Men's Group

Last edited Sat Sep 8, 2012, 08:00 PM - Edit history (1)

I should have waited for the following day when my mind would hopefully be clearer.

I assure you my "alleged" former psychologist from my teenager years is quite real. He's 80 years old today. His incompetence and arrogance were truly amazing. Sadly, I was too stupid as a teenager to be able to realize that. He hurt me and my parents deeply. The group therapy incident was only one of many, and certainly wasn't the worst. I could have mentioned him by name, but I didn't care to possibly open myself up to a lawsuit.

All I was saying is that the popular culture is not friendly toward sensitive teenagers who have misgivings, if not outright convictions, about becoming sexually active. (I meant with other persons, of course. Not including masturbation.) I had no intention of defending abstinence-based sex education.

I would also observe that the local community makes a great difference in that regard. In many ways this country is quite diverse. There's a world of difference between, say, Berkeley, California, and Philadelphia, Mississippi (ugh!). They're like two different countries. But the popular culture is still national in scope.

When I referred to the exploitative quality of casual sex, I was referring only to the fact that insecure teenage girls are frequently targeted by conscienceless teenage boys who want to trick them into having sex with them. I frequently heard guys like that boast about their sexual conquests all the time as I was growing up. I got sick and tired of it. The women in my family (namely, my sister and our mother) weren't sex objects. They were both bright, intellectual women whose interests were not stereotypically "feminine." They both took principled stands against the racial discrimination of the day. My mother defied her racist, bigoted mother; and my sister was blacklisted by the John Birch Society for supporting civil rights. So, I grew up respecting women. As a college freshman in the fall of 1969, I heard a guy exclaiming how inhumane the war in Vietnam was. Then practically in the same breath, he started bragging about how he had seduced a young gal by claiming he loved her -- which, as he acknowledged in his boasting, was a complete lie. I found the clash of his professed concern over what was happening in Vietnam with the way he himself treated others to be rather galling and hypocritical, in my estimation. That is what I was referencing, and I do realize the majority of sexual encounters outside of marriage are not of a predatory nature of the kind I just described.