Age of Wisdom

People start writing at different ages, Mary Shelley was 20, F. Scott Fitzgerald was 23, Thoreau was 31, Salinger 32, Henry Miller 43, Tolkien 45, there is not really a right time to become a writer, at least if you're a writer of fiction, poetry or something along those lines.  However, if you would like to tell the world how they ought to live, my humble suggestion is that you wait until the pimples have mostly gone away.  The writer of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris, has recently come out to say that perhaps the book about Christian sexual ethics for young people, which he wrote when he was at the ripe old age of 21, has perhaps done some significant harm.
I was fortunate to have grown up in a mostly mainline Christian tradition that only occasionally dipped its toes into the sort of evangelical madness that gave us "purity" culture.  I think I had heard of the book, but by the time I actually got around to awkwardly saying "wassup" to dating, I was not really that interested in purity of any sort.  As I read the reactions from folks around the interweb to Mr. Harris' much belated apology for whatever harm he might have done to a generation of Christian youth by inflicting them with guilt, shame and loads of tacit patriarchy.  I am sort of wondering why anyone would listen to a 21 year old person about something like marriage.
When I was 21 I could barely maintain a functional relationship with myself, let alone another person, let alone provide guidance to someone else to do such a thing.  It is egomania on the border of being a sociopath for a 21 year old to try and give out any sort of relationship advice.  Write a story about your friends doing stupid things, or make up a morality tale about a zombie, but don't write something that might just be grabbed up by a bunch of fearful adults who want to keep the kids from getting too frisky.
That said, I can't really blame Mr. Harris very much.  He was, after all, 21 years old and as such a verifiable idiot.  I know, I sound old and cranky, but 21 years, unless you have lived an extraordinarily full life, is simply not old enough to approach any sort of wisdom.  You might be smart, you might be bordering on capability, but wisdom has, at most, waved at you from across the street.  What is disturbing is how fully and almost violently his work was inflicted upon a generation of youth.  In some quarters it still goes on and I can't adequately express, as the father of a 13 and 14 year old, how creepy it is to me to hear about fathers and daughters going to "purity balls" where the girls promise their fathers they will remain virgins until marriage.
And it is not that I'm some libertine either, I absolutely believe that our culture has trivialized sexuality to a dangerous extent.  It's just that purity culture, as it did and to some extent does still exist, gets the emphasis so painfully wrong.  Teach kids to value themselves and think about things like what love really is, don't try to shame and scare them.  Sexuality, fear and shame combine in toxic ways and that toxic stuff can poison relationships.
Apparently it did so to a great number of people, most of whom are accepting Mr. Harris' heartfelt apology and applauding his decision to not publish I Kissed Dating Goodbye any longer.  But in the articles and comments I have read are a great many stories about lives and relationships that were rather roundly ruined at a crucial juncture.  As the parent of teenagers, watching them take their first steps into the world of human relationship is terrifying, I just pray that at 44 I will have the wisdom not to let my fear get the best of me, and if I do get the fear, I will not inflict it upon them.