A recent New York Times piece looked at a study of 500 social media accounts operated by girls ages 12-18. The study revealed disturbing trends — notably, the pressure that teenage boys put on girls to “sext,” or text nude and other explicit images of themselves.
Over two-thirds of the girls reported being asked to sext by their male peers. And when they didn’t do what the boys wanted, the boys lashed out. “The majority described facing intense pressure that often began with promises of affection and discretion in exchange for ‘nudes,’ before accelerating to ‘persistent requests, anger displays, harassment and threats,'” the Times reports.
Who’s to blame for this type of behavior? Parents? Yes, to a certain extent. Schools? Yes, they’re responsible, too. But, primarily, our culture.
Our TV shows, movies, music, and, of course, porn, tell males that they should indulge their sexual desires, that they can have what they want when they want it, and that girls are just as sexually driven as they are. And then we’re so shocked when some of the boys this culture has produced become manchild Hollywood or media, or business, or political gatekeepers who abuse their power for sex.
The entertainment elite who turned a blind eye and abetted this culture even wear black at awards shows to virtue-signal how very shocked and horrified they are. They pat each other on the back for having something to say now —after abiding, and even celebrating, pedophiles and perpetrators in their midst for years.
For decades, America’s elite have tried to snuff out the Victorian morality that governed men’s behavior toward women. They’ve yelled “sexist,” “patriarchy,” and “chauvinist” loud enough and long enough that only a few good men still want to be gentlemen. And then they wonder why so many men seem to act like pigs toward women and defend their actions as beyond their control.
So what can we do? We can teach boys to act like gentlemen. We can teach and live by basic Judeo-Christian morals, which say that men need to protect women because they’re physically weaker and treat them with dignity and respect because they’re people.
The New York Times notes that “boys are nearly four times as likely to pressure girls to send sexts as girls are to pressure boys to do so.”
Boys will express their masculinity one way or another. If they’re ridiculed for holding a door open or hunting or wanting to join the military, they’ll express their repressed maleness in some other way, and often sexually. Combine this with sex ed classes in elementary school, and ridicule of abstinence education, and you have a certain percentage of, well, little Harvey Weinsteins and Anthony Weiners.
Sadly a lot of girls in this study said they “had little recourse for dealing with the often hostile barrage of solicitations for pictures.” One girl even said that if she didn’t send the pictures, rumors would be spread. In a normal culture, the boys would be scared of rumors — rumors about them pressuring girls to sext them. In a normal culture, boys would be scared that a girl’s father, or brother, or the girls themselves, would confront and shame them for demanding nude pics.
But in today’s culture, the values of Hollywood secularism and materialism have impacted our culture far more than core Judeo-Christian values have impacted Hollywood. Of course there are Harvey Weinsteins in Hollywood, Washington D.C. and even in our middle schools.
Boys who pressure girls for sex, and punish them when they don’t deliver will turn into man-boys who seek power and status in order to get sex. Maybe instead of ridiculing guys who have moral standards (see VP Mike Pence, David French, Russell Wilson and others), we should be pointing to them as examples.