Many years ago I cooked in a small diner, and the owner’s 13-year-old daughter would wash the dishes on weekends and during the summer. It so happened that this 13YO was built like a full-grown woman, was unusually talented at applying her makeup, and had a more “adult” fashion sense. Basically, she looked like a supermodel (except she had curves). One day, she was putting away some clean glasses behind the counter, and a young man who wasn’t a regular customer started chatting her up. I heard him ask for her phone number. I was about to speak up, but the girl asked him how old he was before I could speak. The guy said he was 26, and she said, “Oh, I’m only 13.” Lemme tell you, I’d never seen somebody in such a hurry to pay his bill and leave
Men can be very bad at judging ages. By the time I was 30, I’d noticed that I could barely tell the difference between a 17-year-old and a 21-year-old based solely on appearance. And as I’ve gotten older, that age gap has widened (though now I tend to make the mistake in the other direction, so that 23-year-olds look like teenagers to me). When I was 37 I formed a band with some friends, and we booked a gig at a local bar. At the time, I didn’t drink and I hadn’t set foot in a bar in almost 10 years. I got up on stage for that first gig, looked out at the crowd, and my very first thought was, “Holy shit, is anybody checking I.D. around here?” because I was sure I was looking at a bunch of high school kids.
Some teenagers look like children, some teenagers look like 20 somethings. You see a bunch of hot girls around and without checking their ID you don’t know their actual ages, you just assume the ones you find hot are 20 somethings and the ones that look like children are teenagers. That is not always true, I had a GF that looked to be in her teens well into her 30s and after three kids.
Actress Kelly Stables, with the right makeup and wardrobe, could easily play a teenager. She’ll be 39 in January. It helps that she’s only 4 feet, 11 inches tall.
As the mother of an 11 year old in the first stages of puberty, I have been paying attention to how other girls around that age are developing. I am pretty sure that there must be at least a girl in her class that already got her period, and yet they all look to me like kids with tiny mounds, incipient acne, and very awkward looking bodies. This is, physically, the least attractive a female will ever be.
I have never used the word pubescent to describe a fully mature individual.
Although I don’t fit that particular demographic, the answer to your question is no.
Sad to think the OP was ready to dump this poor guy because of his “cave man” remark, which on the face of it is far from demonstrating that he’d lunge at random pubescent females on the street.
(for some reason, I’m reminded of a story in Gerold Frank’s “The Boston Strangler”. He describes a man who (during the height of the panic) mentioned to his girlfriend that one easy way to get a woman to open her apartment door would be to meow like a kitten. She became terrified and reported him to the police as a Strangler suspect.)
When I was 12 I spent the summer (June through early August) with my brother and sister-in-law at their new home a few states away from my Home. I started my period for the first time while we drove to their state. My boobs “budded” at age 9 (my SIL remarked upon them with that term at that time so that visual has stuck.) It meant my nipples had gotten slightly larger and the fat was starting to show up behind them. It takes a few years for enough fat to show up to be called “boobs”. By that time (12 years old) I was a mere 38B and had no butt… but I had some thighs (I walked a lot, walked coonhounds, rode bike and was just plain old active).
My SIL spent that summer telling guys “she’s 12” because I looked like I was at least 18. I was told this when I went with my SIL to visit her Boss who had a 12 year old daughter. That daughter happened to have several girl friends over when we stopped by. I had on make-up (I had bad acne back then so foundation caked on along with cover-up sticks etc was just normal for me … I still have acne 30+ years later but not as bad as back then) and a dress with high heels. I was 5’ 6" back then and about 120lbs. All the girls thought I was an adult/at least 18.
When the guys found out I was 12 they all backed off but you/I could see in the eyes a few didn’t care about my age but the fact I was probably still a virgin made me even more want-able. That turns some guys on very much. My big brother being a bit crazy, muscular and not one shy to get in a fight probably kept me safe.
I was a virgin but I still enjoyed the looks, whistles and the guys talking to me (but no touching in nono places) even if I had a few years to go before I was really ready for that . I did not want to be a preggo high school drop-out (fighting precedence because my family didn’t set the bar very high). By the time I hit high school my school system had “tracks” that the expectant moms could go on to graduate and have had experience to get a job ie hair dresser, CNA, cosmetologist etc.
Yes most men find some teenage girls physically attractive at least some of the time.
Attraction is not something we consciously choose (we can only choose how to act on it) and physically-speaking once a girl has boobs, butt and curvy legs, it will ding the part of guys’ brains wired to look for such things, why wouldn’t it?
Note also that the difference between a girl of 16 and a woman of 26 can be far less pronounced than between a boy of 16 and man of 26. Women in this thread who are appalled at the guys: are you confident you could always tell the difference?
Having said all that, it’s weird what the guy in the OP said. Firstly in the context of that conversation he seems to be implying men preferentially like very young girls, and that’s much more debatable. It’s certainly not true in my case. And “tantilising” suggests it’s something he actively wrestles with.
For the time being, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt…people say odd things on dates because of nerves. But it’s strike 1.
I don’t get why people are discussing the meaning of pubescent. The guy clarifies that he means women “in puberty.” As in, still going through it. Not post-pubescent, which we’d all pretty much agree is normal.
I think that, to an extent, what he says is true. Attraction isn’t some sort of on/off switch. So I can see how the signals that someone is sexually mature can start to be arousing, even before the process is finished. And, yes, men are, as a general rule, attracted to younger partners, as youth signals health. There’s a reason that all the “hot” female celebrities are either young or deliberately avoid looking older through various means.
Still, having said that, it still sounds incredibly creepy in the context given. If he really did use the word “pubescent” and “tantalizing,” that seems really strange. To be honest, if this was a date, it seems really, really strange to be bringing up attraction to anyone else.
The OP mentions France–is there perhaps a language barrier? Maybe what he is trying to say is being lost in translation and there are cultural differences on what is acceptable to talk about on a date. (Even if he’s speaking English, if it’s a second language for him, he may be thinking in French and “translating”, at least for some words.)
I think what the guy in the OP was saying is that while it may appear the French aren’t so hung up on youth as we are here, the reality is quite different and that French men often find even pubescent girls sexually appealing. In other words, he was just making an observation. Not a big deal and certainly not worth ending an otherwise promising relationship over.
I remember back when the Roman Polanski scandal was in the news, it was widely believed that in France sex with 13-year-old girls was not considered all that unusual and people there couldn’t understand what the big deal was. Perhaps the guy in the OP, being 46 himself, grew up while some of those attitudes still existed.
And speaking of Polanski and in the context of the question raised in the OP, I’m reminded of something Polanski once said to writer Martin Amis in an interview:
I will confess, as an “old” male who finds teenaged girls sexually attractive, and who can be socially awkward and not know how to talk on a date … I would never use the word “pubescent” in any sexual context. The word I would use, if I was stupid enough to use it on a date, would be “adolescent”. To me, “pubescent” implies a child who is just beginning the transformation to adulthood (physically), while “adolescent” implies a child who is right on the cusp of adulthood (physically). As a male, “pubescent” was that time in my life when my voice was changing and every time I answered the telephone the person on the other end heard my voice and thought I was my mother. To me, a “pubescent” girl is a “little girl”, while an “adolescent” girl is “damn, I’d be happy to ‘hit that’ as soon as she’s legal!”
My wife knows that I look at younger women, including teenaged girls. But, as I told her, I’ve made it a point to never be alone with one of them, even when I was single. This came up after my wife and I went to the local karaoke bar. A younger woman there wanted to talk to me, outside, alone. I went to my wife and told her this. My wife, at that moment, didn’t understand why I was telling her this. The fact was that, dammit, I needed to step outside for a cigarette. But that younger woman was out there waiting … and I wasn’t going to go out there alone. Sure, she was more than legal age, and she was hella attractive, but, dammit, I wasn’t willing to put myself in that position. So I spelled it out to my wife and brought her outside with me.
Agreed. Keep in mind that for many, many thousands of years, the human lifespan was 30 years or so. They would hit puberty in the early teens, have kids, hopefully live long enough to raise them till they had their own kids, then they would die off.
Mother Nature hasn’t caught up with medical advances that keep us alive longer. So yeah, when a 14 or 15 year old gal in full bloom walks by, I’ll admire the scenery.
This matches my own observations. Men may start finding girls attractive as they develop sexually, but if a guy informed me that he thought this stage of life was particularly tantalizing to his loins, my skin crawl.
Yes, so many of the posts conflate these two things. I’m guessing a disproportion of them are written by females*, who may just not understand the male mind (or we theirs). Or maybe some guys are actually different**, but I doubt many straight guys are really not attracted to underage girls with physical attributes of women, especially if sexualized in their dress and actions, no absolute lower age cutoff. Decent guys don’t act on it and keep it to themselves certainly insofar as it might traumatize the object of such attraction, and for self interested basic reasons don’t generally advertise it to age appropriate partner would beat them about the head for talking about it.
*obviously there have been more than a few cases of adult female teachers actually acting improperly with male teenage students, so stands to reason others feel it but don’t act. Still I think some of this is probably male/female difference.
**not counting gay men either way. They are still fighting a residual stereotype that they are more likely than straight men to actually sexually abuse kids, it’s a political issue essentially, and that IMO probably affects the discussion of whether they are attracted to underage teenagers but don’t act.
Agreed. SWMBO catches me eyeing a young hottie every once in a while, and she just snickers. She says I remind her of an old hound dog asleep on the porch. When a fire engine goes by with the red lights flashing and the siren going off, I’ll raise my head and thump my tall, because I just know I’m supposed to get up and chase it. Then I sigh and go back to sleep and wait for her to rub my ears.
Sometimes men think women are a mystery but know everything about both their own sexuality and male sexuality, then a thread like this comes along and it shows many (not all) women are just as baffled about the basics of male sexual attraction as men are about womens.
As has been pointed out numerous times in this thread there is a long, long distance for properly socialized men in modern, first world cultures from “noticing” the budding sexual attractiveness aspect of a young girl developing breasts and curves to acting on that notice and pursuing her. And beyond this, this “noticing” behavior in men is generally highly compartmentalized. You can notice, with interest, a girl’s budding sexuality without desiring in the least to want to make a move on her. Women often seem not to understand (or even believe if explained) this aspect that male “notice” does not necessarily mean, for most men, “want to fuck”. For a lot of women these two things are immutably welded together and in reality they are not. It’s like admiring a beautiful painting in gallery without wanting to steal it.
The OP’s boyfriend sounds just like a doper making some bio-sociological observation/pontification that may be true in the abstract, but will get people so disposed going “Ewww…Oh God! creepazoid!” if uttered in real life because he dared to say it out loud. If the OP is going to get this exercised over these kinds of awkward observations she needs to drop him because it is likely he will continue do it.
