Does The Pajama Diaries promote underage sex?

Lately I've discovered that the four-day story arc from The Pajama Diaries has raised up a crudstorm. One such letter to the Journal Enquirer claims that the comic is promoting underage sex, while the writer claims that she saw the arc on March 19 and 20 (I think she got the wrong number of days). Here's what she thinks:

"The normalization of teenage sexual activity without any parental authority, as implied in the comic, is entirely void of any morality or traditional values.

"A 15-year-old girl being given the liberty by her mother to ruin her life before she is even an adult is a sad reality in our culture. It should not be glorified or presented as entertaining. Normalizing teen sexual activity leads to broken hearts, broken families, teen pregnancy, and suicide.

"[Jill Kaplan's role in this four-day story arc] is to completely abandon her duty to her [15-year-old] daughter [Jess] to protect her and guide her as she enters adult life. Instead, some kind of reasonable, value-based morality would have been appropriate.

"Pretending that a lack of authority in this area of life is anything but destructive, immature, and negligent is misguided and sad.

"Prudish morality is often mocked as “not fun” or “old fashioned,” but wantonly ignoring the wisdom of thousands of years of religious values is, in the end, foolish. Even if a person is not religious, promoting underage sexual activity is unsafe and irresponsible."

This is kinda awkward, don't you think?

Huh, I thought this would be about a bunch of Californians clutching at pearls over other people being less uptight than them.

Soo, yeah, a comic strip portrays a 15-year-old girl having sex and it being mostly OK. Eh, teenagers desire sex before they're legally allowed to do it in most countries. I've never heard of The Pajama Diaries before this, so I can only speak about the four strips linked, but it looks like it's simply portraying underage sex without necessarily condoning it. Furthermore, since it looks like it was consensual, the message is to talk to your kids and understand rather than to condemn them. After all, if you rant and condemn something, they'll just do it in secret, and any potential problems will be more likely to happen and more severe if they do.

Canada and Japan has a sort of sliding scale of age of consent, which is an interesting approach. If this arc was published in Canada, the sex would not be underage.

EDIT: Also, re-reading the quotes you provided, I see an undercurrent of slut-shaming to the objections, as if Jill was acting immorally by having sex before she was 16 and she should have been disciplined somehow, rather than her mother giving advice.

edited 2nd Apr '18 9:14:07 AM by VampireBuddha

It's mostly hilarious, especially the ignorant bit at the end. "Centuries of wisdom" say unmarried sex is inappropriate: they had absolutely not problem whatsoever with teenage sex or even preteen sex; the mindset was very much "if it bleeds, it breeds".

I'm going to Hell for that one, but so are they.

Furthermore, the reason it is unwise to sex young is because you could get pregnant and, if you're too young, chances are you'll die. Thus back then it was legitimate to say "if you have sex you will die". The reason it's unwise to sex unmarried is because even if your body can handle a pregnancy, your wallet (or basket, as the case may be) and your schedule probably can't handle the outcome if you don't have someone to depend on.

And of course you had charming STD's.

Thankfully, we have an arsenal of contraceptives, STD prevention and cure tools, and just better tech in general. So teenagers get to be as horny with each other as they want... so long as they have less than two years of age difference between them and they started dating before either of them reached majority? That's safe enough, right? We're really much more concerned with power imbalance and the potential for manipulation and emotional harm than we are with blanket prohibition.