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Boys, Girls & Sexual Pressure
June 30, 2009
Something’s terribly wrong when a 14-year-old girl thinks suicide is the only way to escape her boyfriend’s insistence on having sex.
Visibly upset, a father told me recently that his daughter was so distraught by the pressure her boyfriend put on her to have sex that she thought suicide would be easier than continuing to resist him. She confided in a teacher, who alerted the father, who found the girl a therapist. After assuring him that therapy was a good idea, I asked him, “What happened to the boy?”
“The boy?” he asked.
“Yes, the boy who pressured your daughter. The boy who pressured her so much she was ready to kill herself to avoid him. What happened to him?”
“Nothing, I guess,” said the father.
Nothing? Why was this being treated as the girl’s problem? Why was the boy free to treat another girl the same way with nary a word of reprimand? If he had bullied a boy to near-suicide, he would have been punished. Should sexual bullying be treated differently? I don’t think so.
I encouraged the father to talk to the boy’s parents or discuss the situation with a counselor from the teens’ school. My hope, I told him, would be for an adult to talk with the boy about respecting boundaries and about his own sexual decision-making.
Sharing Sexual Responsibility
Females have historically been the sexual gatekeepers within male-female relationships, burdened with the task of protecting their virginity, honor and reputation by holding off male sexual advances until marriage. I won’t get into an historical analysis of this tradition, but I will argue for equity: It’s time for males to share the responsibility for saying no when the situation calls for it, to respect a partner’s boundaries, and, when the time is right for both partners to say Yes, to share the responsibility for protection against pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
Let’s get back to the family introduced earlier. The father began our conversation by asking whether he responded correctly when his daughter changed his cell phone ring tone to a song lyric in which a male used degrading language to demand oral sex from a female.
When the father discovered the new ring tone, he explained to his daughter how inappropriate her actions were. He said he told her, “Suppose that ring tone went off when I was with parents of your friends? Can you imagine what they would think of me?”
He was wise to get her to consider the ramifications of her actions, and I suggested they also discuss her choice of song. What message was the singer putting across, and how did that make his daughter feel as a female?
I’m grateful that a conversation about a teachable moment opened the door to a much more important conversation about this girl’s suicidal episode. It was an example of what parents should do: take an off-hand remark, a song on the radio, a TV commercial, or a news story, and use it to start a conversation about sexuality, sexual health, and sexual responsibility.
Too often, these conversations take place between mothers and daughters, with sons left to come to their own conclusions and make their own rules. Parents, it’s time to step up to the plate. Talk to your sons about the pressures they face to be sexually active, the pressure they may be putting on partners, and the ramifications of the choices they make.
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