"Another Awkward Sex Talk: Respect and Violence"

Article here. Excerpt:

'It has never been easy for adults to deal with young teenagers honestly and sensibly on this subject, and it isn’t easy now. We live with an endless parade of hypersexualized images — and a constant soundtrack of adults lamenting children’s exposure to that endless parade. There’s increasing knowledge of dating violence, including well-publicized celebrity incidents. And there’s always a new movie to see about how adolescent boys are clueless, sex-obsessed goofballs.

Stir it all together, and you may get an official worldview in which boys are viewed as potential criminals and girls as potential victims.

William Pollack, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who wrote “Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood” (Owl Books, 1999), argues that the way we talk to boys and young men about sex often stereotypes them and hurts their feelings.

“One boy said, ‘They treat us like we’re perpetrators — we have sexual needs but we also have other needs,’ ” Dr. Pollack told me.'

One feminist's commentary here.

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