Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Emma Hart,
Also... I don't want to get too deep on this, but your list of "immature" things? Is a list of feminine things. I still do all that stuff, thanks.
Yeah, I think it's not a very helpful concept at all.
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Re: age of consent. This is a fraught issue, something I find big parallels with drug policy on. We might very well accept that it's not a good idea to take some drugs, but progressive thought has at least accepted that people will do it anyway, and using a criminal justice system on people who essentially have a health issue has been a major cockup in policy for decades.
Similarly, it's probably not a good idea for very young children to have sex with anyone, but they sure as hell will do it anyway, and in any sense except the strictly legal, they will very often consent, probably enthusiastically. To my way of thinking, rather than prosecution for this kind of thing, far better would be counseling, probing the older person in particular for their reasons. Facilitated by an experienced counselor, the younger person might see the motives of the older one much more clearly, and find they don't like them after all. Or, they might very well prove to be harmlessly in love, at which point the best possible advice about protection would be very, very helpful to a hell of a lot of children. This puts a huge onus on the counselor to detect sexual predators and abusive relationships, but I'm inclined to think this could be quite easy, for an experienced person with psyche training. Their recommendations could possibly have the backing of law, rather like mediators. I think this sort of thing happens anyway, but in a highly haphazard manner, that kids seek out advice from experienced people they know and trust. Unfortunately, some kids just don't have anyone like that in their lives.
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Popularly, but erroneously attributed to Hugh Hefner
He'd be a real hypocrite if he claimed that now. He doesn't have 49 year old girlfriends.
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My first sexual partner was 16 and I was 20. We were intellectual equals, and I'm damned sure it made her feel grown up and wise to have such a boyfriend. But I came to realize over the years we were together that she would never really be as "mature" as me (well OK maybe now when such things begin to fade to irrelevance), because we both kept growing, and you can't just inject the missing 4 years. It's no slight on her, but it was actually extremely costly to me that I made the mistake of presuming she had my level of maturity because we loved each other.
We don't really need to inject the idea of maturity into explanations of why girls are attracted to older boys. It's quite a deep criticism of the other children the same age who simply haven't got an older partner. It came across as super smug when I was at school, a quite explicit put-down of everyone around you to lord your older boyfriend at others, akin to lording wealth, Emma I'm not accusing you of this, nor am I saying you weren't mature beyond your years. It was just such a common claim is all I'm saying, and these girls who claimed maturity were much the same as they had been 6 months earlier when they didn't have an older sexual partner. They were still 14 year old girls listening to Wham, sneaky-smoking behind the school, giggling uncontrollably, reading poetry at the same level as anyone else their age, bitter on their parents, no clue about their future, etc, etc.
The way I see it, the reason it happens is because each has something the other wants. Both want companionship and intimacy. But we usually also want more than that, we want partners that enable us to do things we want to do, and older boys enable younger girls. Love is a highly competitive business, we're all seeking to maximize things in life. Boys are willing to pay a much higher premium for sex, so they're willing to take partners much younger, and just put up with the immaturity. They might want one their age, but the older guys have in turn taken up all those slots.
And this is why I think it does set up a power dynamic. But it's not totally one sided - the bargain is fair, the girl can withdraw herself from the man if he is abusing it, and he will suffer from that. However, I think the age gap gives men a lot of advantages - they are simply more free and powerful.
*Edit, please note, these sweeping generalization are NOT meant to deny the existence of women who are attracted to men the same age or younger, or boys attracted to older women. I was one such boy, but there just weren't any that weren't going out with doctors, etc. I didn't even come onto their radar.
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The first Love Of My LIfe was a scrape under three years older than I, and I was ready for sex well before he was.
Goodness me, I was perfectly ready, in a physical sense, for sex at the age of 12. I sorely doubt it would have done me a lick of harm, unless I got someone pregnant or caught something. It was a long and frustrating wait, I tell you.
Edit: I guess I've always been a little bit suss of the claims of girls to maturity beyond their years, since I got plenty of interest from girls my age, until they actually found out my age - I always looked way older than I am. It was especially telling on one occasion that a girl was coming on to me for ages, then a chance remark mentioned that I was swotting for 6th Form Cert, and she said "Whaaat? I thought you were 19", and then just walked off to find some older guy. A 19 year old girl I was having a great old chinwag with after a bit of rocking on in a nightclub once asked if we could go home and I said it would have to be her place, my folks wouldn't approve. She asked how old I was and actually recoiled in horror when I told her 14. Everyone always told me I should have lied, but I didn't want that to be the start of a relationship.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Emma Hart,
The most important thing to do would be to change the way ordinary people think about sexual assault.
FWIW, I think most people's ideas about sex form during puberty. That includes rapists. Not sure how that helps, but I think changing adult thinking is pretty damned hard. So:
some people need more than a 45 minute class in sex-ed to actually "get it". It is still all about the perpetrator.
Perhaps not, but it's a very worthwhile thing for schoolchildren to become informed about. Curiously, I do remember that we had a class (5th form I think) that was about rape. A science class, I think. It was a hard subject to discuss even then, though. Would you want to be triggering any victims in the class? It was even more full of uncomfortable silences than the regular sex-education. It didn't help that most of what we heard about the sexual encounters of our friends were the girls who were mostly shagging older guys, and the guys who were mostly shagging younger girls. Everything about that speaks of power imbalance, and statutory rape is all over it.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Emma Hart,
I don't think the "not defining triggering" comment is entirely fair, though.
In your linked comment you say:
And yes, you can never tell what's going to trigger someone.
Which pretty much means it's got no definition that people can use as a guideline. I mean, lets face it, the entire thread is triggering to the people "who find it too distressing to take part in". The entire state of Texas was triggering for one of the characters in Thelma and Louise.
I can see why you did it, it encouraged caution and consideration. Even if it what I said was totally innocuous it might have had that effect (see paragraph above). It was probably just as well you chose me for such treatment. Part of me actually wants to self-flatter and suggest you unconsciously picked me on account of my thick skin.
Anyway, I'm sorry my statement triggered someone, glad you spared them, don't feel bitter about it, and have overcome my fear of spam enough to finally allow my email address to be seen.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Emma Hart,
However. I don't see how noting that something might be "triggering" acts to shut down or limit a conversation.
I guess a whip around of how many people can read my comment that you disemvowelled on account of being triggering would be illuminating. I'm not saying you shouldn't have done it, you reserved the right quite clearly. But the outcome of it on me has been that I've written about 5 quite lengthy posts, mostly things from my experience, that I've simply deleted. That limits anyone being able to benefit from any of it.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't limit things. Some of what I deleted was simply too personal and the telling felt like betrayal. Other things were potentially triggering on the definition you never gave, but I felt it likely to have meant, after the first disemvowelling.
I guess the point is that rape is so damned divisive and traumatic that it really does need quite careful comment management, and my prediction that clash would not happen without concern trolling and mansplaining should not be taken as meaning I think we needed more of that. You wanted to do something different with this thread, and it seems like it has done something different, a sharing of some experiences, without the tut-tutting, raging, and explosion that happen with any sharings like that which happen on less careful blogs. There was a little, but the person causing it withdrew quickly (was this a shutdown?). A non-judgmental approach was basically exactly what I wanted to bring up in my own experience of dealing with a rape victim. Why did they choose to tell me, and no-one else? I wonder if it's related to a comment I once received by a depressed friend - "You're the least judgmental person I know".
Which is probably news to anyone who has only experienced what I say on the net. My take on that is that the net is one of the few places I can make judgment, a very strong urge, the repression of which has made me feel quite bad over the years. But this thread is not the place for such urges.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
without consent it is a violation and a form of violence, isn't that true?
It was a meme, promoted by the staunch feminists of my childhood that "rape is not about sex, it's about violence". I don't really know if it's true, it seems to me that coupling the two does deny some kinds of rape, because it makes it about the intention rather than the consent. But they're certainly strongly linked in my mind.
When I did call off initiations, there were protestations from some of the guys. I tried to make them feel stink about the whole thing "why do you want to get into these guys pants so much?". That sort of worked, but then the follow up came: "Well all right, but can't we at least beat them up?". It confirmed that old meme to me, that the whole abuse of their genitalia aspect of the thing was mostly about power and humiliation.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Emma Hart,
AND, it appears to mean "patronising", and we already have a word for that, it's "patronising".
Which is, interestingly, a totally gendered word. There's no word for womansplaining that I'm aware of, although I'm happy to be enlightened. I guess "nagging" is the closest we've got, a telling pointer about how gendered power is.
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