Stop worrying about girls and young women
At our recent anniversary celebrations, an old anecdote about an experience we had on our honeymoon came up.
I won't tell the whole story here. The short form goes as follows. We were on a nude beach in the south of France. There was a family of German nudists there. The parents had, being committed to nudism, taught their children that being naked in public is good and natural. But they had a thirteen or fourteen year old daughter who had recently discovered that men really liked seeing her naked and she was getting a rather large charge out of her power to provoke reactions from them. She spent a lot of time walking nearby such men so she could bask in their attention and her parents spent a lot of time discouraging this. The hypocrisy of the parents' reaction gave us quite a giggle.
Over the years, the story has given quite a few other people a giggle too. But when it came up on our most recent anniversary, one woman hearing the story got all solemn and said, "I worry about that poor girl."
I love this woman and the Serpentine One and I have been friends with her for a long, long time now but that strikes me as nonsense.
Here is the thing. William Blake and the rest of the Romantics were just wrong: Children are not innocent. That goes triple for teenagers especially teenage girls. They get it, they really do. When 15-year old Sara, Megan and Theresa all put on double-push-up bras, low-cut tank tops and skimpy, skin-tight shorts that outline their labia for all the world to see it is not because they don't understand the consequences of what are doing. They are doing because they do understand the consequences and, though they might get to hurt by the experience, they are not hothouse flowers but girls and girls are tough.
Nor is it the case that they are somehow being pressured into doing this by evil men somewhere. They are doing it because they like doing it.
Now I can see why others might not like what they are doing and there are, in my opinion, very good social reasons for public modesty but let's not pretend we are doing this to protect the poor little flowers because they aren't poor little flowers.
A final thought: We also should be honest about our motives here. More than a few men who worry about young girls strike me as being more motivated by sour grapes because girls didn't dress this way and didn't seem nearly so keen to perform oral sex when they were teenagers. And when women in their thirties, forties and fifties are suddenly keen for women in their teens and twenties to be more modest, we should ask what role pure self interest is playing.
There are good reasons for more public modesty but there are also lots of disingenuous arguments for it.
Update: I've posted some further thoughts and clarifications.
At our recent anniversary celebrations, an old anecdote about an experience we had on our honeymoon came up.
I won't tell the whole story here. The short form goes as follows. We were on a nude beach in the south of France. There was a family of German nudists there. The parents had, being committed to nudism, taught their children that being naked in public is good and natural. But they had a thirteen or fourteen year old daughter who had recently discovered that men really liked seeing her naked and she was getting a rather large charge out of her power to provoke reactions from them. She spent a lot of time walking nearby such men so she could bask in their attention and her parents spent a lot of time discouraging this. The hypocrisy of the parents' reaction gave us quite a giggle.
Over the years, the story has given quite a few other people a giggle too. But when it came up on our most recent anniversary, one woman hearing the story got all solemn and said, "I worry about that poor girl."
I love this woman and the Serpentine One and I have been friends with her for a long, long time now but that strikes me as nonsense.
Here is the thing. William Blake and the rest of the Romantics were just wrong: Children are not innocent. That goes triple for teenagers especially teenage girls. They get it, they really do. When 15-year old Sara, Megan and Theresa all put on double-push-up bras, low-cut tank tops and skimpy, skin-tight shorts that outline their labia for all the world to see it is not because they don't understand the consequences of what are doing. They are doing because they do understand the consequences and, though they might get to hurt by the experience, they are not hothouse flowers but girls and girls are tough.
Nor is it the case that they are somehow being pressured into doing this by evil men somewhere. They are doing it because they like doing it.
Now I can see why others might not like what they are doing and there are, in my opinion, very good social reasons for public modesty but let's not pretend we are doing this to protect the poor little flowers because they aren't poor little flowers.
A final thought: We also should be honest about our motives here. More than a few men who worry about young girls strike me as being more motivated by sour grapes because girls didn't dress this way and didn't seem nearly so keen to perform oral sex when they were teenagers. And when women in their thirties, forties and fifties are suddenly keen for women in their teens and twenties to be more modest, we should ask what role pure self interest is playing.
There are good reasons for more public modesty but there are also lots of disingenuous arguments for it.
Update: I've posted some further thoughts and clarifications.
I agree with you, but unfortunately the reactionary state and federal statutes in the US don't. The scene you describe on the beach in France could never happen here. Parents who practice nudism in front of their children could very easily be charged with Risk of Injury to a Minor, a felony, I kid you not. There's so many components to this issue. Age of consent laws in the US--which vary from state to state--are always higher than in Europe. People--and I'm talking about mental health professionals some of whom are my colleagues--talk about how the media "prematurely" sexualize young girls (the Jon Benet/"Little Miss Sunshine" syndrome), which causes their "objectification." The other problem is that mental health professionals have a vested interest in perpetuating what are essentially myths--its called job security. You would be amazed at all the controversy going on right now about the DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders-Fifth Edition) due out in 2013 about sexual "disorders." What the Americans proposed was shot down unanimously by the representatives from every European country. They claimed, and rightly, that there is no empirical evidence to support what the Americans were saying, and that the mental health profession in the US works in league with the criminal justice system as an agent of social control. The French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was presented in a very cursory way in a course I took in grad school so I don't claim to be an expert, warned about this 50 or 60 years ago citing the former Soviet Union and the gulag as evidence. I began to see that this is happening here shortly after I entered this field. The statutes I mentioned about were passed by legislatures exclusively based on the testimonies of mental health professionals testifying before their committees. The media too perpetuates these myths, while at the same time throwing sex and nudity in everyone's face whenever it can. We have a very ambivalent and very unhealthy view of sexuality here. I could go on and on about this--I haven't even touched on Freud's latency theory--but you get the idea.
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, this appeared on one of the professional list-serves today in reference to the new proposals about sexual disorders for the DSM-V. I'm paraphrasing here so that no one can accuse me of anything:
ReplyDelete"That these proposals have led to so much controversy even in the US is itself evidence that there is nothing even approaching a consensus among mental health professionals, which should give pause to the DSM-V Sexual Disorders Work Group."
I read an article quite a while ago online taken from Tikkun Magazine, which is a progressive Jewish publication. The thesis is that what you've been talking about the last day or so--objectification of women, alleged innocence of children as adolescents are legally defined--is the unwitting result of feminism and the rise of the religious right. I would also add, and I think you allude to this as well, that these are all criticisms if not outright attacks on normal male sexuality. The male is always perceived as the predator while the female is the victim. In fact, there are actual female predators and actual male victims, though infrequent and even less frequently reported. 99% of these are statutory crimes where there was consent and no issue of force, but the age difference was greater than the law allows. But this is true with male on female as well, perhaps not to the same degree but often enough: 15 yo girl calls 17 yo boy and asks him if he wants a blow job. He says sure, she comes over, her parents find out and call the police. Ridiculous.