, in all of the stories I have heard from friends, there’s never been one where a middle school kid was doing that,” she says. “I feel like most of us didn’t even know what that was back then.”

Girls who engage in oral sex are bad girls, Dr. Phil implies. But surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and first person accounts reveal that most young women who are going down are doing it for their own reasons, not to get attention. And most of them are not doing it in school bathroom stalls, either. Check any online teen health message board, like Oprah’s community message board—it seems that most teens are engaging in oral in their bedroom, or in the bedroom of their partner, not on the streets. “It’s not so difficult to do that you have to resort to doing it at school,” Erica says. “There are lots of opportunities outside of that.”

But it seems in nearly every case, the girl still gets the blame for the activity.

Dr. Phil hopes to “protect our daughters from giving blow jobs,” yet he says nothing about concern or responsibility regarding teenage boys. Little does he realize that boys are giving (and obviously getting) as well.

In an article from the Washington Post, Jennifer Manlove, who directs fertility research for the organization Child Trends, says that guys give as often as girls.

“You assume that females are more likely to give, males more likely to receive,” she says. “We were surprised that the percentages were similar.”

Whatever the cause for rate increases in oral sex—whether it’s because teens openly express their sexual behavior more often now, or because it’s perceived as “safer sex,” the jury is out. But the next time Dr. Phil wants to blame the girls, he should address the fact that guys are equal participants.