And speaking of fathers (and did you know I’m a “hottest daddy blogger” nominee?) how’d you like to be one of of Leonard Sax’s children? Reviewing the teenage-vampire movie Twilight, Marx in Drag says

Before I even saw the film, I read an article by Leonard Saxs about the movie “Twilight”. Sax suggested that young girls love the book series and will crowd the theatres because the narrative reflects what girls want, how girls are made hormonally/genetically/biologically/spiritually. Girls, according to Sax, want romance and safety and, above all else, an asexual life. He contrasted this with boys who want, above all else, sex which explains why they are obsessed with danger and video games.

Read the quote in context here.

Hey, it’s fine with me if teenage girls stick to asexual, cookie-baking lives, nor is it a problem if teenage boys hew to video games and Magic cards. Although really I think it would be great if they all spent a little more time doing non-arithmetic math, philosophy, poetry, hiking in the wilderness, and some kind of semi-industrial handwork like welding, leather, or hot-glass arts. Waiting till you’re physically, emotionally, and socially ready for sex (i.e. sticking to masturbation till your an adult) is never a bad idea**.

No better evidence for this exists, by the way, than Leonard Sax’s outlandish extrapolation of teenager dynamics into immutable logic about adult outlooks: modeling adult behavior on intermediate adolescent development makes as much sense as modeling adult bathroom behavior on toddlers in pull-ups.

MiD has more

Like all completely a-historical narratives that are not based in empirical reality, Sax relied on an old (and tired) lie about erotic desire. (By the way, there have been times in Western culture when boys and men overtly expressed a desire for romance; boys and men get more turned on by sex embedded in a relational narrative than porn; and there are cultures in which girls’ erotic pleasure is equally important to boys’.)

The lie is that, because girls’ are hormonally/genetically/biologically/spiritually (pick your ideological poison) conditioned to like romance, they must not want sex. And because boys are hormonally/genetically/biologically/spiritually programmed to want sex, they are not interested in romance. Since when are romance and sex so incompatible?

Um, yeah. Sort of like “porn is a male thing, romance novels a female thing” there’s actually, um, considerable overlap in consumption. And, not to beat a dead horse or anything but maybe, just maybe it’s not so much that even teenagers are “innately” romantic vs. horny as… marketing decisions, based on stereotypes, make it flipping hard to find the kind of porn and/or romantic writing that appeals to their respectively-assigned genders.

And finally

Deborah Tolman [see, for instance —fl] dispels this lie. Turns out adolescent girls do have sexual desire and, in the right context, want to talk about and do something about it. Further, Tolman has a much better explanation for why girls don’t show that desire, let alone parade it around as a badge of honor like some adolescent boys. It’s not about hormones, biology, genetics, or God’s will; it’s about male privilege.

The rest of MiB’s post discusses not what Sax sees, or even what the (patriarchal, male) author of the Twilight series sees, but what she’s pretty sure teenage girls see in it. Yes, it’s about “safety,” as Sax imagines, but it’s not the asexual safety he imagines. Definitely worth reading the whole thing. But I digress…

In his film review Leonard Sax, like many others stalwart upholders of the “no-sex” class paradigm, confidently proclaims that girls retreat has nothing to do with “social constructs.” They’re just naturally “that way.” Nor does the behavior of boys influence, nor is it in turn influenced by, girls wariness not of sex but of the male-privilege-ing assumptions of what others can do with their sexuality since they have no use for it themselves!

The “No-Sex” class paradigm, remember, has two main components: one prescriptive (you should be this way) and one proscriptive (and here’s what we get to do to you if you aren’t.) In his descriptions Sax both enforces his how he believes girls and women should be, and, by giving he blessing to thrill-seeking and violence in boys and men, he erects the pickets that confine female erotic impulses to inexpressible fantasies of … um… literarily if not literally “someone who wants to eat you alive with every fiber of his being.” (Follow that last link to Amanda Marcotte’s take on the Twilight phenomenon.)

[** A good metric for knowing you’re mature enough? When you’re able to grasp and hold on to the fact that despite decades of frantic sexualization of youth roughly half of all 2nd-year college students, male and female, are still virgins. Because if you get that then you lose the often self-induced “everybody else has already done it” peer-pressure-y feeling that if you don’t do something soon you’ll be the last virgin on the planet. At which point you might decide you want to have sex for enjoyment instead of as some kind of rite of passage. Because, for instance, one good metric of adulthood is realizing that adulthood doesn’t depend on rites of passage. —fl]