Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Pulling together several themes from the last couple of days, here’s in interesting post from last month by Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper about a mediated sexual assault on rapper Lil Wayne when he was 11 years old. She’s quoting from a movie about him where he’s telling a protégé nicknamed “Twist” about an incident his own mentor, nicknamed “Baby,” instigated. (Emphasis hers.)

Wayne tells Twist that Baby, Wayne’s father figure, was one of the men encouraging the woman to perform oral sex on him. “I’m a do you like Baby and them did me,” Wayne informs him.

After the documentary was filmed, Lil’ Wayne spoke about his childhood sexual assault again, in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Kimmel goaded Wayne into talking about “losing his virginity” at the age of 11. Then, Kimmel—along with, oddly, Charlie Gibson, who was also a guest on the show that night—teamed up to tease Wayne over the incident, which they presented as an impressive display of Wayne’s manhood. Except that this time, Wayne was no longer up for joking about the matter, and he finally explained to Kimmel that the experience was a negative one. It was also revealed that the woman who was being encouraged to “suck little Wayne’s little dick” was 14 years old.

After the Kimmel segment aired, Cara at the Curvature wrote an excellent piece about the cultural tendency to respond to sexual assaults against males by recasting the assault as a positive sexual experience for the victim…

She said it here.

Quick note, Cara’s post at the Curvature really is a great one, as is a post from Sociological Images that inspired her.

Anyway, Hess concludes with

When sexual assault against males is excused as a joke or even held up as a badge of honor, that doesn’t just work to erase victims after the fact. This attitude directly causes sexual assaults. Twist is told he needs to have sex whether he wants to or not, just like Wayne did before him.

Yikes!

Here’s a handful of ideas we probably need to spend a little more time thinking about… and encouraging others to think about as well.

• sexual assault on male victims is not well-understood, and consequently not taken seriously
• male sexual awakening begins considerably later than most people seem to assume
• gendered allegations that it’s “natural” for boys to already be ready for sex are incorrect, and therefore if a boy ends up in a sexual situation at age 11 (as in Wayne’s case) or even 4 (as in mine) the presumption is that “he’s just getting an early start” is also (deeply) incorrect.
• Pressure to become precociously sexual has consequences on boys or, more subtly but no less incorrect…

• if the consequences for boys look different than the consequences for girls then they are thought to be of no consequences at all

and finally

• if boys are pressured and/or feel pressured to be precocious — either by their elders, other boys, or by girls who may already be beginning to feel sexual — they may try to fake their degree of knowledge and interest and may try to rely on social scripts from… less than ideal sources

Something else to consider: as adults it sure seems like a lot of us have a general sense of amnesia and/or avoidance of memories of that part our lives. Nevertheless it seems to be a pretty formative period where a huge number of general social assumptions are put into practice. Those of us with children, at least, and really I think everyone who plans to live among peers who are even slightly younger than we are need to reassess our own experiences and, where possible, see if we can provide more structure for children in, especially, their very early adolescence.