Jezebel’s Anna North has an interesting piece up on the return of Reddit’s ultra-skeezy Jailbait subreddit – and on the surprising number of vocal redditors who think that pedophilia ephebophilia is perfectly “natural.”
Oh, and here’s the Men’s Rights subreddit’s response to the Jezebel piece.
Holly,
I fully agree. But that does not mean that their intent is malicious. I’d assume in many cases women dating less desirable men are likely to get away with abusive behavior for quite some time¹, but I don’t think it’s right to say that all women dating a less desirable man do it to abuse.
Regarding the skeeviness, that is or was my inuitive response too, but I don’t think it’s right to trust them without analysis.
¹ see for example BethA’s comment here: http://geekfeminism.org/2011/09/04/geeks-as-bullied-and-bullies/
So this is sort of funny and on topic: the most recent occasion of a man speaking to me inappropriately occurred just this past Sunday. In my home. I was working an all day event and my sister was at our house (we just moved!) waiting for the cable guy to come and install our service. I walk in, after a 10 hour day, dressed in business attire, she comes to the door and says, quite tersely, “Cable guy’s here” and walks away. I follow, getting ready to ask her what’s wrong but I can barely get the question out before the problem makes its self known.
The tech had been flirting with her aggressively pretty much since his arrival. Her outfit? A baggy tshirt and sweats complete with head scarf and sneakers. As soon as he came up from the basement he greeted her with a “Just finishing up here doll baby. Where’d you say you worked again?”
“I didn’t”‘she replied before putting her head phones back in and returning to her computer.
He looked at me and started right in with the same bullshit. Inappropriate after inappropriate comment. I asked him if he was done in a stern manner and he told me he needed to get his ladder. I followed him upstairs to where he’d placed the ladder for roof access and placed my bag on my desk.
“Oh, this must be your bedroom. Your bed is nice. Real soft. I bet your man loves it. I rolled around in it.”
Direct. Fucking. Quote.
I told him that he needed to leave. He gathered his equipment; I locked the door behind him. I asked my sister of it had been like that the entire time. Too long story short, it had. So I called customer service to report him.
The next day I received a call from his dispatcher, a woman actually, as follow up to the incident report. She was pretty disgusted by the time I got to the part about my bed.
“I tell these guys all the time ‘You are there to install cable. Period.’ and they just don’t listen.”
I wonder what my sister and I did wrong.’being in our own home? Or having the audacity to order cable?
Kilo, what do you mean by “less desirable men”?
Pecunium, rereading that part, my formulation of the whole paragraph was very poor. Of course it’s still true in concrete cases. My point would be more that (especially from the the 25-year old’s point of view) the power distribution is not necessarily quite as unbalanced as it would seem to be in the abstract; the imbalance itself is certainly still there and has important consequences.
Nobinayamu, the hell with the dispatch, call/write corporate HQ. That is some bullshit.
I don’t care about, “malice”. I care about the inability of the 15 year old to make an informed decision.
I’m not willing to grant, as a blanket, that there is no ill-intent in the “15 year olds want to fuck me” crowd in any case.
Molly Ren,
I think the link explained the situation I mean best (search for the comment by BethA, the relevant part is the third to last paragraph). To be a bit more concrete, I mean who view themselves as less desirable, and thus that ending their relationship would force them into (likely permanent) loneliness.
I hate it when these men explain their attraction to young teenage girls by implying that it is natural because women under 18 are more fertile. The peak age of fertility is 24. Girls under the age of 18 are more likely to give birth to low weight, pre-term babies. It wasn’t even until the 20th century with improved nutrition that girls reached menarche in their early teens. So they can’t explain their creepiness with evolutionary biology, which seems to be a favorite for some.
Pecunium,
fair point. I don’t want to argue that such a relationship would not be bad. But I don’t see how a relationship with a sixteen-year old, or even an eighteen-year old, would not have the same problem, at best to a slightly lesser degree.
And I’m certainly not arguing about blankets. Of course a good number of them are likely to be horrible, vile people. I’m arguing against the idea that they necessarily are.
Brandon, don’t project your creeping on 15 year olds on the rest of us. Then again, how old are you? If you are like 17, it isn’t a surprise that 15 year olds might be more in your age range than 50 year olds. However, this is not the issue under discussion (young people dating young people, older people dating older people), but rather a projection on all men (and others attracted to women, presumably, though evopsych pseudoscience nonsense can’t seem to wrap its head around queerness) about age based attractions. Still, I am 22 and would take a grown woman over either or those little girls you named. Not just personality issue wise and consent wise (though both are important), but also looks wise-people who look 12 just aren’t sexy.
Also, this woman is 41 in this photo
http://www.moviesnobs.net/images/over_40/halle_berry.jpg
43
http://www.moviesnobs.net/images/over_40/sandra_bullock.jpg
I have a teenage sister, her friends and classmates are not sexy women, they are awkward little girls, by and large (the same principle applies to teen boys vs adult men). I would much rather go after Joan Jett who is almost 50 than a bunch of little girls.
Oh, and every woman on this list is 40+ http://www.listal.com/list/the-old-women-list
Yeah, I don’t know why you think teenage girls are sexy than women (unless you are, as I suspect, a teenager yourself), but I certainly do not share the sentiment. There are far more women who are thirty who I find sexy than girls under 18.
Wow. NWOSlave is really bothered by the idea that some women might escape their just punishment for going around and lookin’ sexy, isn’t he?
I’m a man and I’ve never been sexually frustrated by seeing women in skimpy clothing. I simply enjoy view.
kilo: We’ve gone over this ground a lot. There is no good place to draw the bright line, but it has to be drawn. Are there 15 year olds who can make that call…? Sure.
Are they the significant majority? No. I grew up in Calif., where the line is 18. It’s problematic because we don’t have an age clause, so the vast majority of minors break the law. A fair number of them break it with people who could go to jail for it (I did).
But I am not sure 16 is the right point to move it down to. Why? Because the risks are disuasive to a lot of people. I was 17 when I first let someone break the law with me. By 17 I don’t think I was at risk (and my parents were attentive enough that my being exploited wasn’t likely to happen).
The line has to be drawn somewhere, and what I see from the
“pro-sex with less than 16 year olds” crowd doesn’t make me think they are playing honestly.
Benjamin Lee Whorf called, he and Sapir want their hypothesis back.
Disclaimer: I done read some books one time
@Matthew Cline,
I’m a man and I’ve never been sexually frustrated by seeing women in skimpy clothing. I simply enjoy view.
Word. It’s guys like NWO who ruin it for the rest of us–men as well as women. My wife won’t go out jogging where anyone can see her because she doesn’t want to be harassed. And she’s not out to titillate anyone, she just wants to fucking run.
So, yeah, fuck you NWO, and anyone like you. You are a miserable person whose only ambition in life is to make everyone else as miserable as you. What a sorry sack you are.
Brandon, don’t project your creeping on 15 year olds on the rest of us. Then again, how old are you?
hes almost 30
Brandon:
How do you control for the misguided souls who would choose Johansson even over a picture of Brinkley at the same age?
NWO, are you forced to wear what you wear outside the workplace or something? o_O
So I’m not a statistician or anything, but shouldn’t a study involve, I don’t know, data?
Or at least Lore.
Brandon, you can talk about who you think people would find more physically attractive until your face turns blue and falls off, but that won’t make your opinions fact. And it won’t make me stop wondering what’s wrong with you that you seriously want to go after young teen girls, if for no other reason than young teen girls are very often some degree of godawful, self-centered, immature, irritating-beyond-words people, and some don’t even begin to grow out of it until well into their college years. I couldn’t care less how attractive a young woman in her teens might be, all I think of when one of you guys starts on about them is how you’d have to be fucking deranged, or have the same mentality, or just assume that you’ll be training them to speak on command on subjects you’ve picked out — or that you just haven’t a fucking clue.
OK, thread’s over, Ami just won.
Brandon, you can talk about who you think people would find more physically attractive until your face turns blue and falls off, but that won’t make your opinions fact.
you must not understand. fact is a term that only exists relative to How Things Affect Brandon.
self-centered, immature
nevermind, i see you two have already met.
@OSHIII: Who said I was interested in “going after young girls”? I am talking about general attractiveness not my own personal list of what I look for in a woman.
I also agree with your reasons why teen girls are irritating and self-centered. I often can’t stand spending 5 minutes around my teen cousins. However, I didn’t bring up personality or character traits…but physical attractiveness. This can be judged without a word spoken.
What is deranged by having the thought that women are the most attractive around peak fertility which ranges from puberty to their late 20’s? You don’t need some Harvard study to understand that on average, younger women are viewed as more attractive than older women.