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Why is modern western society so messed up about its attitudes to sexual desire?
Research in many countries over many years has determined that men and boys find the most attractive women are those aged 17. In many countries and states depicting such young women naked or in sexually suggestive ways is actually a serious criminal offence. The law has made normal healthy sexual desire, literally the most common form of sexual desire, into a perversion and a sex crime. This cannot possibly be a good or healthy state of affairs.
If you want to kill a dragon or fight a demon you have to know where they live, what they do and what they like. Simply fearing and hating them is not going to be much use.
“Paedophiles”, sex monsters, rapists and predatory sleaze-balls are a problem and need to be tackled and counteracted. But we can never successfully fight any enemy who we refuse to understand. It does no good for the fight against sex crimes to pretend that real men are never sexually attracted to teenagers any more than it helps to pretend only bank robbers want to have more money.
The most desirable mate for any male is, always has been and always will be a bright, fit and healthy teenage virgin who has just passed through puberty and research suggests that this normally equates to the age of about 17. It follows from this that it is highly likely that bright, fit, healthy and attractive 13 year olds are going to stimulate some sexual interest. That is the way the human mind works. You can't turn on attraction in the way of the Hollywood cliche when the hero asks the heroine to take off her glasses and let her hair down, with attraction going from 0 to 100% in five seconds flat. The reality is men can see things which trigger their sexual interest in inanimate objects, animals, men and children; finding something attractive is not a matter of all or nothing there are thousands of neurons that fire, desire is a threshold. There is a positive response and a dampening response. I believe we would be much better served if we acknowledged that grown men do find teenage girls attractive and we should work on making sure that people have healthy levels of dampening responses that stop them acting inappropriately.
If a grown man finds himself feeling sexually attracted towards a teenage girl he should stop feeling guilty about it. It is normal to find teenage girls attractive, as much as anything our species ever does is normal, and if 17 is the ideal age anybody who knows anything about bell curves knows that peaks do not start at the origin, lots of men find 16, 15, 14 and 13 year olds attractive. However, attraction doesn't give a man a right, need or duty to act. Finding your neighbour's 14 year old daughter sexually attractive is one thing, wolf whistling her is something else entirely.
Grown men following teenagers around is a breakdown in normal behaviour and it is thoroughly reprehensible. But it is not reprehensible because of a perverted desire, the problem is not one of desire it is one of self control. The fault lies not with the id but the superego, not with a faulty devil on the shoulder but a faulty angel. |
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It does no good to try to beat the devil out of such offenders as it isn't the desire that is at fault it is a breakdown in self control that is at fault. Millions of normal healthy men can watch schoolgirls playing sports in short skirts and seeing pert young breasts bouncing around and be stimulated and attracted by the sight. It is only a minority who go on to act out their fantasies that are problematic.
Are you thinking that I am protesting too much? Honi soit qui mal y pense. There is nothing wrong with the desire to be rich, the problem comes when people think that desire excuses theft, drug dealing or rap music. You can't own the Mona Lisa, it isn't for sale and almost certainly never will be, but there's no reason to beat yourself up with whips and wear a hair shirt because you would like to own it. The desire to own something you can never possess is nothing to be ashamed of.
It also does society no good to be launching a witch hunt seeking out people who have normal desires and the honesty to acknowledge them. Practical experience tells us that it is the priests, scout leaders and teachers who profess they have no “unnatural desires” who are often the ones to be watched.
I am employed in a job where it is assumed I wish to make as much money as possible and yet I am expected to act as a team player and have utter respect for company monies and property. There is no contradiction between acknowledging a desire to have money and having a commitment to act honestly and to respect property, I don't have to demonstrate that I don't like money before I am taken on in a position that involves handling money on behalf of other people. Neither should it be necessary for me to pretend that the only human being I am ever attracted to is my wife.
Let us have the courage and the honesty to be able to admit that which we know to be true. We know that men, both heterosexual and homosexual, have desires for members of the (to them) appropriate sex which do not start from a conveniently legal minimum age. Acknowledging the normality of this desire would be a great step towards society's sexual maturity.
Paedophilia and situational abuse
The term paedophilia covers a wide spectrum of attitudes and behaviour. In the media it has become seen to be the correct term for the driving force behind a sexual predator who attacks children, with the definition of child extending way past puberty in many cases. This is not a correct usage. Paedophiles are people who have an attraction and sexual interest in pre and peripubescent children. It is perfectly possible to be sexually interested in children without showing any inappropriate behaviour, just as it is possible to be celibate and yet clearly know which sex you are not having sex with. Also many people who sexually abuse children are not especially or exclusively attracted to young children, they are situational abusers, people who abuse when they have the opportunity, it just so happens that the opportunity arises with a child. For many men convicted of sexually abusing children it was simply the fact that they had the opportunity that caused the problem, if the opportunity had not presented itself they would not have gone out of their way to engage in sexual contact with children.
Paedophiles can abuse children for their own selfish reasons whilst telling themselves and each other that they really love children and would hate to think of them suffering. They try to make out that children are willing partners and are not harmed by having sex with adults. This is a self-serving fantasy. In many cases the harm done is transparently physical and it is obvious that no form of consent was involved. However, children do have sexual urges and are capable of enjoying sex and reciprocating sexual advances from adults but they lack the psychological equipment to cope with sex without distorting their personalities into gross caricatures. Children who engage in sex with adults are almost always damaged by the experience, often in a way which makes them emotional cripples. There does need to be some social and/or legal pressures in place to protect children from sexual exploitation. However most legal systems I am aware of do a bad job.
People make money from selling sexual fantasy images of girls too young to have adult sexual relationships. The name Britney Spears obviously leaps to mind here. Britney is famous for having been underage and sexy. Once a girl has been featured in a sexualized image while under the legal age for sex they take that dubious but commercially valuable image with them for life. It can lead to some serious personality problems. Britney is hardly the most stable young woman you are ever unlikely to meet. Neither of course is Mary-Kate Olsen. The problem with the Olsens comes from appearing in countless reruns on children's TV. They are always being seen as 12 and 13 one minute and then appearing in grown-up clothes as adults the next. To the sicko that is enough to freeze the two images in a very unhealthy cocktail.
Adolescence is always a dangerous period. The body of an adult and the mind of an adult do not arrive in tandem or all at once. There are several years of overlap and grey area. What is the healthy way to help our children get through this period of their lives without being either thwarted and inhibited or overexposed and damaged? I don't know. But it seems we are as far away from a healthy recipe as we have ever been.
I don't like the idea of a formal age of consent because it has a number of drawbacks:
1 ] It's a target: I must lose my virginity before it stops being naughty
2 ] It becomes a norm
3 ] For some it criminalizes behaviour which is harmless, especially if it is set at the ridiculously high age of 18 or even 21
Without a formal age of consent, or with one set at a low figure such as the traditional Catholic Church's favourite age of 12, leaves lawmakers open to accusation that they are delivering our daughters into the hands of vile abusers.
In Britain there is in effect a tolerance zone for underage sex. Very few prosecutions are ever brought unless there are exceptional circumstances. Cognizance is taken of the age gap between the parties, an 18 year old having sex with a 14 year old would not likely to result in a prosecution, although a 22 year old and a 14 year old probably would. This is, in some respects, clearly a form of age discrimination. But then again discrimination means choice, calling somebody a man of discriminating tastes is not an insult. Two 15 year olds having sex would have to be doing it on a bus to get themselves prosecuted. Of course after the age of 16 consensual sex (heterosexual or homosexual) becomes legal no matter what the age of the partner unless there is a relationship of trust (e.g. teacher, social worker), in which case the age increases to 18. 16 is also the age at which people can marry although in England and Wales parental approval is required for such marriages under the age of 18.
The law on depictions of children has now been taken over by the new Puritans. I find it quite absurd that it would be fully legal for an nonagenarian to have sex with a 16 year old (and even to pay for such sex as long as he never goes to Holland) but if she herself took a photograph of her own breasts she could in theory be sent to prison for ten years. Are exceptions made for X rays and mammograms?
Recently in Britain parents have been prosecuted for taking photographs of their children playing in the bath. That is simply absurd and crazy, how are children protected by having their parents arrested for something like that?
By defining any nude image of a child as being indecent until proven otherwise, which seems to be the practical effect, common sense has been sacrificed to the Great God Something-Must-Be-Done. We can get bounced into making bad laws by media campaigns. The media complained about an epidemic of child pornography and so parliament passed the first law. The black market supply of nasty illegal material continued so the media feeding frenzy continued and in 2003 parliament showed how tough it was by extending the law to the age of 18. By what logic? Nasty material featuring young children being sexually abused and raped turns up on British computers so the legal response is to stop 16 year olds being shown in photographs naked. There is no logical connection! It isn't even the same drive. There are men who are attracted to pre-pubescent children, often of both sexes, and there are men who are attracted to young but post-pubescent girls. The first group are paedophiles and are obviously dangerous, abnormal and sociopathic. The second group are much better defined as ephebophiles.
Ephebophilia is a rather pretentious expression for something which is thoroughly normal, and certainly many orders of magnitude more common and normal than homosexuality: finding immediately post-pubescent young women attractive. Studies of men and boys in a huge range of cultures has shown that the optimum age for female beauty is 17. In other words the ideal is now illegal! That is obviously going to cause problems as most men would find a 17 year old the most attractive partner, at least in fantasy. The reason behind it is obviously biological, for any man of any age old enough to have sex the perfect age for a wife is just old enough to be reliably fertile, so she has the maximum possible life ahead of her giving birth to, raising and educating his children and grandchildren. It is a quality strategy as much as a quantity strategy, a younger wife will still be alive to educate his grandchildren and to increase their chances of survival, social enhancement and prosperity when the older but wiser alternative woman is wormfood.
For a one-night-stand (or rape for that matter) age doesn't matter, any female between 13 and 45 is as good as any other from a simple crude gene selfishness approach if the idea is to inseminate and then slink away. Common Chimpanzees follow this pattern, with a male preference shown to mature females of proven fertility ahead of the young unproven virgins. But for a wife the ideal is fertile, pneumatic, smart, pretty and virginal, which makes 17 perfection. I suspect that there are two separate things going on here, genes are building men to find 17 year olds to be most attractive and genes are building women to be at their peak of attractiveness at 17. It would be interesting to tease out which factor is the stronger.
Our species needs dirty old men
The desire for young women is not in any way perverted, it is thoroughly wholesome, it shows a man has got an eye towards choosing a wife, mother and homemaker rather than simply having an eye for fornication. In a species in which maternal mortality has traditionally been very high because our highly developed brains require the passing of a massive head down the birth canal it makes perfect sense for all males of all ages to stay on the lookout for potential young virginal brides. A good Homo sapiens looks after his wife and children and at the same time notices potential replacements because at any time he may need to find a new wife to ensure the success of his entire family. If it wasn't for “dirty old men” our species might have died out. In my own family in the nineteenth century there are several cases of men having two families, with the second wife always being much younger, sometimes the youngest sister of his first wife. The young second wife has the strength to keep both new and old family going.
So, ladies, when your husband's gaze follows a pair of pert young buttocks down the street don't automatically smack him around the back of the head. It is his genes that make him take notice, and those instincts are well-honed to match up with your interests, because if you were to die your children would stand a better chance in life with a young and healthy virginal stepmother rather than one of the old, ugly and wicked variety who comes with children of her own to compete with and oust your children. As long as he does no more than look you have nothing to worry about. Of course in modern times death in childbirth is much less common and a man's roving eye can be a real threat to the first wife, and second wives still tend to be significantly younger than first wives. Don't be alarmed at your man noticing very young women but be very wary of anything that suggests he is wanting them to notice him. As long as it is only his eyes that follow the girls you can relax, he's perfectly normal and healthy.
Age of Consent
We do not need an age of consent law to deal with rape or abuse. If a relationship is abusive it is abusive and should be illegal, if it isn't it isn't.
Perhaps an alternative to an age of consent would be some kind of coming of age ceremony which could be undertaken when the young person themselves thought it was appropriate, after such a ceremony the young person could them be issued with an official identity card demonstrating their adult status. It is an idea worth contemplating. There are too many girls who catch a bus, pay half fare because they're children, go to a night club with fake ID and drink, get drunk, have illegal underage sex, and then get pregnant before they are old enough to get a job and then they ask daddy not to shout at them because they are still his baby. Perhaps the time has come to let young people decide when they think they have grown up, and toss aside all arbitrary ages. If you decide you are old enough to have sex and drink then you are old enough to pay full price for everything, to work for your keep and take an adult's sentence if convicted of any crime.
Comment: Age of Consent
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