I would say that people’s perceptions from country to country certainly change in consideration to the legal age of consent. I still have difficulty in considering a 16 year old male in this country to be a viable sex partner for me purely because I grew up in a place where, until recently, it would’ve been statutory rape. I’d ick myself out thinking about it, even though I’d legally be supported in doing so. If I’d grown up without cultural messages telling me that my thinking was somehow wrong/whatever, I’d probably be a lot less icked out* and be diving into the sweet twinkie goodness.
*Yes, it’s a technical term, doncha know.
I remember being a 16 year old female and getting that sort of attention from a man old enough to be my father.
creeped me out in a serious way. As, apparently, according to the description in the thread, was the young woman in question.
And, to add to it all, Danalan seemed to have been bragging about this incident, seeing it as amusing.
While he may have been absolutely certain that he and his beer guzzling friend (and by the way, anyone else wonder why no one’s ragging on them for drinking & driving? - It seemed obvious that the driver in particular was known for his drinking), anyhow, they may have been certain that they wouldn’t have ‘done anything’.
however, she was in a car with two men (who she’d thought she could trust, after all, they were friends of her friends father fercryin out loud), she’d never met before, they’d been drinking, were intending to drink more, and suddenly they’re commenting on her underwear? and apparently amused by it?
no, I"m not saying illegal. I’m saying definately creepy and not very nice, either.
I thought the behavior described was crass and boorish, and would have been the same if applied to a sixteen year old, and twenty-one year old, or a forty year old.
I don’t believe the age of the girl is an issue, except perhaps in the recognition that sixteen year old females may not have had as much time to develop self-protective awareness as forty year old females.
Rude, however, is rude.
But the OP goes beyond that. It describes this event as “sexual exploitation” which is, in fact, a criminal offense. Disavowing that notion, the OP then goes on to clarify that it’s not a crime, but an indecent display of behavior, that is complained of.
I think “sexual exploitation,” if not used to describe a criminal act, is an emotionally-charged description. There are certain feminist academics that would have us believe that all sex is rape; that all marriage is slavery, and the use of “sexual exploitation” here seems to fit into that mindset.
I don’t agree it’s the correct term to use here.
- Rick
Okay, it’s 5:30 in the AM, so maybe my reading comprehension skills are failing me, but doesn’t close reading reveal that it was only his friend that made an inappropriate comment?
As it is, I think some of us are taking him to task for hanging out with a friend whose inappropriateness meter is a touch out of whack. And possibly for not having the most finely honed surreptitious glancing skills.
Would it be better, perhaps, if he were more proficient at glancing up girls skirts without getting caught? She wouldn’t have caught him, and wouldn’t have been so icked out. Is that honestly a better scenario?
Yeah, yeah, an ideal scenario is one where neither he nor his friend looked. But come on, put two straight, non-geriatric guys in a truck with a high school cheerleader - hotness is more or less implied - wearing a mini-skirt, straddling the gearbox, and I’ll give you 75:1 odds that the passenger, at least, will give a downward glance or two.
As for the perceived bragging, I think it was more the telling of an anecdote that, if not for the fact that the girl was made uncomfortable, would have been at least kinda funny, albeit in an odd and surreal kind of way. I mean, come on, the Hello Kitty vibrator is a laugh riot and HK panties aren’t?
Addressing **KKBattousai{/B]'s comments, IMO only:
Both he and his friend openly looked when they thought they’d seen that she wasn’t wearing panties, and both laughed; the original poster in that thread said he said “Hello!” to her - after looking in the region of her “kitty”. The friend took a while to figure it out and finally realizing what the cartoon kitten was, said “Hello Kitty”, so both of them commented on what her undies had on them.
Sure, Hello Kitty undies are funny and odd, but making a girl, who’s the daughter of your friend, embarrassed over her underwear is very tacky, and liable to get your friend incensed at you. Hello Kitty vibrators are funny but no one is talking about them in context of being used at the time, like giving one to a teenage girl who likes Sanrio.
He was talking about her in the post in a leering fashion, and how they ** thought** she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all (check the paragraph about how there weren’t any apparent undies, just a dark area, and how they had to look). They openly looked up her skirt and after not seeing the expected “commando” state, they laughed about/commented on her undies. If someone did that to me today, they’d be lucky if I didn’t slap them, and I’d sure as hell chew them out, and tell others what total pervs they were; back when I was 16 I’d have been scared and humiliated.
If the post had been along the lines of “this friend’s daughter had to straddle the gearbox in the truck, and so shifting obviously posed a problem, and with her tight skirt riding up we thought she wasn’t wearing any underwear until we caught a glimpse of her Hello Kitty underwear, and it just seemed so funny to us in context that we cracked up”, I’d have thought it was more amusing. The blow-by-blow description of how close they were getting to her “cherry”, and the leering over the thought that she might have no panties on at all, only to get a glimpse of “kitty” when they did look, is what I didn’t like.
… preview is my friend.
Hmm… of two minds.
Real world, practical evolutionary side says it’s silly to affirm that an attractive, budding 17 year old girl in a mini-skirt is not a potentially sexually interesting creature to a man. Turning the corner off the main road a few months ago I saw my neighbor’s 16 year old daughter from the back at a slight distance in a skin tight pair of pants and top and thought “Wow”, assuming she was a nearby college student, as I got closer she happened to cross the street, recognized me and waved. A bit stunned I waved back .
Now, she was none the wiser and the context change was probably 2-3 seconds from hardbody outline to positive ID as young neighbor, but it was an slightly oogy experience even thinking this way about someone who calls me “Mr. Astro”.
About a half year before the mis-identification incident I was visiting her mother and this young girl (then 16 or early 17) was going to the beach with her friends and popped downstairs into the living room in an itsy bitsy, teenie weeny two piece bikini. Now she was, and is, an athlete and there not an ounce of fat on her body and all the female pieces were in perfect alignment on top of her very long legs and athletic little rear end. Her mother commented that she needed a higher SPF tanning lotion and them remarked to me offhand how she had looked like that once many moons ago, until she noticed my embarrassment and told her daughter to go upstairs put on some shorts and finish getting ready.
Which brings us to the second mind of appropriate social behavior. While it is normal, on a neural hardware basis, to be visually interested in an attractive, budding 16 year old, a grown man should not leering and trying to sneak little panty glances at this socially and culturally ptotected class of people. There is an assumed period of time from approximately 15-18 where young girls are given some dispensation from being actively considered sexual objects by most adult men with any sense of social responsibility and good form.
It was pretty creepy listening to Danalan’s and his friends sweaty little truck ride and gleeful tag team humilation of the young girl at the end. IMO it was indicative of a adult man with poor manners and an adolescent maturity level. The truly oogy part is not the girl-spread legs-panty scenario, but the fact that there is a reasonably intelligent, grown man thinking that this little drama was highly amusing and something he really needed to share with everyone. How low do you have to go on the personal social mores ladder to get to that place?
Jeez, I’m in Astro’s postion here. On the one hand, it is not wrong to view a 16-year-old in a sexual manner. We’re hardwired to find youth attractive, given that in just an eyeblink ago in the history of our species, girls would be married at 16, mothers by 20, and dead by 35. It’s not unnatural to notice a girl in bloom, but it is disgraceful to take advantage, as Danalan and the other jerk clearly did.
The boundary of decent behavior was crossed by treating the girl as an object, noit a person; by the disgracefully laddish behavior which is a mark of serious immaturity in a man in his 40s; and by the humilation of the girl at the end.
She probably felt invaded and deeply creeped out by Danalan’s trangressive behavior. I’ll bet she cried her eyes out after she got home.
Shameful.
Did you guys high five after you dropped her off?
seriously, why didnt you just ask her to move her legs?
Did you guys high five after you dropped her off?
seriously, why didnt you just ask her to move her legs?
Or, you know, they could have let her sit on the side closest to the passenger door. But then they would have had to sit next to each other, and maybe even touch each other, and it might have turned them gay or something.
Word, Anahita.
Okay, they found her attractive. That I can understand. A few subtle glances, fine. But to keep oogling, and then, when she ASKED them if they were looking up her skirt, instead of appologizing and saying, “Sorry,” or something, to LAUGH and then comment on her panties?
Plus, instead of “spread your legs babe,” which kind of creeped me out, how about, “Um, would you mind moving your legs? Thanks.”
This sort of thing would have me in tears. When I was sixteen, I probably would have told my friend’s father.
And then MY father.
I was this girl ten years ago. My friend’s father bought a new convertible and took his son and I out for a spin. I sat in the cramped, slouchy back seat and they sat in the front. A few miles out I realized that my friend’s dad was looking down my shirt with the rear view mirror. I sat back and pulled my shirt back up a bit and he blatantly readjusted the mirror and craned his neck. You all know how windy it is in a back seat of a convertible, and it was all I could do to keep my shirt in place, with him ogling me the entire time. At one point I turned to the side, and kind of leaned against the door to try and shield myself with the seat. At the next light, he moved his seat back saying his legs were “cramped” and I was forced back into the center of the backseat and directly into his line of view. By now I was humiliated, confused, and completely unsure of how to respond. He topped off this exercise in objectification by leering at his son (my SO at the time) and saying “Now I see why you’re downstairs (in his basement bedroom) so often” nudgenudge winkwink. I wanted to puke. This was a man three times my age who often gave me lifts home alone. I had never felt unsafe around him before, but I didn’t ever get into a car with him again.
You owe that girl an apology Danalan. Maybe she thought it was no big deal, but it wouldn’t hurt to let her know you’re sorry for being such an ass, just in case she really was disturbed by the situation. Sexy or not, she was just a kid and you obviously embarrassed her. Or worse, made her fear for her safety, question her own judgement, and possibly blame herself for you and your friend’s inappropriate actions. “Natural reaction” or not, that’s a pretty shitty way to make a fellow human being feel.
bella
(devil’s advocate)
Guinastasia said: “And then MY father.”
I don’t know about YOUR father…but I know MY father would have gone nuts
I find Danalan’s response really incomprehensible. Say she had been 18 and thus legal pretty much everywhere. Say everyone in the truck were single and unattached, and Danalan really was considering making a pass of some kind.
IS THAT HOW YOU FUCKING DO IT?
Is it? Is that kind of behavior likely to get you laid, since that’s obviously what was on your mind? Did you think she’d be flattered and, in a husky voice out of a porn flick, say, “Would you like to see a little more?” What kind of a creep’s fantasy world do you live in? “Ha ha ha, when she turned really red and felt exposed and vulnerable and horrified and nauseated by us creepy older men, that was REALLY FUCKING FUNNY!”
I’ve got a beautiful 16-year-old sister, and if anyone acted this way toward her he would be very sorry, very soon. I hope she tells the entire incident to her father, though she probably won’t because she’s feeling horrible about it.
And for God’s sake I hope no one says, “She shouldn’t have been dressed that way in the first place.” Go back to the Taliban.
I think the post would have been funnier if it had not been written so salaciously, and instead was about the extreme discomfort most adult males encounter when they find themselves attracted to ‘off-limits’ young girls, but the story wouldn’t have been the same. He would have been the one blushing, and avoiding looking at her, and being extremely polite in conversation.
I haven’t run into this too much because I don’t have any guilt about being attracted teenage girls. I would never act on that attraction, not just because of the legal aspects, but because I’ve found that women I’ve dated who were in their early 20s were too immature to be very compatible with me, I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have a 16 year old girlfriend. I have had one situation where I crossed my own lines, unintentionally.
I was picking up my stepdaughter at the local elementary school (grades K through 6). For safety they have the older students come out to the cars of the waiting parents and ask them which child they are there to pick up, then they go get them and escort them out to the car. Anyway, I pull up and am lost in thought when someone taps on my window. I look up and a cute and rather shapely teenage girl is there, I roll down the window to see what she wants, and she asks me which kid I’m there for. I tell her my stepdaughter’s name, and as she walks away I’m looking at her and wondering why they have someone from the high school there, usually it was the 6th graders. Then, when she’s coming back I get a better look at her face, and I realize she’s a lot younger than I thought at first - she IS a 6th grader.
That had me very uncomfortable for a while, and I wasn’t really ogling her or fantasizing about her at all, I’d just noticed she was cute in a way that you shouldn’t think of 11 year olds as cute. I didn’t do or say anything to make her uncomfortable, though, and felt considerable guilt about it.
Uh, should have clarified. People who say women shouldn’t dress however they want in order to avoiding arousing unacceptable urges in men are the ones who should go back to the Taliban.
Of course it is a stupid argument. zen101 was being sarcastic.
From the voice of the post in question, I’d be shocked if the truck didn’t have truck nuts attached. I expect an account of the barn dance and hootenany that followed afterwards.
I’m not outraged. I’m not impressed,either.