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Having the time of their lives. Credit: John Rogers/Getty
We think of the teenage years as a time of adventure, of making mistakes, of taking up space. We think of the teenage years the way they are for boys. But for girls, it can be a time of retreat. The catcalls and the pinching and the men who stand too close or follow you — all these things that teach you public space is not something you can use, but something you have become. No wonder teenage girls shrink away to their bedrooms, away from that scrutiny. And one of the places where you learn what it means to be public is at school.
School was where I overheard the boys discussing the relative merits of the anointed hot girls outside class (I say “overheard”, but they filled the corridor with their bodies and the air with their newly-deepened voices, so there was no discretion involved at all, and anyway, boys will be boys). School was where I learned to dread the comments which let me know where my slow-to-change body sat in that hierarchy (because boys will be boys). School was where I envied the girls set above me and dreaded the kind of attention they received (because boys will be boys). And school was where I eventually learned to shrink my body defensively when I sensed someone behind me — because boys will be boys.
I don’t know how much this was the thing that drove my own bedroom retreat (it’s never one thing, is it? But it so often is this thing among many). But for whatever reason, I became a committed school-avoider, and I spent my school-avoiding years reading about people having an even crappier time of being a teenager than I was. That meant those twin bibles of angst, The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar; and I don’t know whether I noticed at the time, but it makes a lot of sense to me now that Holden Caulfield’s breakdown involves wandering New York, while Esther Greenwood secretes herself in a crawlspace under her house to overdose — the tiniest chamber it is possible to fold herself into.
I don’t know if it’s really possible to be a school-avoider now. You could obviously just stop going, but I don’t see how you can wholly get away from it like I did. I’ve got two teenagers of my own now, and they are of course constantly attached to their phones. Now, those corridor conversations happen on Snapchat, constantly — you could avoid them, but only at the cost of cutting yourself off entirely from communication with the world.
The other thing that teenagers have now, and I did not, is internet porn. When boys decide to size up the available girl-flesh, their appraisals are informed by a worldly acquaintance with the female body in various states of penetrative duress — an NSPCC study from five years ago found that by the time children were 15, 65% had seen pornography, with boys viewing it more often and more deliberately than girls. And 53% of boys who had seen online pornography considered it to be “realistic”.
One of the things I’ve found consistently through 18 years of parenting two children is that I simply never manage to land my life lessons in time. The moment I realise that some particular horror of growing-up is liable to impinge on them or their friendship group, it’s usually already happened. And how, in any case, is a parent supposed to discuss the grisly realities of the pornified world without, well, discussing the grisly realities of the pornified world? I count myself a pretty honest parent, but even so, it’s hard to envisage having the steely unembarrassability required to sit them down for a Talk about Pornhub.
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SubscribeI always feel that female authors project too much as to what they think young men and boys are going through. Male teenagers are as full of angst, nerves, embarrassment, fear of rejection, fear of humiliation, false bravado, and complete ignorance about relationships, yet society deems they have to make the first move. How do you do that without being laughed at? How do you share your feelings without being ridiculed – by the girl, by the girl’s friends and then by your male friends, ending up feeling rejected, feeling worthless? Perhaps a brushing touch to see if affection was returned or interest was more than just friends (Try “Saturday Boy” by Billy Bragg).
It was always my experience that girls talked about the boys much more than the boys talked about the girls, and the girls were way more likely to share stories (and ratings) of the other sex among their BFFs. Girls always got to love and relationships faster than boys – they were the ones off chasing the older males who had cars and motorbikes when the boys were first becoming embarrassed by that thing in their pocket. The girls had the gushing stories of romance and pent-up desire, looking up pictures of weddings and keeping up with the ‘gos’ and dreams of being scooped up by a celebrity. This yearning to be loved, was what made them prey for older guys who’d got past the hang-ups of teenage years. The boys, not so much – most would turn beetroot at the mention of the name of a girl that they liked.
Male teenagers may be full of angst, etc etc, but how do they resolve it? Usually not by criticising boys who resolve it by humiliating girls.
I think you’re wrong in the most part. Violence against girls was always deemed wrong – you don’t hit girls is a long-standing British norm. It’s so deeply ingrained that I’m still uneasy with films like the Marvel superhero series which show men vs women in the fight scenes.
Girls would give as good as they got verbally – more so often as they were protected by the don’t hit girls rule. But if boys stepped out of line physically they would be ostracised or shunned or given a kicking depending on the social relationships at play. Men, in general, don’t like violence of any kind against women.
However, the line as to what is violence towards women has been moving. It used to be clearly about actions involving force or aggression. Now, it encompasses a broad range of acts of a milder kind that might be deemed as unpleasant, rather than being threatening, and so less likely to trigger natural male defensive instincts for female victims.
Perhaps your observations might be conditioned by your personal experiences. Those of my period (I’m 80) would agree with your observations but our years were sans porn so perhaps we have no recent experience. I would not expect many 20-30 year old people to be reading or commenting on Unherd. I have no idea of Unherd demographics.
I think you’re quite right about hitting girls, but way off the mark about humiliating them, at least from my memories of my adolescence fifty years ago. My point was not that all boys engaged in it, though many did, but that few opposed it.
You might pop over to Everyone’s Invited and read some of the testimonies to get a better idea of the concerns voiced in this article.
Personally I wouldn’t classify non consensual penetrative sex even with a non resisting, partially conscious individual (male or female) as “an act of a milder kind”.
The sharing of pictures of pudenda on social media might not appear, at first viewing as threatening or as damaging as breaking someone’s jaw but as the testimonies describe it does cause damage of a different flavour and more unfortunately this may be largely unseen and indeed, buried.
I can only think of four strategies, at the moment, to try and turn this particular Ever Given a couple of points to port or starboard :
Any other suggestions anyone ?
Who is describing sexual assault as anything but terrible? That’s not mild to me.
Individuals have to support each other in this. Men have to support women and women have to support men. This shouldn’t be a fight between sexes. The old fashioned role of a chivalrous gentleman should be the male aspiration, as it has for hundreds of years in polite society. A battle between the sexes is not going to help, mutual male-female support can.
Many of the male commenters here seem to react very defensively, pointing out that neither they nor men in general engage, or used to engage, in the more harmful behaviours in the article. While this may be true, I feel sure that if they tried a bit more to recall their teenage years, they’d realise they were aware of other boys doing so, and, like most authorities in those days, said and did little about it.
Quite what would encourage a more open and less defensive approach, I don’t know.
Single-sex schools?
non consensual penetrative sex even with a non resisting, partially conscious individual (male or female) is wrong
I totally agree with that… But! Women who experience violent sexual assault are now effectively being lumped into the same category as women who get “catcalled” walking down the road, or women who choose not to remove themselves from an awkward, regrettable sexual encounter. That is not OK.
If we want to prevent sexual assault and help victims unfortunate enough to have already experienced it, we need to make sure we are addressing a defined problem.
Having sex and regretting it later is not being sexually assaulted. Agreeing to sex you weren’t 100 percent sure you wanted to have is not being sexually assaulted. Having consensual sex under the influence of alcohol is not being sexually assaulted. We owe the victims of violent sexual crimes that very important distinction.
“Any other suggestions anyone ?”
Yes. Abolish co-education. That problem (if not others) would be solved. It’s amazing how people forget how little either sex really knew about the other when they weren’t forced to mix. But people got together eventually, anyway.
11,000 people are signed up for this. In a country of ~87 million. Do the math. There are probably more people who dress up as teddy bears to have sex. To take a very-very-very fringe phenomenon and paint it as speaking to something larger in society is a ridiculous method of argumentation.
“how do boys resolve hardship”
“A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” ~Marcus Aurelius
Boys were very rarely the trouble at school, the girls were!
All very true but since when should a woman writer listen to a man?
When he has a more logical and well substantiated argument?… but maybe this is an old fashioned view and touch out of vogue…
The claims on Everyone’s Invited are made anonymously. Is that really acceptable? How do we know 1) that they are real and 2) that they are accurate. I no longer automatically believe anonymously sourced anything, we have seen too much anonymously alleged that turned out not to be true at all. This is no way to make policy.
When you look at the report referenced in the article sexual harassment is such a broad category that anyone can claim to have been sexually harassed. My advice to all men is to simply not interact with women at all as that is the only way to avoid being accused of sexual harassment.
Well, that’s one way to look at it. The photo attached to this article doesn’t appear to match the tale the article is trying to tell, girls everywhere under attack from predatory males. In fact, I wondered if the author even knew any teenage girls.
She says in the article that she has 2 teenagers of her own, almost permanently attached to their phones.
She seem stunningly unfamiliar with teenage girls
It’s the “almost permanently attached to their phones” part that’s causing most of her problems.
I’m honestly tired of parents lamenting that “they just can’t stop this sexually-charged culture from reaching their kids.” YES YOU CAN!
Simple things:
Take away their phones. Unless it’s critical for work, dump yours too.
Put the one computer in your house that has Internet access in a public place and make EVERYONE (even Mom & Dad) use it.
Get rid of Alexa. Why did you pay for a machine that listens in on your family?
More dramatic:
Home educate your children.
Adjust your life so you can drop to 1 income.
Move to a place where you can form a real local community (church / neighborhood / rural life) of interdependence
If your first instinct to those ideas was “my God, take away my kids’ phones? I don’t want to be some kind of freak!” you have already lost. Living counter-culturally is incredibly hard, but it can be done.
This is one of the very real downsides of the MeToo movement. Given that “believe women” implies “disbelieve men”, it’s not surprising that some men are extremely averse of coed settings. If you tell men they will be tarred and feathered of the step out of line with a woman, and that whether they step out of line is determined by the woman’s perceptions, don’t be surprised if they ignore women.
Internet porn may pale compared to a real relationship (do under 30’s realize that?), but at least you don’t risk a sexual assault / harassment claim from the the PornHub girls.
It’s so obvious that you’re a man. Stop pretending to be a woman.
Didn’t J K Rowling get into hot water for expressing similar sentiments??
Pinker points out, the rate of rape is now 50 per 100,000 people, Down 80% in the last 35 years, which is several magnitudes removed from one in four. Domestic abuse has plunged as well. Since 1993, the rate of reported violence against women by their intimate partners has fallen by almost two-thirds. Yet, this good news has been virtually ignored
Yes changing the definition to be broader is a sneaky move and based on gaining funds. The same has been done with “poverty” rates where people still own TV’s and microwaves, cell phones….
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-amazing-news-about-rape-statistics/article4200939/
I went to a huge girl’s comprehensive and grew up with a group of the best girlfriends anyone could wish for.
The boy’s comprehensive round the corner was a source of excitement, delight and hilarity from the age of 14 onwards.
It’s interesting that this latest sexual harassment scandal in schools erupts on the back of the Sarah Everard tragedy and ensueing protests and when schools have been closed for 3 months.
I’ve already said elsewhere that I think it’s hysteria as a result of the lockdown, + social media contagion, and of course feminists will make the most of it.
Add on:
when I say the boys were a source of hilarity I don’t mean we laughed AT them, I mean we had great fun WITH them, flirting, banter, giggles etc.
Happy days.
Surely this is the long term effect of the decline of the family? With both parents out to work, masses of only children and an increasing cultural insistence on generational division, the “kids” were bound to become a feral pack. There is abundant evidence of bullying in British schools, for example, not held back by disempowered teachers because there is no moral structure to assist them. Throw the internet into the mix, unregulated, uncensored, unbridled and the fat is in the fire. The explanations are staring us in the face, but today we are blind.
I agree with you, just not convinced porn has much to do with it.
If anything I would have thought being constantly bombarded with the message that boys and girls are “equal” has more to do with any bad behaviour than porn.
I concur to this extent: that in a stable society with established norms and strong, positive expectations – reinforced by good manners – unbridled internet erotica would present far less of a danger; and it would probably involve fewer of the really nasty ingredients in the first place. But in a world where one group is expected to hate itself and trash its traditions and others are pushed into screaming indignation over imagined, ancient grudges; where morality is in flux between old compromise and new puritanism; where – above all – the wisdom of age and the comfort of siblings is absent – then internet influence will be infinitely stronger. And in that context, our context, it is appalling.
Totally agree – “a stable society with established norms and strong, positive expectations – reinforced by good manners” But how to do that when most parents spend only 30-mins a day with their kids, and often don’t have time to eat with them…let alone impart basic wisdom and morals that ensure they grow into responsible and likable humans.
Have really good schools which focus on the whole child not just the exam results?
I partly agree, but it leaves too much to the state. Plus parents should be responsible for their kids! Who else should do a better job if not the parents?
A parents duties and responsibilities…
A parent is their child’s first teacher and should remain their best teacher throughout life.
Pornography is deeply damaging to both boys and girls. Porn addiction is an increasing problem, probfor those at risk of other addictions and sadly renders men with significant relationship and psychosexual difficulties as a result. Addiction is not the risk to women. Much more expectations of boys other girls and themselves adding to difficult feelings of low self worth etc. I think it has added a new level of complexity to confusing developing sexuality for teenagers. I met some super women running the sex education sessions for Croydon who have absolutely got the gist of this. They run joint and single sex sessions.
Porn is a problem. No doubt. Possibly even more damaging in the end to men than women providing women can be given the confidence to understand and enable their own consent and pleasure
You do know that females download 30% of visual porn, and represent almost 100% of consumers of written porn, right?
Same old, same old. The mindless objections to porn. Porn is NOT the problem. The problem is that we take teenagers, who re naturally sexual creatures, and we tell them that they cannot have sex. A more open, positive, accepting approach to sexuality would be an enormous improvement.
Internet has made little difference here…Over the past 35 years, the rate of rape in the U.S. has fallen by an astonishing 80 per cent. The views of women are far BETTER than anything we have ever had, yet anti-rape organizations convey an impression that women are in more danger than ever! in order to secure funding.
The evidence is overwhelming. We are more enlightened now, and men – most men, anyway – behave much better. That is bad news for the grievance industry, which must stretch its definitions of assault and abuse to ridiculous extremes to keep its numbers up. It can’t acknowledge the good news, because it has too much at stake.
Women who experience violent sexual assault are now effectively being lumped into the same category as women who get “catcalled” walking down the road, or women who choose not to remove themselves from an awkward, regrettable sexual encounter. That is not OK.
If we want to prevent sexual assault and help victims unfortunate enough to have already experienced it, we need to make sure we are addressing a defined problem. Having sex and regretting it later is not being sexually assaulted. Agreeing to sex you weren’t 100 percent sure you wanted to have is not being sexually assaulted. Having consensual sex under the influence of alcohol is not being sexually assaulted. We owe the victims of violent sexual crimes that very important distinction.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-amazing-news-about-rape-statistics/article4200939/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/red-alert-politics/todays-ambiguous-definition-of-sexual-assault-is-a-slap-in-the-face-to-real-victims-of-trauma
What about the porn boys show other boys at school or wherever?
Which can happen at a distressingly young age- the boys need protecting just as much as the girls.
(Should say, the protecting of the boys needs to start much ealier than the focus on the girls- there is a time lag between seeing and doing.)
I noticed around twenty years ago, when schools in this country started having computers kids could access in their free time, boys under ten playing online fruit machines (I don’t think money was involved). Pretty standard, except the symbols weren’t apples and oranges, but images that would have counted as soft porn in my youth. And this in a school, with the monitors clearly visible to anyone passing by, being ignored by the staff.
I don’t understand why so many commenters here seem to think that it’s just “screeching feminists” who can see that the exposure of children to hardcore pornography might have it’s problems…
yeah, very much playing the man not the ball. But the message would be better delivered replacing the first few woe is me/my childhood paragraphs with your single line “the exposure of children to hardcore pornography might have it’s problems…”
This is a great site and one im happy to support but its not immune to the guardianland writing style of authors inserting themselves into the topic.
I should hope Unherd is not immune to writers you – or I – disagree with!
true, and im happy to support the site.
The reason teachers don’t want to discuss sexism is because it’s so hard to define. If a cute guy strokes a girl’s arm in the hallway she might view it as an opportunity to flirt. If some gross incel dork touches her she can scream in outrage and demand the kid be suspended. Sexism is a offense involving consent. If the girl likes it, there’s no crime. If she doesn’t like it, there is a crime. It’s her decision alone, and pointing this out makes for an awkward hypocritical discussion best left for parents, not teachers.
For those that still haven’t got it: Sarah Dictum is (as usual) projecting her idealized concepts of how the world should be, and this whole issue is about power.
The author is just another woke warrior pushing an agenda where stuff that pleases & suits her must be promoted, while anything that wrestles power & control from her hands must be demonized. She and her feminist friends know better than anyone, and her narrative exists to override any facts.
Interestingly, nobody seems to notice how this obnoxious behaviour is driving male libido away from flesh & blood women. The risk of porn is not “misinforming” men as to what sex is (they can decide on that by themselves, right?), but on detaching their personal sexual universe from flesh&blood women. Endless disapproval and demonization comes with a price.
One wonders if Sarah Dictum would be honest enough to admit what she really wants: Male attention from only the men she choses, in the exact prescribed protocol that she dictates and only when it suits her whims. As for any frustration that the rest of the male population might encounter under such an ideal arrangement, let’s all make sure that it is entirely their fault, that they are hopelesly degenerate animals and that the wider society never thinks twice about demonizing them…
“Sarah Dictum”- a very apposite Freudian slip.
It’s really not that hard. Just don’t touch people without their consent. If you really think that stroking someone’s arm is a good way to start and opportunity to ‘flirt’ , you just haven’t understood the OP at all ( maybe because you aren’t trying.)
If you want to flirt, make a verbal approach, possibly even a pleasant one. Try to think how you as a boy would react if another boy ( let’s say a year older and two inches taller than you ) came up to you and started stroking your arm. Maybe even imagine if it happens to you as an adult male. Opportunity to flirt, eh.
By the way, this isn’t sexism we are talking about. It’s sexual harassment and even assault.
There is a little more to it than that – and there is more to ‘sex education’ than anti-harassment. What is it that we want to socialise those boys into? The article tells us that girls have a right to feel safe and protected in public, and that boys have an obligation to guarantee this by not doing things that girls do not like and by policing each other to stay within bounds. So far fine, but is there nothing more to being male than an obligation to work for female happiness? Boys (and men) might feel more interested in teaching that included how courtship was supposed to work and how they could go about it, not just what they are not allowed to do. And, for that matter, in a division of labour between the sexes that did not limit itself to giving rights to women and obligations to men.
I am 73, and when you get to that age you realise how much things have changed. The Prime Minister can openly live at 10 Downing Street with his unmarried “partner” and their child. The most senior police officer in the country is not only female but openly gay. We are now very open and frank and knowing and liberal about sex, or so we thought – and then we are told, as if it were an astounding revelation, that if large numbers of young people are thrown together for long periods five days a week, sex will rear its head (if that’s the right phrase…). Well, well, surprise, surprise!
Of course nothing should take place without the full and free consent of all involved. Of course serious physical assault and, even more so, rape (though that, surely, is rare in schools) should be treated with the utmost seriousness. But I think such things, even if real, make up a tiny proportion of the reported incidents, and that many amount to no more than a vulgar noise from a boy as a girl passes in the corridor, or something similarly trivial.
Sarah Ditum says the system is making a bad job of prosecuting rape. Even one unpunished rape is one too many, but I fear the figures are for accusations of rape, and it is not unheard of for vindictive women to falsely accuse men of assault and rape. Annette Kralendijk’s point about the unreliability of anonymous allegations is well made.
It also seems to be assumed that all girls are sensitive, delicate little flowers who can’t even tolerate a boy or man looking at them. As Mark Preston says, the definition of sexual harassment can be so broad that one sometimes does indeed think the only solution is for males to cease all interaction with females. There have been reports of workplaces where the men are so utterly terrified of being accused of “staring” and “sexual harassment” that they cannot bring themselves to look directly at a woman even when speaking to her.
As for the sensitive, delicate flowers, it’s well-known that, as Saul D says, girls talk about boys far more than boys talk about girls, often with an explicitness about their characteristics and performance that would make many a boy blush! As Claire D says, the boys’ school could be a source of hilarity, no doubt due to the greater maturity of girls in that age group.
Porn? Hardcore porn was available in this country almost for as long as I can remember, but was difficult and expensive to obtain and, for films and videos, needed expensive and elaborate equipment for viewing. Now, I could find the most explicit stuff in seconds through the machine on which I am writing this. The surprising thing is how LITTLE effect this far greater availability and accessibility appears to have had. Can it be that such material (made, of course, by fully and freely consenting adults) is – as was authoritatively concluded several times, well before the Internet era – mostly harmless?
There have been reports of workplaces where the men are so utterly terrified …
I’ve worked in places where the women, often on piece rate, while perhaps not terrified, were regularly subjected to sexual harassment by the men, who as supervisors or fork-lift drivers had the time and opportunity for reminding them of their place.
And I worked in many offices as a banker, then many schools as a teacher, and my experience was that it was females, not men, who constantly sexualized the workplace by telling dirty jokes, touching men inappropriately, and attempting to make passes at men who weren’t really interested.
Turns out that most women are as capable as most men of inappropriate behaviour.
Oh flip, Ray, I did’nt mean “hilarity” at the boys expense.
I meant that we – the girls, had great fun *with* the boys, teasing each other, flirting, lots of banter and giggling. There were crushes, true love and broken hearts on both sides later on I can tell you. Sorry I did’nt put it across better.
“it is not unheard of for vindictive women to falsely accuse men of assault and rape.” but it is very very rare. Because, the accuser takes a real risk to her reputation even if the accusation is true.
To expand, which is only fair.
I don’t agree with you.
i) Your comment assumes the sexual harassment claims are righteous for a start and there is no evidence as yet apart from the accusations.
ii) Boys and men have been looking at hardcore porn since at least the Ancient Egyptians, they don’t do this in a vacuum, they have mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, neighbours etc, to learn what women are about from the cradle upwards.
iii) It is an accepted part of our wonderful emancipated liberal society that teenagers will/should want to have sex with each other, this is only natural, we are no longer ‘repressed’ (that’s irony by the way), ie, our society encourages children to have sex.
iv) There are always some horrible characters who behave badly and they need to be dealt with appropriately.
I think you are making a big mistake to accept this whole moral panic at face value, and to believe that boys and men are suddenly worse because of online porn (that does’nt mean I approve of porn, I don’t, but that’s another matter).
What is an example of hardcore porn from ancient Egypt? Did they make videos, too? What a silly remark.
If you’re talking about that piece of papyrus, there seems to have been only one copy and does not look like something that teenage boys got to pass around. Nor does it in any way support a statement that “Boys and men have been looking at hardcore porn since at least the Ancient Egyptians” since that makes it sound like a massive phenomenon, of which there is no evidence at all.
Well, erotic depictions from the ancient world are not for the prude, that’s for sure. There is a famous sculpture from Pompeii – if memory serves – of a mythological figure penetrating a goat. It was sufficiently graphic to reduce the viewing public to silence – at least on the day I visited. Quite “shy-making”, as the Bright Young Things used to say. And I well recall the extraordinary effect of some Greek Vase painting I stumbled across in a small museum just outside Rome – again, surprisingly graphic and frank. Then there’s the Shunga tradition in Japan, which amazed Edmond de Goncourt. And so on. So Claire D has a point.
Graffiti at Deir el Bahri of Senemut and Hatshepsut.
+ displays of bestiality to entertain the Roman people (men and women) in the Colosseum in Rome.
Your definition of hardcore porn maybe “videos”, mine is the content.
It wasn’t hardcore porn – it was everyday life.
I don’t know about ancient Egypt, but I’ve seen plenty from feudal Japan and ancient india.
Boys and men may have been looking at hardcore porn since at least the Ancient Egyptians, but in those days it was probably not what they looked at whenever and wherever they wanted, available in effectively infinite amounts. It would probably have seemed exceptional, not the norm at all.
Sure, but food, water, art, literature, music, drama, comedy, and thousands of other things are also more plentiful at much the same scale as pornography now than at those periods in time.
True enough, but given the choice of literature, music, drama, comedy, and porn, how many boys will choose the latter much of the time? Male baboons will happily spend hours viewing female baboons’ bottoms in preference to other images. Do we want our boys to ape them?
Boys don’t only choose porn if they have access to it. I had access to it, and I only chose it for about ten minutes at a time as I recall.
I don’t doubt you, but I was wondering how many boys would choose literature or drama. I think few would choose porn and nothing else, but I guess many would choose a combination of porn, music, sport and action movies. I know at least two men in their sixties or seventies who, on ‘discovering’ the internet, used it largely for porn. At one time, I think it was said that over 50% of web traffic or content was porn, though I’m unsure of exact facts and figures.
” that doesn’t mean I approve of porn, I don’t, but that’s another matter.”
I wonder what your gut instinct is telling you.
My “gut instinct is telling” me I personally don’t like porn. Simple.
But as well as guts I have a brain and with my brain I am able to look at matters, like facts and evidence, objectively, think about them, and come to some kind of judgement. I may be wrong of course and I am usually willing to change my mind if I am presented with more or different information.
Simon Denis below has put up a good argument which has modified my view a bit, but I still think the reaction to these hysterical accusations is overblown by the press, who like to stir things up, and I still think the majority of boys today are not porn mad degenerates.
Institutional racism doesn’t exist but some have learned to profit from it and some are brainwashed into believing it does.
Rape culture in schools doesn’t exist but some have learned to profit from it and some are brainwashed into believing it does.
Nothing bad or untoward exists but some have learned to profit from it and some are brainwashed into believing it does?
Please don’t ascribe comments to other people. It’s very dishonest.
It’s a way of questioning your statements that neither institutional racism nor rape culture exist.
No it isn’t. If you had intended to do that you would have posted some evidence to the contrary. Instead you posted a smug and dishonest attempt at sarcasm.
Sarcasm, yes.
Smug, maybe.
Dishonest? Perhaps that applies more to your wilful misunderstanding.
“Six other things that aren’t a problem according to a government report” – The Daily Mash
And for a sort of evidence of institutional racism in the UK, today’s Times reports, in “PM’s top black adviser Samuel Kasumu resigns amid race review backlash”, ‘Johnson responded to a backlash against the review today by saying that the government might not agree with “absolutely everything” in it. “There are very serious issues that our society faces to do with racism that we need to address,” he said.’
That’s not evidence of institutional racism in the UK, not of any sort. You’re very confused.
If the report had said that there was raging racism in this country, worse than a combination of Apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow Deep South, however ridiculous that might appear to a dispassionate observer, the PM would never have been allowed to get away with any disagreement, especially if it contradicted the “lived experience” of the non-white members of the Commission.
That he feels not only able, but compelled, to disagree with a positive review, compiled after meticulous research, and that no-one criticises him for daring to quibble with the black Chairman of that Commission, tells you all you need to know about the looking-glass world we now live in.
Indeed. The court of Louis XIV had nothing on today’s dissemblers. We are governed by PR Companies disseminating through a media of smoke and daggers. Every now and then a true reflection is seen in the hall of mirrors.
I hope, for the sake of this generation of schoolboys, that a report based on measurable instances of sexual abuse is compiled soon. But I fear the damage has been done. Imagine losing a year of schooling and then being told you are toxic because of anonymous and immeasurable data during a culture war that you cannot understand.
You’re the one alleging it. You prove it.
What tortured, strange lives people like Sarah live, especially as teenagers. I don’t really recall anything like that at school. We were too busy being in bands, playing football, worrying about our driving test and helping with the haymaking.
No one expects you to remember things that didn’t happen to you.
If something is alien to the experience of most people, that’s worth noting. Feminism based on Marxist dialectic of power relationships and class oppression turned into sex oppression can give a very distorted view of most people’s reality.
‘Feminism based on Marxist dialectic of power relationships and class oppression turned into sex oppression can give a very distorted view of most people’s reality.’
A perfect description of so much contemporary ‘journalism’!
OK, it’s April 1st.
I recall plenty at the schools I attended. Could it be you don’t recall because you thought little of it?
Maybe Fraser and I just attended a better class of school than you did?
My experience was that there were at least 3 groups of boys and they were all separate. There were the “cool ones” but we never knew what they talked about as we were not allowed in their company. There were the want-to-be-cool ones who never would be but tried to be cool and hung out near the cool ones until they were chased away (usually after about 5 minutes) and there were the rest, never cool and certainly not confident enough to talk about girls, girls were things that we didn’t understand. We would talk about football or motorbikes or listen (quietly) to pirate radio – yes, I was in the third group!
I attended several schools – two grammar schools, a comprehensive, a sixth form college, and one of England’s more prestigious public schools. My experience was remarkably similar in all of them. Some boys were shy or interested in other things, but a fair few made a point of humiliating girls, and they were rarely if ever challenged, by other boys or by the staff. I was quite surprised in my first week at the public school to witness boys loudly and ostentatiously rating passing women in the street for their f’ability – I had foolishly imagined a ‘better class’ of boy at what you’d presumably term a better class of school.
(And I’m talking of humiliating, not hitting or physically assaulting – that was a different matter at all of the schools in question.)
And you think the same thing does’nt go on in girls schools when observing men and boys?
The reality is, growing up, particularly through adolescence, tends to involve humiliation, it’s part of being human. With Christianity we found one way of making ourselves accountable on the most personal level for mean behaviour, it was a narrative everyone could understand, even if it was ignored or scorned a lot of the time.
Trying to replace Ch. with the politics of feminist outrage or wokery will never work, because it is’nt universal, it pits one s e x or one skin colour against the other for power.
She wrote “The abuse of girls and women is endemic, and schools are no kind of a safe space. A 2019 survey for the National Education Union reported that more than a third of girls at mixed-sex schools had experienced sexual harassment at school, and nearly a quarter had experienced unwanted touching of a sexual nature.”
Now I know that’s a lot, and definitely too many, but the idea that nearly two-thirds of girls HADN’T experienced sexual harassment at school, and more than three-quarters HADN’T experienced unwanted touching of a sexual nature is definitely not the impression you take away from Sarah D’s first four or five paragraphs.
I assume that Sarah Ditum is not one of the girls in the photo, who has unbuttoned her blouse, exposed her midriff and presumably rolled up her skirt to make it as short as possible. Modelled probably on how older sisters and single mothers go out on a Friday night to pull. The issues of sexual abuse and pornography are serious. Sarah Ditum would do better however to try to understand that not every woman feels like her and that few boys feel the way that she assumes they do. Teenage sexual angst knows no gender boundary. Boys and also girls often confront their angst and insecurity by shows of bravado.
The concern over ‘boys being demonised’ is based on the fear that boys will be condemned for things they haven’t done, or worse, admit to things they haven’t done. If they learn that they will not be judged by their personal actions, then there will be no point in them taking personal responsibility for their actions.
This old-fashioned view that a person should be judged by what he or she does is opposed by many people and not just the author of this article. For instance it is opposed by the abusers who will hide behind the excuse that they only did what all the other boys were doing. It will also be opposed by the headteachers who turned a blind eye to the abuse or even covered it up.
My memory of my teenage years tells me that the girls were way ahead of the boys in their understanding of sexuality and the way it works. It sounds rather as if the writer has just never got over the fact that she was not objectified by her male peers as she craved to be.
I feel her pain but ultimately she does not have a problem with some “grotesque version of masculinity” but with masculinity itself.
And my memory of my teen years tells me girls were also all too well aware of the risks of rape, male violence, and sexual harassment, even if the latter two terms hadn’t entered the mainstream back then. Boys may have lagged behind in their understanding of sexuality, but they saw it as largely free of consequences for themselves.
“ Boys may have lagged behind in their understanding of sexuality, but they saw it as largely free of consequences for themselves.” – I’m 57 years old and have always been aware of the consequences of breaking the law. BTW, nice of you to speak on behalf of all boys in the past. When were you elected to this position?
I did begin my comment with ‘And my memory of my teen years tells me,’ meaning in effect I was talking of my recollections of boys I knew, and I wasn’t only thinking of law breaking. Sexual harassment was even less a concern of the law in those days.
Really??
Have you transitioned?
A bit ironic to read this in a time when kids have been consigned to little beyond online activity. A year’s worth of isolation, stunted social development, and lost learning might be a bit more serious than the impact of any particular website.
Very true. As a man it would be easier for me to get enthusiastically behind these efforts, if I could see something positive for boys to grow into as well. After all we, too, hold up half the sky, and we, too, have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of sex. The problems the article list are real enough, but they all seem to be perfectly solvable if only we could get rid of the boys in the public sphere, or at least get them to behave like girls.
As it is you sound a bit like an antelope preaching to a lion about the joys of being vegetarian. Is it actually true that boys do not want the current version of masculinity either? And what exactly are you offering that they might like better? If you could tell us about an alternative sex role that boys (and men) actually found attractive, or at least that they could see considered their interests as well, you might find it easier to sell.
The results are there already in the west, and are commendable! and just ignored by the progressive left
The Better Angels of Our Nature, which documents the steep decline of violence through human history. His is the best account yet of what has really happened to violence against women. Like other crimes of violence, it has hit historic lows. Over the past 35 years, for example, the rate of rape in the U.S. has fallen by an astonishing 80 per cent.
Rape statistics are never perfect, because many rapes aren’t reported. But Mr. Pinker’s data come from the U.S. Bureau of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey, and are the best there are. Even if the numbers aren’t exact, the general trend is clear. The incidence of rape has fallen faster than every other major crime, including homicide. (As Mr. Pinker points out, the rate of rape is now 50 per 100,000 people, which is several magnitudes removed from one in four.) Domestic abuse has plunged as well. Since 1993, the rate of reported violence against women by their intimate partners has fallen by almost two-thirds.
Yet, this good news has been virtually ignored. Progressive people are right to deplore the supreme illogic of the Harper government for cracking down on crime at a time when every type of major crime has hit historic lows. Yet other progressives insist that violence against women remains a serious problem. “Rather than celebrating their success, anti-rape organizations convey an impression that women are in more danger than ever,” Mr. Pinker comments.
It’s easy to forget how dramatically attitudes toward rape and wife abuse have changed. As recently as the 1950s, light-hearted magazine ads depicted husbands spanking their wives for buying the wrong kind of coffee. Police treated rape as a joke, too, and the victim and her reputation were routinely put on trial.
The great rights revolutions that gathered steam in the second half of the 20th century put an end to all that. Today, jokes about smacking your wife are reprehensible, and in many jurisdictions it is mandatory for police to lay charges of spousal assault even if the woman objects.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-amazing-news-about-rape-statistics/article4200939/
Interesting. I ought to read Pinker.
Rasmus, I wish I could upvote this a thousand times.
And the “alternative scenario” description is conspicuously absent every time this issue is discussed. Might it be because (as I pointed in my previous post above) an honest description of such “ideal” male behaviour would reveal uncomfortable truths about the character of the descriptor?
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
Awaiting for approval
I wonder if this is strange English, or if somewhere in cyberspace there is a virtual in-tray labelled ‘For approval’, and another labelled ‘Awaiting for approval’.
I really do have sympathies for parents and kids in this age- But maybe the best way is to not let have kids have internet on their phones, and have the computer on, but in the lounge where all content can be kept transparent. As hard as it sounds parents have to step up and do some parenting, protect their kids from what is harmful. It’s not just the job for the state.
The impact modern-life work life balance has had on families is profound:
Parents often don’t have time to eat with their kids… let alone converse about important topics. I’m sure it’s also the same in other countries…contributing to negative development, poor family fitness and lack of family communication and trust.
https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/teens/survey.html
British parents spend fewer than 30 minutes of quality time a day with their children…
Average parent-spends just 5-hours face to face with their kids a week….
Suicide rates and social media:
(Girls are affected more by social media – with a 70% increase in suicide rates) *Jonathan Haidt https://twitter.com/jonhaidt/status/1083018993991077888?lang=en
What about internet on other kids’ phones? Unless your kids are home-schooled and strictly limited in who they can mix with, restricting what they do at home may have little effect.
It is the discussion about why those restrictions are in place at home which might help bridge that gap, the clearly expressed parental concern. It is not just seeing nasty porn on a friend’s phone, but being able to turn away and say not interested even in the face of peer pressure. No different really to the conversations about under age drinking, smoking and drugs.
Well ” nasty porn on a friend’s phone”
It is the parents job to build better character in their children And to help kids choose better friends or at least condemn their friends for such a banal interest! Peer pressure is only effective in children who have no confidence to stand ground in their own character! And have poor understanding of right and wrong – This flaw can follow through to adulthood! To people that are required to lead. (but then lack the character to do so) – we all lose by this, including the child who never felt secure in themself and simply followed the crowd!
Poor and weak character, with no moral bounds are tasks for parents to remedy, so their child can flourish and know true individualism, creativity, diversity of thought and freedom! and not be locked into uniform crowd think…(Teaching that is not the job of the state!, they have trouble enough with simple things like tax)
Many of the comments on this article seem to be ignoring the fact that, in what the author describes as this ‘pornified world’, the genie is out of the bottle. One doesn’t even have to go to the ‘grisly realities’ of Pornhub and its all-too-available like: when even mainstream terrestrial channels broadcast what amounts to titillating pornography (eg I’m thinking of Channel 4’s ‘Naked Attraction’), it is clear that young people are being bathed in a coarse, crass, brutalising view of sexual relationships which poisons their attitudes to the opposite sex. It seems that all we can offer our children now are sticking-plaster remedies such as martial arts and slick back-chat for girls (see eg Elaine Giedrys-Leeper’s comment here). Many people – especially in the media – laughed poor Mary Whitehouse to scorn years ago, but she has been proved right, especially as technology has turbo-charged the evils of pornography that she campaigned against. We have been sleep-walking, step by insidious step, into this horrible cul-de-sac, and I see no easy method of escaping while our attitudes to sexual behaviour remain so confused and contradictory.
I wish I could give your comment a hundred votes
Unherd goes woke.
I agree that boys and men must be respectful to women and girls and that online pornography is a scourge of our society. Social media just makes it worse with constant pressure on looks and attitudes. I also agree that girls and boys should be able to make choices about how they
look and dress, guided as much as they can be by responsible adults. I think we have to ask ourselves what we expect in schools when we mix teenage girls with skirts so short they show their bums and blouses busting at the seams with teenage boys, some also dressed in a pretty revealing way. A standard, unisex school uniform (with trousers) would surely help to subdue the sexual tension and reduce competitive dressing.
Whilst we cannot condone inappropriate behaviour by boys we mustn’t fall into the trap of believing that all boys act in this way. Education and good parenting is the way forward.
When I taught 18 year olds, I would often discuss current issues. One issue I raised with a class one day was the use of porn by kids, and the effect it was having. At that point, all of the kids turned and looked at a young blonde girl.
It turned out that on a daily basis, she would go to her room, cruise a variety of porn sites, download the best, make a composite file, and send it around to dozens of other girls in the school.
From that point on, I realized that the claim that it is boys who watch porn, not girls, is just another feminist sexual stereotype, the kind peddled by women like Dittum in pursuit of a sexist agenda. If feminists like Dittum truly want to change the script, they need to accept the fact that young women in the throes of their own hormonal storms are part of the problem.
Some schools do run a very effective pastoral system. It takes very special teachers to grasp the nettle and navigate the fine line between necessary disciplinary action and supporting both victim and perpetrator.
Alternatively, as people from both Left and Right said in a great Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch, we could simply ‘chop their goodies off’.
“chop their goodies off…”
Well maybe just the internet on the phone ;P its less messy.
Goodies, Fraser
Who is this censor
Was this picture taken at a school?
If it was – why was it that the Head Teachers had not grasped the sense to remind the school pupils through their respective parents’ or guardians’ evenings and the normal interfaces with both at relevant discussions that the way you dress or wear clothes at school ought to be one of a respectful standard.
We had this at the various schools we attended in the 1960s and 1970s.
Surely part of the general standard settings for schools ought to include this proviso.
However returning to the issues raised herein.
The decline of Society in its Moral Behaviour has been long-going. It almost certainly started with – nay before – cinema and the use of the small screen as you can see with the older films from the 1930s and later post the Second World War (or Great Patriotic War in the Eastern European context) and the development of the even smaller screen (micro-computers presented as “mobile ‘phones”- although many appear to be used for that purpose these days in any respect of the original terminology.
It belies belief that a few organisations (or maybe a large umber of such) are attempting to subvert the world and in particular the young with salacious images and pornographic content! Presumably – and lets be kind here – the purveyors of such “devices” were fully aware of what they were doing when they made these items of equipment? (Is this an understatement of the truth?) Or are these purveyors of such “devices” actually party to the issue when they make these items of equipment? (For fear of being dragged into a law suit there is no further commentary allowed to be followed by this discussive route!)
And even with the suppression of use – or control of use – by parents and guardians it is reported “apparently” that these controls can be bypassed fairly easily by using “accidentally-triggered” codes and words.
The writer addresses certain issues and may we respectfully ask then why it starts off with the picture shown here-above? It is tasteless, and have the people shown therein been agreed to be shown in this article this way by their parents/guardians? Please answer this as we would like to know! Yesterday (maybe the day before) a an article (or report) was published in one of the better (or shall we say more learned) papers – the precise one we cannot chase within this text writing but we believe the New Statesmen may have been same – wherein the writer talked through some of her experiences as being a young lady growing up and becoming a young married lady. You should read it….if We get the link again it will be re-referenced.
The issues here are real.
Anecdotally – in the media portal known as “Facebook” there was a “pseudo vimeo/uptime/U-tube/etc. article reporting a young lady at school being harassed by a young man who was “seemingly” put up to the task of interfering with the “said young lady’s undergarment” during a school lesson. The lady in question asked for the teacher to address the issue and seek redress. The Male Teacher did nothing but shrugged the issue off. The same young man repeated the same event. So the young lady fearing that this would be ignored advised her parents, summonsed a school parents/Board of Governors meeting to lodge a formal complaint which would have included the teacher and the instigator (young man) and this resulted in a threat to call in the Police and arrest the person for a sexual molestation as well as the Teacher for condoning the issue. The problem was solved within a very short time.
So things can be done here.
“Was this picture taken at a school?”
I imagine it was not. The people in the photo all look too old, and I have never seen a school whose selection of school ties was quite that diverse.
Looks to me more like an undergrads’ “old school uniform” party !!
Yeah. Big variety of school ties and the guy in the lower right is a little thin on top and I don’t recall any party that either of my daughters went to as teenagers, where the dress code was “school uniform”
“I’ve got two teenagers of my own now, and they are of course constantly attached to their phones.”
If you truly want to pass your culture to your children, you must make your culture deep and meaningful, and keep youth culture out of your family. The author admits that the phone is the biggest source of cultural pollution, but apparently hasn’t done anything about it.
Our home educated daughters are 14,13 & 12 and none have smartphones. I am getting rid of my Android phone as well; my wife needs hers for work. We don’t have Netflix or cable. We don’t allow ANY social media accounts (for us or them.) We are open about why our Internet limitations are in place. Our 13yo recently asked if her horse trainer could post a video of her on YouTube, and we said yes. But she asked! Because she knew our entire family takes Internet posting very seriously, and she understands why. We also have cultivated a network of friends who have made the same commitments. Were any of them to get smartphones for their kids, we would politely wind down the relationship.
In short, it can be done. But you first have to decide that you want to. It doesn’t sound like the author really wants to.
Gosh the comments here are quite something. Sexual assault and harassment is rife- to the point where I don’t know a woman who hasn’t experienced it. Why do we still hold the (very unlikely) possibility of a boy being falsely accused in higher regard than the actual cases of assault and harassment that 97% 16-24 year old women have experienced it and have to live with forever.
To paraphrase Chris Morris… “if you classify a child as anyone over the age of 25, statistically speaking 80% of the population are paedophiles”
Where I live, the idea that men have uncontrollable urges is rife. I’ve heard it repeatedly, including from the head of the Buddhist Lay Women’s Association.
I find it an absurd and obviously incorrect notion. Nearly all men can and do control their urges. Men here wouldn’t dream of treating a general’s daughter the way they might treat a female garment worker. Their urges are not uncontrollable, but they are frequently uncontrolled, as there are few if any consequences.
Sexual assault and harassment is rife- to the point where I don’t know a woman who hasn’t experienced it.
if every man who had his bicep squeezed by a female or was otherwise touched during a conversation saw that as evidence of harassment, your statement would be equally applicable to males. And boys ARE falsely accused. There have been numerous instances of it, including court cases. The definitions of both assault and harassment are so watered down as to be meaningless.
A man who has his bicep squeezed by a woman doesn’t often fear the situation escalating out of his control.
Most women don’t have that fear, either.
I wonder how true that is. In some situations, to be sure, a woman may welcome a man’s hand on her thigh. In others, might she not fear saying nothing being taken as consent not just to that, but a lot more, and not only by the man, but perhaps by the police and the courts if it comes to it?
What is the usual advice to teenage boys touched suggestively by a girl? And to girls touched by a boy?
How do you know? Who appointed you the spokesman for ‘most women’? Have you asked any of the women in your family ,or social group? Do you think they would speak honestly to you, given your dismissive certainty?
No, but I’ve had my genitals grabbed by a female co-worker, who thought my embarrassment great fun. It’s not about the threat of escalation, Ian, it’s about the violation of physical space by inappropriate, unsolicited female cropping.
Have you honestly had your bicep squeezed by a complete stranger in a public setting, without any prior engagement on your part? Now ask pretty much any woman who travels on the tube at peak hours…l
More than that – it’s actually improved significantly over 35 years! by 80% I think more than anything its an attempt to gain funding and nothing to do about the actual situation out there.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-amazing-news-about-rape-statistics/article4200939/
Justice Kavanaugh, the Duke Lacrosse Team, and the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the U of Virginia may have a different view.
Apart from the incidents of sexual harassment from men that were welcomed.
Those men are now their husbands.
I suppose Britney Spears cavorting as a naughty school girl .in her video “hit me one more time” has nothing to do with it ?
Britney was also quite good at playing the Feminist card. As in: “I can dress or dance anyway I want. And if some pathetic man gets an erection that’s HIS problem.”
I think that is at least part of it but media in general is very bad for young people in that movies and you tube videos and tick too and Facebook are absolutely loaded with teenagers, make and female doing questionable things in public.
“wandering New York”
It’s always been in the same place that I know of. Writers should avoid ambiguity (particularly a feature of ‘modernisation’ or current argot) because often it makes things less clear.
I cite this Spotlight article as evidence that nothing is ever going to get better in U.K. and U.S. society…
That picture rather trashes the argument. And, by the way:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08pldr0/i-am-not-a-rapist
Well, I’ve read the comments, and I’m frankly amazed. With very few exceptions, the male names ( and some of the women) just want to deny there is a problem, or are refusing to understand it by comparing it to actual criminality .
Pretty obvious where the boys are getting their ideas of correct behaviour from! many of the men on this site seem to believe that unsolicited and unexpected physical contact with a woman with whom they have no agreed relationship is ‘ flirting’. I have never used an emoji before, but this one just seems to be worth a hundred words.
Here’s a thought.Try to imagine how you ( man/boy) might react if a larger, older, or more high status man performs the same action to you or your son. Then extrapolate.
Anyone else pretty sure that Annette and Claire are dudes using women’s names? I mean, there’s no evidence that they aren’t.
Anyone else pretty sure that Santa Claus is really the Easter Bunny? I mean, there’s no evidence that he’s not….
What incredibly bad logic.