Consider that title: among today’s teenagers, who is more intimidated by the opposite sex, boys or girls? And what has been the trajectory of this over the past several decades?
Both James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal and Hugo Schwyzer at Jezebel (not to put them on the same plane) point to an op-ed written by Amy Schalet in the New York Times.
In it Schalet points out that a much lower percentage of mid-teen boys and girls are having sex today than twenty years ago. She writes:
Today, though more than half of unmarried 18- and 19-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, fewer than 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old boys and girls have, down from 50 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls in 1988. And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation.
Schalet characterizes this as “boys behaving like girls”. Boys have become more sensitive and romantic and are under less pressure to shed the “stigma of virginity”.
Taranto feels that Schalet just glosses over one explanation for this turn. He points out that she mentions young mens’ anxieties and fears of the potential negative consequences of sex, but doesn’t give enough weight to its explanatory power in assessing why young men would increasingly want to avoid sex:
At the same time, there is good reason for males (men as well as boys) to be more fearful of sex than females. Contemporary reproductive technology and law place all the burden for unwanted pregnancy on them. Between the pill and abortion, women have complete control over the reproductive process.
As Taranto points out, though a decrease in teenage sex is good in one very clear sense, such fears, anxieties, and hangups could effect sexual relationships into adulthood. If teenage boys are fearful of sexual relationships now, how will that domino into the future?
I’d take Taranto a little further. Teenage boys have every reason to be afraid of the outcomes of sex, but I tend to think that some of that explanation is merely the boys’ just-so response to the real root of the their anxiety: they’re scared to death of the girls themselves. Just trying to remember back to my own teenage years and trying to put myself into the mind of today’s teenager, the immobilizing fear of the process of sexual discovery precludes any thought of accidental pregnancy.
Boys aren’t just scared of the outcomes of sex; they’re scared of the process of sex – of the flirtations and interactions necessary to ever have sex in the first place. This is the true outcome of feminism. Masculinity in all of its forms has been degutted. Our school system – at the behest of feminists and academics – has beefed up the self-esteem of girls to the point that they just dominate their male peers. Believing as I do in essential sexual differences arising from biology, boys and young men are not mentally and emotionally equipped to handle this backwardation of domination.
And here’s what it gets down to fundamentally: boys know that they are not unconditionally supported. They are hesitant to act; they are scared to proceed knowing that they have no emotional safety net. At some point if a boy steps too far out and risks himself, in the event of his humiliation he will be left to fend for himself. This is no huge ordeal, but it strikes me that boys, more than girls, are afflicted more with feelings of shame, guilt, and self-loathing. A girl might get dumped or rejected or even picked on. But, generally, someone will care if she suffers. A friend, teacher, or another love interest will come along to help them out of their emotional jam, and there is hardly ever a feeling of pity. Not quite the same with boys. If a boy fails, there is no support system. He’s on his own, and he’s a pitiful creature – a loser.
That’s probably the best way to sum this up: boys can be losers; girls can’t. And both know it.
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Our civilization is going to end.
My prediction? Between 15 and 25 years from now, you will see prominent feminists assassinated. Women’s Studies departments at major universities fire-bombed. Outspoken feminist journalists like Hanna Rosin and Kate Bolick will wear targets. There will be gender riots.
The fantasy of “gender is a social construct” will lead to civil disruption that will make the VietNam protests look like a bad day at the park. And don’t even get me started on how the economy will be affected. With skyrocketing births from single mothers (our new prison population), and Rosin’s “End of Men” female domination of the workplace, just who is going to pay the taxes to support this preposterous socialist fantasy?
I am 51 and have never been more delighted that I don’t have kids. I pity the younger generation for the sewer of humanity they will inherit.
What might have been a great dream given to us by the founding fathers will crumble beneath the false religion of feminist wish fulfilment.
I am embarrassed at what this country has become. I am seriously considering handing in my passport and emigrating. I no longer love this country. Not at all.
Something else to consider is how male sexuality has been shamed and demonized, with feminist educators and administrators calling guys “creeps” and “potential rapists” if they [insert normal male behavior here]. (This was just starting around the time I finished school, and from what I hear it’s a hundred times worse today. ) So a lot of young guys grow up being ashamed of their sexuality, or even see it as something potentially dangerous.
Meanwhile, feminists have set it up so that female sexuality is allowed to run wild and free anywhere and everywhere (slutwalks etc.).
So we shouldn’t be surprised that girls are becoming bolder than boys when it comes to sex and dating, because this is how the sexes have been conditioned to behave WRT sexuality.
The only guys who are approaching girls in great numbers are the guys who don’t care if they creep girls out or not. Ironic that guidelines ostensibly designed to protect women from “jerks” and “creeps” virtually ensure that they’re the only ones who will ever actually hit on them.
I hear you zorroprimo. I moved to Spain and am looking to stay.
Excellent point retrenched. I could write tons more about this but not right now since am on my iPhone.
The this american life episode about testosterone has the reporter Alex blumberg talk pretty openly about how he hated his T growing up and hated his sexual desire and basically hated himself for being male.
I wasnt as bad but kinda close.
These sensitive, incomplete boys are being praised by parents, teachers, and feminist social engineers as examples of the ideal demasculinized male of the future. In contrast, they’re very evidently not regarded by their female classmates as potential sexual partners (I’m with Taranto in interpreting this talk about prudence as a face-saving rationalization). And it’s not surprising if we take it that hetero-sexual females are attracted to masculine sexuality, and these boys are the star pupils in internalizing the lesson that masculine sexuality is a Bad Thing.
Boys who are on the sensitive, romantic, “feminine” part of the spectrum should be taught that these traits are a complement to, and not a replacement for, the more classically masculine traits that are required of them. For example, your emotional intelligence might make you a great boyfriend and lover, but you have to be able to confidently express masculine sexuality in order to be chosen as a boyfriend in the first place.
Boys who have trouble developing and expressing their masculinity should be given mentorship and encouragement to help them develop those traits that they need to make good in the world and find happiness in their sexual life. Instead, as part of a social engineering campaign that has nothing to do with making them happy, the opposite if anything, these lost boys are being patted on the head and told that it’s a praiseworthy thing that they have no idea how to act like men.
So the boy doesn’t have a social safety net for premarital sex… are we supposed to cry or something? The social safety network comes with marriage. With marriage, you’ve got two sets of families to fall back on, plus friends and relatives. Pretty much anyone who attended the wedding was implicitly saying, “I approve of this (sexual, emotional, and legal) union.”
I agree that the control the female has over reproduction leaves the father with few options. If he doesn’t want the child, too bad. She can carry to term and get money from him. If he wants to be a father and will do anything to support his child, the female can still abort.
[Chuck Rudd: No, we aren't supposed to cry. As Taranto touched on in his WSJ article, the decline of teenage pregnancy is a good thing. But how have we gone about achieving it? Either teenage boys are afraid because they are on the hook for pregnancy or they are just flat out scared of girls - of making a move, of flirting, interacting, and rejection. These are second- and third-best solutions to the problem.]
I don’t think masculinity is on the wane, approaching girls was always difficult for boys, the difference now is that boys need to express ‘hyper’ masculinity to do it. I know if I were a young boy today and I had the choice between online porn, games and chips or pretending to be P Diddy to get a little nooky I’d definitely choose the former.
People shouldn’t underestimate the power of substitution.
Teen pregnancy is down. The percentages of teens using or abusing drugs and or alcohol, down. Teen STD/HIV rates, down. The number of teens involved in fatal car accidents, down as well. While the point of the article I believe is quite valid, I don’t thin it’s quite as deep of a conspiracy as everyone is making it out to be. For whatever reason, it seems that teenagers are in general making better decisions about what types of things they choose to engage in. It would be interesting to explore this phenomenon as a whole. What, or who is responsible for this shift in statistics? Or is it as simple as all the smarmy PSA’s finally paying off?
reading hugo shyster is like simultaneously eating bad fish and accidentally swallowing a plug of chewing tobacco. it’s that nauseating.
[quote]So the boy doesn’t have a social safety net for premarital sex… are we supposed to cry or something? The social safety network comes with marriage.[/quote]Captain Save a Hoe, ahem, Allen, this is simply not true. Even in marriage, men have all of the responsibilities, and none of the rights, and this continues even after cupcake gets a divorce.
nigga please. white boy needs to learn to stay outta the hood. u oughta know that already, Chuck. (smh).
aw, did Hugo Skeezer proclaim the end of men-y’know the kind of guys who attempt to kill an ex in a drug fueled rage, work as an overpaid prefessor and talk down to other men while kissing up to hateful feminists?
What’s next? Mr. Manboobz crying about decreasing obesity epedemics and whining that he’ll have to go back to only 4 meals a day of fast food?
“As Taranto points out, though a decrease in teenage sex is good in one very clear sense, such fears, anxieties, and hangups could effect sexual relationships into adulthood. If teenage boys are fearful of sexual relationships now, how will that domino into the future?”
Japan has already given us the answer: Grass Eaters. Mark my words, it’s on its way. You’ll see hapless betas starting splitting pretty clearly before too long. Group A will adopt Game/PUA principles and Group B will go the MGTOW/Total Forced Lonliness/Grass Eater route.
Girls are getting wise and hence immune to game tactics.
It’s escalating to the point-same as to join a gang-you may have to do a hit for her to get wet.
Casting this as just like female chastity as a “face-saving rationalization” is absolutely correct, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Does male virginity enhance a boy’s reputation, do women value male virginity? No and no.
Research into self-esteem doesn’t really support your conclusion. Teenage boys still (always have) hold a better self-image and have more confidence than teenage girls. I would tend to go with Taranto’s explanation. I would take it a bit further and add fear of STD’s to the mix. It isn’t just pregnancy and possible implications of that. I would also add porn into the mix. It’s quite easily accessible and far less risky. I will agree that boys may be somewhat intimidated by girls who have more sexual experience than they do. It might make them feel inadequate by comparison when they are supposed to be more competent and more knowlegeable according to society. Finally, they may also be more afraid of being accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault. Schools run “education” programs emphasizing these things and boys may be intimidated by those programs enough to abstain longer.
Before sex, teenage guys have to run the gauntlet of being perceived as alpha. Then they have to initiate contact and be proper aloof and cool despite sex drives screaming the opposite. Then if they arent actually blown off and get into the girls pants, they have to jackhammer like an alpha from their favorite porno.
Then anytime in the next 8 months he is at the whim of girl emotion, which might regret it and cry false date rape.
This all after the girl actually decides she wants to fuck now and not focus on her career. And after the guy has sacrificed his long term prospects to get a white collar job by getting covered in tats, drunk every weekend, working some low wage job to put chromes on his hyundai.
You get the picture.
Today, though more than half of unmarried 18- and 19-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, fewer than 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old boys and girls have, down from 50 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls in 1988. And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation.
Or these statistics could all be a fraud.
The numbers are all self reported which is a notoriously unreliable way of assessing anything.
For all we know that 1988 sample, born from 1969 to 1973, were simply lying to a greater degree in claiming earlier and greater sexual activity.
This is just Junk Social Science.
“Self-esteem” is psuedoscience. It was yet another invented explanation for poor performance of blacks. It’s possible to be a very low self-esteem narcissist, which sounds like it should be plainly contradictory but it is not.
Girls have ‘low self-esteem’ because they tend to be high self-monitors (in comparison to boys), so ‘low self-esteem’ is actually a positive (as in resulting in successful outcomes) trait here. It means they are more likely to work at controlling the perceptions others have of them, where as boys are more likely to do what feels ‘natural’ (which no one dares gainsay), and hence ‘high self-esteem’, which for a lot of boys (ones that have poor socialization skills) is actually bad.
A ‘high self-esteem’ boy might still have anti-social attitudes about females as well, trusting in things just working themselves out on their own rather than feeling it necessary to take an active role in managing the perceptions others have of them.
Increasing the pressure on masculinity in one segment of society causes it to vent elsewhere in unpredictable or unpleasant fashion. We may not like to discuss pornography but it remains a reflection of contemporary society. In the 21st century world of smut men & women are rarely depicted as equals in age, background, race, etc. In fact, these disparities are selling points: older women, jailbait, neighbors, teachers, racial hostility/revenge, etc. The ‘Boogie Nights’ era of shaggy hair, mustaches, infamously bad and repetitive music, and film stock is long gone, but so are any mentions of desire, romance, attraction, etc.
In one of life’s great ironies, young people view these contrived scenarios and emulate the behavior they see: boys as feral, mute hunters, high-fiving and celebrating their conquests after, girls as initially ‘empowered’ seductresses but ultimately submissive rag dolls in a destructive peer competition.
In high school and college culture hookups are valued for their throwaway quality as much as for the sex while relationships are mocked and feared because the sentimentality and emotion found in adults are viewed as alien concepts after 4-8 years of reinforcement.
Another irony: feminism hates pornography because of the primacy of the male and the exploitation of the female but feminist ideology as manifested in schools and society has produced this Bizarro world of male/female interaction.
A final irony: the high priestesses of feminism are largely lesbians and old maids. They’ve got heterosexual women tap-dancing to a song with such an impossibly fast tempo and far too many steps that exhaustion and frustration, rather than fulfillment, balance, power, etc. are inevitable, thanks to the false prophets of feminism.
Boys are being pussified. More young pussy for me!
OT: Chuck, kudos on being wise enough to hide your domain registry info for glpiggy.net
But are you sure it’s a good idea to be so open with details of your real identity? You may want a real corporate job one day. (maybe as district manager for the restaurant chain, lol)
it’s already out there now. too late to put the genie back in the bottle.
“That’s probably the best way to sum this up: boys can be losers; girls can’t. And both know it.”
I don’t know that this is entirely true, though there is some truth in it. The girls that can be losers include the classic “school slut,” the fatties, the uglies and the weirdos. These girls do exist, but they’re off the radar for most men, just like lower betas are off the radar for most women.
Case in point: a good friend of mine told me he was dating someone from my high school graduating class. I had no idea who she was. I pulled out my old yearbook and remembered why: she was stunningly average, someone who did not even register on my 17-year-old hormonically-crazed brain. But as for the girls I had crushed on, I could probably still tell you some of the clothes they wore!
The decline in unwanted, unplanned pregnancies and teen sex is a good thing. If sexual inactivity trend continues into the 20′s it might prove to be problematic and into the 30′s its a disaster but 18-21 isn’t too late.
Anyway our society need a reboot and if these shy hammered down by the police state kids give us a Japan style “grass eater” revolt it will be just as final as an all guns blazing one and likely quieter , so its not all bad. We’ll be replaced with more a more successful society any which way. My money is on a bunch of smaller nations around the highly religious WN types and other strongly emotive bonding structures.
Down the line if society ever gets fixed and/or for some reason teen sex goes up, hopefully we can get some kind of male birth control option like RISUG going to gp with Norplant and the like.. The left has a point, unless a person is prepared financially for a kid, they ought not have one and the right is correct, if they do its on the governments dime .
Though risky the best way to do that is to set fertility by default “off” at say 15 or whenever first sexual activity comes.
Of course there are downsides beyond tryanical population control concerns ,corp-gov is counting on new warm bodies from somewhere and a nation of nothing but planned pregancies these days would Signapore level fertitility , with wages down half who could afford kids..
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chicks act like guys. it’s off-putting.
“My prediction? Between 15 and 25 years from now, you will see prominent feminists assassinated. Women’s Studies departments at major universities fire-bombed. Outspoken feminist journalists like Hanna Rosin and Kate Bolick will wear targets. There will be gender riots.”
As I understand it, uber-cunt Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the opposition Labor Party in the British House of Commons, already wears a bullet-proof vest in public. Can’t imagine why.
As I have said before, zorroprimo’s prediction is the third and final stage. First (unfortunately) is random attacks on women from men frustrated not only in their sex lives, but also in their ability to make a living thanks to public policies favoring cunts. Think Marc Lepine and George Sodini. We are already at this stage.
Second stage is more men deciding to off the bitches who frivolously accuse them of rape or sexual harrassment, or ex-wives who contributed nothing to the marriage taking them for everything they’ve got. If you can spend the rest of your life in prison at the whim of a cunt for making her “uncomfortable” or “hurting her feelings”, then you might as well commit a crime that can be objectively measured and which the state will have to prove you committed under the presumption of innocence at your trial. Think Darren Mack.
@Rivelino
how is Spain? i heard that is basically on it’s way to becoming like america too?
Ah yes, high school romances…
I for one, at least early on, was pretty scared of fucking up and being known as “that guy” or “creep” or whatever, and get hated on by the girls. Your rep is pretty much set for four years, so you don’t want to ruin it.
Later on with a few experiences under my belt, that changed, but the man those freshman/sophomore days, I had no idea what to do and was definitely intimidated. It’s an awkward stage most guys go through, but all that be-a-nice-guy don’t be aggressive stuff really leaves you in a bind, mentally.
FFY–
True dat, but if you can survive those years ANNNDD if you can put the wounds behind you after that, you can then reinvent yourself as often as necessary. As roissy once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) men’s fear of women stems from the risk of at least ostracism and at most physical violence that one could expect in the state of nature from making a wrong move. Today if you get shot down all you need to do is move to the other side of the bar.