'Woman-boy affair in TV and movies pushes fewer buttons'

First, here's another one in the same general category:
"The First Time" (Jacqueline Bisset), 1969; three teenage boys yearn for their first sexual experience with someone they mistake for a prostitute (part comedy, part pathos).

I was also surprised "The Graduate" didn't get a mention. The article seemed cutoff and incomplete.

Explanation? While they may not realize it, I think a lot of women are sensing a decrease in their sexual power vis a vis their lessened ability to parlay it into the whole security/committment/marriage thing. When you combine that with the fact that all women basically lose sexual power with age, I think at least part of the explanation has to do their exploring the implications and ramifications of this underlying dynamic. Just about all female media focuses in some way or another on some aspect or another of their sexual power.

Plus, women have be told by feminists for so long that going after the young'uns is what men do and that women are entitled to do the same thing. That's where the double standard aspects of it come in, because there's always been an element of societal disapproval attached to men going after women young enough to be their daughters -- even if it was entirely mutual, there was lots of scowling (based on envy IMO) by others. And of course the guy had to be rich and powerful in the first place.

In the converse situations, where the woman's money is much less if any factor (though in several of the cases involving teachers, her access to alcohol seems to have played into things), I think a lot of it has to do with women's self-esteem, as if being able to snag a sixteen y.o. boy when you're twice his age or more is some real accomplishment, and having a tiny bit of sexual power left is better than having none.

So there's an unconcious pity for the perps and no real concern for the victims because boys don't get pregnant. Our primal psychologies are wired to view the two situations differently. This is an argument for the law compensating by making women more accountable when they go after boys, just because it's so much easier for them to do so.

* MB

Yes, in most representations on film, on TV, or in books of fiction that have an under age male sleeping with an older female the male is cast in the role of sexual predator and the teacher is seduced. This is because the only role we as a society are willing to accept males in is the one of conquering, suave, predatory "thinking with his dick" type.

Observation casts doubt on this model. Look at the behavior of students at high school or even junior high school these days and tell me which group (boys or girls) is more often using their sexuality to achieve desired goals?

Girls are more often sexually predatory then boys. The only difference is when a girl wants a boy he is admired by his peers and she gets him. When a boy wants a girl if her peers do not approve, he gets rejected. If her peers do approve then he gets her and her peers. This leads to the time old stereotype of the high school stud. The truth in any high school like anywhere else is that its the girls who are choosing who to have sex with. They pick out the ones they want, they all sleep with the few they have chosen, and he gets all the negative labels for it. Girls sleep with "players" not because of their skill but because the girls have chosen them as the best of the bunch and all of them take their turn with him.

This could even be a handsome young male teacher. Girls are predatory in packs and if one is successful in her attempts at seduction then the rest will follow. "Players" are just as often victims of female sexuality as they are predators. Why do you think it is that "Players" most often end up with the sleeping with the friends and sisters of the pack member that he originally slept with? Because she told the rest how good he was and they thought they'd give him a shot as well.

Basically we as a society need to start looking at human sexuality differently. The genders may never be equal sexually. But a good start would be to recognize that the sex toy industry (dominated by females desires and females being nearly the sole consumers) is as old as the porn industry and just as big. Hey, you can buy dozens of varieties of sex toys at Spencer Gifts or even Sears and TJMax called personal massagers. Women like sex every bit as much as men, men just don't realize it because 9 out of every 10 women they pursue rejects them.

Our stereotypes do no really reflect reality and we need to re-evaluate what's really going on with human sexuality in order to better understand what is and is not "normal" human sexual behavior.

Sex is definitely an area where men will have to fight very hard to achieve equality. Female 'porn' (things that cause similar sexual arousal in females to what pornographic images cause in males) is readily available anywhere with little to no restrictions on who can buy it.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather then later. Next time you hear a feminist tell you how harmful porn is to women tell her that dildos and vibrators and pop-culture porn like cosmo and romance novels (word porn) are equally harmful to men and see what she says. They create unrealistic images of and expectations of men in the minds of women leading to objectification of males and unrealistic expectations of male genitalia and abilities. Just like porn makes us think fake breasts are sexy.

Boys and girls may be different in the way they behave sexually but both genders are equally sexual and if anything, girls may in fact be the ultimate sexual predators in our species.

> "Players" are just as often victims of female sexuality as they are predators.

Or, as another wise man once said: "Everyone is a 'player' which is a female term of convenience. Women 'play' men, the only difference is, they call it 'dating'..."

There's definitely an aspect of female mate competition going on -- evidence is all around -- though not in these older women/younger men scenarios. If only a tiny percentage of men warrant having groupies and bimbos actively going after them (a la your HS 'stud' scenario), the ratio of girls to boys in that particular sphere is obviously going to be large and the resulting competition among women is going to be fierce, weeding out all but those women with the highest mate value and best skills.

But the older women are not in this game at all, however much they might like to imagine themselves being.

> ...girls may in fact be the ultimate sexual predators in our species.

Mencken reached about the same conclusion in sections 34 to 36 of In Defense of Women 80+ years ago - so it must be right!

* MB

Professor Paragon, kudos for insightful writing!

If you have not yet introduced yourself to the enticing, intelligent Laura Kipnis, I highly recommend her as perhaps one of the very few post-feminist-feminists worth reading.

Just for starters (and because it's about the politics of porn...) try this link --

http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/

Pornified & Female Chauvinist Pigs

Excellent e-mail discourse among three well-known female cultural critics/journalists talking about two important recent books on porn and raunch culture:

(Kipnis) – “I also agree that it's distressing that heterosexual femininity is still organized around the need to capture and retain male attention. Why don't more women choose to opt out? Yet another large perplexing question—I think it might have something to do with fathers.”

(Hint – Kipnis is a Freudian Marxist Feminist --- a really fun intellectual girl!)

(LK) – “These books left me wondering: Why are women still perpetually playing the role of social scolds and self-appointed moral beacons? This stance traces back to the 19th century social purity movements when women decided that men were essentially dirty, that gambling, drinking, and prostitution had to go, and that sweeping up social dirt—playing the nation's housekeepers— would be the path to female empowerment. At least the raunch girls have given up on male reform. I count this as progress, since I'm not sure that being the most self-righteous sex is really the path to anyone's emancipation.”

----

I would personally love to see a mud-wrestling tag-team pay-per-view with Laura Kipnis + Dr. Helen VS. Wendy McElroy + The Biscuit Queen.

Dr. Evil and Zenpriest would referee!

Hey, it has commercial 'Net potential!

That first post of mine was a bit of a rant and not 100% on topic. I get carried away when it comes to perceptions of men women and sex because that is one of the issues that hits close to home in my own life (hardly the only MRA issue that has touched my life and defiantly not the only one I support but it is one of the biggest for me because so many others do not wish to touch such issues)

From my experiences there is no truth whatsoever to the fairy tales we are taught about men and women when we are children regarding sex. The stereotypes about men, women and sex simply are not true at all.

I will check out that site though thanks. Sounds like it is a good read.

Well, Paragon, perhaps you don't have the academic credentials to be a "real" professor, but your writing and logic warrant an honorary degree from MRA U.!

Most of the excellent writing that is recognized in the MRA 'Net comes from non-academics, and this is no coincidence.

The majority of male academics serve in feminist-dominated institutions, where they learned to become servile while seeking tenure. Once they get tenure, (typically requiring six years of servility), they have forgotten how to be men.

There are exceptions of course, but not many.

It's very difficult to be an anti-feminist professional academic.

(Recall the public emasculation of the Harvard U. president Larry Summers who "mispoke" about gender variables & I.Q.?)

So, the real MRA college is on the Web.

For now. ;-)

So, M.B., what's your take --- to extend your argument -- that traditional Pussy Power is being devalued?

It's like watching the dollar compete against the Euro, right?

As men wise up and refuse the bait, women are starting to re-engineer the bait.

Mostly by making it more stinky, more provocative, more direct.

Any seasoned catfish fisherman understands this strategy.

Stinky is always better if you want to hook the BIG ones!

I'm only partially kidding....

> So, M.B., what's your take --- to extend your argument --
> that traditional Pussy Power is being devalued?

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but that won't stop me from spinning off in some direction...

Yes, the female raunch culture Ariel Levy and friends are talking about is the typical female response to the decreasing strength of Pussy Power vis a vis increasingly wary men (who because of their invisibility are not part of their discussion). Female-female competition increases, which basically means more flesh is exposed and the girls get more overtly aggressive, partly because they bear few of the risks should things go wrong. At least in eastern europe the whores are smarter and are now offering cooking and cleaning services in addition to what they's regularly be expected do, because there are too few customers in the competitive market they're in. Here in america, by contrast, the women claim they're "over-qualified for love" (Christine Whelan in her recent book) and basically bash their customers -- not an effective strategy, but entirely consistent with them having turned into bullies.

The fact is that women are having fewer children and living longer lives, so the proportion of their lives devoted to the traditionally female role of childrearing is decreasing. Thus, they're spending more time in the traditional male role -- i.e., working. The proportion of women who have parlayed their sex into a lifelong exemption from work is thus way down. Though we hear a lot about "trophy wives", the real prize is a trophy husband who does what the average guy was expected to do for his wife / mother-of-his-kids as a matter of course.

With women living longer, they're spending a smaller proportion of their lives in that late-teens to early-thirties phase where they have Pussy Power, though I've often thought a lot of the feminist power plays were designed to maintain that sort of power for women as they got older and no longer had it, a compensation for the inevitable loss which results from ageing. We have to remember that their and our experience in this regard is entirely different: a girl in her mid-twenties is at the height of the power specific to her sex, and it only goes downhill from there; us guys start out basically powerless and if we compete and follow the rules our power increases - probably at least to the point where we don't really care any more. (Or, as the saying goes: men age like wine; women age like milk.) One of the things women in general haven't seemed to figure out, perhaps because they're spending so much time dwelling on all that they think they're entitled to and not getting, is that the current habit of them focusing on education and careers so much early in their lives is causing them to squander that short portion of their lives where they do have The Power, or spending it in pointless ways.

Hey, some trout fishemen here in Colorado use that stinky bait shit, and I'm breathing through my mouth just thinking about how awful it is... (I'm a fly-fisherman)

* MB

Since female raunch culture is at it's height in girls before the window you describe as being the height of pussy power, and arguably the height of pussy power is at puberty for girls. Not so much power to get a husband, but that's hardly the only power pussy has. The tweenie/teen set are the absolute height of consumer power and there is no group on Earth that is marketed to more. They don't have jobs but they control hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide because of pussy power. Also, at around 16 a female has already achieved a fully developed womanly figure yet remains within the hyper protective bubble of childhood which is an absolutely unmatchable power. She already has it and knows what to do with it yet she remains untouchable [and completely unaccountable for her abuses of that power]. I challenge you to find a more smug arrogant creature on Earth then a teenage girl. Why do you think there is a mass exodus of male teachers from our high schools? Because they are absolutely powerless when it comes to the whims of what is approaching 60% of the high school population.

It just depends on how you define power. I completely agree that the height of power for women when it comes to attracting a mate is mid-twenties, but she's had all kinds of power before that - which is if you ask me what has created so many physically attractive but otherwise utterly repulsive females in that age group. I'm in that age group and really there's allot of pretty faces with nice bodies out there but the rest of the package the comes with that is an absolute deal breaker. Pussy power has already begun to drop dramatically in the 20s-30s set because their potential mates [erm, victims] are already wising up in droves.

Perhaps the fall off at the traditional height of pussy power is a contributing factor to the phenomena that is gaining publicity which is pedophilia among unquestionably physically attractive women in that age group. Perhaps they are so repulsive to their potential mates or so delusional that the power they possessed so early in life (which is relatively new in western society) has already begun to fade when they think it should be peaking. Perhaps one factor creating the female knockouts (merely one subset of female sexual deviants that is currently a hot topic of debate) who prey on younger and younger boys is that they already feel like they need to reclaim their youth while they are still in it because the empty promises of feminism has not only left them unfulfilled but robbed them of power right when they should have the most.

They already see that they aren't the cover models on their favorite magazines anymore (the cover model is 14 now), they no longer have unlimited disposable income without any need to earn it, they are no longer the main target of advertisers for all the consumer goods females lust for more then the air they breath (she's 12 now) because advertisers follow the money and a single working girl with bills to pay doesn't have it but a 12 year old with a mommy and two daddies (one wealthy step dad and one cleaned out biological dad who feels he has to buy his daughters love back) has lots of cash to spend.

25 year old women these days already feel like they are in an age crisis, stuck between the world that was and the reality that they no longer have 'it' anymore.