Boys and Women, Girls and Men
In his monthly NRO diary, John Derbyshire comments on the Debra Lafave case, in which a very pretty 25-year-old schoolteacher had an intimate relationship with her 14-year-old male student. Mr. Derbyshire notes that it was odd how the coverage implied “that this was just like a 25-year-old male teacher doing the same thing to a 14-year-old female student.” Then he hits his stride:
Well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t. Not only is the Lafave case not just like that, it isn’t anything like that. Item: Ms. Lafave is a very pretty young woman. I was a 14-year-old boy myself once. It was a while ago, but I can still remember what it felt like. I would have been thrilled to be seduced by Ms. Lafave, and I would have been the envy of my peers. I would go so far as to say that it is the sweetest dream of every red-blooded 14-year-old boy to be seduced by an attractive older woman.
That doesn’t make Ms. Lafave’s actions right, of course, and I am not apologizing for her. It does, though, at least in my mind, cast deep suspicion on claims by (among others) the boy’s parents that he was “traumatized” by the experience. Believe me, gentle reader, there are 14-year-old boys all over America yearning to be so “traumatized.”
Yes, but so what? He implies that it’s different with a boy and a woman because the boy wants it so much, and would enjoy it so much. But this only shows how little Mr. Derbyshire knows about teenage girls. If the girls’ attraction to handsome men in their twenties is any less boys’ attraction to pretty women in their twenties, then the difference is very small. Maybe fewer girls would act on those impulses given the chance; that depends on the older man’s skill at sweet-talk. But the adolescent urge to procreate is not dramatically weaker in girls than in boys.
I note that Mr. Derbyshire has a daughter named Nellie, whose age is about 13. Give it just a few years more, Mr. Derbyshire, and you’ll see.
Nonetheless, I agree that it’s strange to pretend to see no difference between an woman with boy and a man with a girl. There are differences, but they aren’t what Derbyshire thinks they are.
The big traditional difference is that girls can get pregnant and boys can’t. In an age before effective contraception, any girl or woman between puberty and menopause took an enormous risk of pregnancy every time she had sex. And if she was unmarried, then she risked stigmatizing both herself and her child. This concern played a dominant role in shaping relations between the sexes in Western Civilization—and all over the world.
What changed was effective contraception, the kind of culture-warping technological advance that I was thinking of in this post. Before contraception, the fear of illegitimacy was huge, even right up through the fifties. Contraception removed the underlying problem, and with it the rationale that supported so many of our customs and assumptions. Now we need to re-examine our culture to account for these changes, and that’s a particularly difficult task when our thinking is burdened with Marxist fantasies about the interchangeability of the sexes. But the task would still be there, even if we didn’t have Marxism.
This is where the same-sex marriage (SSM) push becomes important. SSM isn’t really about gays, but instead about taking Marxist claims of sex interchangeability to their logical conclusion. Conservatives have had trouble defending against this attack on our culture because the technological change has left all our traditions in that area rather brittle. We know that there are still important differences between the sexes, but it’s going to take some time for everyone to agree on what those differences are, and what we should do about them.
So is it just outmoded tradition for us to feel that an older man with a girl is doing something much worse than an older woman with a boy? I’m not sure. We’re all trying to figure it out as a society, right now.
One difference would be that most girls want relationships more than sex, so a girl with an older man probably hopes that they will marry, establish a home together, have some babies, and all the rest that women’s instincts crave. A boy with the woman just wants the sex. So when the adult-teen relationship inevitably fails, the boy can simply be grateful for the fun he has had, while the girl has lost all her dreams of lifelong love and a happy home.
Those are generalizations, of course. Some boys would be heartbroken; some girls wouldn’t care. But those types of generalizations, with all their inaccuracies, are the stuff of which cultures are made. If we are to rebuild our culture—which we must in the face of those who want to tear it down—then we must settle on generalizations like those and hold to them, despite their inaccuracies.
Ben,
I agree with you about the desire of teenage girls to be noticed by older men being comparable in extent to teenage boys wanting to be noticed by older women. I think the asymmetry occurs on the other end: older men are, on average, more interested in younger women than vice-versa. The cases like this one and the LeTourneau case make the national media because they are the exceptions to the rule.
The damage is not always as obvious, but I think men, whether adolescent or not, who “sleep around” are harmed in some ways as much as the women are. The stereotype is as you portrayed things: the woman is the one who gets “stuck” with the pregnancy, while the man just got to “have fun”. Like most stereotypes, there’s some truth there, but we tend to overlook what the man loses by engaging in one-night stands. Popular culture reinforces this stereotype by portraying characters like Joey on Friends who sleep around but experience no negative consequences as a result.
Comment by Mike S. — April 1, 2006 @ 9:07 pm
Here’s an article by Kathryn Lopez that gets at the issue in my previous comment.
Comment by Mike S. — April 5, 2006 @ 9:14 am
but, nobody here seems to give the suitable reason for such attractions. I haven’t seen much boys (not at least in my country) who are attracted to women, though, I know many girls who seem to have life-long dreams with the man they get attracted to. They say that they feel more protected when it comes to like a man at his twenties, while boys are thought to be less wiser than a man, so they are quite uncomfortable and doubt at their desires when it comes to spending a night with him. While, there is one more fact, girls always expect someone else to either ask or request them for anything they’ve got to do and so, they themselves do not ask others for spending a night with them, but expect others to ask for it. They think that a man has seen a lot in his life compared to a boy, and must be aware of the “do’s” and “don’t’s” when a girl has to spend a night with him.
Comment by Cecile — December 6, 2007 @ 6:12 am