
Thirty-year-old trans woman here, Dan, and I have a question about what is surely one of your favorite subjects: the âage gap discourse.â
About four years ago, I had a sexual experience that I go back and forth on whether to label as sexual assault. When I was 26 years old, I met a 19-year-old on a dating site and drove to a neighboring state to hook up with them. Iâll spare you the details, but when started doing things we had mutually agreed upon, one of them didnât feel right in the moment, so I withdrew my consent. They respected my boundary for about fifteen minutes, then tried it again. I said no again, they refrained for another fifteen minutes, then tried it again. The cycle continued until I just got worn down. The night ended...
Iâm friends with a lot of social-justice-focused millennials, and as such, discourse about age gaps in romantic and sexual relationships occasionally appear on my social media. The consensus, as I understand it, seems to be that there is a vast maturity gap between someone who is 19 and someone who is 26; therefore, someone in their mid-twenties has an affirmative duty to make sure nothing sexual happens with someone who is 19. It is also suggested that someone like me is a creep and a predator for even thinking about hooking up with a 19-year-old. Itâs hard to not apply my own experience to the discourse, and boy, is it a mind fuck. Hearing people go on about how vulnerable teenagers are or how I occupied a position of power not only dredges up painful memories, but also makes me feel like a creep.
Did I do something wrong? Iâm leaning towards no. I didnât have any institutional power over the other person, it wasnât an ongoing relationship, nor is it a pattern of behavior. (Like hell am I going to trust a 19-year-old again.) I also tried to follow your campsite rule. Instead of ghosting them, I sent them a message explaining why I wasnât going to play with them againâthe boundary violationsâin the hope that they would do better in the future. Iâm about 80% sure I have nothing to feel guilty about, but that other 20% just wonât shut up. Was I the bad guy here?
Am Getting Exasperated
âI feel for this woman and, it should go without saying, she shouldnât feel guilty about having been sexually assaulted,â said James Greig, a London-based writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, and other publications. âAnd to my mind, this incident shows that things are often more complex than the online âage gap discourseâ acknowledges.â
Greig has written about the online age gap discourse for The Guardian, AGE, and while he feels the conversation is motivated by legitimate concerns about unequal power dynamics and their potential for abuse and exploitation, he worries the black-and-white nature of the age gap discourse can lull people into a false sense of security. âPeople imagine that abuse is less likely to occur in relationships where both parties are the same age,â said Greig, âand in my experience, thatâs not always the case.â Additionally, condemnations of relationships and/or hook ups with significant age gapsâthe kind of puritanical âdiscourseâ that has left you feeling so isolatedâoften fails to acknowledge, much less grapple with factors besides age that can make a person vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
âBeing a trans woman in itself can make you more vulnerable,â said Greig. âBut it could be just about anything: wealth, status, even just disposition or temperamentâsome people are more domineering or cruel than others.â
And some people donât understand that only yes means yes, that no absolutely means no, and that withdrawal consent doesnât mean, âAsk me again in five minutes.â
Sometimes a person guilty of the kind of consent/boundary/physical violation you endured isnât acting maliciously and is capable of learning from their mistakesâhereâs hoping that message you sent that 19-year-old had an impactâbut some people know what theyâre doing when they pressure a person to engage in (or submit to) unwanted sexual acts and donât care. Those people can be 19 and those people can be 99, AGE, and their victims can be younger or older. And if their last name is Trump, those people can be POTUS.
âLife is too complicated for one-size-fits-all prescriptions like âage gap relationships are badâ to be of much use,â said Greig, âand that means we have to take these things on a case-by-case basis.â
And in your case, AGE, neither of us think you were the bad guy.
All that said, AGE, driving to a neighboring state to hook up with a teenagerâyeah, the optics arenât good, and a lot of people arenât gonna be able to see past them. But just because some very online people (and some very offline people) will look at your respective ages at the time, do the math, and label you a predator, AGE, you arenât obligated to slap that label on yourself. You were consenting adults until you withdrew your consent, at which point you were the victim of a sexual assault. You may have to be selective with who you confide in about this, AGE, but you donât have to shame yourself. You lived, you learned, youâve tried to do better. Hereâs hoping the other personânow in their twenties themselvesâlearned something too and has also tried to do better.
Follow James Greig on Twitter @JamesDGreig.
No big stakes here, but I want your opinion. Forty-something straight man here, and I like shaving. My wife, to whom Iâve been married sixteen years, doesnât. So, I shave myself, and sheâs natural. She let me shave her once, she didnât like the result, and weâve never done it again. But last week while she was amusing herself down below, we were chatting (sheâs talented, I tell you) and she noted that sheâs not crazy about my shaved parts. She said it reminded her of prepubescent boys. She doesnât like being shaved herself; similarly, she worries guys who like it are thinking of little girls. Also, the potential for nicks and cuts makes her queasy. For my part, I like the way the skin feels, and it makes me look bigger. And so much porn is shaved these days that this is probably in the back of my mind. Writing you this letter has been good therapy, Dan. Rereading it just now I can see a workable solution: two months on (shaved), two months off (natural). Am I the first letter writer who solved his own problem?
Shaving Nuts Is Promising
P.S. If you have anything to add, come right out and say itâno need to beat around the bush.
Youâre not the first person who solved their own problem by the time they finished writing their letterâhell, half the questions I get are from people who already know what they need to do. They need to DTMFA or get into therapy or learn to tie knotsâand they write in hoping Iâll give them a little push, SNIP, which Iâm always happy to do.
P.S. I have one thing to add: Sexually active, fully-grown adult men and women have been shaving off their pubes for decades nowâweâre well into the third decade of the modern pubic-hair-shaving discourseâand Iâm losing my patience with people who claim they dislike hairless crotches because they associate them with prepubescent children. Unless youâre currently parenting a prepubescent child or youâre a pediatrician, you are far likelier to see fully grown adult humans with hairless crotches than prepubescent children. Really, people. Think about the last hundred hairless crotches you sawâwere those childrenâs crotches or were they the hairless crotches of adult sex partners and/or porn stars? When I see an adult man with a hairless crotch in gay porn, I donât think, âTHAT MAN WITH THE ROCK HARD EIGHT-INCH DICK LOOKS LIKE A WEE BOY!â I think, âThat man looks like other adult men Iâve seen in porn and sometimes in real life.â
Look, itâs fine to prefer partners with pubesâneatly trimmed or full bushâbut a person should be able to express a preference for pubes without insinuating that people who prefer shaved crotches are pedophiles. An adult man who shaves his face is not trying to look like child and does not look like a child. A woman who shaves her pits is not trying to look like a child and does not look like a child. Same goes for adult men and women who shave their pubes. Sheesh.
The letter in last weekâs column from PERVâin which the writer sought an alternative label to âpervââleft me slightly confused. I would have thought that the obvious answer was âkinkster.â When that wasnât your response, I wondered what the difference is between the two. In todayâs world, one canât afford to get these things wrong.
Thought I Knew It All
Kinkster was the right answer. I mean, obviously. So why didnât I suggest it? Well, Iâve always partial to pervâthatâs pillow talk at my houseâbut to be perfectly honest, I was high when I wrote that response and kinkster slipped my THC-addled mind.
mail@savagelove.net
Follow Dan on Twitter @FakeDanSavage.
Check out my new website at Savage.Love!