Older Women & Teen Boys: A 'Humorous' Trope with Disastrous Consequences
Did I just wake up in 1987?
Two stories in the media this week got me thinking, once again, about the weird ways we fail to protect teenage boys’ innocence.
As a parent of teens and a writer who has been reporting on issues facing boys for the last twelve years (including a few years focused on male survivors of childhood sexual abuse), I’m shocked at the ways in which we, as a culture, see teen boys as somehow exempt from the rule that everyone deserves bodily autonomy.
It’s almost as if, when it comes to sexuality, we don’t see tween and teenage boys as children at all.
We often openly mock older teens for being virgins, or, worse, for sharing the trauma of being sexually assaulted or preyed upon by female abusers.
Below are the two recent examples that got me thinking. While both are about celebrities, it’s OK if you don’t know their names. The point isn’t the celebrity, but rather the universality of these experiences and the ways in which society reacts to them.
Ultimately, I believe that dismissing boys’ and men’s equal right to be safe and protected ultimately harms us all.
Content note: While I mention cases of abuse or predation in this story, I do NOT include detailed descriptions of SA or CSA in any of these examples.
Why Cole Sprouse’s story of losing his virginity makes us uncomfortable
The first big media story that pissed me off comes from Cole Sprouse’s appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast (yes, that’s a weird name for a podcast, but it’s just another celeb interview show). The 30 year-old actor, who was a child star on Nickelodeon in the early 00s, told the story of losing his virginity* at age 14 to an older girl. While we don’t know her age, she was old enough for Sprouse to describe the scenario as “dubious”.
Sprouse tells the story with a laugh, but it’s an uncomfortable laugh. Not because of how “cringey” his behavior is in this story (as he describes it) but because the cringey person in the story is a 14 year-old child (who looked like this at the time — yikes).
Yes, Sprouse is laughing at himself on the podcast; at the awkward ways in which a 14 year-old child asked an older girl whom he didn’t really know to have sex with him — and then at the awkward ways in which he actually performed that sex. But I’m not convinced that makes it better. While he and the podcast host laugh and cringe, the story becomes unavoidably sad once he says that he regretted the interaction and talks about the long-term consequences of having had that as his first sexual interaction.
While I believe we should all be allowed to define our own experiences and not have others casually force a label upon us, I feel comfortable saying that this scenario would not be healthy for the majority of 14 year-olds. Sprouse seems to low-key agree that the behavior was inappropriate or even illegal, given that he shared a tweet with the sentiment “somebody jail that girl”:
The second thing that pissed me off this week is a trailer for a new Jennifer Lawrence movie, No Hard Feelings.
This is the story of a woman who is supposed to be in her late 20s or early 30s, secretly hired by a 19 year-old kid’s parents to have sex with him before he heads off to college — the first sex of the teenager’s life.
While the son is legally an adult and can give consent, the trailer makes it very clear that he is not interested in this grown woman. Still, his parents continue to push her to “seduce” him.
The teen in question is sexually innocent and immature in a number of ways that are made explicit — including spitting a Long Island Iced Tea all over the table because he didn’t know it would have alcohol in it, refusing to skinny dip in the dark because there isn’t a lifeguard, and believing she is actually kidnapping him when she jokes about it in a sexy way.
He is also shown being actively afraid of her and easily bullied into doing things he’s clearly saying “no” to. Scenes like this appear to be played for laughs.
The fact that his parents are paying a sexually experienced older woman to literally groom their teenage son for sex without his consent (calling it seduction) is troubling. That this is the premise for a comedy in the year 2023 is even more so.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have not seen this film as it has not been released yet. It’s possible there’s a twist at the end where the parents and Jennifer Lawrence’s character realize this is creepy AF and discover that it is beautiful for a young man to know he’s not ready for sex and therefore not force himself to do it.
Maybe the three non-teenagers in the movie realize that guys deserve bodily autonomy and that sexually shaming boys for not fitting into the dangerous expectation that all teen boys and men are sexual aggressors is problematic. If that’s the case, the trailer is a major bait-and-switch.
Regardless of whether that’s the case, this trailer, and likely the film, play upon the idea that a man is a loser if he isn’t sexually experienced. What’s worse, his parents don’t see his sexuality as his own to define or his sexual development as something that should belong solely to him. And it appears audiences are supposed to just laugh along.
Why these examples matter & negatively affect everyone
These examples might be less potent were there not so much stigma around boys and men who are victims of SA perpetrated by women — especially conventionally attractive women. In general, when a boy is victimized by a woman or an older girl, he is considered un-manly if he doesn’t “enjoy” his assault**.
He is often overtly accused of being gay if that sex was unwanted or if he feels he suffered negative effects as a result of not being able to give consent — as if all heterosexual boys and men automatically give sexual consent to any woman in any circumstance just by virtue of being guys.
Boys who were harmed by women are implied to have “Lucky Bastard Syndrome”, a degrading term that refers to a man or boy who talks about the negative effects of having sexual interactions with a significantly older woman when he was a child or non-consensual sex with any woman once he is an adult. The term implies a boy or man has no right to complain about any heterosexual interaction — despite the fact that the interaction may legally qualify as abuse, rape or other sexual assault.
The phrase was coined by smug professional troll Bill Maher on his show Politically Incorrect a decade ago. He laughs, mocking victims of abuse while talking about a study out of UCLA that identified a startling percentage of high school and college-aged boys who had been sexually victimized by women.
Maher took the opportunity not only to mock them, but to imply that the boys who are preyed upon by adult women should be grateful.
Note: the video of Maher below is heartbreaking in its casual cruelty.
Sickening, right?
When Chris Brown (yes, the singer/dancer convicted of committing domestic violence against Rihanna, his then-girlfriend) told of “losing his virginity”* at the age of 8 to a girl aged 14 or 15, many people cheered. This, along with his admission that he’d seen a lot of p9rn9graphy before that age hanging out with older boys in the country, was seen as evidence of his sexual prowess and masculinity.
Others, however, saw this scenario as an example of grooming and child sexual assault. Legally, it likely was, and the fact that I personally despise Brown due to the violence he inflicted upon at least one woman is irrelevant to the fact that this should not have happened to an 8 year-old.
Maher is far from the only person to openly mock boys and men who are victims of female sexual perpetrators, but apathy is the more common way in which boys are shown to be less deserving of protection from exploitative heterosexual sexual contact. There are countless “humorous” examples of boys and men being sexually harassed or even raped by women on TV and in movies that we’ve become desensitized to it. However, in almost all of these scenes if the victim’s and perpetrator’s genders were swapped, there would be outrage (and justifiably so).
For proof, watch this collection of “funny” clips of men and boys being SA’d by women in some of the most popular movies and TV shows. You’ll be surprised by how many of these scenes you’ve probably seen before.
I’m rarely a proponent of “gender swapping” in thought experiments (men often have more systematic power than women, therefore these examples are rarely accurate enough to be helpful), but in the United States, everyone has the same civil rights and legal protections no matter the gender of either party. So, in this case, I think a gender-swapping thought experiment is appropriate.
In other words: If you don’t think a 13 year-old girl can consent to sex with a 24 year-old teacher due to their age and power disparity, you should agree that a 13 year-old boy cannot consent to sex with a woman the same age.
And yet these stories continue to be played for laughs, as if we all agreed that boys and men are inherently too sexual to be anything other than mindless monsters who would never say “no” to heterosexual sex with any woman.
These messages make society more dangerous for anyone of any gender
When it comes to female-perpetrated SA and CSA against men and boys, guys receive the following messages on a regular basis:
that their value as men lies in their sexual conquests
that they should shut down any part of themselves that wants sex to be emotionally meaningful if casual sex is presented to them
that they should disregard the “no” voice in their own minds
that mutual and enthusiastic consent isn’t all that important in sexual interactions
Read that list again and let it sink in — then let me know if you still think this gendered double standard isn’t problematic.
Joanna Schroeder is a writer and media critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Esquire and more. She also serves as managing editor of the Experts division at YourTango. Social media links and representation info available via LinkTree.
Notes and disclaimers:
*note: I’m using the term ‘losing virginity’ here a casual language to indicate a person’s first penetrative sex, but I actually don’t subscribe to the notion of virginity at all. More details about why the construct of “virginity” is problematic are available here.
**note 2: Saying “enjoy” here is a little tricky because a victim can experience physical pleasure during a sexual assault. That’s because sexual response is a reflex, controlled by the central nervous system in the spine. While a negative emotional state may impede normal sexual response, this is not always the case. This distinction is key, as many victims of CSA and SA feel guilty or complicit if their central nervous system reacted to the assault with a reflexive sexual response. In truth, sexual response is NOT an indication of complicity and is not a substitute for enthusiastic, affirmative consent. Many predators know this and will exploit this reflex and associated guilt/complicity to silence victims.
Brava, Joanna! Thank you for highlight this issue. I'll be sharing.
I would think there is some sort of "PTSD" that these boys suffer from these forced CSA.
In the "world of psychology", what would be the the behavior of these boys from the PTSD from these experiences as adults?