This is a comment to an article I read in The Atlantic some years ago Read the article here.
The Response follows.
There is a huge deep and dark hole in this whole discussion. There is a balance that no one really seems to care to talk much about. In this article, and it would seem this book, everyone is focusing on the plight and woes of teenage girls. No one considers the other side of that dynamic, the teenage boys. And that, is truly a bigger part of the problem than all of your nincompoop about these girls.
But, since you brought it up, allow me to address the young ladies. On the whole they have completely discarded the FRIEND part of the boyfriend experience. They want a boy who will fall into all of the fantasies of the boyfriend idea. Twilight teaches our young girls that the angry, loner cute weird guy with a whole family of issues is the one that you should skip school for, the one you should chase all over the northern territories, the one you should place yourself in mortal peril, even commit suicide for because nothing is more important than love. These girls all expect some tall, dark and handsome to wrap them up in this fantasy. The truth is, that guy is usually the one who cajoles, seduces and threatens your daughters into those locker rooms in the first place. He is the prime beef cake and the girls are expected to compete for his attention. Hollywood teaches them this. The very tales you cite in your piece as bringing our young womens head out of the gutter are social lies that give them no more freedom from attachment to a man than the 1950's did. And with attachment to a man comes sex.
And the boys are entirely rounded up in sex as a thought. At 12-15 years old our young men have less than no guidance when it comes to relationship issues. Things are handled, in boy world, with violence of action whether it be fighting or fucking; the most direct route to conflict resolution is a physical one. Maybe if the angst ridden vampire boy in Twilight had received some communications classes he could have just told the stupid mortal girl what the deal was in the first place. Instead he moaned, and whined and enticed her and led her on. And people completely missed that he's a VAMPIRE, and evil being bent on human destruction. On one hand boys are still taught to respect a women and treat them with kindness and care; but on the other we are also taught that there are things a woman can't handle and you should keep them out. The real sticker is, and it begins around junior high when the girls "harass the boys with their endless flirtations" is that the women control the whole game. Just because it may seem to you that we didn't notice, or care, we did. Those of us you shoved aside in high school so you could go blow Donny rock star in the bathroom. Even if you had no intention of blowing him, why did you follow him in there in the first place? It's unseemly. But they did, we watched the girls do these things. What the boys are taught, by these ceaseless images of masculine attractiveness is that unless you are one of these guys, hot, rich, sexy, you will never be happy. And as one of those guys, the girls are going to expect you virile.
There was a time in my middle and early high school years when I believed that the only way to have a girlfriend was to make a friend first. I made a lot of friends but I never had a girlfriend. I was told that you had to woo a woman. I was told you had to do little things to let her know how much you cared. It would be a long time before I had a girlfriend. I watched the other guys, the guys I knew were jackasses, get the girls. Being a friend to females got you nothing and I soon learned that making them desire YOU changed the game. I became the desirable man and I believed I had it all together, and I was still in high school. During those years we had a lot of sex with a lot of girls and not one moment of it was forced or coerced. There was little conversation from our parents about sex at all so what we learned we learned from experimenting, and in my generation we experimented all the time, every weekend and twice during school if we could. But it was all to learn the please the ladies, who were coming for the sex anyway.
There is something in this idea that these girls are the only ones deluded here, that the fantasy is all theirs and when they stray from it they become victims. It is also the burden of the boy who doesn't know what to do with the information he's given any more than she does. Think of that kid who stood by and watched the girl he loved throw herself into the midst of those wolves in the first place. Maybe he tried to talk to her, but would she have heard him? Her message is follow the meat, his message is lure the girl. No wonder they come to some physical head, for good or worse, and it's usually worse.
The voice of the boy is a mute one, shrouded in violence and secrecy. yet we are held responsible for the state of the girls that ignore us. Because there is a sex culture that borders on the destructive, it does not mean that the onus lies with the male. For every bald faced jerk out there, there is a man just struggling to figure out what the hell women really want. And for every woman that makes a male friend there is one who simply wants to spend some time naked in a locker room.
The boys, and we all know boys, are putting it where they can put it and they are not thinking about it because no one told them they should. They have no control over it because no one told them how. The boys aren't to blame here, the boys, like the girls, are lost in the same sea of emotion and misinformation we were lost in. And those candid conversations about sex they are so upset by are the ones we need to be having with them. We have to step in where everyone else is failing and talk to our kids about the realities of sex and relationships. I promise you, the "Boyfriend" culture isn't going to fly just because women are having a change of heart. No one thought to ask the boys if they wanted to engage in a new sort of game? What if we want to focus on education, physical fitness, skills, talents, and power that you'll some to suck up when we're thirty.
