Sexual Predators: A Double Standard

Yesterday I read an excellent post on Blue Collar Atheist about sexual harassment, and after watching this video this morning on TheYoungTurks channel I felt it I needed to look at my own views, my own possible double standard when it comes to sexual advances towards a teenage boy on the part of a young, attractive woman. 

I am in no way going to deny that there is indeed a double standard in public opinion with regards to this issue. If a 24 year old man made sexual advances towards a 15 year old girl no one would be discussing whether or not that man is a sexual predator. On the other hand, when people look at this attractive, young, blonde woman hitting on a young, virile 15 year old boy, it doesn’t seem to be the same. As Cenk put it, if it had happened to him at that age “best day of my life!”

I’m not going to discount all that, but I want to counter it with a hypothetical of my own. When I was 15 or 16, I was among the girls that were “old for their ages”. Unfortunately for me, I was also overweight and not considered all that attractive. If I was in a tanning salon and a 24 year old, smoking hot Will Smith-type came up to me topless and tried to kiss me, trust me Cenk, best day of my fucking life.

I suppose the source of the double standard lies in the fact that, as a society we assume that there are far more teenage boys than teenage girls that would welcome such advances. This stems partially from the “horny boy” stereotype and partially with our societal prejudices against women or girls who are sexually active and enjoy it. The “sluts” of this world are dismissed as the oddballs, not “proper”, not what girls or young women are “supposed to be”, whereas the horny teenage boy is exactly what we all expect. Neither of these stereotypes are fair, you don’t have to be a “slut” if you enjoy sex (or would die and go to heaven if a hot guy wanted to kiss you), and not all boys at that age are ready to have sex. They shouldn’t be ridiculed for not being ready or not appreciating the advances (as Hank Fox alluded to in his post) any more than a teenage girl should be ostracized for being ready to have sex. Sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances should be and are already illegal for completely different reasons: if the boy in this case was uncomfortable with her advances and did not want to have anything to do with her, she is undoubtedly a sexual predator. If, on the other hand he was considering it to be the “best day of his life” up until the point that his mom walked in the question thus becomes: what should the age of consent be? If there really is a double standard, should the age of consent be different for boys and girls?

I definitely do not think that there should be any difference, but I find it difficult to pin down an age. Teenagers are so variable in their physical, mental and emotional development that this question is incredibly difficult to answer. I have known 15 year olds that may as well have been 20, and others that may as well have been 10 and very easily manipulated. Then again I have also known legal adults that were easily manipulated, so where do we draw the line?

I definitely think that there should be a different age of consent when it comes to someone in a position of power over the minor, like a counsellor or babysitter etc. If the two people are completely unrelated, on the other hand, I feel like somewhere between 15 or 16 is fair enough. Once again, if there is a 15 year old that is not ready to be sexually active and resists the advances that is illegal for entirely different reasons, just as it is illegal to sexually harass an adult. For those that are ready to have some kind of relationship at that age, however, I say leave them be.

It would be nice to have some science back up my shot in the dark, if anyone knows of any studies conducted on cognitive development in this regard please let me know.

Hm, I'm Not Sure How I Feel About That...

Last week a good friend of mine from the US came to visit me, and since she is studying Sports Management I used the opportunity to first and foremost use it as an excuse to force her to watch a soccer match with me, and secondly to ask her a couple of questions regarding American sports in general. I know next to nothing about American football, so our Q&A brought us to a conversation about the state of women in sports. Italians live in a glass house on this issue, where apart from volleyball female sports leagues are virtually ignored. However I was aware of the existence of the WNBA, so I asked her if there was a similar league for women in American football. She said well… kind of. There is Lingerie Football, which is a serious league in that the women definitely play hard, by the rules and to win, just that they wear lingerie instead of a full uniform. My first response was

Hmm… I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I’ve had a few days to think it over, and I still find the source of ambiguity in my head. Why is that?

On the one hand, I am no ones morality police. I’m perfectly in favor of breastaurants, bikini Jell-O wrestling, strip clubs, porn and even prostitution. Women who want to work in the sex industry (or a merely sexualized one) know exactly what they are signing up for and I have absolutely zero problems with them doing so. There is no reason to believe that the women in the Lingerie league are coerced or somehow participating against their will, and I understand its commercial appeal to the many men who are into that sort of thing.

Also, looking more into it, I discovered a host of Wikipedia pages dedicated to previous female football leagues that were disbanded due to lack of interest and money. I do not think that it is an inherent right for women to be able to participate in any sporting event known to man, I understand that if people are not going to pay to watch it, it’s not going to happen. But still there is something that bugs me about the whole thing.

I suppose, after much thought, my issue lies in the fact that bikini Jell-O wrestling is not as analogous as it may initially seem. The difference is that, if a woman wants to box or wrestle professionally and not in their underwear for the sexual pleasure of men, they can. There is the option of stripping down and covering one’s self in Jell-O for the crowd, or there is the option not to do so. Instead, when it comes to football, if a woman wanted to play even semi-professionally she has no choice but to do so in Lingerie, and a quick look at the teams in the league will also tell you that physical attractiveness is (at best) as much of a deciding factor as skill when deciding who to accept onto the team.

The question thus becomes: are there many women that even want an athletic career in football? That is something that I cannot answer, I have no idea. What I can claim is that times are changing, we are moving away from the times when “girls” were not “supposed” to like football, demonstrated by the fact that more and more women are showing interest in the sport, as well as more and more men who are willing to admit that they don’t see the point in it. (This is something I also see here: at the European Cup finals last night I was in a crowd of at least 1000 people, and it was split 50:50 gender-wise).  Mere numbers aside, who would even be willing to invest a significant amount of money in creating a league that history has shown us to be a flop?

A brief search on the internet shows me that Women’s football in college does exist, kind of, in some places. Does anyone have better information about that? I would propose if colleges started to get serious about their female football teams, offering athletic scholarships to women for them and perhaps making it a slightly bigger deal in their sports departments, it might be the spark to generate some interest, being mixed in with “school spirit” and all that. Once again I am shooting from a dark corner of complete naïveté in this regard, so please do help me out if you know more about this.

Has it all been tried, and people just could not care less about seeing women in sports, especially football? Or have previous attempts failed because backers were just not putting enough effort into the idea?

Book Review: Deadly Waters

On we plough with the nonfiction, and this time we head over to Somalia with Jay Bahadur in Deadly Waters. A very young Canadian journalist travels to Puntland, a semi-autonomous (though not recognized as such) region where piracy is rampant.

No one can deny that the writing of this book took amazing courage. Few places in the world right now are less dangerous for foreigners than Puntland, and yet he just picked up his things one morning and took off. His journey was remarkable and some of his comments insightful, but I can’t say I loved this book the way I loved many of the others that I have read so far.

I suppose I found the writing style a little dry and disjointed, and for the first time I was having difficulty following the names of the people in the book, who they were and what their story was. I felt that the delivery of the history of Somalia was fragmented and incomplete in parts, as if he was trying to give the bare minimum in background information so that he could get on with the story. Although I will not call him a master of words in weaving a nonfiction story that you can’t put down, I’m not going to knock the actual research and effort that was put into this book.

I suppose if Somali piracy is something that is of particular interest to you, how it started and what their life is like, but you don’t actually know anything about it, this is the book for you. I appreciate that he really tries to get to all sides of the story to find the truth, something that all journalists are supposed to do and yet sadly very few do anymore. If, on the other hand Somalia and piracy are not something that will pique your interest in their own right I would not reccommend this book, as it lacks the mastery of certain authors that make you love the subject no matter what it is.

Oh Yea? Well... You're Mommy Is A Poopyhead!!

I’ve finally passed the first major hurdle of those crazy deadlines I was telling you about, enough to have a little time to squeeze in a story that’s been on my mind for the last few days. It seems as though it is only when I am at my busiest that people start pestering me with the silliest things, this time it was a friend of a friend on facebook that was trying to make the losing argument that FOX News is an excellent news source with well researched stories. 

It all started with my friend quoting an article from the blaze, where I told him how terribly he had hurt my feelings that he had stooped so low. He told me that he still loved me despite us being political worlds apart, to which I responded 

We don’t have to agree politically, I just wished you respected facts and journalistic integrity, neither of which can be found on the blaze or Fox News. 

At this point one of his friends decided to bogart the conversation, among other things accusing me of having a warped definition of journalistic integrity, which was funny, since I had never given one. I didn’t think he could possibly be serious, so I simply stated that Fox is not defensible, not if you’re literate. This sent him on a tirade of NBC and MSNBC suck you know! You’re telling me they’re better?! No I said, I’m not commenting on other news sources, I’m commenting on FOX, which is terrible, systemically biased, and a great source for ridiculous outbursts like “Amsterdam is a cesspool of corruption!”; “Tide goes in, tide goes out, you can’t explain that!”; “Now we all know that Jon Stewart is going to Hell” and so many more. He fired back with the same argument: other news sources are bad you know! You’re not aware that one time Chris Matthews told Hilary Clinton he’d help her?! 

 It didn’t matter how many times I tried to explain to him that the “well, other people suck too!” is not a valid argument he went back to it four times, after which I abandoned the conversation. While there was no point in letting the facebook flame wars we were having devolve any further as he was getting less and less coherent as time went on (at one point he accused me of having made a race-based argument, though making clear that he was not calling me a racist o.O), I felt the need to address this. 

If someone criticizes something that you like or respect, is your automatic reaction to 

A. Use that criticism to make assumptions about what that person likes or respects, and 

B. Use “well, what you like SUCKS!” as an argument? 

If you do, please stop, it’s a very silly argument. 

Leaving out the weird rambling racist analogy that my facebook rival was trying to formulate to address this issue, let me give you an analogy myself. 

I walk in to your apartment building, and immediately I notice that something is off. There’s a musty smell in the lobby, I can clearly see water damage on one side of the building, the security camera monitoring the front door is broken and the elevator door jams a lot. I tell you “damn, you’re apartment building really sucks!” 

You respond “yea, well, other apartment buildings on this block suck too you know! I saw paint peeling in the bathroom of number 8! And the doorman at number 5 is really rude! You can’t prove that my apartment building is the worst!” 

You’re right, I can’t, because to do so would require me investigating every inch of every apartment building on the block, which would honestly take far more time and effort than I am willing to put into this. I can say that I suspect your apartment building is the worst, given what I have seen so far, but for all I know the building next door has a devil’s gate to Hell hidden in the basement that I don’t know about. Also, you have to define what you mean by “worst”, worst in structure? Damage? Security? Aesthetically? Anyway it doesn’t matter if you’re the worst, the second worst or the best. I never accused your building to be the worst, I simply told you there are some major problems with it. 

Unperturbed, you pursue the argument “Oh yea?! Well, number 6 over there had a fire in one of the apartments once! And number 10 only has seven floors instead of nine!” 

I start to get frustrated, because I’m not talking about the other buildings, I’m talking about yours. If there are other apartment buildings that also have problems that sucks, but it has no bearing on the horrible conditions of yours. The conditions of your building are no better if it is surrounded by worse buildings and no worse if it is surrounded by better buildings. The problems in your place stand on their own and I am criticizing them objectively, not comparatively. If there are problems along the entire block that might be indicative of another problem, perhaps the people that built them are corrupt and need investigating, but that is not the issue here. The issue is there are problems that you and everyone else who lives in this crap apartment building need to address, regardless of what others do in other buildings. 

Still unperturbed, you continue “You can’t be objective because you love all the other buildings and want to hate mine no matter what! Did you know that number 3 had a rat in the basement? I saw it! And number 9 has squeaky doors!” 

And this is where I abandon the conversation, because there is no argument to be made with a brick wall of stubborn. 

If someone takes issue with something that you like or respect, you need to address the specific criticisms that that person has. If they are right, take a good look at them and see if they have a point. Screaming at everyone else around you in order to deflect negative attention from yourself not only is a losing argument, it makes you look like a child having a tantrum. 

Extra brownie points to anyone who feels like turning the above exchange into a webcomic, we’ll call it “talking to Fox viewers” :)

We Need To Add Some Extra Humanity

I'm still in the throes of those crazy deadlines I was telling you about, but I managed to squeeze in a little time to watch this video and felt I needed to share it.

While it specifically addresses a case of extreme misogyny in the online gaming community, it is more widely applicable as good advice to all men on how to respond when encountered with extreme sexism.

I know many guys that may see it and may even acknowledge it, but they'll never actually say anything about it. It's a "that's not really my problem" attitude, overlying a more deeply engrained sometimes unconscious "bros before hos" mentality. Grow up friends, time to overcompensate with your humanity

Ill Doctrine: All These Sexist Gamer Dudes Are Some Shook Ones from ANIMALNewYork.com on Vimeo.

Why Do You Believe?

I often get into debates with people about religion, sometimes heatedly (usually when the person I am speaking to is being arrogant and thick-headed), other times for the simple reason that I am curious as to why they believe what they do (when the person is nice, non-judgemental and otherwise seems quite intelligent). Recently I have had two such discussions with two people, which started amicably enough with me pointing at all the places the bible contradicts the “free will”, “god is love”, “justification for baptism” etc. arguments, which brought us directly to the central question of why the hell do you believe anyway? It always comes down to that, as it is impossible to continue the conversation without first establishing a sans-goal-post-shifting basis for the argument. They both happened to respond with an answer that is supposed to be a conversation stopper, an “oh well, this is where we agree to disagree and amicably go our separate ways” response.

I believe because I feel it, I feel something inside me when I pray

How shocked were they then, when all of a sudden I got a little frustrated with them, not only not accepting it as an end of the conversation, but rather answered

That’s not a fucking answer!

I was amazed that this was the first time that they had someone not accept that ridiculous answer. While I am sure many of you are fully aware as to why that is, but for those of you who have not thought too much about it, let me elaborate for you as I did for them:

Here we need another pinning down of what you do and do not believe. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in aliens visiting the earth? How about vampires? No? Well, trust me, there are people that do. Many of them believe because they feel it. They feel the presence of their departed mother or spouse or pet, and therefore believe that their spirit is still walking the earth and keeping them company. There are people that are absolutely convinced that they were abducted by aliens and there are people that are sure vampires really exist, because they feel it. Why then, do most people in the world not accept those personal feelings as proof of the existence of ghosts, aliens or vampires? Because personal feelings are subjective, of course they are. You need external, objective evidence to back up these things in order to be justified in believing them. Personal opinion has no bearing on reality. Without objective evidence you can find other more plausible explanations for these feelings: that you’re grief over losing a loved one and being in the house you shared with them causes you to feel like they’re still there, that you suffer from sleep paralysis, that you really want live to be a little cooler.

If you accept someone’s personal feelings about what they believe, then you’re not allowed to scoff at ghosts, faries, aliens, vampires, or any other such fantasy. Going even further, if “I believe it exists because I feel it” was a valid argument, any hallucination a schizophrenic person has ever had exists too, from the voices to the people they see. This is why “I believe in God because I feel Him” does not qualify as a good reason to believe in God, not by a long shot.

And anyway, this personal fuzzy feeling you have inside is not only a terrible reason to believe in a god, but how in the hell did you jump from “warm fuzzy feeling” to “the God of the bible as interpreted by the Vatican”?! How do you know that your personal feelings are “evidence” for that specific god, and not Zeus, Thor or Buddha?

One of them did not have an answer, mostly because she is swaying away from theism and is honestly trying to identify the source of this “feeling” that is keeping her from really calling herself an atheist. The other one used “it’s a matter of faith” as the centre for all the circles he began to spin in. But that’s a whole can of worms for another time.

Book Review: Trafficked

I know what you're thinking, I'm reading way too many books, and perhaps blogging a little too much about them. Bear with me though, because you may have noticed that the books I have been reading lately have either raised interesting ethical questions for discussion or brought up some extremely interesting, relevant history, making them more than book reviews. This book, by Sophie Hayes, is one of them.

This is the true story of what happened to her when she decided to trust a man that she thought was her friend. This is not just a tragic story of what happened to a young woman that I feel necessary to bear witness to, as hard as it might be. It is that too, of course, but it is much more. 

Sophie Hayes is a young, educated, middle class white English girl. While her relationship with her father can be described as mutual apathy at best, there are no indications that she should not live a normal, middle class British life. She had a good job, her own apartment, a future waiting for her. Then, she decided to take a trip to Italy to visit a person she considered her best friend for four years. 

Sophie Hayes was forced into prostitution by a criminal psycopath on the streets of an undisclosed (though Northern, from clues in the book) city in Italy. Her story made me go through an emotional rollercoaster that I did not expect. I wanted to jump into the pages before her first terrifying night and beat the living daylights out of the disgusting animal that trafficked her. I wanted to smack the policemen that treated her like shit upside the head for being so painfully ignorant. I wanted to stop alongside the roads that are known to be full of prostitutes, stop at each one and ask "are you OK? Do you want to be here? Do you need someone to help you get home?" though knowing full well that, regardless of whether or not those girls are there voluntarily or not, the answer would be a resounding No. Admiration for her courage in writing her story, not just for mentioning the terrible parts, but for being able to capture the times in which she loved him and felt safe with him, which I think are emotions that are even harder and take more courage to revisit. I had a nightmare that I was driving along the road and I saw a friend of mine in her same position, and trying to convince her to get in the fucking car so that I could save her. During the whole thing I found myself coming back to one central thought that might be paradoxical at first: this is why I think prostitution needs to be legalized. 

Before jumping down my throat hear me out. In Italy, as it is in Spain and most other European countries where it is not outright legal, prostitution is decriminalized. This means that you cannot be arrested for either being a prostitute or for seeking out a prostitute to sleep with. This was done in an effort to focus time and resources towards the real criminals, forget police officers posing as hookers or johns to arrest someone just trying to earn a living or looking for a blowjob, but rather go after the pimps and the traffickers. 

While I can partially agree with this strategy, in that I don't see the egregious criminal offence in deciding to be paid for a handjob (especially since it magically does not become an egregious criminal offence if there is a camera present and the video is destined for the internet), there are some evident problems in this decriminalization. What seems to be the situation is that, far from bringing focused attention down on the traffickers, prostitution becomes largely ignored. Policemen will occasionally make a few prostitutes clear out if people start to complain, they may ask to see their papers to see if they are in the country legally, but they have no recourse to arrest them and thus question them. Sure, once in a while you'll hear about a few pimps going to jail, but usually because they were involved in a much larger crime ring that also (and primarily) involved bringing people into the country illegally, that the people they brought were sex slaves and not textile slaves is often coincidental. If your society is OK with not criminalizing prostitution, why the hell wouldn't you take the leap and make it outright legal?

Making it legal and regulating it severely undercuts traffickers. You have houses where there is security if needed, it is a taxed business (also making it a much needed source of revenue), you can mandate regular medical checks just like in the porn industry, which not only helps assure the prostitute is free of STDs but secondarily is an excellent way of spotting systematic abuse that is commonplace amongst traffickers. You have a license, which means that no illegal immigrants would be allowed to work there, them being the women that are most likely the ones brought over against their will. After that, criminalize prostitution that is conducted outside the regulated standards. 


It is time to stop not only demonizing women who choose the sex trade, but also the johns that seek their services. As it is also alluded to in the book, most of them are nice enough guys, most men have no interest in sleeping with a prostitute who is being forced against her will. Sophie Hayes had to invent an elaborate back story because many people were genuinely curious to know why she was doing what she did, no judgement, no sadism. If you are a john, wouldn't you rather go to a clean house, where you know the prostitute does not have STDs, where you know everything is legal and above board, rather than troll the streets for a frightened girl that most likely is forced against her will, could be sick and/or have a dangerous pimp lurking around? There will always be a handful of sadists that would prefer that scenario, and I have no problem with their asses being hauled off to prison for participating in an illegal sex trade.


The last point to consider is that criminals are opportunists. If you legalize prostitution and make it reasonable and accessible to customers you are providing a serious source of competition for the traffickers. They have less clients buzzing around, would have to dramatically lower prices in order to provide some kind of incentive, have police scrutiny intensify, in many cases they could easily decide that sex trafficking is no longer profitable enough and switch to another form of criminal activity. I think we need to start considering these things right alongside increasing awareness that this is a significant problem, as well as expand the resources available for victims that have managed to or are trying to escape. 


It is a story I suggest everyone reads, because it is so important to acknowledge the often ignored problem, and really begin discussing what we can do about it.