Chile's Gone Wild!

In what has to qualify as a soft core article in the New York Times we are slightly astonished to read in a headline, "In Tangle of Young Lips, a Sex Rebellion in Chile." The article itself seems to make it clear that Michele Bachelet is leading a country that isn't exactly Pinochet's Chile:

It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America’s most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaetón beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls ages 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts, revealing bras, tattoos and nipple rings.

The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can.

And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.

Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong into that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youths are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.

And along with the news, we have a series of photos that show what Chile's children-- these are children by almost anyone's definition-- are up to. And we learn in one of the captions to the photos:

The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education, and sex education materials were destroyed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. A new sex curriculum was introduced in 1993, but sexual educators say they are struggling to keep up with the avalanche of sex information on the Internet.

Maybe it's appropriate to blame it all on Henry Kissinger. I hope the Grey Lady sells some papers on it.