,
16 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
This. This is everywhere. This is a thing that people say about 13 year old girls all the time, and do you know what it means? It means badness. It doesn’t mean normal dude. But it is also horrifically common.
In fact, I’m reminded of a large selection of grown men in my own history who did things ranging from kissing my 14 year old neck, to telling me I was an “old soul,” & “nebulous woman child,” to calling my house, knowing I was 15, speaking to my mom, & trying to ask me on a date.
This wasn’t just one man who did this. It was many. All kinds of men. They told me I was a Lolita, (which to me sounded kind of fancy), that grown women didn’t like sex and denied it to their husbands, but that teenagers understood them, that I had wisdom, that I was beautiful.
From the age of about 14 to 18 this sort of approach happened daily. Men told me they were waiting for my birthday, asked if I was a virgin, told me they liked younger women because we weren’t jaded, and claimed that grown women were oppressors, while girls my age were perfect.
It happened so often that it was a known thing. If an older dude walked past me and my friends, we all knew he was coming for me. We made fun of these guys, mostly, and mostly nothing horrific happened. Except that sometimes it did.
“My wife doesn’t understand my needs,” said men like these, who were in their 40’s when I was 15. And that tactic is a useful one. It works on teenage girls, because we wanted to understand anything. We wanted to help. It also isolated us from adult women who could keep us safe.
These men coaxed us into believing our mothers were our enemies. Also their girlfriends. Also anyone who wasn’t a teenage girl, or a poor, victimized 40 something man who only wanted to tell us we were beautiful and to be understood. Couldn’t we understand how powerful we were?
Their actions were meant to convince us - the victims of assault, harassment, rape, and ultimately years of trauma - that we were the true criminals. They, after all, could not resist our overwhelming sexuality, our power, our 14 year old beauty. How could anyone expect them to?
So, yeah, guys who say the things Epstein does, the things that actually so many men do? (“There’s a huge difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia”) Those guys are making themselves a cozy nest in which they are victims of teenage girls, not vice versa.
But the teenage girls? ARE NOT THE CRIMINALS. THEY ARE THE VICTIMS OF THIS. It is not their fault if they are dazzled, lured, picked up, bewildered, convinced that they are the cure for middle aged male misery. The criminals are lying to them, & lying with foul effectiveness.
“You have no idea how sexual a 13 year old girl can be,” has nothing to do with whether she should be sexualized by adults. Indeed, she is probably sexual. She’s hitting puberty. This doesn’t mean adult men should respond to her sexuality with predation, & then plead victimhood.
I get angrier and angrier about this the older I get. I’m 42, and I think about the 42 year old men who hit on me when I was 15, telling me with every compliment that adult women were bad guys, and that they and I were meant to align forces, and I want to wreak havoc.
It wasn’t my job to save the lives of men three times my age. It was not my job to cure their horniness, their loneliness, their lack. But the culture told me I had to listen when men told me what I was. Often, men told me I was lucky to be desired. Nubile. Nebulous. Woman-Child.
They redacted my still forming identity into the identity of a teenage sex-witch, and carefully reduced their own identities into poor guys who were so nice, but who were not understood by anyone but...me. I was so special, this baby sorceress. How could I not help them?
In the moment, I didn’t know these men were criminals, pedophiles - nothing like that. I just thought they were poor dudes, & I figured I was the one with all the power and the luck. I, after all, was happy: more than they said they had. “You could make me happy,” they said.
This is daily foulness in the culture, not the extreme edge. Men approached me this way, ALL THE TIME. It was not unusual. It was standard. It still is. And it is not okay.
