About a year ago I collected a bunch of demographic data sets about this subject for a class project on endocrine disrupting chemicals. Along with the average ages of menarche and thelarche(budding of breast tissue) decreasing we also have rapidly increasing numbers of highly precocious puberty(as early as 6year-olds, sometimes), and increasing prevalence of every kind of disease that is linked to hormone disruption in women. There are literally hundreds of biochemical systems in women’s bodies that are regulated by the same hormones that govern sexual development. There has also been nearly 4 decades of 1% per year decline in age-adjusted testosterone levels for men. Obviously, this decrease also goes with all sorts of health issues like a decrease in overall immunity, strength, bone density, muscle mass, sperm count, and just an overall shittier health. Not all of the data is demographic either, but demographic data establishes a widespread phenomenon. There is just as much chemical analysis and lab testing data to establish direct causal links between pollutant levels, hormone disruption, developmental issues in different animal species and also behavioral patterns associated with the hormone levels.
Can people reading here grasp just how many different kinds of social impact all of these chemical changes must be having? Your hormonal health directly affects every major decision in your life, both directly and indirectly. An early thelarche causing lifelong sexual trauma and making more women distrust and dislike men in general is just barely scratching the surface, in my opinion. This is not even to mention the many social causes exacerbating many of the hormonal disruptions, like lowered paternal involvement directly reducing age of menarche.
Putting together that project (with input from many mentors that are a lot more learned than I am) was the most devastatingly depressing experiences I have ever had in my life. Most professors, scientific researchers and engineers I have mentioned this data to are either already aware of it or are not particularly surprised by it. I have felt like an absolute lunatic as I try to explain to people twice my age, people who have multiple degrees in chemistry, medicine, or other STEM subjects, why this data has unbelievably far reaching consequences and why they should take it more seriously. I have tried and almost entirely failed at this so far. Perhaps I really am a lunatic and don’t know what I am talking about here, but there is never any convincing argument to the contrary to all the concerns I have raised. My argument is mainly based on the chemistry and the clear demographic data on the subject, which no one has denied. The best counter I got so far was- “well if it was such a major issue then wouldn’t there be a lot more noise about it? Since no one is talking about it it must not be that big of an issue”. I will put together another “lunatic” essay about it on my Substack soon-ish(I am in the middle of exams) for anyone wanting to read it, but frankly I don’t have a lot of hope that anything will be done about it, since the people that are best placed to do anything about it seem not to be bothered at all.
Ironically, this is one of the reasons I was disappointed that the Cass Report discovered that there are possibly many health risks for puberty blockers. Puberty blockers made sense for a lot of these confused girls who were not ready to be sexualized. I hoped it was unintentionally delaying menarche to a more appropriate age. But in retrospect, correcting one chemical endocrine disruption with a different chemical was never going to be as healthy as stopping the first endocrine disruption.
If you continue your research and publish it, or even post it on Substack, you can count on at least one reader who will avoid giving their child what endocrine disrupting chemicals you identify, if that is even possible these days.
I am not an expert in any of the subjects I am talking about here- perhaps that is why I can look at all the different aspects of it- but what I am planning to write about is how all the trends fit together.
Lots of variables are at play here, as well as nonlinear dynamics and feedback loops. To make matters worse, social factors are presumably involved (difficult to quantify and include in a model). Data on environmental pollutants and exposure levels are also basically non extant prior to the 90s. It's going to be as tough a puzzle to solve as the question of anthropogenic climate change.
Some random thoughts/observations that may be of use:
Nutrition and caloric intake are one driving factor in determining the average age of menarche in a given population. Physiological stress can cause an individual woman to cease menstruation. (common in female distance runners)
Female hormonal cycles are altered by the presence/density of other females. Synchronization of cycles can occur in a house full of women, for example.
I was an adolescent in the early 90s. Girls went through puberty beginning in the 6th grade. It seemed nearly universal by 7th grade (age 12-13) For the Black population, this was shifted 1-2 years earlier.
For the Boys, it was similar to the girls, but shifted later by about 1 year.
As for the decrease in testosterone: The elimination of male spaces, especially work places must play a role. Competition/team work in male exclusive environments raises T levels in men, at least temporarily. 'Winning' competition (against other men) has an even greater effect. Possession of physical territory/successfully defending said territory has a similar effect. De-territorialisation has the opposite effect. What is mass immigration if not de-territorialisation of native male population? Atomisation is a characterized by, among other things, de territorialisation. No one 'owns' the local environment - we are all merely transient residents of the same crappy hotel.
Obesity lowers testosterone levels in men....and low t-levels cause men to gain fat mass. Not sure about the arrow of causation on this one. Might be bidirectional. Either way, the high carb, high sugar common diet must play a role at the population level.
As someone who studied chemistry i have often thought how insane we are as a society in how little regulation and safety for chemicals that gets put into our environment.
A chemical or diet related cause you would expect to vary a bit across regions unless it's ubiquitous (plastics?)
Fascinating that girls without dad's tend to have earlier menarche pointing to other environmental reasons but nothing today hasn't happened before has it, ie stressors etc?
Edit: female birth control, hrt in the water supply?
An old frogtwitter poster, that Walt probably remembers, named @menaquinone4 introduced the topic into the alt-right sphere back in the day. Since then, I've been vastly fascinated with the subject of Endocrine Disruptors and their more than plausible effects in modern society. Especially BPA which I think there is quite an amount of solid scientific evidence of its effects.
However, aside from you guys, I've not seen many people discuss this despite it has wide implications in many modern health and societal trends as you suggests.
Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally rail thin. Like, REALLY skinny by today's standards.
The women in my family are all tall and slim with basically the same body type. My older sister looked like a literal skeleton when she was 13, in the 80s. I looked skinny but not like a skeleton, in the 90s. Our mom looked like a concentration camp victim at 13, in the 60s. My sister's daughter, born in the 2000s, looked slim but not at all skinny, and she definitely had softness. I know lots of teenagers who are more plump than their parents, which basically didn't exist in the past.
I also think pre adolescent and adolescent girls have been getting hit on by adult men for all of history and that's nothing new. I was a super late bloomer and got my period and developed way after my friends, around 14. Regardless of that fact and being totally flat chested, I STILL had friends dads and strange men on the street leering and saying disgusting things to me, and was trapped in a corner and molested by two older boys at a public pool. My mom has similar tales from the 50s and 60s, and like I said, she resembled a blonde concentration camp victim with zero boobs, and it still happened. I don't think these things are new, they just weren't talked about previously. And yes of course a teenage girl with big gravity defying boobs is going to get it all the worse.
Btw, women absolutely DO consider that their own fathers are disgusting pigs just like their friend's dad and their math teacher and their uncle and their neighbor...but the thought is so horrifying and profoundly upsetting and depressing to think about that it's best to put it out of your mind, because what else can you do? I mean how exactly do you think it would have made you feel if you found out in junior high that your mom was likely furiously masturbating to 13 year old boys? And so was everyone else's mom? Like wtf do you do with that information??
Anyway, I appreciate your concern with and interest in the issue. I do disagree that it's environmental beyond just increased levels of adiposity. And I disagree that it's the stating and harassment from men (virtually all adult men, not much of an issue with boys your own age). Ask literally any woman alive, even 75 year olds, and they will tell you they were cat called and harassed more from age 13 to 17 than any other age.
Personally I think it's bc of porn and women now having to know exactly what guys are watching and getting off to...every guy, all the time. It's another thing you really can't deal with other than just choosing to not think of it. Before the 90s, this was something most women were ignorant of or could easily avoid. Before the 70s, it didn't even exist. Now, you can't help but know about it and know exactly how absolutely fucking depraved it is, and it's every guy everywhere all the time. That is an enormous difference in a few decades, and profoundly psychologically unsettling for women/girls. I'm surprised they're not ALL asexual/lesbians whatever.
There are studies that control for adiposity and it only explains a small part of the decrease in age of menarche. It’s actually quite likely that increased obesity in young women is the result of precocious puberty and not its cause. Hormones affect adiposity much more than adiposity affects hormones.
About getting attention from men despite having no boobs, there are quite a lot of things that signal sexual maturity more than boobs do. Boobs are just a stand-in to use in an argument, but realistically, your facial characteristics, shape of your hips, length of eyelashes, body hair, redness and clarity of skin and various body odors are much more salient in sexual signaling than boobs- especially because boobs can be artificially enhanced or hidden away in baggy clothes.
Ha. Yeah I got tons of attention from adult men at 14 but it wasn't til I started artificially enhancing with a major padded bra in high school that the boys my age paid attention. ;) I do get that the cause and effect of body fat isn't clear, but there's definitely a strong association in international studies done everywhere. To the point where they can almost predict how many months earlier you're likely to get your period for every one point increase in BMI.
Plus it's well known that a lot of extreme athletes who keep very low body fat, like gymnasts and ballerinas, often don't get their period til they're like 16.
I certainly remember being rail thin and flat chested in junior high while all my friends looked like full grown women. And all those girls with D cups in 7th grade seemed to like the attention...they got boyfriends early, they got married early, they're all normal now. So I still say the increasing numbers of asexual, nonbinary, trans etc young women who are rejecting sex with men entirely is mostly about porn and the internet revealing too much to everyone about what other people are really like. But I do grant that separate from that, early puberty is not a good thing. I have a mentally challenged niece who went through puberty at age 10 and she's mentally about 6...it has been very bad.
Strong predictive value of a correlation doesn’t always mean a strong correlation. Adiposity is predictably associated with early puberty, where you can predict the number of months of precocity based on BMI, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of the phenomenon-not even close. That’s why you get a weak but highly consistent correlation between the two variables.
What do you think about all the de-transitioners coming forward that say that they either developed too early and felt dysmorphia because of it or the ones that felt insecure in their perfectly normal bodies because all the other girls their age were hyper feminine and much more sexually mature? This seems to me very much like a drastic population level shift causing issues on both ends of the spectrum.
I think any time you're on the extreme on either end and don't "fit in" or are different from your peers and what's portrayed in the media, it's very difficult for teenagers, especially girls.
At puberty you become exquisitely attuned to social status and the opinion of your peers and it's mortifying to be out of step (unless it's for something admired...the boys who got tall and matured earlier than others certainly seemed to socially benefit from it). I was absolutely OBSESSED and perpetually mortified by being flat chested and not getting my period til two years after most of my friends. Though honestly I was much more tortured and upset about not living up to the standards of models and actresses than I was about my own peer group. But it preoccupied 90% of my thoughts at the time, and I wouldve murdered my own family to get myself a nice pair of boobs. My recollection is that the well developed girls in 7th and 8th grade mostly flaunted it, but they were in the realm of normal. There were probably girls who had developed in more like 4th or 5th grade who were embarrassed and hiding it so perhaps I didn't notice. Of course this was the 90s so no one had ever heard of such a thing as trans or NB...I can easily imagine that if one is an outlier on any measure that's generally considered socially undesirable, that a tween girl would look for any possible avenue to escape her circumstances. It's easy for me to imagine thinking to myself at 13 "hey I'm tall and thin and flat, I'd make a really good looking guy, maybe I should try that". I did listen to Jordan Peterson's interview with a detrans girl and she mentions that a lot of her motivation was being flat chested and not curvy and feeling like she didn't live up to feminine ideals. It would be interesting if someone did a study looking at how many female teenaged transitioners fall within the average/median range for things like height, weight, and development level, and how many fall more towards the tail on both sides of the curve.
Do men notice those things that much tho? I mean, in the cases we're talking about where someone's getting leered at from across the room or whatever. I suppose subconsciously.. Still I really think men do bear some responsibility for controlling themselves. We should obvs find other ways of dealing w it.
Your comment made me text my mom and sister to ask, because we were all very skinny kids. My mom got hers at 10 or 11, still in elementary school in the 60s or early 70s. I was surprised to hear that. I got mine at 12 in the mid-90s. My younger sister hasn't responded, but my hazy memory says she got hers around 11 or 12, too. After reading Sai's comment after yours, I'm really curious about this fat/hormone link, either way. None of us started gaining weight until my mom during menopause (aside from some normal fluctuation). My mom and sister were those kinds of women who walked out of the hospital in their normal pants after having babies.
Yeah, same in my family. I have pics of my mom on the beach in the 70s post babies and she was thin as a model. Though we all got ours later around 13/14. I was one of the kids embarrassed about not having it and having all my supplies ready years before I needed them.
I like watching music documentaries from the 60s and 70s, which generally feature a lot of concert footage of young people, and that's where the weight/fat difference is hugely striking. Huge crowds of people in their teens and 20s and everyone is skinny. It's actually much more noticeable wrt the men than it is the women, because they have no fat OR muscles...they're all just skinny birds compared to nowadays.
I mean...couldn't possibly be because there is massively more food, everywhere, all the time now?? People used to eat meals, and that was it. Moms didn't carry snacks and drinks everywhere. Gas stations didn't sell food and snacks. Literally only grocery stores, farm stands, and restaurants sold food...other than popcorn (which was way smaller) at the movies or hot dogs at a sporting event. I remember those days and I'm not that old! There is food and candy and snacks and drinks filled with sugar sold and available literally everywhere all the time now. Every mom I know literally carries snacks on her everywhere she goes. That was not a thing pre 1990s. People were just expected to be hungry sometimes and it wasn't considered the end of the world.
I'm just saying...Occam's razor. This trend is not limited to the US. It has occurred all over the world including very remote and not very westernized places. The biggest difference is people all over the world have far more food available to them than ever in history. Most places were subject to ocassional famine most of history and there were still some through the 1990s...in the 80s children in the millions still literally starved to death. There hasn't been a real famine in the entire world in over a decade (warnings and fund raisers about famine risk notwithstanding, you don't see skeletal 7 year olds with distended bellies like was a common sight on TV in the 80s). People are fatter everywhere because they're well fed.
People underestimate how much better tasting food is these days too.
Even compared to the aughts, food today is MUCH tastier thanks to massive advances in industrial gastronomy. Compared to the 80s it's like a completely different country. Makes compulsive snacking a lot easier. Even in like 1998 your option to get fat was like Lunchables or Kid Cuisine. Or for adults, compare a Hungry Man to a Devour bowl. Night and day.
Thankfully there have recently been a lot of advances specifically in making low calorie food not taste like shit and that is taking a lot of the edge off the problem. These days the healthiest protein bars / shakes taste delicious, whereas even 15 years ago they were disgusting. But I think like 2005-2015 in particular was kind of a danger zone when it comes to culinary tech.
And lol I was the weirdo drinking protein drinks in the 90s, and I remember gagging them down and sometimes almost puking, they tasted so bad. Now they're great.
Oh totally. Food is completely different. Other than your basics, it was awful in the past. And there were no options outside of big cities. The level of diversity and quality and options now is off the charts compared to 1980s and prior, there's no comparison. Before the 1990s, you couldn't even get a salad anywhere but big cities that wasn't just iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Grocery stores had bananas, oranges, and apples and maybe some plums and berries in the summer, but that was it. No one had ever heard of a kiwi. No one ate sushi. Most towns had a low quality pizza and Italian place and a crappy Chinese place and like a Long John Silver's and Ponderosa and that was it. Food used to be one of the big distinctions between a major metro and everywhere else, same with access to cool clothes. Now you can get great quality food and fashion and lots of others things no matter where you live.
It’s occurred all over the world in places where the diet changes to American processed food.
The widespread obesity happening in America and its vassal states is not simply due to an abundance of food. Food scarcity hasn’t been an issue in the US since the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago.
I'm not talking about obesity...yes that's an issue in most western nations now. But I'm talking about just more food and nourishment in general, worldwide. In places like Peru and Afghanistan, everywhere. It isn't about being "fat" it's about not being rail skinny with no extra calories, as women need a certain level of body fat to get their period. Don't think I'm talking about obesity, but actual lack on malnourishment. 20 year olds in many nations are now far taller than their parents and grandparents were too, because they have enough food. And age of first menses is dropping worldwide. Globally, we have produced about 1% more food every year PER CAPITA since the 1990s, meaning even with population growth food production goes up even more and there is simply far more food. So plenty of girls that 40 years ago didn't have enough body fat til they were older, because they were actually semi malnourished, now reach that point earlier. And in the US or other places where obesity is an issue, a plump elementary age girl might get there even earlier. But don't mistake me saying this is just because of being overweight or obese, that's not at all the case.
But people really seem to forget just how thin people were in the past...they didn't much muscle mass either. Look at old photos of the public and men are all skinny with very little muscle OR fat. And kids that people think are normal weight today still have more body fat than they used to. I have photos of my friends and I at age 11 in bathing suits circa 1990 and out of ten girls every one is rail thin...not a single bit of soft arm flesh or belly pudge among them, which today you'd see on at least some kids in a group of ten. And btw, we were freaking hungry all the time too.
Would make an awful lot of sense from the evolutionary point of view, no? Body reaches a certain weight and figures it's mature enough to start reproducing. If that comes way earlier than it did in the environment of evolutionary adaptation due to much higher calorie loads...well, you can guess.
I think they've shown you're not attracted to people you grow up with (Westermarck effect), which is probably why incest isn't much more common.
I was actually underweight when I experienced menarche at age 11. As in, I was somewhere around 70-80 lbs. I was still underweight for a few years after that. So no, it's not just a weight thing when that happens. For me, this happened in the late 1990s-- not far off from the 20th century time period you're talking about.
Where did you grow up and you have reason to believe there was a particular environmental exposure there? I.e. was it just you or something happening to other girls in that area? Did your mom get hers around the same age? I think 11 is within the realm of normal...that's 6th grade definitely some girls had theirs then but 12 seemed more common. You are suddenly triggering for me a memory I had completely forgotten about...there was one girl I was in school with who was very short and skinny and childlike in all ways (personality and appearance), who got hers very early like 10 or 11. She didn't have a father in her home. I'd forgotten about her.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. It's entirely possible that there were weird chemicals in the environment-- Kodak and Xerox were based there. It was also the "murder capitol of New York" even in the 1980s/1990s when NYC was at its peak level of violence. My mom didn't grow up there (she grew up in Rome NY) and got hers closer to age 13. It was really hard to compare this to what other girls were going to because the school I went to was REALLY small-- there were only 4 of us in the 6th grade class, and I was the only 6th grade girl. We shared a classroom and teacher with the 4th and 5th grade, kind of like a one room school house type arrangement. The reason for going to private school was that the public schools within city limits (as opposed to the suburbs) had an appalling reputation with everything from test scores to stuff like kids getting into fights, etc. I grew up with the impression that public school was terrifying LOL (this is hilarious because I work in the Sioux Falls public schools now). So before 7th grade, I had no one to compare notes with. In 7th grade, a lot of my peers were getting their first periods and talking about it a fair bit.
I've actually heard the "absent father" explanation before, but that doesn't quite check out for me. My parents are still married to this day. My dad had a well-paying job so my mom could stay home. On weekends, my dad would take me and my brothers to places like Mendon Ponds, Discovery Zone, the Science Museum and Planetarium, etc. Basically every weekend when I was a kid was a fun outing of some sort, so he was more involved than most fathers probably.
However, I remember my home life being really stressful from the mid-'90s onwards. My parents fought with each other constantly. My dad was stressed out because the company he worked for changed management and the new boss was absolutely horrible, but he didn't want to change jobs. My mom started going through "the change" when my younger brother was still a toddler. In the early '90s, we all used to sit together and eat dinner as a family, and by the end of the decade I would be eating in the living room with my younger brother watching "The Simpsons" during dinner every single night and my older brother would watch the bigger TV in the basement. None of us wanted to start sitting together again. I'm unscrambling exactly what happened to this day.
That's funny, I grew up in upstate NY too. Not Rochester, but a similar post industrialist town with shut down factories and major corporations that probably used to dump chemicals in the rivers, very similar. Though in other ways, we're the opposite. My parents were divorced, I went to public school, I was WAY mentally and emotionally ahead of my physical development and always wanting to be an emancipated adult, not a kid.
One thing is similar...home and parents were a nightmare and claustrophobic awkward emotionally borderline unbearable situation from age 13 to 17. But honestly I kind of thought that's just how it was with everyone, especially girls. Puberty and adults are not a good mix, and a daughter going through puberty and mom going through menopause is an explosive mix.
Me and all my friends were all at absolute WAR with our moms at that age. I think it was more normal for people not to get along with their parents back then. Parents didn't try to be their kids' friends and they weren't. When I see how close and open and nice to each other and indulgent parents are with their teenagers these days, it's astonishing to me (even my own dad with my half brother who was born when I was in high school...he's was a totally different type of parent). At least at my school, we 100% viewed our parents as our enemies and prison wardens, and we were all nightmares for them. My mom always talks about how one day around age 17 I finally emerged from my room and had a conversation with her, and she was so shocked she didn't even know what to do. We all get along great now but those years were rough.
Anecdote from father of three young adult women: my daughters’ and their female friends were physically mature, i.e. breasts and waists and hips of adult women, by age 12-13, and still were mentally and behaviorally children. It seems plausible to me that this is occurring earlier than it has in the past and that this has negative consequences for the girls. This is a serious subject with serious consequences, and you are right to raise it. You were also right to attempt to move the conversation into domains, and among female commentators, where it will be accepted and taken seriously. Has Mary Harrington or Louise Perry written about this?
I understand that this is something that has particular focus on women but this idea that we need to defer to some group to talk about a social issues needs to stop. How is this not just identitarianism?
Someones views and behaviour should be judged on their merits. The seclusion of special feminine issues is part of the reason why gender ideology has taken hold. Feminism down played biological explanations because it was inconvenient to their social theories.
It’s not a matter of deference. It’s a matter of recognizing that a mass audience has these filters, and they’re not going to listen to a female focused issue like this if it doesn’t come from a woman. You can say that’s wrong, but that’s a reality. if you’re trying to sell breakfast cereal, you have to sell to the audience that you have, to the market that exists. Walt is absolutely right that for this issue to get traction and for people to take it seriously it needs to be women raising the issue. He has a good intuition about what the public needs to hear and how an issue needs to be presented, in this case.
I'm sure if the set and setting was right I could have this conversation, I'm a bit puzzled by the sensitivity? Menarche is not exactly a dirty word...
Your mileage may vary. If you know a better way to do something important, go ahead and try to do it. No kidding. No snark. Let 100 flowers bloom.
My gut instinct on this is that if some man tried to raise the question of why young women are experiencing their first periods earlier and earlier, the focus would not be on the question of what’s happening to the girls, but on why some creepy guy wants to talk about it, and that would be a distraction from the main issue. On the other hand, if some obviously serious and intelligent and well intentioned woman like, say, Mary Harrington, began to investigate this question it would get a lot more traction, and her motives would not be questioned. I don’t see anything condescending about recognizing that reality.
I think you're reading too much into it, I would be happy to talk about the issue of menarche with anybody and I'm a man. That's why we have medical language.
Upon rethinking this article, I'm not sure there's any future in it. This might be one of those ideas that you've alluded to before which is reasonably debated in the hands of some but unsafe for normies. Modern society has engineered a fiction in which only pedophiles (publicly) find underaged girls hot and enforces it via social death. To counter with the notion it's natural for men to find underaged girls hot due to earlier acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics runs the risk of mixing with the naturalistic fallacy, which is monstrously widespread in society, and create a consensus that it's "fine" to comment on the rack of your daughter's middle school friends because it's "natural." The fact that the naturalistic fallacy is untrue does little to stop its popularity.
Society has attempted to stop this problem with a sledgehammer. It may well be that the issue is better handled by a defter touch of the issue, which writers feminist and non-feminist alike may attempt to refine while trying to avoid the elephant in the room. But the fence exists for a reason.
Sure, I can write about this! My basic summary is along these lines:
--I had my first period at age 11. I remember vividly to this day that I was wearing underwear with Disney pictures on it I was so young.
--I know that my home life was chaotic, and my best friend is constantly pointing out sign and symptoms of CPTSD with me. There's several years of my life before that early menarche where I literally remember Simpsons episodes in way, way more vivid detail than anything that actually went on in my life, like I was constantly dissociating. I joked about this one time with my older brother and he responded completely seriously that watching the Simpsons was "a safe space" from the total chaos around us.
--I also remember a shift in energy with my family roughly around 1995ish. I've gotten up the nerve to ask about it, and my parents kind of tend to blame each other and never give any answers that are satisfactory.
--Since moving to Sioux Falls, I've become more aware of how abnormal the place I grew up was. The guy across the street from me blew up his house when I was 2. I read a substack article about a movie that's incredibly horrifying unless you basically grew up in a 3rd world country-- and then when I watched it, I had the "3rd world" reaction of laughing at it instead of being horrified. I don't know if the stress of growing up in that part of the country contributed to the issue.
--I also remember consistently acting about 2 years younger than I actually was socially through most of the time I was growing up. I tended to have younger friends and get made fun of for having more childish, nerdy interests. I also remember being kind of terrified of the idea of dating as far back as 6th or 7th grade?
--I really have no clue how this happened to me at age 11, but I remember struggling with severe depression for years after that and couldn't explain why. I remember the specific moment that the depression began, though. Every year, the elementary school I went to would have a camp out at a park, and there were specific places in the woods that everyone liked to play in. One of these was "Frog Pond", where we'd wade around catching tadpoles. Another one was "Crayfish Creek". Same idea, lots of wading into the water and interacting with the wildlife. This camp out was a thing I looked forward to every year. Then, in 6th grade, I was already getting my period and couldn't go in the water with the other kids because I was wearing a pad that weekend. To this day, I cry thinking about it. I felt isolated from the other kids even though they didn't know what was going on and I didn't say anything about it. I was the only girl in the entire school dealing with periods, and for a year or two before that I'd had horrible, stabbing pains on my sides as my breasts grew in. I didn't just feel isolated from my childhood friends at that moment; I felt isolated from my entire past and like I was being forced to leave behind a part of my life too soon. I remember leaning into nerdy, tomboyish things after that-- Dungeons and Dragons, video games, sci-fi movies, stupid adult cartoons. I couldn't stand thinking about "girly" stuff a lot of the time. Years later, I would camp at Occupy Wall Street and dress like a boy the entire time and cut my hair short. I hung out with the queerest people in NYC, and peaked with this kind of thing around 2017 when I used they/them pronouns interchangeably with she/her pronouns and identified as "pansexual and solo poly". I absolutely couldn't "own" any kind of "normal", monogamous, straight sexuality despite not really being trans or anything either.
I don't know if I can give any scientific insight on this, but I can certainly write something emotional and talk about what would help me personally open up to the idea of a romantic relationship.
There is a piece on Substack written from a feminine perspective, "A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement", that touches on some of the consequences of the issue without specifically pinning the issue on early puberty specifically that I found to be fairly interesting.
Important post. I'm a couple of years away from having to navigate these waters with my own kids, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Thirty years later I can still remember a high school classmate whose hormones and genetics had lined up so that she looked much older than she was. Not only did she develop early, she was tall and athletic, and as a high school freshman she could easily have passed for a college sophomore. I was two years older and didn't know her well, but everyone in our high school heard nonstop rumors about her being a huge slut, which I'm sure in hindsight were untrue (and probably started by other girls.) It must have been a hellish social experience. Generalize that to a much larger group of girls and it's no wonder we're seeing so much mental illness among young women. Feminism isn't the solution, but it's reacting to a real problem.
There's a lot to be said for old-fashioned Victorian values which drew a sharp distinction between respectable and disreputable women, and where there were serious social penalties to harassing or attacking the reputation of a woman known to be respectable. But there's no way we're ever going to get that past back.
As you say, this is an impossible subject for men to discuss publicly in good faith. And while optics aren't everything, the online (male) right has an optics problem here: like flies to shit, talk of pubertal age inevitably attracts creepy spergs who insist that if the female is in estrus, it should be permissible to mate with her, because anything else would be un-Darwinian.
Women police any talk of this because they don't want to let covert pedos into the overton window. This is an understandable impulse, but by heavy-handedly censoring literally *any* talk of this hugely consequential development they are only hurting their daughters.
Perhaps NO woman should be harassed for her sexual behaviour, but at the same time there should be strong norms against premarital or at LEAST casual sex. After all, research shows it's better for married men as well as women to have a low body count. At the same time, men should stop ogling young girls. Everyone can control their eyes, and I really don't buy they're thinking 11yos are 16 or whatever. I suspect the overstimulating of the male sex drive esp by Big Porn has made this harder
This made me realize something. I was highly selective when choosing a relationship partner, and when me and my wife started seeing each other I immediately felt that her "personality" was different from the girls I met and dated before. Later, she told me she went through puberty unusually late, within the 'historically normal' time frame, much later than most of her female friends.
Maybe part of her "personality" that I liked was that, unlike most if not all other girls I met and dated before, she was not damaged, traumatized and sex-negative in ways described here. She was conservative, but also definitely not sex-negative. Maybe looking for late bloomer girls could be a useful dating & mating advice for guys.
Also, I am wondering whether boys/men have the same issue. Spermarche (first ejaculation) occurs between the age of 12 and 15 (source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3944237/ ), and from this point, boys basically become incels as they're is hardly able to find a girl to have sex with (most often it's even legally prohibited). Prolonged inceldom also leads to trauma, frustration and sex-negativity, and even in very liberal societies that allow teenage casual sex, each boy lives a couple of years as incel anyway.
Puberty for boys is almost as complicated a process as it is for girls. One difference is that girls become fertile and reach full sexual maturity in a relatively small window of age, whereas boys can become fertile and then stay sexually immature for almost a decade after. Sexual maturity here is everything from finishing physical growth and getting full facial hair to emotional maturity and a developed sexual sense of self. With decreasing levels of testosterone, you have this window widening for boys-or actually, I should say men here as they are in their mid 20s by the time they finish maturing- as it starts at roughly the same age but ends later and later.
Good point on the wives. My wife was also a late bloomer, and considerably more sane than previous girlfriends. Now I'm hoping it's at least partly genetic and my daughter will have that benefit.
Not sure if I buy the male thing as much. Getting less sex than you would like is the human male condition. Every man is an incel at some point in his life.
But there is a truth there in that the emergence and recognition of unfulfillable sexual desire is when I clearly delineate my very happy childhood ending and my much less happy adolescence beginning. I noticed that a long time ago. I'm not sure if we're all euphemizing what's unpleasant about being a male teenager, but for me that was basically 100% of it. All the other annoyances, changes, and stresses were extremely minor in comparison.
Big if true, but I would need some more convincing. Are there any correlational studies on this? Are women with early menarche more likely to be feminists, or more likely to have negative opinions about men, or more likely to have mental health problems or lower overall life satisfaction? Or are there too many confounders (e.g. unhealthy girls have later menarche)?
There are too many confounding variables to quantify this relationship in a scientific way. Some aspects of life (especially those pertaining to sentiment and internal narratives) are too messy and abstract to rely on anything other than anecdotal evidence.
But whenever I show this data to a smart and high openness woman and present my theory I never hear anything other than "yeah that makes sense." I suggest you try the same thing.
Setting 18 as the age of majority is a fairly new thing, even in Western civilization. We need to remember that as recently as 1860, the average lifespan was <40. Children were rushed along into adulthood out of sheer necessity.
Improved sanitation, health care and nutrition has changed all that, of course and I certainly do not advocate rushing children into sexual activity, but I am not sure that supporting offspring to the age of 30 is helpful either.
Good post, but I'm not sure why you frame this as a 'feminist issue', when it would be more appropriate just to call it a 'women's issue'. As we can see from the rather unhinged comments of a Mzz Grundy elsewhere in this thread, all we can expect feminists to do is to mine this biological problem for political ammunition, at the price of deepening every social and psychological wound caused by it.
but most women who call themselves feminists aren't gross political lesbians etc.
for 80% of self-described feminists, feminism literally just means "boys should be nice to me" or "I grew up in a blue state"--calling it feminist is a good rhetorical inroad with those broads
Interesting & def some good ideas for dealing w it here. But still the question remains: Are you basically saying that these girls get ogled bc the older men think they're older bc they have breasts? How MUCH older DO they look tho?
I have an acquaintance who was v attractive & mature looking at 11 and got sexually approached on a beach on holiday. She told us & I remember thinking that the man could well have mistaken her for an older teen. (He replied pretty creepily upon knowing she was 11 tho)
But in most of these cases the girls probs are acting like the kids they are, and often the man may know their age. Even if they have a developed chest, I don't believe their faces etc will all, or even mostly, make them look 16 or whatever.
So why are all these men ogling them? That's the question you don't address. It's not an issue of paedophilia bc these girls are not prepubescent. But it is an issue of morality. Why can these rational adult men not refrain from ogling young teenagers? Are you essentially saying this is a behaviour that men, including older men, are unable to control? Fascinating, if so.....
If the problem is men horndogging underage girls, WHY ARE YOU ASKING WOMEN TO SOLVE THAT PROBLEM?
Let's say you are right: something in the water is making girls reach physical sexual maturity at a very young age. It will take years to sort that out. In the meantime, we can't ask 12 year old girls to deal with that. Grown women are not creating a problem for those girls.
Who is the source of the problem? Men. Who could stop being disgusting right now? Men. Who could enforce the rules around this by telling other men that hitting on very young women (please cut the shit about how you can't tell a girl is a teen if she has boobies. Just stop, shut up, no one believes you, you're disgusting) is beneath contempt? Men.
Instead of lamenting you can't get feminists to sit at your feet and listen to you, go lecture your fellow men about their behavior. No women are required to participate at all, you can start right now.
This is precisely the kind of retarded schoolmarmish take I was talking about.
It's pretty much impossible to bring about social change by asking people to "be better." You need to change the physical incentive structure to redirect people at a macro level. Work with the world we have, not the one you want.
We already have age of consent laws and a culture that stigmatizes pedophilia more aggressively than literally anything else and it hasn't fixed the problem. If you want to improve outcomes for young girls you need to attack the *physical source of the problem*.
I almost didn’t believe Walt when he told me that this is the standard response he gets when he brings up the subject, but here you are for everyone to see!
Let’s make something very clear- the problem is not men “horndogging” underage girls, as you say, it very much is the fact that girls are reaching ostensible sexual maturity before they are old enough to be able to handle it. It is really disgusting of you to turn this into an opportunity to shit on men’s completely normal sexuality. The subject of this article is not some sort of pedophile epidemic in men- there are no actual crimes involved here- feeling sexual attraction is not a crime, any more than feeling the urge to murder someone is, irrespective of the age and gender of the person towards whom you have those feelings.
You cannot shame people’s sexual attraction away and then expect them to be unaffected otherwise. If you insist that real physical and biochemical signs of sexual maturity should stop being attractive to men then no man will be able to find any grown adult women attractive(which is the direction I see things sliding in, worryingly enough).
I am sick and tired of women who shirk all responsibility and then claim to be victims. Women are very much required to participate here- it is in their own interests more than anything. Women are the ones who can most effectively protect and guide young girls through the sexual confusion during those years. Women and mothers can also make sure that young girls are allowed a close relationship with their biological fathers, since that actually directly moves the age of menarche higher and currently women are very much responsible for ruining fathers’ chances in this. However, none of these things are clearly to be solved by anyone lecturing anyone so we don’t need your expertise. If you can sit down and shut up on the subject while you are deliberately choosing not to be helpful, I am sure everyone else here will be very thankful for it.
You know, one of the things that got me is they're so aggressive about men never sexualizing women (including *adult* women) that it's never clear exactly when we *are* supposed to sexualize women. They never give you a positive script to follow. 'Cause I got a huge dose of this stuff way back in high school and prided myself on never acting on my attraction...which led to huge problems in my late twenties when I finally decided I did want to have a relationship and the women were very upset I wouldn't touch them.
The big problem that's totally un-PC to mention (but perhaps more likely to be discussed on the right as a result) is I think a lot of the people running this are lesbians, for whom *all* male desire is unwanted. Heterosexual women (and some bi ones) want to be desired by men *sometimes*, though certainly not by ones they're not attracted to. Indeed, if they never are, they're 'ugly' (notice the short Anglo-Saxon word reflecting a basic concept, like 'tree' or 'hot') and it really affects their self-esteem.
The sex negativity in my generation is really palpable. On the one hand you have extreme normalization of anything that looks sexual. I still haven’t gotten over how normal and acceptable selling your sexuality has become. But it’s not really attractive when it is the norm is it? And on the other hand you have these women, whether they’re lesbian or not, trying to shame all the sexuality out of men. Weirdly enough these are the same women who are often selling themselves on the side.
I don’t think the sex negativity is led by lesbians though. It actually reeks of the kind of “token resistance” fetish that most women have, where they want to be perceived as so unnaturally attractive that men just can’t resist it and push past whatever barriers they put up and “claim” them. That dance of moving around social boundaries to play with each other’s sexual fetishes has existed between men and women forever, I think. What has changed is that women want to indulge in their fetish without ever risking that someone they don’t find attractive might push past their resistance to try to claim them too. They want the fun of it without any risks, which is just not possible.
My armchair hypothesis is that there will always be a percentage of women, small but consistent across time, who are naturally "sex negative" in the way prescribed by second wave feminism. Actual exclusive lesbians; women who've been victims of serious and permanently traumatic abuse (not just occasional harassment); women on the autism spectrum who struggle to understand normal social behavior. This group really does experience the world in black and white: ALL male attraction (no exceptions) is frightening and unwelcome, and EVERYTHING about conventional femininity (no exceptions) is an alien script that society is forcing them to perform.
But these women will always be vastly outnumbered by women who still want to be the object of male desire, as long as it's by attractive men, and this will always be the cause of conflict in organized feminism. In the Seventies, leaders like Friedan and Steinem explicitly tried to purge the movement of lesbians. In the Nineties, the split between second and third wave feminists was really a generational battle between middle-aged Boomers and Gen Xers who were young and hot. Back then, Kathleen Hanna types could frame this as an artistic statement: "I'm a conventionally hot woman with a deliberately sexually provocative stage presence -- but you're a misogynist pig if you're attracted to me!"
Today the Internet has generalized this condition to young women who don't want to be participants in it. Even before you get to porn, there's social media, which exposes women to the lowest common denominator of male creepiness. Any woman with public socials will encounter the bottom-feeding men who trawl Facebook and Insta looking for "bobs and vagene."
I agree about autistic women : but I do think men bear some responsibility for this. I've done some research on them recently & they are more likely to be raped or assaulted. It's not just innocent stuff they misinterpret.
Similarly, I'm bi & most lesbians I know don't like men hitting on them, but don't feel angry at the men unless they push on & get creepy & overbearing. Plus there's predatory unicorn hunters who can be pretty ruthless trying to trick lesbians into threesomes withoit letting on their bf will be involved. & corrective rape. A lot of the time the lesbian suspicion is due to genuine horrible experiences.
The time scale's important to keep in mind; feminism preceded gay liberation in acceptance. Society was a lot more homophobic back then; it didn't get taken out of the DSM until 1973. So a lot of it was tactical; they didn't want the feminist movement to get associated with lesbianism (or gays).
Of course lesbians are going to be much more motivated to be feminists; pre-1960 gender roles offer them no chance at a relationship they like.
I think you really might have a point there. It makes sense when you explain it that way. I just basically walked away when that happened because I couldn't figure out if it was token or not and didn't want to take any chances.
I think old-school second-wave sex negativity was, like the one we were just arguing with. The new stuff...well, I would assume a younger person would know better than me.
I don't have a huge problem with sex work, honestly. I've never been a client, paid on OnlyFans, or even really looked at much porn (my lack of familiarity with it was the basis for a really funny encounter with a more experienced woman a while ago). At first I thought it was wrong, now I think it would turn into a neverending money hole, kind of like Magic cards or drugs. But...if there's a market, might as well get the money directly to the performer, instead of letting the studio exploit them.
Hmmm I'm bi & I def think that men should sexualise women in bars etc. BTW, in my experience, lesbians who are v vocal about hating men all the time are not lesbian but traumatised bi women. Actual lesbians don't think about men much, unless they have male friends etc as a lot do. See Dworkin, Sheila Jeffreys : claim to be lesbian, but no real relationships w women.
Or traumatized straight women; numerically that's going to be a bigger group. I've always though you were right about the traumatized bi thing, but being a man I mostly saw it from the other side: bi women who didn't get traumatized and were fine with men.
I also think there may be a bit of a generation gap as lesbians in my generation (Xennial) tended to be a lot more anti-male as a rule. More homophobia and unwanted advances and so on (I'd guess).
This doesn't really answer the question tho. Ofc the men can't help their FEELINGS. But they CAN help whether they ogle, grope, etc. I really don't buy that there's no clue to these girls actual age.
You're from India, aren't you? I've noticed on Indian subreddits (I'm interested so lurk often) there's a lot of posts about men staring at women. Is this just something that's more accepted as inevitable in India, and women etc try & work around it? Perhaps There's something in that approach. I still think men have more self control in this than they claim, though I agree w all your suggestions for women.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that men can’t control their actions. That would be rather dehumanizing to them in my books. What does “horndogging” mean here anyway? I often find that women that complain about this sort of thing are not talking about any real actions taken by the men, often not even about being stared at, but just this nebulous miasma of being “sexualized” by them. I don’t think the women are imagining it entirely, but they are complaining about things that fall in the unconscious/subconscious realm, where accountability cannot be applied.
In India, everyone just “stares” a lot more than usual. But what a lot of these posts online seem to omit is that they stare into your eyes, not so much at your body. Strangers hold real eye contact with you here and it can come across rather aggressive if you aren’t used to it. There is almost never anything aggressive or even sexual about it though. It is just a social norm of non-verbal communication. I have lived in other places outside of India and the norms about this tend to vary quite a lot across the human population.
Hi, sorry, I feel like I misunderstood your earlier post. In Walt's post & the comments, people were talking about trauma & seemed to refer to obvious ogling, groping etc. Ditto for the posts he linked to. So obvs if that is what we're talking about, men can control that. I agree that saying otherwise is dehumanising to them. As a caveat I would say that mums & dads of early puberty girls should protect them by dressing them as childlike as possible. These cues will emphasise they are nit fair game for sexual attention.
I agree in some cases it could be vague thing that's not voluntary.
Interesting to hear that about India - the posts I saw, by Indian born & raised men & women,mainly saw it as sexual staring at women. But I see there may be wider cultural norms about staring that play into the issue.
You are an animal hardwired to reproduce. Female secondary sex characteristics are designed to attract mates. If they are there that says, “ready to reproduce”.
Obviously there are ethical questions but they are separate from the biological reality. It’s like shaming people for thinking French fries taste good.
Yeah....to be clear : the attraction itself can't be helped. But ogling & harassing is a choice, and should be shamed. As long as you keep the attraction to yourself, no problem.
I mean, I don't think Walt is advocating men do that. The point is that if something in the environment is producing this (and fat could very well be it), it's going to produce a lot more of these sorts of problems and it should be addressed in addition to that.
It's like when you tell women not to go drunk to parties and lock their doors, etc., and feminists go 'HOW ABOUT TELLING MEN NOT TO RAPE!' Well, sure, we do that. We even put them in jail to be raped themselves when they do rape people. But it's still sensible to tell women to be careful.
(And for the record, my youngest partner was in her late twenties...I was an extremely late bloomer.)
If a gay man were in here saying he and his pals should not be condemned for hitting on 13 year old boys who look a bit taller and broader than their peers would you be leaping to defend him? Would all your pals in the comments be doing so?
Yeah thought not. You would be saying if gay men want to be accepted in society they need to stigmatize men who can’t keep it together around kids.
Most gay men constantly hit on younger boys and get away with it. If it were an issue of precocious puberty causing it I definitely would take the same stand I have taken for heterosexual men. As far as I have seen though, gay men that hit on young boys are specifically attracted to signs of sexual immaturity more than sexual maturity. These two things are clearly quite different.
I don’t know what you are even crowing about here because the only reason anyone ever actually talks against pedophilia is when the victim is female. If the victim is male, and especially if the perpetrator is female, most people say “nice” and that he’s lucky to be getting such attention.
Here we are discussing young adolescents. It is true that the rare instances of women coming on to young teen boys are not always readily condemned as they should be. Cases of adult men hitting on young teen boys are condemned very harshly and gay men have actually taken action to oppose the NAMBLA brigades in their ranks ( after some pushing from lesbians). In this thread there have been multiple instances of men — and you — saying it is somehow unreasonable to ask heterosexual men to leave young teen girls alone. It is the straight version of NAMBLA bullshit and it is gross. All the commentary about how only dour frowny old frump ladies even care is exactly what went on before decent gay men got their shit together. Decent straight men and their fawny female apologists should reflect on that.
It’s like you don’t even bother reading anything I have said here..
Do you not understand the difference between feeling attraction toward signs of sexual immaturity vs signs of sexual maturity? No one in this entire thread has defended the former, and yes, I will keep defending the latter as long as there is no criminal pedophilic behavior involved. If you think that precocious puberty is not the main problem here then you need to reexamine your priorities.
And it is a really cheap trick to insinuate that I am only defending men because I am “fawning” over them. I am never going to be apologetic about defending good men, and the reasons are my own, so make of that what you will.
Adult men macking on young teenagers is disgusting and indefensible, no matter what their bodies look like. The problem is men’s behavior, which is in fact under their control, not the physiological development of teens, which happens involuntarily.
Exactly. Straight men & women go ballistic about gay men having relationships w 16yo boys or even potentially finding them attractive. Yet the same situation w girls is brushed off, since men apparently can't control where they look.
Hmm...I thought we were generally talking about men here, not boys. On boys, I went coed until I was 13 & don't remember any sexual harassment of anyone. I thought boys got their sexual awakening around 13, not 11 or whatever this age people are getting early puberty at is? I wonder if porn is priming boys to act aggressively. I've read some awful stuff recently claiming rape has increased at primary schools due to porn.
Honestly, it's been a month and I've forgotten. I think part of the argument is people are actually going through puberty earlier due to being fatter and the body turning on puberty when a given weight is reached, probably enough to support the additional energy expenditure of mating (and pregnancy for women).
I guess you could blame porn. The anti-porn movement seems tied up with conservatives who want the 50s back (and I was influenced by one fellow who insisted on blaming porn for everything), so I'm skeptical, but it is true it's easier to get than in my day and is apparently much more intense. I also never really got into it so I don't have a lot of firsthand experience.
Good point : body fat would make girls look older.
Porn's influence can def be overblown but it certainly is a lot more ubiquitous than before and more violent. I suppose it's like any industry : oversaturation makes it boring, so they have to make more extreme products to get an audience. After all, w sex, There's only so many ways to film normal stuff, so the way to amp it up is sadly to make it violent/humiliating.
Great article and I hope this gets discussed more. I’ve thought about this for awhile as well but couldn’t articulate it as well as you did here. One of my big concerns is that there’s going to be a push to lean into this trend with policies such as lowering age of consent laws and expanding “children’s rights” by the logic that they’re biologically adults at a younger age.
nah it's gonna be the opposite--upon hitting 30, zoomer women will vote to increase the AOC to 25 and humans will gradually become elves.
even though teenagers are *physically* much older than in the past they are *mentally* much younger, and there is no broad impulse to reverse this. trying to push back on infantilization/coddling of adolescents would prob get u called a groomer.
the problem is the enormous disconnect between the rapid physical maturation and the psychological arrested development.
Hell, I dated a 22-year-old man when I was 32 and was honestly shocked at the negative reactions. He came on to me and was THRILLED that I said yes. We met in a bar and both misjudged how old the other one was-- he thought I was younger, I thought he was older. By the time we realized how big the age gap was, we were having too much fun to break things up over that. In our photos together, we looked like we were the same age. He was of legal drinking age and finished with college. To this day, I'm convinced that the negative reactions were due to jealousy-- I looked young and had no problems pulling a young, hot guy.
The idea of AOC being 25 while elementary school kids can be allowed/coerced into social or medical gender transitioning in elementary school seems like just too much of a contradiction to me. But I can appreciate your viewpoint and I suppose a point in your argument’s favor is all the unironic “she’s only 21 you sick freak” responses whenever Leonardo di caprio gets a new gf.
the contradiction is the point--you get called a pedo for dating a 23yo girl as a 30yo guy, and meanwhile they trans your kid.
modern progressives (esp sex negative zoomer women) want to create a sexless society where everyone is traumatized at an early age and nobody even wants to fuck bc it's scary and gross.
it's truly a horrific ideology that needs to be smashed.
About a year ago I collected a bunch of demographic data sets about this subject for a class project on endocrine disrupting chemicals. Along with the average ages of menarche and thelarche(budding of breast tissue) decreasing we also have rapidly increasing numbers of highly precocious puberty(as early as 6year-olds, sometimes), and increasing prevalence of every kind of disease that is linked to hormone disruption in women. There are literally hundreds of biochemical systems in women’s bodies that are regulated by the same hormones that govern sexual development. There has also been nearly 4 decades of 1% per year decline in age-adjusted testosterone levels for men. Obviously, this decrease also goes with all sorts of health issues like a decrease in overall immunity, strength, bone density, muscle mass, sperm count, and just an overall shittier health. Not all of the data is demographic either, but demographic data establishes a widespread phenomenon. There is just as much chemical analysis and lab testing data to establish direct causal links between pollutant levels, hormone disruption, developmental issues in different animal species and also behavioral patterns associated with the hormone levels.
Can people reading here grasp just how many different kinds of social impact all of these chemical changes must be having? Your hormonal health directly affects every major decision in your life, both directly and indirectly. An early thelarche causing lifelong sexual trauma and making more women distrust and dislike men in general is just barely scratching the surface, in my opinion. This is not even to mention the many social causes exacerbating many of the hormonal disruptions, like lowered paternal involvement directly reducing age of menarche.
Putting together that project (with input from many mentors that are a lot more learned than I am) was the most devastatingly depressing experiences I have ever had in my life. Most professors, scientific researchers and engineers I have mentioned this data to are either already aware of it or are not particularly surprised by it. I have felt like an absolute lunatic as I try to explain to people twice my age, people who have multiple degrees in chemistry, medicine, or other STEM subjects, why this data has unbelievably far reaching consequences and why they should take it more seriously. I have tried and almost entirely failed at this so far. Perhaps I really am a lunatic and don’t know what I am talking about here, but there is never any convincing argument to the contrary to all the concerns I have raised. My argument is mainly based on the chemistry and the clear demographic data on the subject, which no one has denied. The best counter I got so far was- “well if it was such a major issue then wouldn’t there be a lot more noise about it? Since no one is talking about it it must not be that big of an issue”. I will put together another “lunatic” essay about it on my Substack soon-ish(I am in the middle of exams) for anyone wanting to read it, but frankly I don’t have a lot of hope that anything will be done about it, since the people that are best placed to do anything about it seem not to be bothered at all.
Ironically, this is one of the reasons I was disappointed that the Cass Report discovered that there are possibly many health risks for puberty blockers. Puberty blockers made sense for a lot of these confused girls who were not ready to be sexualized. I hoped it was unintentionally delaying menarche to a more appropriate age. But in retrospect, correcting one chemical endocrine disruption with a different chemical was never going to be as healthy as stopping the first endocrine disruption.
If you continue your research and publish it, or even post it on Substack, you can count on at least one reader who will avoid giving their child what endocrine disrupting chemicals you identify, if that is even possible these days.
I am not an expert in any of the subjects I am talking about here- perhaps that is why I can look at all the different aspects of it- but what I am planning to write about is how all the trends fit together.
If you are specifically looking for an endocrinological analysis of hormone disrupting chemicals, start here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2726844/#B25 and follow the sources listed.
Lots of variables are at play here, as well as nonlinear dynamics and feedback loops. To make matters worse, social factors are presumably involved (difficult to quantify and include in a model). Data on environmental pollutants and exposure levels are also basically non extant prior to the 90s. It's going to be as tough a puzzle to solve as the question of anthropogenic climate change.
Some random thoughts/observations that may be of use:
Nutrition and caloric intake are one driving factor in determining the average age of menarche in a given population. Physiological stress can cause an individual woman to cease menstruation. (common in female distance runners)
Female hormonal cycles are altered by the presence/density of other females. Synchronization of cycles can occur in a house full of women, for example.
I was an adolescent in the early 90s. Girls went through puberty beginning in the 6th grade. It seemed nearly universal by 7th grade (age 12-13) For the Black population, this was shifted 1-2 years earlier.
For the Boys, it was similar to the girls, but shifted later by about 1 year.
As for the decrease in testosterone: The elimination of male spaces, especially work places must play a role. Competition/team work in male exclusive environments raises T levels in men, at least temporarily. 'Winning' competition (against other men) has an even greater effect. Possession of physical territory/successfully defending said territory has a similar effect. De-territorialisation has the opposite effect. What is mass immigration if not de-territorialisation of native male population? Atomisation is a characterized by, among other things, de territorialisation. No one 'owns' the local environment - we are all merely transient residents of the same crappy hotel.
Obesity lowers testosterone levels in men....and low t-levels cause men to gain fat mass. Not sure about the arrow of causation on this one. Might be bidirectional. Either way, the high carb, high sugar common diet must play a role at the population level.
As someone who studied chemistry i have often thought how insane we are as a society in how little regulation and safety for chemicals that gets put into our environment.
A chemical or diet related cause you would expect to vary a bit across regions unless it's ubiquitous (plastics?)
Fascinating that girls without dad's tend to have earlier menarche pointing to other environmental reasons but nothing today hasn't happened before has it, ie stressors etc?
Edit: female birth control, hrt in the water supply?
What’s the story on paternal involvement and menarche?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964498/#:~:text=However%2C%20there%20may%20be%20paternal,of%20menarche%20in%20their%20daughters
Paternal involvement is correlated with a more stable environment growing up and paternal abandonment or neglect is associated with earlier menarche.
An old frogtwitter poster, that Walt probably remembers, named @menaquinone4 introduced the topic into the alt-right sphere back in the day. Since then, I've been vastly fascinated with the subject of Endocrine Disruptors and their more than plausible effects in modern society. Especially BPA which I think there is quite an amount of solid scientific evidence of its effects.
However, aside from you guys, I've not seen many people discuss this despite it has wide implications in many modern health and societal trends as you suggests.
Every study I've seen, and simple observation, tells me that girls hit puberty earlier now merely because of increased adiposity. They're fatter. And you don't need to be actually "fat" but even normal sized kids these days are generally much softer than they used to be. Before roughly the 80s and 90s, teenagers were almost universally rail thin. Like, REALLY skinny by today's standards.
The women in my family are all tall and slim with basically the same body type. My older sister looked like a literal skeleton when she was 13, in the 80s. I looked skinny but not like a skeleton, in the 90s. Our mom looked like a concentration camp victim at 13, in the 60s. My sister's daughter, born in the 2000s, looked slim but not at all skinny, and she definitely had softness. I know lots of teenagers who are more plump than their parents, which basically didn't exist in the past.
I also think pre adolescent and adolescent girls have been getting hit on by adult men for all of history and that's nothing new. I was a super late bloomer and got my period and developed way after my friends, around 14. Regardless of that fact and being totally flat chested, I STILL had friends dads and strange men on the street leering and saying disgusting things to me, and was trapped in a corner and molested by two older boys at a public pool. My mom has similar tales from the 50s and 60s, and like I said, she resembled a blonde concentration camp victim with zero boobs, and it still happened. I don't think these things are new, they just weren't talked about previously. And yes of course a teenage girl with big gravity defying boobs is going to get it all the worse.
Btw, women absolutely DO consider that their own fathers are disgusting pigs just like their friend's dad and their math teacher and their uncle and their neighbor...but the thought is so horrifying and profoundly upsetting and depressing to think about that it's best to put it out of your mind, because what else can you do? I mean how exactly do you think it would have made you feel if you found out in junior high that your mom was likely furiously masturbating to 13 year old boys? And so was everyone else's mom? Like wtf do you do with that information??
Anyway, I appreciate your concern with and interest in the issue. I do disagree that it's environmental beyond just increased levels of adiposity. And I disagree that it's the stating and harassment from men (virtually all adult men, not much of an issue with boys your own age). Ask literally any woman alive, even 75 year olds, and they will tell you they were cat called and harassed more from age 13 to 17 than any other age.
Personally I think it's bc of porn and women now having to know exactly what guys are watching and getting off to...every guy, all the time. It's another thing you really can't deal with other than just choosing to not think of it. Before the 90s, this was something most women were ignorant of or could easily avoid. Before the 70s, it didn't even exist. Now, you can't help but know about it and know exactly how absolutely fucking depraved it is, and it's every guy everywhere all the time. That is an enormous difference in a few decades, and profoundly psychologically unsettling for women/girls. I'm surprised they're not ALL asexual/lesbians whatever.
There are studies that control for adiposity and it only explains a small part of the decrease in age of menarche. It’s actually quite likely that increased obesity in young women is the result of precocious puberty and not its cause. Hormones affect adiposity much more than adiposity affects hormones.
About getting attention from men despite having no boobs, there are quite a lot of things that signal sexual maturity more than boobs do. Boobs are just a stand-in to use in an argument, but realistically, your facial characteristics, shape of your hips, length of eyelashes, body hair, redness and clarity of skin and various body odors are much more salient in sexual signaling than boobs- especially because boobs can be artificially enhanced or hidden away in baggy clothes.
Ha. Yeah I got tons of attention from adult men at 14 but it wasn't til I started artificially enhancing with a major padded bra in high school that the boys my age paid attention. ;) I do get that the cause and effect of body fat isn't clear, but there's definitely a strong association in international studies done everywhere. To the point where they can almost predict how many months earlier you're likely to get your period for every one point increase in BMI.
Plus it's well known that a lot of extreme athletes who keep very low body fat, like gymnasts and ballerinas, often don't get their period til they're like 16.
I certainly remember being rail thin and flat chested in junior high while all my friends looked like full grown women. And all those girls with D cups in 7th grade seemed to like the attention...they got boyfriends early, they got married early, they're all normal now. So I still say the increasing numbers of asexual, nonbinary, trans etc young women who are rejecting sex with men entirely is mostly about porn and the internet revealing too much to everyone about what other people are really like. But I do grant that separate from that, early puberty is not a good thing. I have a mentally challenged niece who went through puberty at age 10 and she's mentally about 6...it has been very bad.
Strong predictive value of a correlation doesn’t always mean a strong correlation. Adiposity is predictably associated with early puberty, where you can predict the number of months of precocity based on BMI, but it doesn’t explain the entirety of the phenomenon-not even close. That’s why you get a weak but highly consistent correlation between the two variables.
What do you think about all the de-transitioners coming forward that say that they either developed too early and felt dysmorphia because of it or the ones that felt insecure in their perfectly normal bodies because all the other girls their age were hyper feminine and much more sexually mature? This seems to me very much like a drastic population level shift causing issues on both ends of the spectrum.
I think any time you're on the extreme on either end and don't "fit in" or are different from your peers and what's portrayed in the media, it's very difficult for teenagers, especially girls.
At puberty you become exquisitely attuned to social status and the opinion of your peers and it's mortifying to be out of step (unless it's for something admired...the boys who got tall and matured earlier than others certainly seemed to socially benefit from it). I was absolutely OBSESSED and perpetually mortified by being flat chested and not getting my period til two years after most of my friends. Though honestly I was much more tortured and upset about not living up to the standards of models and actresses than I was about my own peer group. But it preoccupied 90% of my thoughts at the time, and I wouldve murdered my own family to get myself a nice pair of boobs. My recollection is that the well developed girls in 7th and 8th grade mostly flaunted it, but they were in the realm of normal. There were probably girls who had developed in more like 4th or 5th grade who were embarrassed and hiding it so perhaps I didn't notice. Of course this was the 90s so no one had ever heard of such a thing as trans or NB...I can easily imagine that if one is an outlier on any measure that's generally considered socially undesirable, that a tween girl would look for any possible avenue to escape her circumstances. It's easy for me to imagine thinking to myself at 13 "hey I'm tall and thin and flat, I'd make a really good looking guy, maybe I should try that". I did listen to Jordan Peterson's interview with a detrans girl and she mentions that a lot of her motivation was being flat chested and not curvy and feeling like she didn't live up to feminine ideals. It would be interesting if someone did a study looking at how many female teenaged transitioners fall within the average/median range for things like height, weight, and development level, and how many fall more towards the tail on both sides of the curve.
Do men notice those things that much tho? I mean, in the cases we're talking about where someone's getting leered at from across the room or whatever. I suppose subconsciously.. Still I really think men do bear some responsibility for controlling themselves. We should obvs find other ways of dealing w it.
Your comment made me text my mom and sister to ask, because we were all very skinny kids. My mom got hers at 10 or 11, still in elementary school in the 60s or early 70s. I was surprised to hear that. I got mine at 12 in the mid-90s. My younger sister hasn't responded, but my hazy memory says she got hers around 11 or 12, too. After reading Sai's comment after yours, I'm really curious about this fat/hormone link, either way. None of us started gaining weight until my mom during menopause (aside from some normal fluctuation). My mom and sister were those kinds of women who walked out of the hospital in their normal pants after having babies.
Yeah, same in my family. I have pics of my mom on the beach in the 70s post babies and she was thin as a model. Though we all got ours later around 13/14. I was one of the kids embarrassed about not having it and having all my supplies ready years before I needed them.
I like watching music documentaries from the 60s and 70s, which generally feature a lot of concert footage of young people, and that's where the weight/fat difference is hugely striking. Huge crowds of people in their teens and 20s and everyone is skinny. It's actually much more noticeable wrt the men than it is the women, because they have no fat OR muscles...they're all just skinny birds compared to nowadays.
The increased adiposity itself is due to endocrine disruptors…
I mean...couldn't possibly be because there is massively more food, everywhere, all the time now?? People used to eat meals, and that was it. Moms didn't carry snacks and drinks everywhere. Gas stations didn't sell food and snacks. Literally only grocery stores, farm stands, and restaurants sold food...other than popcorn (which was way smaller) at the movies or hot dogs at a sporting event. I remember those days and I'm not that old! There is food and candy and snacks and drinks filled with sugar sold and available literally everywhere all the time now. Every mom I know literally carries snacks on her everywhere she goes. That was not a thing pre 1990s. People were just expected to be hungry sometimes and it wasn't considered the end of the world.
I'm just saying...Occam's razor. This trend is not limited to the US. It has occurred all over the world including very remote and not very westernized places. The biggest difference is people all over the world have far more food available to them than ever in history. Most places were subject to ocassional famine most of history and there were still some through the 1990s...in the 80s children in the millions still literally starved to death. There hasn't been a real famine in the entire world in over a decade (warnings and fund raisers about famine risk notwithstanding, you don't see skeletal 7 year olds with distended bellies like was a common sight on TV in the 80s). People are fatter everywhere because they're well fed.
People underestimate how much better tasting food is these days too.
Even compared to the aughts, food today is MUCH tastier thanks to massive advances in industrial gastronomy. Compared to the 80s it's like a completely different country. Makes compulsive snacking a lot easier. Even in like 1998 your option to get fat was like Lunchables or Kid Cuisine. Or for adults, compare a Hungry Man to a Devour bowl. Night and day.
Thankfully there have recently been a lot of advances specifically in making low calorie food not taste like shit and that is taking a lot of the edge off the problem. These days the healthiest protein bars / shakes taste delicious, whereas even 15 years ago they were disgusting. But I think like 2005-2015 in particular was kind of a danger zone when it comes to culinary tech.
And lol I was the weirdo drinking protein drinks in the 90s, and I remember gagging them down and sometimes almost puking, they tasted so bad. Now they're great.
Oh totally. Food is completely different. Other than your basics, it was awful in the past. And there were no options outside of big cities. The level of diversity and quality and options now is off the charts compared to 1980s and prior, there's no comparison. Before the 1990s, you couldn't even get a salad anywhere but big cities that wasn't just iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Grocery stores had bananas, oranges, and apples and maybe some plums and berries in the summer, but that was it. No one had ever heard of a kiwi. No one ate sushi. Most towns had a low quality pizza and Italian place and a crappy Chinese place and like a Long John Silver's and Ponderosa and that was it. Food used to be one of the big distinctions between a major metro and everywhere else, same with access to cool clothes. Now you can get great quality food and fashion and lots of others things no matter where you live.
It’s occurred all over the world in places where the diet changes to American processed food.
The widespread obesity happening in America and its vassal states is not simply due to an abundance of food. Food scarcity hasn’t been an issue in the US since the Great Depression, almost 100 years ago.
I'm not talking about obesity...yes that's an issue in most western nations now. But I'm talking about just more food and nourishment in general, worldwide. In places like Peru and Afghanistan, everywhere. It isn't about being "fat" it's about not being rail skinny with no extra calories, as women need a certain level of body fat to get their period. Don't think I'm talking about obesity, but actual lack on malnourishment. 20 year olds in many nations are now far taller than their parents and grandparents were too, because they have enough food. And age of first menses is dropping worldwide. Globally, we have produced about 1% more food every year PER CAPITA since the 1990s, meaning even with population growth food production goes up even more and there is simply far more food. So plenty of girls that 40 years ago didn't have enough body fat til they were older, because they were actually semi malnourished, now reach that point earlier. And in the US or other places where obesity is an issue, a plump elementary age girl might get there even earlier. But don't mistake me saying this is just because of being overweight or obese, that's not at all the case.
But people really seem to forget just how thin people were in the past...they didn't much muscle mass either. Look at old photos of the public and men are all skinny with very little muscle OR fat. And kids that people think are normal weight today still have more body fat than they used to. I have photos of my friends and I at age 11 in bathing suits circa 1990 and out of ten girls every one is rail thin...not a single bit of soft arm flesh or belly pudge among them, which today you'd see on at least some kids in a group of ten. And btw, we were freaking hungry all the time too.
Would make an awful lot of sense from the evolutionary point of view, no? Body reaches a certain weight and figures it's mature enough to start reproducing. If that comes way earlier than it did in the environment of evolutionary adaptation due to much higher calorie loads...well, you can guess.
I think they've shown you're not attracted to people you grow up with (Westermarck effect), which is probably why incest isn't much more common.
I agree w all that. Porn has made men's fantasies much more out there, shall we say, and now everyone knows about what everyone else is watching.
I was actually underweight when I experienced menarche at age 11. As in, I was somewhere around 70-80 lbs. I was still underweight for a few years after that. So no, it's not just a weight thing when that happens. For me, this happened in the late 1990s-- not far off from the 20th century time period you're talking about.
Where did you grow up and you have reason to believe there was a particular environmental exposure there? I.e. was it just you or something happening to other girls in that area? Did your mom get hers around the same age? I think 11 is within the realm of normal...that's 6th grade definitely some girls had theirs then but 12 seemed more common. You are suddenly triggering for me a memory I had completely forgotten about...there was one girl I was in school with who was very short and skinny and childlike in all ways (personality and appearance), who got hers very early like 10 or 11. She didn't have a father in her home. I'd forgotten about her.
I grew up in Rochester, NY. It's entirely possible that there were weird chemicals in the environment-- Kodak and Xerox were based there. It was also the "murder capitol of New York" even in the 1980s/1990s when NYC was at its peak level of violence. My mom didn't grow up there (she grew up in Rome NY) and got hers closer to age 13. It was really hard to compare this to what other girls were going to because the school I went to was REALLY small-- there were only 4 of us in the 6th grade class, and I was the only 6th grade girl. We shared a classroom and teacher with the 4th and 5th grade, kind of like a one room school house type arrangement. The reason for going to private school was that the public schools within city limits (as opposed to the suburbs) had an appalling reputation with everything from test scores to stuff like kids getting into fights, etc. I grew up with the impression that public school was terrifying LOL (this is hilarious because I work in the Sioux Falls public schools now). So before 7th grade, I had no one to compare notes with. In 7th grade, a lot of my peers were getting their first periods and talking about it a fair bit.
I've actually heard the "absent father" explanation before, but that doesn't quite check out for me. My parents are still married to this day. My dad had a well-paying job so my mom could stay home. On weekends, my dad would take me and my brothers to places like Mendon Ponds, Discovery Zone, the Science Museum and Planetarium, etc. Basically every weekend when I was a kid was a fun outing of some sort, so he was more involved than most fathers probably.
However, I remember my home life being really stressful from the mid-'90s onwards. My parents fought with each other constantly. My dad was stressed out because the company he worked for changed management and the new boss was absolutely horrible, but he didn't want to change jobs. My mom started going through "the change" when my younger brother was still a toddler. In the early '90s, we all used to sit together and eat dinner as a family, and by the end of the decade I would be eating in the living room with my younger brother watching "The Simpsons" during dinner every single night and my older brother would watch the bigger TV in the basement. None of us wanted to start sitting together again. I'm unscrambling exactly what happened to this day.
That's funny, I grew up in upstate NY too. Not Rochester, but a similar post industrialist town with shut down factories and major corporations that probably used to dump chemicals in the rivers, very similar. Though in other ways, we're the opposite. My parents were divorced, I went to public school, I was WAY mentally and emotionally ahead of my physical development and always wanting to be an emancipated adult, not a kid.
One thing is similar...home and parents were a nightmare and claustrophobic awkward emotionally borderline unbearable situation from age 13 to 17. But honestly I kind of thought that's just how it was with everyone, especially girls. Puberty and adults are not a good mix, and a daughter going through puberty and mom going through menopause is an explosive mix.
Me and all my friends were all at absolute WAR with our moms at that age. I think it was more normal for people not to get along with their parents back then. Parents didn't try to be their kids' friends and they weren't. When I see how close and open and nice to each other and indulgent parents are with their teenagers these days, it's astonishing to me (even my own dad with my half brother who was born when I was in high school...he's was a totally different type of parent). At least at my school, we 100% viewed our parents as our enemies and prison wardens, and we were all nightmares for them. My mom always talks about how one day around age 17 I finally emerged from my room and had a conversation with her, and she was so shocked she didn't even know what to do. We all get along great now but those years were rough.
Anecdote from father of three young adult women: my daughters’ and their female friends were physically mature, i.e. breasts and waists and hips of adult women, by age 12-13, and still were mentally and behaviorally children. It seems plausible to me that this is occurring earlier than it has in the past and that this has negative consequences for the girls. This is a serious subject with serious consequences, and you are right to raise it. You were also right to attempt to move the conversation into domains, and among female commentators, where it will be accepted and taken seriously. Has Mary Harrington or Louise Perry written about this?
Thank you--this is exactly the response I was hoping for.
I don't believe anyone has tackled this yet but I am lobbying Mary hard. She is the right voice to take this up.
I understand that this is something that has particular focus on women but this idea that we need to defer to some group to talk about a social issues needs to stop. How is this not just identitarianism?
Someones views and behaviour should be judged on their merits. The seclusion of special feminine issues is part of the reason why gender ideology has taken hold. Feminism down played biological explanations because it was inconvenient to their social theories.
Edit:typos
It’s not a matter of deference. It’s a matter of recognizing that a mass audience has these filters, and they’re not going to listen to a female focused issue like this if it doesn’t come from a woman. You can say that’s wrong, but that’s a reality. if you’re trying to sell breakfast cereal, you have to sell to the audience that you have, to the market that exists. Walt is absolutely right that for this issue to get traction and for people to take it seriously it needs to be women raising the issue. He has a good intuition about what the public needs to hear and how an issue needs to be presented, in this case.
Well that's fair enough I spose but borders on condescending. Of course there's a large body of men who will take this issue seriously
Try raising this issue with a 30th percentile agreeableness normie woman and report back your results.
I'm sure if the set and setting was right I could have this conversation, I'm a bit puzzled by the sensitivity? Menarche is not exactly a dirty word...
Your mileage may vary. If you know a better way to do something important, go ahead and try to do it. No kidding. No snark. Let 100 flowers bloom.
My gut instinct on this is that if some man tried to raise the question of why young women are experiencing their first periods earlier and earlier, the focus would not be on the question of what’s happening to the girls, but on why some creepy guy wants to talk about it, and that would be a distraction from the main issue. On the other hand, if some obviously serious and intelligent and well intentioned woman like, say, Mary Harrington, began to investigate this question it would get a lot more traction, and her motives would not be questioned. I don’t see anything condescending about recognizing that reality.
I think you're reading too much into it, I would be happy to talk about the issue of menarche with anybody and I'm a man. That's why we have medical language.
Upon rethinking this article, I'm not sure there's any future in it. This might be one of those ideas that you've alluded to before which is reasonably debated in the hands of some but unsafe for normies. Modern society has engineered a fiction in which only pedophiles (publicly) find underaged girls hot and enforces it via social death. To counter with the notion it's natural for men to find underaged girls hot due to earlier acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics runs the risk of mixing with the naturalistic fallacy, which is monstrously widespread in society, and create a consensus that it's "fine" to comment on the rack of your daughter's middle school friends because it's "natural." The fact that the naturalistic fallacy is untrue does little to stop its popularity.
Society has attempted to stop this problem with a sledgehammer. It may well be that the issue is better handled by a defter touch of the issue, which writers feminist and non-feminist alike may attempt to refine while trying to avoid the elephant in the room. But the fence exists for a reason.
Can't men control their gaze just a little? Asking too much?
Sure, I can write about this! My basic summary is along these lines:
--I had my first period at age 11. I remember vividly to this day that I was wearing underwear with Disney pictures on it I was so young.
--I know that my home life was chaotic, and my best friend is constantly pointing out sign and symptoms of CPTSD with me. There's several years of my life before that early menarche where I literally remember Simpsons episodes in way, way more vivid detail than anything that actually went on in my life, like I was constantly dissociating. I joked about this one time with my older brother and he responded completely seriously that watching the Simpsons was "a safe space" from the total chaos around us.
--I also remember a shift in energy with my family roughly around 1995ish. I've gotten up the nerve to ask about it, and my parents kind of tend to blame each other and never give any answers that are satisfactory.
--Since moving to Sioux Falls, I've become more aware of how abnormal the place I grew up was. The guy across the street from me blew up his house when I was 2. I read a substack article about a movie that's incredibly horrifying unless you basically grew up in a 3rd world country-- and then when I watched it, I had the "3rd world" reaction of laughing at it instead of being horrified. I don't know if the stress of growing up in that part of the country contributed to the issue.
--I also remember consistently acting about 2 years younger than I actually was socially through most of the time I was growing up. I tended to have younger friends and get made fun of for having more childish, nerdy interests. I also remember being kind of terrified of the idea of dating as far back as 6th or 7th grade?
--I really have no clue how this happened to me at age 11, but I remember struggling with severe depression for years after that and couldn't explain why. I remember the specific moment that the depression began, though. Every year, the elementary school I went to would have a camp out at a park, and there were specific places in the woods that everyone liked to play in. One of these was "Frog Pond", where we'd wade around catching tadpoles. Another one was "Crayfish Creek". Same idea, lots of wading into the water and interacting with the wildlife. This camp out was a thing I looked forward to every year. Then, in 6th grade, I was already getting my period and couldn't go in the water with the other kids because I was wearing a pad that weekend. To this day, I cry thinking about it. I felt isolated from the other kids even though they didn't know what was going on and I didn't say anything about it. I was the only girl in the entire school dealing with periods, and for a year or two before that I'd had horrible, stabbing pains on my sides as my breasts grew in. I didn't just feel isolated from my childhood friends at that moment; I felt isolated from my entire past and like I was being forced to leave behind a part of my life too soon. I remember leaning into nerdy, tomboyish things after that-- Dungeons and Dragons, video games, sci-fi movies, stupid adult cartoons. I couldn't stand thinking about "girly" stuff a lot of the time. Years later, I would camp at Occupy Wall Street and dress like a boy the entire time and cut my hair short. I hung out with the queerest people in NYC, and peaked with this kind of thing around 2017 when I used they/them pronouns interchangeably with she/her pronouns and identified as "pansexual and solo poly". I absolutely couldn't "own" any kind of "normal", monogamous, straight sexuality despite not really being trans or anything either.
I don't know if I can give any scientific insight on this, but I can certainly write something emotional and talk about what would help me personally open up to the idea of a romantic relationship.
There is a piece on Substack written from a feminine perspective, "A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement", that touches on some of the consequences of the issue without specifically pinning the issue on early puberty specifically that I found to be fairly interesting.
Here's the link: https://zinnia01.substack.com/p/a-partial-explanation-of-zoomer-girl
Never heard of this writer, but this is excellent.
Important post. I'm a couple of years away from having to navigate these waters with my own kids, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Thirty years later I can still remember a high school classmate whose hormones and genetics had lined up so that she looked much older than she was. Not only did she develop early, she was tall and athletic, and as a high school freshman she could easily have passed for a college sophomore. I was two years older and didn't know her well, but everyone in our high school heard nonstop rumors about her being a huge slut, which I'm sure in hindsight were untrue (and probably started by other girls.) It must have been a hellish social experience. Generalize that to a much larger group of girls and it's no wonder we're seeing so much mental illness among young women. Feminism isn't the solution, but it's reacting to a real problem.
There's a lot to be said for old-fashioned Victorian values which drew a sharp distinction between respectable and disreputable women, and where there were serious social penalties to harassing or attacking the reputation of a woman known to be respectable. But there's no way we're ever going to get that past back.
As you say, this is an impossible subject for men to discuss publicly in good faith. And while optics aren't everything, the online (male) right has an optics problem here: like flies to shit, talk of pubertal age inevitably attracts creepy spergs who insist that if the female is in estrus, it should be permissible to mate with her, because anything else would be un-Darwinian.
Hit the nail on the head.
Women police any talk of this because they don't want to let covert pedos into the overton window. This is an understandable impulse, but by heavy-handedly censoring literally *any* talk of this hugely consequential development they are only hurting their daughters.
Perhaps NO woman should be harassed for her sexual behaviour, but at the same time there should be strong norms against premarital or at LEAST casual sex. After all, research shows it's better for married men as well as women to have a low body count. At the same time, men should stop ogling young girls. Everyone can control their eyes, and I really don't buy they're thinking 11yos are 16 or whatever. I suspect the overstimulating of the male sex drive esp by Big Porn has made this harder
This made me realize something. I was highly selective when choosing a relationship partner, and when me and my wife started seeing each other I immediately felt that her "personality" was different from the girls I met and dated before. Later, she told me she went through puberty unusually late, within the 'historically normal' time frame, much later than most of her female friends.
Maybe part of her "personality" that I liked was that, unlike most if not all other girls I met and dated before, she was not damaged, traumatized and sex-negative in ways described here. She was conservative, but also definitely not sex-negative. Maybe looking for late bloomer girls could be a useful dating & mating advice for guys.
Also, I am wondering whether boys/men have the same issue. Spermarche (first ejaculation) occurs between the age of 12 and 15 (source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3944237/ ), and from this point, boys basically become incels as they're is hardly able to find a girl to have sex with (most often it's even legally prohibited). Prolonged inceldom also leads to trauma, frustration and sex-negativity, and even in very liberal societies that allow teenage casual sex, each boy lives a couple of years as incel anyway.
Puberty for boys is almost as complicated a process as it is for girls. One difference is that girls become fertile and reach full sexual maturity in a relatively small window of age, whereas boys can become fertile and then stay sexually immature for almost a decade after. Sexual maturity here is everything from finishing physical growth and getting full facial hair to emotional maturity and a developed sexual sense of self. With decreasing levels of testosterone, you have this window widening for boys-or actually, I should say men here as they are in their mid 20s by the time they finish maturing- as it starts at roughly the same age but ends later and later.
Good point on the wives. My wife was also a late bloomer, and considerably more sane than previous girlfriends. Now I'm hoping it's at least partly genetic and my daughter will have that benefit.
Not sure if I buy the male thing as much. Getting less sex than you would like is the human male condition. Every man is an incel at some point in his life.
But there is a truth there in that the emergence and recognition of unfulfillable sexual desire is when I clearly delineate my very happy childhood ending and my much less happy adolescence beginning. I noticed that a long time ago. I'm not sure if we're all euphemizing what's unpleasant about being a male teenager, but for me that was basically 100% of it. All the other annoyances, changes, and stresses were extremely minor in comparison.
Big if true, but I would need some more convincing. Are there any correlational studies on this? Are women with early menarche more likely to be feminists, or more likely to have negative opinions about men, or more likely to have mental health problems or lower overall life satisfaction? Or are there too many confounders (e.g. unhealthy girls have later menarche)?
There are too many confounding variables to quantify this relationship in a scientific way. Some aspects of life (especially those pertaining to sentiment and internal narratives) are too messy and abstract to rely on anything other than anecdotal evidence.
But whenever I show this data to a smart and high openness woman and present my theory I never hear anything other than "yeah that makes sense." I suggest you try the same thing.
Thank you! I will.
Setting 18 as the age of majority is a fairly new thing, even in Western civilization. We need to remember that as recently as 1860, the average lifespan was <40. Children were rushed along into adulthood out of sheer necessity.
Improved sanitation, health care and nutrition has changed all that, of course and I certainly do not advocate rushing children into sexual activity, but I am not sure that supporting offspring to the age of 30 is helpful either.
Good post, but I'm not sure why you frame this as a 'feminist issue', when it would be more appropriate just to call it a 'women's issue'. As we can see from the rather unhinged comments of a Mzz Grundy elsewhere in this thread, all we can expect feminists to do is to mine this biological problem for political ammunition, at the price of deepening every social and psychological wound caused by it.
but most women who call themselves feminists aren't gross political lesbians etc.
for 80% of self-described feminists, feminism literally just means "boys should be nice to me" or "I grew up in a blue state"--calling it feminist is a good rhetorical inroad with those broads
We don't need women speaking about this but sex realists who look at the data and do research to uncover the truth
Wrong again. The problem is actually men horndogging young girls, and the solution is for them to stop it.
Interesting & def some good ideas for dealing w it here. But still the question remains: Are you basically saying that these girls get ogled bc the older men think they're older bc they have breasts? How MUCH older DO they look tho?
I have an acquaintance who was v attractive & mature looking at 11 and got sexually approached on a beach on holiday. She told us & I remember thinking that the man could well have mistaken her for an older teen. (He replied pretty creepily upon knowing she was 11 tho)
But in most of these cases the girls probs are acting like the kids they are, and often the man may know their age. Even if they have a developed chest, I don't believe their faces etc will all, or even mostly, make them look 16 or whatever.
So why are all these men ogling them? That's the question you don't address. It's not an issue of paedophilia bc these girls are not prepubescent. But it is an issue of morality. Why can these rational adult men not refrain from ogling young teenagers? Are you essentially saying this is a behaviour that men, including older men, are unable to control? Fascinating, if so.....
If the problem is men horndogging underage girls, WHY ARE YOU ASKING WOMEN TO SOLVE THAT PROBLEM?
Let's say you are right: something in the water is making girls reach physical sexual maturity at a very young age. It will take years to sort that out. In the meantime, we can't ask 12 year old girls to deal with that. Grown women are not creating a problem for those girls.
Who is the source of the problem? Men. Who could stop being disgusting right now? Men. Who could enforce the rules around this by telling other men that hitting on very young women (please cut the shit about how you can't tell a girl is a teen if she has boobies. Just stop, shut up, no one believes you, you're disgusting) is beneath contempt? Men.
Instead of lamenting you can't get feminists to sit at your feet and listen to you, go lecture your fellow men about their behavior. No women are required to participate at all, you can start right now.
This is precisely the kind of retarded schoolmarmish take I was talking about.
It's pretty much impossible to bring about social change by asking people to "be better." You need to change the physical incentive structure to redirect people at a macro level. Work with the world we have, not the one you want.
We already have age of consent laws and a culture that stigmatizes pedophilia more aggressively than literally anything else and it hasn't fixed the problem. If you want to improve outcomes for young girls you need to attack the *physical source of the problem*.
You've discovered one of the arguments they're going to be using against you (or your eventual amanuensis). Take note.
Men are the physical source of the problem. Please have at it.
if you are proposing we physically exterminate men that is at least a suggestion! I respect that a hell of a lot more than impotent whining.
lol wasn’t the point of your article “why won’t feminists listen to meeeeeeeeeeeee”
🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭
yes, and I am very palpably succeeding in that goal
More retarded schoolmarms than you can handle hubba hubba
Can men really mot help the ogling & griping of these girls tho? I agree we need other remedies. But is testosterone really that powerful?
I almost didn’t believe Walt when he told me that this is the standard response he gets when he brings up the subject, but here you are for everyone to see!
Let’s make something very clear- the problem is not men “horndogging” underage girls, as you say, it very much is the fact that girls are reaching ostensible sexual maturity before they are old enough to be able to handle it. It is really disgusting of you to turn this into an opportunity to shit on men’s completely normal sexuality. The subject of this article is not some sort of pedophile epidemic in men- there are no actual crimes involved here- feeling sexual attraction is not a crime, any more than feeling the urge to murder someone is, irrespective of the age and gender of the person towards whom you have those feelings.
You cannot shame people’s sexual attraction away and then expect them to be unaffected otherwise. If you insist that real physical and biochemical signs of sexual maturity should stop being attractive to men then no man will be able to find any grown adult women attractive(which is the direction I see things sliding in, worryingly enough).
I am sick and tired of women who shirk all responsibility and then claim to be victims. Women are very much required to participate here- it is in their own interests more than anything. Women are the ones who can most effectively protect and guide young girls through the sexual confusion during those years. Women and mothers can also make sure that young girls are allowed a close relationship with their biological fathers, since that actually directly moves the age of menarche higher and currently women are very much responsible for ruining fathers’ chances in this. However, none of these things are clearly to be solved by anyone lecturing anyone so we don’t need your expertise. If you can sit down and shut up on the subject while you are deliberately choosing not to be helpful, I am sure everyone else here will be very thankful for it.
You know, one of the things that got me is they're so aggressive about men never sexualizing women (including *adult* women) that it's never clear exactly when we *are* supposed to sexualize women. They never give you a positive script to follow. 'Cause I got a huge dose of this stuff way back in high school and prided myself on never acting on my attraction...which led to huge problems in my late twenties when I finally decided I did want to have a relationship and the women were very upset I wouldn't touch them.
The big problem that's totally un-PC to mention (but perhaps more likely to be discussed on the right as a result) is I think a lot of the people running this are lesbians, for whom *all* male desire is unwanted. Heterosexual women (and some bi ones) want to be desired by men *sometimes*, though certainly not by ones they're not attracted to. Indeed, if they never are, they're 'ugly' (notice the short Anglo-Saxon word reflecting a basic concept, like 'tree' or 'hot') and it really affects their self-esteem.
The sex negativity in my generation is really palpable. On the one hand you have extreme normalization of anything that looks sexual. I still haven’t gotten over how normal and acceptable selling your sexuality has become. But it’s not really attractive when it is the norm is it? And on the other hand you have these women, whether they’re lesbian or not, trying to shame all the sexuality out of men. Weirdly enough these are the same women who are often selling themselves on the side.
I don’t think the sex negativity is led by lesbians though. It actually reeks of the kind of “token resistance” fetish that most women have, where they want to be perceived as so unnaturally attractive that men just can’t resist it and push past whatever barriers they put up and “claim” them. That dance of moving around social boundaries to play with each other’s sexual fetishes has existed between men and women forever, I think. What has changed is that women want to indulge in their fetish without ever risking that someone they don’t find attractive might push past their resistance to try to claim them too. They want the fun of it without any risks, which is just not possible.
You're both on to something here, I think.
My armchair hypothesis is that there will always be a percentage of women, small but consistent across time, who are naturally "sex negative" in the way prescribed by second wave feminism. Actual exclusive lesbians; women who've been victims of serious and permanently traumatic abuse (not just occasional harassment); women on the autism spectrum who struggle to understand normal social behavior. This group really does experience the world in black and white: ALL male attraction (no exceptions) is frightening and unwelcome, and EVERYTHING about conventional femininity (no exceptions) is an alien script that society is forcing them to perform.
But these women will always be vastly outnumbered by women who still want to be the object of male desire, as long as it's by attractive men, and this will always be the cause of conflict in organized feminism. In the Seventies, leaders like Friedan and Steinem explicitly tried to purge the movement of lesbians. In the Nineties, the split between second and third wave feminists was really a generational battle between middle-aged Boomers and Gen Xers who were young and hot. Back then, Kathleen Hanna types could frame this as an artistic statement: "I'm a conventionally hot woman with a deliberately sexually provocative stage presence -- but you're a misogynist pig if you're attracted to me!"
Today the Internet has generalized this condition to young women who don't want to be participants in it. Even before you get to porn, there's social media, which exposes women to the lowest common denominator of male creepiness. Any woman with public socials will encounter the bottom-feeding men who trawl Facebook and Insta looking for "bobs and vagene."
I agree about autistic women : but I do think men bear some responsibility for this. I've done some research on them recently & they are more likely to be raped or assaulted. It's not just innocent stuff they misinterpret.
Similarly, I'm bi & most lesbians I know don't like men hitting on them, but don't feel angry at the men unless they push on & get creepy & overbearing. Plus there's predatory unicorn hunters who can be pretty ruthless trying to trick lesbians into threesomes withoit letting on their bf will be involved. & corrective rape. A lot of the time the lesbian suspicion is due to genuine horrible experiences.
Steinem was always friendly to lesbians, it was Friedan who was homophobic. She disliked gay men too, tho I agree sex issues were part of it.
The time scale's important to keep in mind; feminism preceded gay liberation in acceptance. Society was a lot more homophobic back then; it didn't get taken out of the DSM until 1973. So a lot of it was tactical; they didn't want the feminist movement to get associated with lesbianism (or gays).
Of course lesbians are going to be much more motivated to be feminists; pre-1960 gender roles offer them no chance at a relationship they like.
I think you really might have a point there. It makes sense when you explain it that way. I just basically walked away when that happened because I couldn't figure out if it was token or not and didn't want to take any chances.
I think old-school second-wave sex negativity was, like the one we were just arguing with. The new stuff...well, I would assume a younger person would know better than me.
I don't have a huge problem with sex work, honestly. I've never been a client, paid on OnlyFans, or even really looked at much porn (my lack of familiarity with it was the basis for a really funny encounter with a more experienced woman a while ago). At first I thought it was wrong, now I think it would turn into a neverending money hole, kind of like Magic cards or drugs. But...if there's a market, might as well get the money directly to the performer, instead of letting the studio exploit them.
Hmmm I'm bi & I def think that men should sexualise women in bars etc. BTW, in my experience, lesbians who are v vocal about hating men all the time are not lesbian but traumatised bi women. Actual lesbians don't think about men much, unless they have male friends etc as a lot do. See Dworkin, Sheila Jeffreys : claim to be lesbian, but no real relationships w women.
Or traumatized straight women; numerically that's going to be a bigger group. I've always though you were right about the traumatized bi thing, but being a man I mostly saw it from the other side: bi women who didn't get traumatized and were fine with men.
I also think there may be a bit of a generation gap as lesbians in my generation (Xennial) tended to be a lot more anti-male as a rule. More homophobia and unwanted advances and so on (I'd guess).
This doesn't really answer the question tho. Ofc the men can't help their FEELINGS. But they CAN help whether they ogle, grope, etc. I really don't buy that there's no clue to these girls actual age.
You're from India, aren't you? I've noticed on Indian subreddits (I'm interested so lurk often) there's a lot of posts about men staring at women. Is this just something that's more accepted as inevitable in India, and women etc try & work around it? Perhaps There's something in that approach. I still think men have more self control in this than they claim, though I agree w all your suggestions for women.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that men can’t control their actions. That would be rather dehumanizing to them in my books. What does “horndogging” mean here anyway? I often find that women that complain about this sort of thing are not talking about any real actions taken by the men, often not even about being stared at, but just this nebulous miasma of being “sexualized” by them. I don’t think the women are imagining it entirely, but they are complaining about things that fall in the unconscious/subconscious realm, where accountability cannot be applied.
In India, everyone just “stares” a lot more than usual. But what a lot of these posts online seem to omit is that they stare into your eyes, not so much at your body. Strangers hold real eye contact with you here and it can come across rather aggressive if you aren’t used to it. There is almost never anything aggressive or even sexual about it though. It is just a social norm of non-verbal communication. I have lived in other places outside of India and the norms about this tend to vary quite a lot across the human population.
Hi, sorry, I feel like I misunderstood your earlier post. In Walt's post & the comments, people were talking about trauma & seemed to refer to obvious ogling, groping etc. Ditto for the posts he linked to. So obvs if that is what we're talking about, men can control that. I agree that saying otherwise is dehumanising to them. As a caveat I would say that mums & dads of early puberty girls should protect them by dressing them as childlike as possible. These cues will emphasise they are nit fair game for sexual attention.
I agree in some cases it could be vague thing that's not voluntary.
Interesting to hear that about India - the posts I saw, by Indian born & raised men & women,mainly saw it as sexual staring at women. But I see there may be wider cultural norms about staring that play into the issue.
It’s not disgusting to be physically attracted to sexually mature female bodies.
It is if you ogle and harass early puberty girls tho. I don't buy that there's no indication of their actual age
You are an animal hardwired to reproduce. Female secondary sex characteristics are designed to attract mates. If they are there that says, “ready to reproduce”.
Obviously there are ethical questions but they are separate from the biological reality. It’s like shaming people for thinking French fries taste good.
Yeah....to be clear : the attraction itself can't be helped. But ogling & harassing is a choice, and should be shamed. As long as you keep the attraction to yourself, no problem.
I mean, I don't think Walt is advocating men do that. The point is that if something in the environment is producing this (and fat could very well be it), it's going to produce a lot more of these sorts of problems and it should be addressed in addition to that.
It's like when you tell women not to go drunk to parties and lock their doors, etc., and feminists go 'HOW ABOUT TELLING MEN NOT TO RAPE!' Well, sure, we do that. We even put them in jail to be raped themselves when they do rape people. But it's still sensible to tell women to be careful.
(And for the record, my youngest partner was in her late twenties...I was an extremely late bloomer.)
If a gay man were in here saying he and his pals should not be condemned for hitting on 13 year old boys who look a bit taller and broader than their peers would you be leaping to defend him? Would all your pals in the comments be doing so?
Yeah thought not. You would be saying if gay men want to be accepted in society they need to stigmatize men who can’t keep it together around kids.
Most gay men constantly hit on younger boys and get away with it. If it were an issue of precocious puberty causing it I definitely would take the same stand I have taken for heterosexual men. As far as I have seen though, gay men that hit on young boys are specifically attracted to signs of sexual immaturity more than sexual maturity. These two things are clearly quite different.
I don’t know what you are even crowing about here because the only reason anyone ever actually talks against pedophilia is when the victim is female. If the victim is male, and especially if the perpetrator is female, most people say “nice” and that he’s lucky to be getting such attention.
Here we are discussing young adolescents. It is true that the rare instances of women coming on to young teen boys are not always readily condemned as they should be. Cases of adult men hitting on young teen boys are condemned very harshly and gay men have actually taken action to oppose the NAMBLA brigades in their ranks ( after some pushing from lesbians). In this thread there have been multiple instances of men — and you — saying it is somehow unreasonable to ask heterosexual men to leave young teen girls alone. It is the straight version of NAMBLA bullshit and it is gross. All the commentary about how only dour frowny old frump ladies even care is exactly what went on before decent gay men got their shit together. Decent straight men and their fawny female apologists should reflect on that.
It’s like you don’t even bother reading anything I have said here..
Do you not understand the difference between feeling attraction toward signs of sexual immaturity vs signs of sexual maturity? No one in this entire thread has defended the former, and yes, I will keep defending the latter as long as there is no criminal pedophilic behavior involved. If you think that precocious puberty is not the main problem here then you need to reexamine your priorities.
And it is a really cheap trick to insinuate that I am only defending men because I am “fawning” over them. I am never going to be apologetic about defending good men, and the reasons are my own, so make of that what you will.
Adult men macking on young teenagers is disgusting and indefensible, no matter what their bodies look like. The problem is men’s behavior, which is in fact under their control, not the physiological development of teens, which happens involuntarily.
Exactly. Straight men & women go ballistic about gay men having relationships w 16yo boys or even potentially finding them attractive. Yet the same situation w girls is brushed off, since men apparently can't control where they look.
But we're not defending him or his heterosexual counterpart. (At least I'm not.) We're saying there's something else that's causing a problem.
Is it really so hard to not ogle/harass early puberty girls tho? I don't bi that they're 11 or whatever & There's no clues to their age visible.
Apparently, for some boys, it is.
I was scared to do anything at that age.
Hmm...I thought we were generally talking about men here, not boys. On boys, I went coed until I was 13 & don't remember any sexual harassment of anyone. I thought boys got their sexual awakening around 13, not 11 or whatever this age people are getting early puberty at is? I wonder if porn is priming boys to act aggressively. I've read some awful stuff recently claiming rape has increased at primary schools due to porn.
Honestly, it's been a month and I've forgotten. I think part of the argument is people are actually going through puberty earlier due to being fatter and the body turning on puberty when a given weight is reached, probably enough to support the additional energy expenditure of mating (and pregnancy for women).
I guess you could blame porn. The anti-porn movement seems tied up with conservatives who want the 50s back (and I was influenced by one fellow who insisted on blaming porn for everything), so I'm skeptical, but it is true it's easier to get than in my day and is apparently much more intense. I also never really got into it so I don't have a lot of firsthand experience.
Good point : body fat would make girls look older.
Porn's influence can def be overblown but it certainly is a lot more ubiquitous than before and more violent. I suppose it's like any industry : oversaturation makes it boring, so they have to make more extreme products to get an audience. After all, w sex, There's only so many ways to film normal stuff, so the way to amp it up is sadly to make it violent/humiliating.
Great article and I hope this gets discussed more. I’ve thought about this for awhile as well but couldn’t articulate it as well as you did here. One of my big concerns is that there’s going to be a push to lean into this trend with policies such as lowering age of consent laws and expanding “children’s rights” by the logic that they’re biologically adults at a younger age.
nah it's gonna be the opposite--upon hitting 30, zoomer women will vote to increase the AOC to 25 and humans will gradually become elves.
even though teenagers are *physically* much older than in the past they are *mentally* much younger, and there is no broad impulse to reverse this. trying to push back on infantilization/coddling of adolescents would prob get u called a groomer.
the problem is the enormous disconnect between the rapid physical maturation and the psychological arrested development.
Hell, I dated a 22-year-old man when I was 32 and was honestly shocked at the negative reactions. He came on to me and was THRILLED that I said yes. We met in a bar and both misjudged how old the other one was-- he thought I was younger, I thought he was older. By the time we realized how big the age gap was, we were having too much fun to break things up over that. In our photos together, we looked like we were the same age. He was of legal drinking age and finished with college. To this day, I'm convinced that the negative reactions were due to jealousy-- I looked young and had no problems pulling a young, hot guy.
The idea of AOC being 25 while elementary school kids can be allowed/coerced into social or medical gender transitioning in elementary school seems like just too much of a contradiction to me. But I can appreciate your viewpoint and I suppose a point in your argument’s favor is all the unironic “she’s only 21 you sick freak” responses whenever Leonardo di caprio gets a new gf.
the contradiction is the point--you get called a pedo for dating a 23yo girl as a 30yo guy, and meanwhile they trans your kid.
modern progressives (esp sex negative zoomer women) want to create a sexless society where everyone is traumatized at an early age and nobody even wants to fuck bc it's scary and gross.
it's truly a horrific ideology that needs to be smashed.