I sure as hell don’t know how such issues should be dealt with, but this story is indeed disturbing. Girl, 12, starts dating man, 20. At 14, she gets pregnant and they get married. She was in eighth grade. He was 24.
Now, will it do any good at this point to lock the guy up? No, it probably won’t. In fact, it’ll probably just make it harder on the 14-year-old child who is now at home with a newborn baby. But this relationship is obviously, um, problematic. I’m not trying to be judgmental here, but I’m pretty sure that when a 12-year-old and a 20-year-old are in a sexual relationship (or a business relationship, or any relationship), there’s going to be an inherent power differentiation, and a serious issue of judgment and maturity (on the 12-year-old’s part by simply being 12, and on the 20-year-old’s part for having sex with a child).
I’ve said before that I think it’s important to let women make their own decisions, and to let them be their own moral agents. I’ve also said that being of minor age should not strip someone of their right to their own body. I certainly stand by those statements. But where does statutory rape come in — particularly the more extreme kind, like this? Thoughts?
I’ve read about this and I don’t see it as a close call.
Certainly, pre-teens have a right to their own desires and bodies — but there’s a lot of things we do not let them do with their bodies because they have not developed adult decision-making skills. We don’t let them drink alcohol, get tattoos or fuck adults. Now, they may be able to get away with these things, but as a society, we acknowledge that adults still get to tell them what to do, especially in these important regards.
(Not that I’m denying that teens are sexual. But the power differential with adult sex partners and the history of children being used by adults for sexual gratification leaves me in no doubt that it must be prevented. Teens should explore their own bodies, and then those of agemates.)
This guy is a sometime Marine and a socially maladapted adult. He feels more at home with children. That describes a lot of pedophiles. In fact, I believe that describes the classic pedophile. He’s still an adult, with the mind, body and legal status of an adult. There is too great a power imbalance for him to be in a relationship with a girl of twelve, or fourteen.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the marriage can be invalidated at this point. I do think it is important that he go to jail — especially in a highly publicized case — to deter other adult men from using young girls as their sexual toys.
I am also appalled by the judgment of her parents in permitting her to marry the man who molested her.
It’s not the age difference that bothers me; however, when placed into context, I think it does constitute pædophia. How sexually mature could the girl have been at 12? Something is definitely wrong if the man can a) find that attractive, and b) find mutual ground on which to base a relationship.
Sorry, most minors do not grasp the consequences of their actions or make mature, responsible decisions (not to say that adults do, but at least adults theoretically should be able to handle the responsibilities that go along with them). While with adults there is the possiblity of coercion, with minors it’s significantly greater. Case in point: Jodie Renee Collie a 12-year old that’s just run away with a 27-year old registered sex offender. WHile the child doesn’t know better, the adult should and should be held accountable for taking advantage in these sorts of situations.
I’ve known (and know) 17-, 16-, and even 15-year-olds that are pretty responsible. But the line has to be drawn somewhere and 18 seems a good place to do it. Course, you get problems like a freshman dating a junior (17 vs. 19 or 16 vs. 18 or something), but we can use a little common sense in those cases.
12 vs 20 is waaaaay out of line… I would say lock the guy up until the girl is 18, then let her decide what she wants to do. It really seems like she was taken advantage of.
I’m 18 (and I look younger) and when some guy in his mid-thirties with a wife and kids ogles me on the street I think that’s sick. But when I read this story, I was going to puke.
As for the discussion of women’s sexual liberty and “right to her own body”, I second the NE atty general: “We weren’t talking about a 19-year-old-and-one-day senior in high school and his 15-year-old-and-364-day sophomore girlfriend. We were talking about a grown man and a child.” To me it’s not a liberty issue because a 12-14 year old is not an adult, and a 20-22 year old man certainly is. Since our culture sets the age of maturity around 18, young adolescents are generally not expected to be able to live on their own, work at a full time job, drive cars or make other big life decisions. On the contrary, a young man in his twenties is expected to do all of the above.
Getting pregnant and having children are big decisions, even for adults. And if young adolescents are having sex, children will be an inevitable consequence – not all of them will use birth control, use it correctly or have abortions. Many parents are probably too squeamish to educate 10 or 11 year olds on the details of responsible sexual behavior, and I’d rather have them thinking about being midway through their K-12 career than worrying about being pregnant.
This is a hard one. A good friend of mine was married at age 13 to a man who was 18. She had three children by the time she was twenty. She divorced her husband after three years. Her third child was by someone else. She claims she was sexually precocious and wanted to get away from her parents. I might add she is a very good mother, and is attending college after getting her GED. Thanks to the parents she was trying to escape. My husband’s mother was 13 when she married his father who was 34. They were married for 40 years until he died. She followed him a year later. The family says from a broken heart.
I am not advocating either of the above scenarios, just adding another spin.
When I took Ethan to the doctor yesterday, she told me to begin to tell him about sex and set body-safe precedents that would protect him from sexual predators. I was glad to tell her that we were already doing so.
(This was also during a suggestion that I begin to tell him about drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.)
Ryan, many states have what is called a “Romeo and Juliet” statute: instead of a single age of consent, the ages are graduated. For example, under 12 is off limits altogether, a young person of 12-16 is off limits to a partner 4 years his or her senior, and a teen of 17 is of age to consent to sex with any adult.
I think this kind of statute is virtually required by common sense.
Can you expand on that?
David-
I meant that primarily as a response to those who believe that adults should get to make young peoples’ reproductive choices for them. If a girl under the age of 18 is pregnant, her parents should not be legally allowed to force her to have an abortion if she wants to carry the pregnancy to term. Similarly, parents should not be allowed to legally force their minor daughter to give birth. Parental consent and notification laws, for abortion and birth control, were specifically what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
Thinking about Espahan’s post … Were the people from another country? Because I suppose acceptable ages of marriage can vary with culutre. For example, in the 1800s girls married at very young ages because most people died in their thirties. However, these girls were raised to expect leaving home/marrying at these ages. Today’s young Western adolescents are not ready to run their own household and are largely treated as children, with children’s responsibilities.
I’ll throw this out there: in Lauren K. Ayers’ parenting book “Teenage Girls”, she notes that “early sexual activity may seem liberating to young girls [but] it is worth noting that in repressive traditional cultures it has been used as a means of dominating and subjugating females.” (164) I think that’s why I still object to young (11-14 year old) adolescents having sexual relations, especially with someone much older.
It is still troublesome about the young girl from KS, though. I consider the father of her baby a statutory rapist, but it would be unfortunate if she ended up going on welfare. I wish someone could help her take care of her baby so she could at least get an HS diploma.
Oh my god. The most disgusting part… it’s legal for children as young as 12 to marry in Kansas. What year is this, again?
Jill, I don’t see any inconsistency between advocating a child’s right to terminate a pregnancy and advocating legal bars to adults using children for sex. In the latter case, the state is imposing its judgment on a child to avoid a problem. The bar isn’t permanent: the child is free to have a fulfilling sex life with adult partners in a few years. In the former case, well, it’s too late to avoid the problem.
When a young girl is pregnant, at least one thing has already failed, and there’s a life-changing event that must be dealt with one way or another. The problem cannot be avoided, and the only question is who ought to be vested with the power to make this decision.
Not to escape the subject of the post, but unfortunately, this mid-30s guy probably can’t help himself. Looking younger than 18 is not the same as looking 12. Biologically, girls are sex-ready by 14 or so, and thus its no surprise that guys are drawn—if only primally and ephemerally—to “young” girls. Whether or not they harbor that thought longer than a split second, and whether or not they act on it, for god’s sake, is another matter entirely.
Kate, what you wrote raises an interesting issue aside from the topic of the thread — desire, and when it is an imposition.
You’re 18. You say you look younger, but perception of age, and self-perception of age, are subject to much inaccuracy. People (men or women) may look at you and see 18 or so, and conclude (correctly) that if you were interested, you’re old enough to make that decision.
Of course, I don’t know your sexual orientation, and if you don’t want sex with men, that’s fine. If you don’t like guys in their mid-thirties, that’s your choice. And if you’re not interested in a parent, your choice.
But there’s a lot of assumptions built into the model you describe: that the guy thinks you’re younger than 18 (maybe, maybe not), that he shouldn’t be looking at an 18 year old because he’s in his mid-thirties (that’s up to him and whoever his sex partners are), and that he shouldn’t be looking at anyone else because he’s married (marriages vary, and lots of folks have more flexible arrangements).
OTOH, sadly at least some of those assumptions will be correct the vast majority of the time. And also sadly, these guys are imposing their desire on you, which disturbs you.
What that leaves me with is a big question. How does one analyze when expressions of desire (from a glance to a proposition) are appropriate, and when they are an imposition? Certainly, most of us don’t want nobody to ever look for sex — otherwise, nobody would get laid, and most of us don’t want a world like that. But then, I think we’d all agree that sometimes cruising someone is over-the-line, rude, and even harrassment where men impose their desire on women who just want to be left alone.
Of course, it’s easy for us all to say we’d like never to be aware of the desires of anyone we wouldn’t desire back. I might say I never want to know that sixty year old women lust after me, because I’m probably never going to be interested back. But that’s not fair — it will not be true that no guy in his thirties is interested in a woman in her sixties, and she’s entitled to try to find someone, right?
For that reason, I don’t think it’s about who you’re looking for, but how.
Thomas-
I agree, I also think, as you so eloquently put it, that there isn’t “any inconsistency between advocating a child’s right to terminate a pregnancy and advocating legal bars to adults using children for sex.” I’ve just always had a more difficult time getting to that conclusion while maintaining a consistent philosophy that children have rights. Thank you for the thoughts, they were really helpful!
As the father of two daughters, I’d like to echo the voices of hardassitude here. With all we know about adolescence and the development of personality that occurs during that time, it is ludicrous to suggest that a 12-year-old girl or boy is ready to make potentially life-altering decisions regarding their sexuality and reproductive capacity. Are there exceptions? Probably. But, on average, 12-year-olds are children. The more support they get from their parents, their schools, civic organizations, and the law, the better.
As a parent, it seems to me that sexuality is like a lot of other issues. Children should gradually be granted more freedom, within boundaries, as they demonstrate the capacity to exercise that freedom responsibly. To suggest that children have 100% domain over their bodies (or their money, their safety, or anything else for that matter) is a cop-out and irresponsible.
A 20-year-old having sexual relations with a 12-year-old should be deprived of the opportunity in a way that makes clear to all that such behavior is unacceptable.
Heliologue, of course he can “help himself”. What, do you think he had an involuntary muscle reflex? Can’t…stop…staring…eyelids…frozen…
it’s legal for children as young as 12 to marry in Kansas
As long as they’re children of the opposite sex, that is. Kansas’s “Romeo and Juliet” law does not apply to same-sex couples. Kansas has no minimum marriage age.
Lauren, of course there’s a reason to lock the guy up. “Well, it’s too late now” just means that you can fuck children as long as you hurry up and marry them afterward.
mythago, AB – An op-ed in the New York Times said that many states have idiotic marriage laws on the books. Like many other antiquated laws, people have never bothered to change them. I looked up “marriageable age” at wikipedia – in NH and NY it is 13/14 with parental consent, NC no minimum age if the girl is pregnant and MS no minimum age with parental consent.
Heliologue, Thomas – There are 12 year olds who have more mature and womanly figures than me. I’m short and I have young looking facial features. I don’t wear a lot of makeup or “sexy” looking clothes. Men can damn well figure out I’m not striving for their sexual approval/recognition – I don’t sashay around town shaking my ass and batting my eyes or wear halter/tube tops, shirts that say “My Boyfriend Is Out Of Town”, miniskirts, short shorts, g-strings that show, little string bikinis or stiletto heels. (Disclaimer: I’m not saying its ok to sexually harrass/rape a woman who dresses like that, but she’s got to expect some sort of male attention.)
Our misogynistic and male-centric world view really pisses me off. That I have to accept I’ll get hit on because I wear a (gasp!) camisole. Well, gosh, it just never occurs to people that maybe I’m wearing it because it’s 85 frickin degrees outside or because I find the fabric/color attractive. I *must* be wearing it so I can provoke those unsuspecting men with my unclothed arms/clavicles. (heavy sarcasm) Whatever, men can look, but it’s absolutely unacceptable the kind of lurid smiles, leers and hoots I get when I’m minding my own business.
Even if I don’t look 12, I may look 15/16, and maybe that is “sexually mature” but I still find it disgusting and hideously inappropriate for a 35 year old man. The article about the couple in KS made me wonder, too, why does a man in his 20s or 30s seek out a teen girl? Why can’t he get a girlfriend who’s in her 20s or 30s? In our culture (just witness the Olson twins ickiness and “Barely Legal” magazines), we fetishize extreme youth for women, ie. Inexperience, powerlessness and vulnerability. I’m no tin-foil hatter, but what better way to keep women down than to encourage us into early unions (whether marriage or otherwise) with men who have more power than we do?
Katie:
I agree. I find the tendency to fetishize inexperience and vulnerability troubling.
Still agreeing with you.
Still agreeing with you. Whoever wants to get your attention, aggressive cruising when they have no reason to think you’re receptive is making their desire your problem, something that I don’t think is okay.
What I’m not interested in doing is defending guys who stare and catcall you in the street. I’m against that. Not because they are 35 or you look young — but simply because we all have a right to be let alone. In a patriarchal culture, I take for granted that if some folks want sex with me, except in a very few circumstances, they’ll keep it to themselves unless they have reason to believe I’m interested. You ought to be able to count on the same thing. The fact that you can’t shows we have a long way to go.
So I’m not defending men who rudely stare or bother you. I wanted instead to raise the broader debate: we all ought to be free of unwanted advances — men generally are, with exceptions, while women have to deal with them non-stop. But I, or one, don’t want people to stop looking for sex partners — so what is a good, respectful way of looking to hook up, and what is an imposing, patriarchal way?
Still agreeing with you. I think it’s probably always okay to glance at someone, and look away. If I want sex with someone, that’s my issue, and I don’t intrude on someone else as long as my desire stays in my own head. On my account, no issue arises until the desirer wants to see if the desiree is reciprocally interested.
Reading people’s intentions from clothing is sometimes difficult. What may seem like a clear signal may not be at all what the wearer intended to convey.
I recall standing in line getting my weekly load of Ramen Noodles while in law school, when I noticed a woman behind me, about my age, was wearing a heavy black vinyl dog collar, with a big stainless steel D-ring. I was available at the time and looking, specifically for someone into BDSM, and she was attractive. I was fairly sure that she was signalling her kinky disposition, but this was the West Village, and S/M inspired fashion showed up on folks with no BDSM interest. So I asked, “Is that collar a fashion statement or a statement of intent?” She looked embarrassed and stammered something. It was clear that, not only was she not interested, but it hadn’t really occurred to her that it would be read that way! I apologized for the misunderstanding and paid for my groceries, and the lesson stuck with me: the signals people intend to send may not be the ones I think they are trying to send.
I agree with you that 35 year old men ought not to be having sex with sixteen year olds. I am also, at a gut level, skeptical of men who, in their mid-thirties, look for late teens — because I usually suspect that they are not looking for equal relationships. But I’m not willing to say that’s a hard and fast rule. I’ve know enough women of 18 or 19 who are looking for sex partners in a mature, self-affirming way and who look for older guys because they distrust the maturity of men their own age. Especially within the BDSM community, where getting experience from a more experienced partner has value, I’m not about to say that it is generally inappropriate for a 35-year old man to have eighteen year old partners; I’m only willing to say it is inappropriate to do so if he’s doing it to take advantage of a difference in maturity.
BTW, if you read my comment above, Kate, you know I’m no fan of this Nebraska statutory rapist. I’m horrified and I want to see him in jail.
Kate, I’m sorry I mistyped your name above.
Thomas -
“But I, or one, don’t want people to stop looking for sex partners — so what is a good, respectful way of looking to hook up, and what is an imposing, patriarchal way?”
If someone wants to hook up, they should go to a bar, a club, or check the personals, where people expressly go for the purpose of hooking up. I wish men would understand that when I’m shopping, outside enjoying the sunshine, getting the mail, waiting for the bus, etc. that I’m not looking to get hit on.
“I’ve know enough women of 18 or 19 who are looking for sex partners in a mature, self-affirming way and who look for older guys because they distrust the maturity of men their own age.”
I think the whole maturity thing is another culture myth. Believe me, I’ve known lots of guys who are young adults but act like 12 year olds because it’s encouraged and deemed cute and appropriate for men to act like boys until they’re 30. Whereas women are basically sex objects as soon as we hit puberty. Also, why are men encouraged to seek young, immature sex partners who will basically depend on them for everything and women encouraged to seek older, mature ones who will likely have more money, power and experience? That paradigm is not biologically ordained, just read Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” or the French novel “Cheri”.
Also, why would a man in his thirties, who has likely has a steady job, a decent education, a house and his own car, seek out a woman my age, who has little work experience, education or knowledge of the world? It just seems socially weird and unequal. I suppose young women might find it “empowering” to seduce an older partner, but sexual power is definitely not the only power.
Kate:
I certainly agree that there’s nothing foreordained or right about an older man / younger woman dynamic. In fact, I’m attracted to women who are generally older than me. Partly this is because I find professional accomplishment and authority sexy, I think. And I know some men who benefitted tremendously from sexual experiences with older women while in their late teens and early twenties (and some of what I learned was from lovers a few years my senior).
Yeah, I agree. A co-worker in his mid-thirties recently told me that, following his divorce, he was dating a twenty-four year old. The next thing he said was, “don’t give me that stare.” Certainly, I think a woman of 24 can make her own decisions. But like you say, I’m suspicious of men who date women with less resources, less accomplishment, etc. I’m suspicious that they’re dating those women because of the power differential.
Also, don’t assume that I’m conflating dating and sex. You ask what a man of 35 would be doing with a woman of 18 — or a man of 18 with a woman of 35 for that matter. As a romantic relationship, they are in different places, and this usually will not work out. (There are of course exceptions.)
But I tend to have the open-textured view that dating and sex are different things that merely overlap (and that not all sex is penetrative, and that not all BDSM is sex, and that affectional orientation is not the same thing as sexual orientation …). So, while I don’t expect most intergenerational romances to work, that doesn’t mean it can’t work for sex. I wouldn’t hesitate, for example, to bottom to a woman in her fifties or even older if the chemistry was there, and if the kind of scene she was looking for was the kind of scene I was looking for.
So, two people in different generations might be attracted to each other for reasons that do not travel through one being able to manipulate and control the other. They might love each other despite, and not because of, the age difference — in fact, the most stable same-sex couple I know are more than fifteen years apart, but nobody thinks that the older partner is using his power to manipulate the younger partner. Or they might simply have something to offer each other sexually. A man of 20 and a woman of 50 might work just fine as fuck buddies. The reverse gives us both pause because it has so often been an oppressive situation — but I’m not willing to say it is intrinsically so, just that it makes me uneasy because it still often is. And I’m certainly not willing to tell my gay male or lesbian friends to confine their sex lives to folks of about the same age, so I think we’re talking here about a specific age difference (older man, younger woman) that is a problem because of the history of patriarchal exploitation. Change the sex of either partner, and the ages are their business, right?
That’s one solution, of course. Mostly, this is a solution that straight men ruin — once a place is the “official place where people go to look for sex partners,” asshole men who treat women with no respect drive all but the most thick-skinned women out by acting like dogs humping a leg. I’m not saying that’s your problem — that’s the problem I have with other straight men.
I do tend to think, though, that if straight men could learn to behave themselves, the simple process of finding out is a woman is interested in exchanging phone numbers shouldn’t be such an awful imposition. (I’m not being sarcastic, I think it is awful that men act like assholes and spoil women’s ability to just enjoy their own time and space.) Kate, what you’re describing, slack-jawed oogling and catcalls, that’s abusive. If men would confine themselves to seeing if there’s any interest, male sexual desire wouldn’t be an oppressive imposition on women. (Of course, if men accepted that they had no right to impose their sexuality on women, there would be no rape, either. Sad, sad world.)
An op-ed in the New York Times said that many states have idiotic marriage laws on the books. Like many other antiquated laws, people have never bothered to change them.
Or didn’t care to change them. The Nebraka AG is getting a lot of calls (from outside Nebraska…hmmmm) from people whining that they should leave this couple alone.
Kate, too long to quote but yes! You are absolutely right!
I don’t sashay around town shaking my ass and batting my eyes or wear halter/tube tops, shirts that say “My Boyfriend Is Out Of Town”, miniskirts, short shorts, g-strings that show, little string bikinis or stiletto heels.
I occassionally “sashay around town” in halter tops (which are pretty much just tank tops with a different kind of strap), or skirts that fall above the knee, or (quite often) stiletto heels. The standard going-out outfit where I live is jeans, a cute tank top, and high heels. I’m certainly not doing it for male attention — I like clothes, so I wear what I like. I’m short, and I like to be taller, so I wear heels. And honestly, I resent the suggestion that I should know and accept that I’m going to get unwanted attention.
The fact is that when men holler at you (and I mean “you” as the general here) on the street, it’s just not a reflection of how physically attractive they find you, or an expression of some urge that they just can’t control because they’re so overwhelmed by such a sexually seductive woman. It’s a power thing. It’s an attempt to give you less ownership over a public space than they have.
Where I live, women get harassed on the street constantly. And believe me, these guys aren’t actually interested in complimenting you, or in dating you, or in somehow making you take an interest in them. They’re only interested in intimidating you and expressing their superior power. That’s why what someone is wearing doesn’t matter — because it has nothing to do with what you look like. I get it when I’m out walking in sweats — in fact, for some reason, I get it more. Older women get it a lot less, I suspect for a variety of reasons — they’re outside of what’s considered a sexually available (and harassable) age (although let me add that I realize that this isn’t true), for one.
So I guess I just want to clarify that there’s a huge difference between actually seeking out a sex partner, and street harassment. 99 percent of the guys who make comments to you on the street aren’t doing it out of genuine interest in establishing any sort of relationship with you.
Or even of paying you a compliment. If they were, they’d be uncomfortable if you reacted negatively.
Jill, absolutely. And, thinking about it, I guess this really is the vast majority of the approaches men make to women in public spaces: not flirting or trying to meet them, but simply misogynist manipulation. Those men are shit. I’m not interested in standing up for them; they’re not engaged in anything I’m in favor of.
The only thing I am standing up for is the honestly-meant flirting. But I’m not sure anybody really objects to that, and if it’s honestly meant (as an approach or just a compliment), then a negative reaction would send the guy away.
Yeah, but this stuff gets tricky (probably obvious, but I thought I’d point it out) because different people have different views on what flirting is and ought to be. To some people, what you do ‘honestly flirting’ would be an unwelcome come-on, a power trip, while to others it may be just harmless flirting.
Regarding Kate’s comments, above, for instance–what’s the difference between a look and a leer? There is a difference, surely, but it’s subjective enough to cause me to err on the side of pretty much not flirting most of the times it occurs to me to flirt. What does that cost me? Not a whole lot, probably, and the benefits are pretty high (i.e. not encouraging other men to act even more flirty, doing everything I can to make sure I’m not making women feel unsafe around me). Still, it means that I wouldn’t have said anything to the collar-wearing woman in your example, Thomas. It also means that the times when you *have* successfully flirted with somebody in that way, I have missed out.
Also regarding Kate’s comments, above, seems like the subtext of her comment implies that she would take your ‘honest flirting’ as objectionable, unless it happenned in a place she thinks of as a ‘flirting zone’–a bar or club.
This is once again why I am happy to have severalf female friends. My female friends help me to gauge the contexts more clearly, pointing out when things would be sort of creepy (to them!) and when they wouldn’t be, as the situations arise. Even if hard-and-fast rules are never found, I can learn to err on the side of caution without missing out completely on the pleasure of (what I consider to be!) honest flirting.
JP, you’re right that everything’s subjective. Of course, that problem goes to place as well as method. What I may think is a glance, might seem like a leer to Kate. But then, the places that Kate thinks of as places to pick people up may be the places that other women just to out to be with friends. Even making fairly reasonable assumptions about the messages someone is sending steer one wrong, but so can assumptions about why someone is in a particular place.
This isn’t really an issue in my life. Most of my romantic partners have been women I met not by flirting with strangers, but women I met through friends or other contexts where I knew them first before I considered dating them, and with casual sex partners, it has often been the same (there have been exceptions). (And that’s all history, anyway. I’m married now, and the circumstances under which my wife and I would be looking for another sex partner are so limited that it’s not really worth trying with strangers. Most of our friends know the deal; if a friend of a friend is interested, they can drop a hint.)
So, I’m not really looking to justify how I look for sex partners. I’m really trying to look at the issue broadly — what, as feminists, do we think is okay, and what isn’t? I appreciate Kate’s view that women signal their receptiveness by being in an appropriate space (though like I said, that’s not always clear), or wearing certain kinds of clothes (though, like Jill said, and like I illustrated, that’s hard to read). I tend to think of it as a matter of method, though as you point out, that’s subjective, too. The real answer is that if we didn’t have a patriarchal culture with power-tripping abusive men, none of this would be an issue, and if women like Kate are ever uncomfortable around men in public spaces, it’s because of the way some men act.
BTW, Jill, are you still checking the gmail account? I sent something about a civil rights case a while ago, and I wanted to make sure you got it.
I’ve found this to be true as well, and I have no idea why. I get more hoots and hollers walking into a Village Pantry in sweatpants with my hair in a tangled knot on the side of my head than I do when I’m dressed up and lookin’ good. Again, no living clue why.
Thomas-
I got it! And it was really interesting and a little more complicated than anything else that I’ve posted lately. I’m definitely going to post something about it, I just want to make sure that I have time to really get into it. And since I’m currently commuting from Jersey and don’t have internet access (I’m in the NYU library right now), I’m just lacking the time to do it justice. But thanks for sending it! It will be written about soon!
Older women get it a lot less, I suspect for a variety of reasons — they’re outside of what’s considered a sexually available (and harassable) age (although let me add that I realize that this isn’t true), for one
Jill, you’re absolutely right about that. I’ve noticed for the past 5 years or so that receive very little male passing-by interest, catcalls, etc., and I haven’t gained weight or started dressing badly or suddenly gotten ugly. I just hit a certain birthday, and it’s as if a door slammed shut. It’s been a relief to me, since I’m rather shy and had found attention on the street to be almost unbearable. I like being invisible in that way. The weird thing is, I still get hit on as much as ever at parties or in other social situations. It’s a funny thought to me that the average guy on the street considers me no longer sexually viable/vulnerable…and I’m still in that stretch between 35 and 40.