Men's Group

... "slut-shaming," I've personally noticed that intolerance goes both ways. Teenagers are expected to become sexually active, and those who have no desire to do so (for whatever reason) are ridiculed. A boy is said to become a man whenever he has sex for the first time. On the basis of what? He becomes a man by using someone?

Please forgive me for citing a personal experience of my own. I want to illustrate the point I'm trying to make. When I was a high-school senior in the fall of 1968, I was seeing an egregiously incompetent clinical psychologist to whom my parents had sent me. After I had seen him with no one else present during each session for several years previously, he assigned me to a therapy group with other teenage boys. In the first session (as I recall), he raised the subject of premarital sex, as he called it. As a sensitive guy, all I did was express some reservation about becoming sexually active because I respected girls and didn't care to use them sexually and then just discard them like empty beer cans. (I should say that those weren't quite the words I used.) For making this mild objection (which wasn't even based upon any religious conviction), I was laughed out of that jerk's office. He was, in fact, being intolerant himself, not to mention the fact that he was reacting in a totally inappropriate manner that was not becoming of a professional.

Speaking as the father of two daughters (now in their twenties), I know that a lot of social pressure is put on teenagers to become sexually active. At the risk of angering some of you, I dare say that the social ridicule of teenagers who want to abstain until they get married or simply have a problem with the exploitative nature of casual sex is actually more prevalent today than is "slut-shaming." At least that is my humble opinion. I would say that the choice some teenagers make to not become sexually active is no one's business but their own.

Needless to say, I've been sickened and disgusted by the double standard for decades.