Most Men [And Some Women] Want

Sex With Teenagers: Is It Pedophilia?

Earlier this month, when 28-year-old Orange County English teacher Sarah Bench-Salorio was charged with molesting two of her underage male students, the public reacted with the mix of outrage and titillation that usually attends such cases.

Yes, people, were condemning this woman’s actions—alleged actions; she just pleaded not guilty—but many observers (mostly men, it must be said) remarked only half-jokingly that these 13-year-old boys were lucky [allegedly], that what happened to them was not so much molestation [allegedly] as a dream come true.

After all, almost every schoolboy is hot for teacher at some point, and wouldn’t it be fantastic if teacher was just as hot for you?

But the situation is very different when the genders are reversed. Sure, most men are obviously, undeniably attracted to certain aspects of immature female sexuality:

From "barely legal" websites to Britney in that "Hit Me Baby, One More Time" schoolgirl video, the erotic appeal of the Lolita is a creepy but potent force in American pop culture.

But, ideally, these girls are actually young women, comfortably above the age of consent, playing dress-up in pigtails and plaid skirts.

Japan Pushes the Envelope

Lolicon is a slang word for the phrase "Lolita complex".

The phrase is a reference to Vladimir Nabokov's book, Lolita, in which a much older man becomes sexually obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl.

In Japan, the term is used to describe an attraction to girls below the age of consent, or an individual attracted to such a person.

Outside Japan, the term most often refers to a genre of manga and anime where childlike female characters are depicted in a sexualized manner or engaged in sexually explicit acts.

The equivalent term for the sexualization of or attraction to young boys is shotacon.

Bura-Sera

These sugar daddies are usually middle-aged, married men with children of their own. Why do they pay so much, and take such great risks, to have sex with young girls?

Many describe this craving as “tamaranai”, an “uncontrollable attraction”, which hardly seems to excuse the fact that they’re exploiting girls their daughter’s age.

“Lolicon” (Lolita complex) and “bura-sera” (the erotic fascination with schoolgirls) are crucial aspects of modern Japanese sexuality.

The ubiquitous sailor-suit school uniform is as important a feature of Japanese pornography as breast implants are in Western porn.

Bura-sera also drives the thriving trade in used panties.

Tragic Britney, brought down just like Lolita

One of the saddest little public dramas of our times, captured daily by gleeful paparazzi, is the ongoing nervous breakdown of the pop star Britney Spears.

Last week it emerged that Spears's ex-husband, Kevin Federline, a dancer and aspiring rapper known as K-Fed, is seeking primary physical custody of their two young boys, on the grounds that she is not in a fit state to bring them up happily and safely.

That grim news comes against the lurid backdrop of a string of other recent Spears stories:

That a plump, post-partum Britney - dressed for a pole-dancing video shoot in a minuscule leather bustier - abandoned the project, sobbing, later to canoodle topless with a grinning stranger in a hot tub.

That she spectacularly wrecked an OK! magazine photo-shoot by letting her Yorkshire terrier defecate on one dress, wiping greasy hands on another, and wandering off with a substantial haul of the designer sample goods.

The impression of a woman in mental freefall is accentuated by Spears's ever-changing wigs: earlier this year, she suddenly shaved all her hair off with a pair of clippers. It is dubious how much those in her immediate circle are doing to help.

Spears's breakdown reminds me of a tragedy contained within a novel, and the novel in question is Nabokov's Lolita, the story of how Humbert Humbert, a fastidious European aesthete and paedophile, seduced and destroyed a 12-year-old American girl.

Lolita, despite the furore caused by its subject matter, has always seemed to me an intensely sad and moral novel.

It exposes not only Humbert's chillingly selfish fascination with exploiting the precocious sexuality of "Lola, the bobby-soxer", but also his towering indifference to the fact that he has ruined her character and future prospects.

Her school observes that she has become "antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey", and when she leaves Humbert, it is for the arms of another predator, until she finally winds up pregnant, penniless and married to a much older man.

Remember the then 16-year-old Britney Spears in 1998, bright-eyed, confident and lithe, gyrating sensationally in her school uniform while singing the ambiguous lyrics: "Hit me baby one more time".

The phenomenon that was Spears allowed middle-aged men who would otherwise have felt embarrassed about ogling schoolgirls to be roguishly open about fancying Britney.

The talented, God-fearing Spears, of course, was 16 and not 12: but wasn't it, in retrospect, all more than a little creepy, including the very public obsession with Spears's virginity and when she was going to lose it?

Now, aged 26 and the mother of two children born in quick succession, Spears herself doesn't seem to know how to age: she is dead-eyed and disorientated, pushing herself into ever shorter and tighter clothing, confusedly court-ing attention while seeming sickened by it.

She appears to want to remain in a hyper-sexual girlhood, even as time and circumstances require her to act like a grown-up.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the world's lascivious attention acted like that of a collective Humbert Humbert upon the teenage Britney.

Its price has been her psychological ruination, from which she will need considerable help to recover.

Yet, once, millions of little girls wanted to be Spears, a just slightly older girl drooled over by millions of adult men.

Now that she is in trouble, her role will be usurped by younger stars, such as soap celebrities and girl band members.

Little girls are suckers for glamour in its most lurid form, from Barbie to the big-breasted, long-tressed Katie Price, also known as the topless model Jordan.

At no time in history has the message been pumped out so forcefully to pre-pubescent girls that the primary import of any woman's life is to be sexually desirable to men.

What follows from that message in less stellar lives, one suspects, is a brief flurry of coquettish triumphs followed by decades of eating disorders, plastic surgery, and quiet self-loathing.

A Government-commissioned report concluded last week that black boys were being similarly let down by their role models.

It suggested that instead of focusing almost exclusively on black rappers and footballers, it might be time for the media also to remind schoolchildren of black men and women who have risen in the law, medicine, finance or the police.

At present, the most ubiquitous image of an adult black man, offered up for apparent admiration in music videos and films, is of a muscular gangster who profits from crime, drives a souped-up car and is surrounded by subservient female eye-candy.

It is, perhaps, heavily ironic that the two great social movements of the late 20th century were the rise of feminism and of black civil rights.

Their leaders, who preached an aspirational, political message of access to the echelons of genuine power, would weep to see the stereotypical role models that the consumer industry routinely dangles today before young girls and black boys.

It is hard for the teenage coquette to age happily, and the violent drug-dealer to stay out of jail.

These days, children have got to be careful what they wish to be when they grow up. The terrifying thing is, it just might happen.

tags: sex  teenage  lolita  complex  culture  paedophilia  

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