My ex’s 17 year old “babysitter” took his virginity when he was 12. When he told me this, I asked if he ever got counseling for being molested and he acted like what happened to him was completely normal. Fast forward to nearly 13 years later and he still doesn’t think he was raped/taken advantage of. As a friend (&…

I got into a heated argument yesterday about situations like these. I was telling a male acquaintance about an idiot I dated who said if his 15 year old daughter was dating a man in his 30s he’d try to give the guy a chance because he’s “open minded” (that was the last time I saw that dude, obvs). That led male…

I recently met someone who went to the same high school as I did. She was a couple of grades ahead but we played “jewish geography” until we stumbled onto a few people. Then she asked me if I knew X. Well, I did, and I also knew that he, at 17, had been involved with a 23 year old teacher. I didn’t offer the info. She…

It’s baffling to me as well. But in certain ways its a fundamentally natural result of subscribing to the idea that “boys will be boys.” Which, shit like this makes clear to us, victimizes boys, too.

How can the family being accepting of their son getting abused by an adult woman?

YEP.

Thank you. Not “relationship,” either. Predatory behavior and grooming. And fuck that fucking family.

Not “sex.”

I do really (and I am being serious) think it has been tried - by individual women (myself included) that regularly comment here. By pointing out that men as well as women benefit from equal pay, equal rights, family leave, women’s right to control their own reproductive health, women feeling and being safe...

A girl in my class did this, too. Dropped out of 9th grade to get married and have a kid, although the guy was pretty close in age. She was a widow with 2 kids by 18.

That tends to happen when about 40 % of American teenagers don’t use condoms - compared to 4 % in other Western nations that actually educate high schoolers on sex, rather than peddle a religionist “abstinence only” agenda to them.

I knew a girl (not well) in my high school who was a naturalized citizen. Her very traditional family had contracted a marriage with friends of theirs when she and her groom were both children (possibly when they were infants). She got married at probably 16 and I know she got sent to the alternative high school for…

Like...how is that better? How is getting divorced at the ripe old age of 17 (I’m guesstimating) better than the alternatives (abortion) (single mom living with her parents for a while). What are her parents thinking?!

TWELVE

I knew a guy who had two children by two different girls before he graduated, they were classmates.

No, it really happened, in Los Angeles. I told my mom about it and she called Children’s Services. It made me so sad.

I grew up with a guy who was divorced before graduating high school. He’d got his girlfriend pregnant and they both had really stupid Christian parents. I also had classmates who had two or three children before graduating. Sometimes I think rednecks should have their kids taken away at birth just on spec.

Eww, same thing happened with this girl on my soccer team in middle school. She got pregnant at 12, her parents sent her to her village in Mexico, where she married the guy that got her pregnant. I think he was 27 and she never came back.

When I was in 10th grade, one of my classmates dropped out to get married. I ran into her more than 20 years later. She was divorced, with a few kids of her own. She said she wished someone could’ve talked her out of that nonsense. Her mother had to sign for her to marry that idiot.

When I was in high school, a girl in my freshman gym class was married. Apparently her mother had found out that she was sleeping with some 20something dude the summer before high school started and insisted that they get married or she’d have him arrested. The girl seemed cool with it at the time, and we were all in…