Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Between all the things we “know” about the differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and things we “know” about men and women on the other hand, there’s this roughly three-year gap that… we don’t “know” much about at all.

It’s not that it’s not studied (I’m sure it must be) and it’s obviously experienced by everybody. It’s just that you don’t hear many people talking about it.

It’s that gap between early childhood and early adulthood, the gap where girls hit their growth spurts, and puberty, and cognitive and social expansion, and start developing romantic and/or early sexual identities while boys in their classes mostly… aren’t.

And yes, mileage varies, yes there’s overlap, yes, yes, yes. But…

There’s this little one, or two, or maybe three year window. One that probably seems small to most adults. It’s maybe 20% of an early adolescent’s life.

It’s not talked about much. Outside of middle-school administrator’s offices anyway.

Seems like it probably has an impact disproportionate to how much it’s discussed though.

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Another point about this that’s pretty important though: the gap I mentioned between middle-school aged girls and boys would be a gap relative to middle-school aged girls and boys. Not compared to, say, high-school aged girls, not to high-school aged boys, definitely not to adults.

Seems like that probably has an impact too.

Failing to understand it, though, probably has an even bigger impact. Much bigger.

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And finally, (and this point is a lot more speculative) I’m not sure when exactly boys start catching up. I’m guessing somewhere between average late high-school and, say, mid-college age.

That definitely seems to have an impact, one that’s probably a little better recognized. And one that I think is considerably exploited by military recruiters and other adults, vendors of gendered-male products and services, and, for better or worse, peers.

Failing (sometimes, I think, willfully failing) to understand that one has, I think, tremendous impact.

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Anyway, two questions:

• What’s your recollection of your own middle-school experiences?

• What’s your recollection of the experiences of middle-schoolers you might have watched grow up?

Summary: A brief history of teen pregnancy policy and how, long before I found this domain name, it motivated me to start blogging.

Actually I can answer part of my previous question, about whether the boyfriend is likely to disappear if his girlfriend becomes pregnant. In fact it was the second issue that made me decide to try to start a political blog, back when a domain name cost $1000 a year and a “blogging platform” meant Notepad.exe and copy of HTML for Dummies.

Again I can’t remember the source nor can I find my original notes (we’re talking mid-1990s here so they might by on a floppy disk somewhere) but…

At the time teen pregnancy rather than illegal immigration was the giant bugaboo of the right, and so of necessity of the left as well.

One data point that stood out for me was that when teenage girls become pregnant, or at least became pregnant back then, the father was overwhelmingly likely to be 10 years older than she was.

In other words the “boyfriend” wasn’t likely to be an actual boy at all!

Again, I don’t have my notes but I’m pretty sure that at least when it comes to teen pregnancy the disappearance of said “boy” friends is likely to be even more complicated.

Some years later, after domain prices and other barriers to creating websites had fallen, and, sad to say, after my original attempt at a straight-up political blog had perished in obscurity, while digging through a list of recently-expired domain names I stumbled across “realadultsex.com.” And snapped it up figuring I’d figure something to do with it. It wasn’t till a year or two after that that I finally decided to, well, start doing this!

Before all that, though, when I was just an obscure straight-up wannabe political blogger, I’d already decided that it wasn’t just a good idea to discourage sex between minors and adults, it would be good policy as well. My domain name has several meanings to me. That’s a big one.

At any rate, while I didn’t yet have much of the progressive and/or “sex-positive” and/or “3rd-wave feminist” vocabulary it seemed pretty clear to me that even if teenagers couldn’t be held accountable for teen pregnancy (a bit of a myth since, in fact, they’re often amazingly solemn in actual peer-to-peer relationships) then it might be a good idea to craft policies to reach impregnating adults instead of “slut-shaming” their juvenile partners.

As far as I know it’s still never been tried.

[This post crystallizes for me an age-related structural gender issue that seems pretty critical but I haven’t seen it discussed much. :-) —fl]

Last week Ezra Klein raised one of those hidden-in-plain-sight issues that I think are barkingly critical to understanding contemporary gender dynamics.

Folks might remember this rather startling map that criss-crossed the internet a few months ago. Using Census Survey data, it purported to show the imbalance in singles of both genders across the country. The East Coast, it turned out, was full of lonesome ladies. The West Coast was packed with unhappy bachelors. Folks had some methodological questions, but most read the map and moved on, or read the map and moved to a city with more hot, hot, singles action.

But Great American Jonathan Soma decided to dig into the numbers and make a more manipulable map. And the main variable he let you manipulate was age. The original map counted all singles between the ages of 20 and 64. The new map lets you screw with some sliders for a data range. And the results are fascinating. On the young end of the spectrum, single men outnumber single women just about everywhere. If you hold the ages to 20-34, DC, for instance, has 27 extra single men for every 1,000 people. Shift the slider so it tracks folks from age 45 to 60, and DC has 48 more single women for every 1,000 folks.

The reason for this, basically, is that women marry younger. About 1/3rd of women are married by age 24. Only 1/5th of men are. That creates some imbalance.

Read the quote in context here.

Click to see the full comic. The syndicated cartoonist Vic Lee addresses the same issue in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

If you can’t make it out the comic is set in a restaurant. In center frame two women are sharing a toast. Behind them an angry older man exclaims to the similarly shocked woman at his table “No! It’s wrong! We’ve got to fight for traditional marriage.” At the next table a hip young man is whispering to his partner “Same-sex Issues?” She whispers back “No, same age!”

Ouch! Now there’s an unspoken taboo!

I’m pretty sure, by the way, that to the probably-substantial extent traditional gender values are involved this one is not unilaterally imposed by men. For instance if I hear one more single woman refer to their younger partner as “my 25-year-old” or, for that matter, a younger man refer to a prospective date as a “cougar” I may use intemperate language. (And duh, it already bugged me when similarly gendered language goes the other way.)

And yes, I’m aware that differential maturity rates among early-adolescent girls and boys establishes something of a gradient very early on. But here’s the deal: that gradient tends to disappear around, oh, say, age 18 — the age, coincidentally, when a blog called “real adult sex” would consider an appropriate age for folks to start having, well, real adult sex! But I digress…

If I hadn’t been thinking a lot about this I might have just left it at something like “gee, it’s just so inefficient this way — single 40-year-old women and unattached 20-year-old men should just start hooking up more often.” I’d have even had both statistical justification (marriages where the male partner is younger tend to be far more durable than other age-related pairings) or personal/anecdotal (if my dad’s parents had stuck with older-man/younger-woman then he wouldn’t be here and neither would I.) And there’s the business about how (at least for now) men tend to die before their partners and so it’s inefficient, dumb, and even self-defeatingly tragic for women to prefer older partners. I could even have dragged out examples of “other cultures” and, of course, the old saw about “sexual peaks.” A bit more recently I might have dragged out bits about patriarchy naturally favoring economically-advantaged older men and younger women with a system pitched against economical autonomy just seeing which side the bread is buttered on. And if (flying-spaghetti monster forfend) I was an ev-psych fan I’d blather about men’s preference for firm boobs and women’s preference for “proven providers…” as if most pre-modern economic and agricultural production world-wide

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that. Whatever.

Instead I’ll just say we gotta start talking about this gendered age gradient. I’m obviously not saying we should start carding couples for their birth years — not only would that be counterproductive at any point it would also be premature. But! If we don’t start looking at it we’re going to continue looking at more than a lot of lonely people of different ages sitting on different coasts.

Look at relative pay differences between men and women, to name just one. We’re so used to looking at comparable pay — how as in the Ledbetter case female manager X was systematically paid less than male managers performing the same work. Chances are looking pretty good right now that the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act will be passed by the next Congress and signed by the next President. Cool, right? Well, sure! But that’s comparative pay.

But what about relative, internal-to-relationship income and experience when by tradition and, evidently, statistical preference of both parties consistently gives the male partner a three to five year jump on the female partner?

In the outside world they can both be earning amounts comparable to peers of both genders, but when it comes to decisions at home about who brings home more money, which career moves… or even geographic ones… should take precedent, and who the family can most afford to stay home with pre-school children a bias towards… whoever has the more established career and income is going to carry a lot of weight. No matter who does most of the dishes on a daily basis. And don’t forget that whoever stays home with new children (usually the lower-earning-power member) is set back all the further.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that aggregate personal choices of partner grossly exaggerate perceptions of differences in height, strength, horniness, or whatever compared to actual averages. For instance there’s far, far, far more overlap in average men’s and women’s heights than in relative heights between hetero partners. Well, in the same way a persistent bias for younger, and therefore on-average lower-earning women partnering with older, and therefore longer-in-the-workplace men will tend to perpetuate gendered economic differences no matter how egalitarian society becomes at large.

Since one of the precepts of radical feminism is that imbalances in domestic heterosexual relationship is the template for all other forms of oppression (one reason why the old-timers kept saying “the personal is the political”) averaging the economic playing field may not create as much egalitarianism as projections of aggregate equality might lead us to expect.

So.

I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to overturn both the one-way Hugh Hefner/Maureen Dowd gender/age template. Which is ok — there are lots of ways to get there. But I will say, rather bluntly, that gender relations are going to plateau below parity until we start seeing more truly random age mixing between gendered couples.

[While all this is a new idea to me it must have been discussed by others earlier. Therefore I’ll welcome pointers to references in comments. Thanks in advance. —fl]

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Random Note: Despite the charts Ezra Klein linked to it’s not necessary to just hookup surpluses of 20-something west-coast men with 40-something east-coast women. Almost all couples are just a few years apart and I’m guessing under any optimal solution that would still be true after the gendered age gradient collapsed. (Unlike, say, Hugo Schwyzer, I don’t think larger age gaps are necessarily a problem… again, as long as they trend gender-random as well.)

Random Note: Makes me wonder about the trend where “red-state” people both begin sex and get married much younger than “blue states”... and consequently blue-state people have more stable marriages and way lower divorce rates. [Update: Doh! Corrected typo in the previous sentence implying that red-state people were better off. —fl]

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See also

- “Cougers,” Entitlement, and Unexamined Bias – Sexism? Ask me (out)

At one point in the musical The Sound of Music Rolf, a 17-year-old recruit in the Nazi-era Austrian military, courts Leisl, a 16-year-old member of the Von Trapp Family Singers with the following, seemingly unobjectionable lyrics.

You are 16 going on 17
Fellows will fall in line
Eager young lads
And grueways and cads
Will offer you fruit and wine

Totally unprepared are you
To face a world of men
Timid and shy and scared are you
Of things beyond your ken

You need someone
Older and wiser
Telling you what to do
I am 17 going on 18
I’ll take care of you

Rodgers And Hammerstein, 1959

So…. what, exactly, qualifies one person to tell a partner what to do? Some places it’s age, yeah, and sometimes it’s class or status or relative economic worth, and or course plenty of places it’s having a penis. But… really… I mean how much more can a 17-year old boy know about, say, sex than a 16-year-old girl if, say, they’re both babe-in-the-woods virgins? (Let alone considering that the boy in the song had no more sense than to join the Hitler fucking Youth!)

Now if you look at the sentiments behind that song (the 16-year-old, I should mention, thoroughly agrees with her suitor that she’s helpless and needs to be, well, taken in hand.)

Well, first of all there’s the whole Patriarchal (or, strictly speaking, masculinist) business about guys just naturally being qualified to call the shots since they’re just naturally superior no matter how naive, stupid, inept, thumb-fingered, ham-handed, pig-headed, or inexperienced they might be.

And there’s the boost to his self-esteem. Sure, it’s a totally false, and thus easily pricked self-esteem. But it certainly simplifies things to just have everyone define you as infallibly right (if not actually infallible.)

And for her there’s even the freedom-from-choice relaxation that comes from utterly delegating all responsibility to another person. Sure, it might be totally false delegation that requires a lot of circumlocution, indirection, subterfuge, resentment, nagging, bitterness, “disappointment” and contempt. But it certainly simplifies things to just let someone else call the shots so that you’re never to blame for anything.

Anyway, let’s look at a couple of possible outcomes of inherent assumptions behind Rolf and Leisl’s decision that Rolf should call the shots.

1) When they hop in the sack they both know it’s his responsibility to “show her” how to have sex. Even though they may both be completely aware that he has no more idea than she. Except, perhaps, that it’s going to hurt. Her.

2) Since he’s responsible for teaching her she’s going to have to be a little circumspect about any suggestions.

3) Whereas they might have different opinions about what constitutes a successful event, since he’s calling the shots any “lessons” are likely to favor his preferred outcome.

4) More to the point, if they’re both equally inexperienced then even though he’s calling the shots neither he nor she will have any idea whether he’s doing whatever he’s doing “right.”

5) Whereas they might have different opinions about what constitutes a successful event, since he’s in charge of teaching her exactly what sex is all about she may have nothing going for her but a “hmmm, well I thought there’d be more to it than that” sense that it wasn’t going all that well.

6a) Even if he winds up doing a pretty good job!

and/or

6b) Even if his father or another adult man in his life has arranged for him to “learn the ropes” with a local prostitute.

Sound like a relationship you’d want to enter into? Were you, like most of us, raised to believe there wasn’t really any other way?

So… let’s look at a couple of possible outcomes of dropping the whole idea that when two people have exactly the same information and/or experience then the one with one with the extra birthdays, the cash, the local accent and skin-color, or, especially, the penis is defined as right and his partner as “having a lot to learn.”

Well, for one thing, without any expectations they could figure out what works best together! To paraphrase Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna, the benefits of fumbling around together to work it out are highly under-appreciated. Sure, you’d have no idea what you were doing but then you’d have no expectations that anyone would! Making one partner or the other the defacto instructor totally breaks that dynamic…

I think I could go on but that last point, all by itself, seems like all the reason we’d need to ditch that whole shocking conceit. And wait, there’s more!

What if one or the other partner not only had a penis but really actually was way more sexually experienced? Would that still give them the credibility, let alone the right, to tell their partner “You need someone / Older and wiser / Telling you what to do?”

No. It’s still a bad idea for exactly the same reasons articulated above.

Update: I should clarify that it’s a bad idea because when it comes to sex you’re really only an inexperienced beginner once. For maybe five minutes. After that chances are pretty darn good that you’re going to have enough context to start figuring out some things on your own… whereupon your partner might continue to be a nice resource to draw on… but older, wiser, and telling you what to do? Bwhahahahaha till milk comes out my nose!