August 11, 2008

The temptation of Saint Agnostic: 1

I've already mentioned that it's the youth who corrupt the adults and not the other way around. I suppose anyone can travel down the path toward ruin by indulging their vices, but in most of these cases, the person themselves is to blame. In a handful of cases, though, their vice actively seeks them out. I wish my vice were inanimate and could be kept at bay by simply not buying it. This mini-series, which should only take two posts, will show how easily my kind of temptation can sneak up on a person and how active of a role young girls have played in tempting me.

In part, this is just to collect and arrange my thoughts, but it's also dispel the myth that guys who like teenagers began with some sort of fetish which they nurtured and then acted on, trying to prey on helpless girls. At least in my case, the first one established contact with me first, and in all cases they provoked me, unrelentingly at times. A love of adolescents may, over time, come to occupy such a guy's thoughts, but that's not at all the "born monster" image that the lazy-minded are content to believe in. It's also a truism that if social sanctions forbid X, only those who are more risk-taking and liable to indulge their vices will seek X. Just as one example, in the Southern Slavic countries at the beginning of the 20th Century (or if we believe the commenter Gannon, in today's Argentina), a late-20s guy who prefers teenage girls would have been completely unremarkable, while it would have been strange in England, even going back several hundred years.

It should go without saying that vice here means "something that makes personal ruin more likely," and not something that is evil. Having now re-discovered the too taut texture of adolescent flesh, could the pleasure centers of my brain light up if I were forced into a relationship with an older-aged woman? It will happen some day, after all. (I plan to marry a very young girl, so that by the time she reaches that stage, I'll be too bogged down in paternal duties and the occasional discreet affair with pretty young things, paying for it if need be, to care about her skin condition.)

Although I didn't always have an eye for teenagers, they ambushed me almost as soon as possible. I was too insulated from the real world during college to have any contact with them, and besides -- college girls. I evaded them my first year after graduation; even during a three-month living-and-teaching stint in Barcelona, where I recall seeing them swarming around the city center, I was still too fascinated by my college-aged students. And after most people's fun year after college, they insulate themselves even further from the world of adolescents, obviously to their health.

It was that damned desire to teach. Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary Still looked at the General Social Survey and found that male teachers were more likely to be divorced than men in other professions or women in the same profession, and really this only held for secondary school teachers or college lecturers. The inference is that they're faced day after day with the sight of The Teenage Thigh, and cannot be content with women their own age. Anyone who's ever worked with teenagers knows that, while their faces look younger, and their muscles a bit more fit, it's the impossibly tight and luminescent skin on their thighs that is the most jarring to older males, who had previously become accustomed to steadily more slackening and opaque skin in women their age. And of course it's also the part they are happiest to display: regardless of the churning of fashion's wheel, young girls will always remain eager to show off how great the skin on their legs looks (damn them).

In the next part, I'll recount some specific instances. There are far too many to cover, but they're all pretty similar and reviewing just a few will serve to make the point: if you had seen, heard, felt, and smelled the things I have, you'd understand how easy it is to be tempted by and to fall for teenagers as an adult.

9 comments:

  1. leaving aside college professors, are male teachers more likely to be divorced because of giving into temptation or because they have low status jobs?

    it'd be interesting to compare divorce rates between men in traditionally male jobs and those in traditionally female jobs, like nursing or teaching.

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  2. We don't know if they gave in to temptation -- they would be so lucky to have the chance. It could just be that they are bombarded by nubile sights all day, come home to their older wives, and are unsatisfied, leading to break-up.

    This doesn't happen with elementary school teachers, so it's probably not a low-status thing. Also think of guys who work in Hollywood: high divorce rates because they're also surrounded by PYTs.

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  3. it'd be interesting to compare divorce rates between men in traditionally male jobs and those in traditionally female jobs, like nursing or teaching

    Until recently, a high percentage of the men in traditionally female jobs weren't the marrying kind, if you catch my drift. Today, not so much.

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  4. Dusk,

    Dont feel ashamed that fifteen and sixteen year old girls like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez make the hair on your chest stand up man..................its utterly and completely natural.


    We used to be "given" in marriage at young ages, as anyone who has read the Old Testament can attest. Sixteen year old boys and fourteen year old girls used to get married in old traditional societies. I didn't just say thirty year old men and fourteen year old girls......I said sixteen year old boys.


    Our system of education puts "life" off for so long. So many people dont reall enter their professions, have enough for their first house, and ready to really "start" until they are twenty-six or so. Those fifteen year olds probably can give birth as healthily and happily as 22 year olds, and BETTER than 34 year olds. We have skewed things "too old".



    A friend of mine named Marty had to go back to his old high school (back when we were about 34) to get an academic record for his then-wife (she divorced him, and now that her fling didn't work out---she's "dissapointed" in her behavior, etc). He ran into a teacher there that he went to high school with. Marty asked him "how do you like your job?" as the umpteenth Britney-clone walked by. Marty's friend knew what he meant. The low-rider pants, the bare midriffs, the breast implants, all of it. Marty's old aquaintaince said, "Man, its like working in a candy store, I have to catch myself all the time". The girls their talked about their sex lives, things they do, fooling around with other girls, threesomes with their BFF's and a guy friend-----things that were unheard of back in our day.


    For fear of the law, of course, one doesn't try it. But to say that physically-speaking 16 year olds and up aren't ready for sex is being biologically dishonest. To be truthful............14 year old girls are ready for sex. I dont feel its appropriate that they have it with 30 year olds, but for a 20 year old? If its consensual? Probably historically very very normal.

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  5. I had the same idea as Roissy. Teacher is a low status job. Even professor is pretty low status compared to people of equal intelligence working in other sectors. My advisor is very well known and makes as much money as any natural science professor could ever hope for, but he's a genius and would probably be filthy rich if he had gone to work for a hedge fund.

    BTW, what is the age of consent in your state? It's 16 here.

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  6. No, the article says they controlled for status, race, etc., to make sure it wasn't a confounding factor.

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  7. Just FYI, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy's younger sister Lydia is married at 16, after seriously entertaining a suitor at 15.

    It was the Victorian counter-reaction to the rather libertine and somewhat awful (in toleration of explicit Child Prostitution) Georgian mores that raised ages of consent in the 1840's. It was not unusual for someone in London's finest areas in the 1810's-20's to step over a drunk 12 year old prostitute.

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  8. Are teachers (including profs) low status? I've spent time outside Canada US, and maybe that's affected my estimation. Cause they're respected the world over in other places. What are high status jobs here, would you say? Doctor? Lawyer? Unless you really like fixing people or arguing the same old already set facts, those are jobs that take a lot of school years (which is good if you don't have to pay, I guess), and then require a lot of your time. Manager and Company Ownder are unpoetic and lame (though the money is so great). Politics are cool. I can see why that's high status. Besides rock star, or movie star, what are considered high status jobs? I think college prof or teaching girls old enough you could hook up with them is a good job, cause you can enjoy life. The money is low, though.

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  9. I guess ive read your posts more scattered through time. I remember being 13 and having a crush on my over 30 year old teacher. At no point did my infatuation or crushing on a 30 year old professor at 13 mean that I was "mature" enough to engage in an emotional and physical relationship with an adult male. Frankly, this whole nonsense about youth "tempting" adults is a lot of BS. Girls and boys have crushes on older adult figures ALL THE TIME. In no way shape or form does it mean that adult women or men should ever engage in these kinds of relationships with junior high/high school kids. Your blog is interesting...if only men like you werent so good at hiding your inclinations we'd mark you with a big flaming letter P.

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