Boys are often told that having a sexual experience with an older woman is a “badge of honor.” But many times such experiences can more accurately be described as a “traumatic experience” and even as a case of sexual abuse.
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Earlier this week, CNN reposted an essay written for Elle magazine by a man who, as a teen, engaged in “consensual” sex with a much older woman. Many people fail to understand that this, too, can be a form of abuse. Oftentimes men are told this is a badge of honor, or that they were “lucky” for having had such experiences. Former MaleSurvivor President Murray Schane, MD wrote about why this can actually be a destabilizing and harmful experience. I felt it was important to share, and I hope you will as well. We need to do more to counter the myth that a boy is always lucky in these circumstances. My thanks to Murray for his permission to share this with the GMP community:
This is a first-person account of a man’s life altered and deformed by the sexual relationship he had as a fifteen year-old boy with a forty year-old married woman, a woman who entered his life as a care-taker for his seriously incapacitated older brother. Doubtless the trauma of witnessing that brother’s accident, and the extraordinary care required to maintain him thereafter had enormous impact on him and his parents. The family dynamics were remolded by guilt, anger, and, especially for the author, a sense of loss as he believed he had lost forever the loving attention of his mother.
Enter the forty year old woman, a kind of volunteer healer for the brother, who began essentially grooming the author by paying him “a great deal of attention,” buying him gifts, “offering sympathy to me rather than to my brother.” The author responded with an innocent love for the woman. But then she introduced talk of sex with him which “until then I had not thought of her in a sexual way.” A clandestine sexual affair began, sustained by its potent mix of anger, lust, and the secret, illicit thrill it evoked.
These were the qualities that bound the boy to the woman who perpetrated the affair, who promoted a consensual-appearing sexual relationship that actually broke apart his trusting, filial attachment, wrested from him his own initiative, and invested in him a warped view of sex and romantic relationship that hobbled him psychologically for years afterward.
Yes the affair could be considered statutory rape yet for the author the repercussions extend far beyond that unnatural conjugal bed. They shaped and deformed his sense of self in relation to others, incapacitated him for truly consensual relationships with other women for years, trained him to seek out other older, married women-damaged women as he states-with whom him he could only re-enact the experience, however fond and forlorn, of that first and actual abuse.
Accompanying these negative psychological effects are neurobiological impingements on the still developing brain. Sexual trauma, however seemingly benign, alters the very structure and function of key components of the brain: the hippocampus, the memory distribution and consolidation center, the amygdala, the brain’s emotional trigger, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the stress response “team,” and the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), the very foundation of personality, which exercises executive function thereby piloting one’s way through life’s experiences. Even at age fifteen the PFC had not matured and remains still malleable and subject to malign alignments.
Early sexual experience, as many survivors can attest, will often implant a brain-based tendency to sex addiction that will persist long into adulthood. Fortunately the brain is also neuroplastic, capable of repair and structural change. But this requires appropriate guidance, therapy, social support, and sometimes even medication.
Men who have had sex at an early age, especially sex with a woman if they are heterosexual or sex with a man if they are gay, will often refer to that first experience as lucky or enjoyable and as if it had no lasting impact. The author of this article offers ample, sad evidence of just how wrong those men may be. To be wrested out of childhood, dragged under the authority of an adult, deprived of initiative, rendered hapless and bound to errant secrecy-all that can cripple the adult who later emerges fully scarred and scathed.
The author, now in his forties, apparently resisted until quite recently the awareness of how damaging was that early sexual experience. Such resistance is one of the reasons we at MaleSurvivor work to assert the message that early sexual experiences can harm children, and that all male survivors regardless of their experiences should have more support and understanding. Men caught up in scenarios like the one described in this article, are often especially resistant and, therefore, especially vulnerable to truly undue suffering. This is yet another example where attention must be paid, and where intervention and prevention needs to be offered.
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The post When Getting “Lucky” Really Isn’t a Good Thing At All appeared first on The Good Men Project.