BEN DOMENECH has a thoughtful and polite response on teen sex now.

But Ben, I’m not an ex-hippie. My Dad is an ex-hippie, whose antiwar protests were sympathetically treated by Garry Wills (who hates me) in Esquire back in ’70 or ’71. I was in fourth grade at the time. And my youngest brother is 21, so I’m not as out of touch with the world of teens as you seem to think.

I got a fair amount of mail along the lines of Ben Domenech’s post, saying “listen to what the teens are saying about teen sex, and you’ll understand how bad it is.”

This seems self-contradictory to me. If teenagers think that teen sex is so bad, then how come we have a problem with so many of them, well, thinking it’s so good?

Really, of course, it can be either — as many other emailers wrote, teen sex was (or is) enjoyable for them, and did (or is doing) them no harm. Some said it was the only happy memory they had of their teen years.

My chief point in my initial post was that teen sex isn’t unnatural or aberrational, and that pretending that it’s some bizarre modern phenomenon born of Elvis or Abercrombie and Fitch misses the point. As I said in a later post, there’s a big difference between sex at 17 or 18 and sex at 13. (Newsmagazines tend to talk about 13-year-olds, while showing provocative photos of 18-year-olds, the better to boost newsstand sales). Personally, I think people are probably better off waiting until they’re post-high school for sex — but I know a lot of people who are damned happy they didn’t, and some who are sorry that they did.

Unlike some people, I don’t feel that I know best for everyone in this regard. If teenagers weren’t infantilized in so many other ways, they’d have a better base of judgment and self-respect, and could make better decisions about when they were ready to have sex. Unfortunately, many teenagers have so few outlets for feeling accomplished and respected that having a boyfriend or girlfriend assumes way too much importance in their lives, which probably causes them to start having sex sooner than they really want to.

I think that the extended infantilization of teens — and even twenty-somethings — in our culture is pernicious and breeds irresponsibility, and I think that sensational treatments of teen sex make that problem worse, not better.

Well, dang. I hadn’t planned to post any more until tonight, and now there’s not time to trim the hedges before I go pick up my daughter from my sister’s. Hmm. Well, as they say at Microsoft, “That’s not a bug — it’s a feature!”

UPDATE: Cal Ulmann thinks Ben’s way too worked up.