HETEROSEXUAL OFFENDERS VS. ADULTS
Heterosexual offenders vs. adults are adult males convicted of sexual contact, without the use of force or threat, with females aged sixteen and older who were not related to them. We have chosen the sixteenth birthday as the beginning of adult life for a number of reasons:
The average sixteen-year-old is biologically adult. She has attained the basic physique which will be hers the rest of her life even though it may be altered by additional adipose tissue and ultimately by the deteriorations of age. She is sexually mature, being capable of conceiving and bearing children; she is physically as capable of sexual response as she ever will be, though this capacity may be masked by inexperience and inhibition. Her strength and motor coordination are sufficient to meet the needs of adult life. She has developed the secondary sexual characteristics that all peoples regard as the distinguishing features of adult females. Throughout human history the majority of the societies of the world have regarded the sixteen-year-old as physically eligible for an adult sexual life.
From a social point of view the average sixteen-year-old has at least a basic knowledge of the behavior that society expects from adults, and sufficient motivation and control to conform to this expectation. Her IQ will not be significantly altered with passing years—her judgment may improve and her fund of knowledge increase, but she has fully developed her fundamental intellectual equipment. In brief, if she is mentally dull at sixteen, she will be no brighter at twenty-one or fifty-one. Until this century, when we artificially protracted childhood, the sixteen-year-old female was considered sufficiently mature, intellectually and emotionally, to function as an adult member of society. In our forefathers’ day, to which we are inclined to look back with respect and pride, sixteen was not considered an unduly early age at which to marry. In some, usually rural, areas today, the number of sixteen-year-old brides is not inconsiderable. We forget that in treating teenagers
as children we encourage them to behave as children, while actually they are capable of adequate adult behavior.
There is great danger in assuming, as we do, that maturity can be accurately calibrated in years. If we insist that sociosexual activity be permitted only to the emotionally and intellectually mature, we should logically withhold permission from vast numbers of individuals aged beyond the magic numeral twenty-one. In our culture whether a given type of sexual behavior is permissible or not depends largely upon the age of the participants: virginity in a teenager is laudable whereas in a forty-year-old it is pathological. If John, aged twenty-one, has an affair with the thirty-year-old divorcee who works in Joe’s Bar, society remains indifferent. If a few people are outraged, they will find that authorities turn a deaf ear to their complaints. But if John has an affair with a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old, the picture is quite different; now society does not look upon him as merely a sower of wild oats or a lucky man (depending upon one’s point of view). John is now a corrupter of youth, an affront to morality, and a statutory rapist. At the base of this attitude is the feeling that John has taken unfair advantage of someone who is not intellectually and emotionally mature. Tin’s feeling is unaltered by the knowledge that the divorcee has an IQ of 80 and a sense of social responsibility worthy of a ten-year-old, whereas the younger girl is an A student in high school and noted for her maturity—the fact that she shows such promise makes John’s offense even more reprehensible.
Going into the matter more deeply, one finds that the situation hinges upon some hard facts. Society has had 30 years in which to make the divorcee conform to its norms of sexual morality and has failed. Legal pressures could be invoked only with some difficulty and effort, and no one is sufficiently concerned to exert them. The divorcee’s parents and relatives, and society in general, have given up. In the case of the younger girl, however, society still has the opportunity of modeling her according to its desires. There are parents and relatives who do not realize that she is no longer a child and who feel an obligation and desire to govern her behavior; they are intimately concerned with her life; they have not relinquished her to her own individuality. There are comprehensive and elastic statutes that can be easily brought into play; proof of coitus is not necessary—almost any circumstantial evidence can be construed as contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The girl’s participation, her intellectual and emotional status—these are of small consequence. Society’s age-grading hierarchy has been affronted and someone must be served up as a propitiatory sacrifice.
The above lengthy and extreme example is illustrative of the inane but inescapable problems we make for ourselves in our necessary attempts to regulate behavior.
3. Other professional scholars have also used age sixteen as the critical dividing point, and note also that this is the demarcation age in compulsory school attendance, and is also recognized as a turning point in child labor laws.
What makes the heterosexual adult offenses a singularly difficult problem is the fact that among all types of sex offenses society is caught in a contradiction. One can easily see the need for preventing forced sexual acts; one can readily agree that sexual acts constituting a public nuisance should be repressed; one can see that parents have the right to protect their children from relationships they deem undesirable; one can, with more effort, find some justification of the position that in a democracy the desires of the majority should prevail when it comes to the permissibility of homosexual behavior. But it is difficult to find logic in our culture vis-a-vis adult heterosexuality. On one hand we stress and encourage the development of heterosexual behavior— the literature, the advertisements, the movies, everything relentlessly dins in the order: be sexually attractive, find romance, get a mate! On the other hand we strive to prevent heterosexual coitus, the logical end-product of the social campaign for heterosexuality, in any situation other than legal marriage. We tread on the accelerator and brake simultaneously; this may result in the desired speed, but it is rough on the mechanism. If early marriage were feasible for everyone, our position would be more tenable, but our complex civilization demands that marriage be delayed. Furthermore, we have never squarely faced the fact that some individuals do not wish to marry and that some others should never marry. Society makes no provision for them, but neither does it exempt them from its prosexual crusade.
Cases of substantial physical force or duress have been eliminated from this category of offenders vs. adults, but the word “substantial” demands discussion. We have eliminated cases where force or duress exceeded the boundaries of what is socially tolerable. Our society expects the male to be the aggressor in heterosexual relationships, and a certain amount of physical force and duress is consequently acceptable and perhaps even socially necessary. Girls are frequently subjected to rather intense and effective duress which takes many forms: threats not to date them again, threats to impair their popularity through adverse comments, even threats to make them walk home—all these are not only common but are accepted as a part of social living. The same is true with physical force, but here a delicacy of judgment is necessary. A man may, for example, grasp a female (known to him, and otherwise socially suitable as a sexual object) by the shoulders and pull her toward him. He must judge by the degree of resistance whether to continue pulling and how much energy to exert. In brief, he is expected to overcome maidenly modesty or even mild disinclination, but not to overpower an active aversion.
Our method of retaining or eliminating cases may best be illustrated by a few simple examples. Concerning duress we would retain an ‘I’ll-make-you-walk-home” case, but exclude the male who threatened ‘I’ll slap you silly.” Concerning force, we would retain the case where a male touched, or briefly held, or pulled an unwilling female, but we would exclude cases where she was struck or physically overpowered.
In the preceding pages we have referred so often to age sixteen that the reader should recall that the offense category under consideration involves females aged sixteen and older. Some of these women were in their twenties, thirties, and forties; at the time of the offense some had never married, others were currently married, and still others were widows or divorcees.
Penalizing a male for a mutually voluntary act with a teen-age female seems rational to some people, but with older women the rationale tends to evaporate. Male virginity is, as we said before, often thought a virtue in early life; with the passage of years it becomes successively an embarrassment, a social detriment, and finally ipso facto evidence of psychological maladjustment. Barring exceptional circumstances such as priesthood, the public would agree with the psychiatrists and psychologists in saying that there was something seriously wrong with a man of forty who was still a virgin. Thanks to our double standard of sexual morality, we do not so harshly judge females, but even so the middle-aged virgin is not regarded as a complete woman and is suspected of emotional maladjustment. The stereotype of the embittered prudish spinster seems to be offered as the reward to the woman who does not marry and who does obey society’s stated wishes concerning premarital coitus. In the lower socioeconomic level protracted virginity is often considered ridiculous and a negation of human nature. This attitude is coarsely but succinctly summed up in the gibe often directed at virgins, “What are you saving it for, the worms?” To most persons in this social milieu it is incomprehensible that a man should be punished for a sexual relationship with a mature unmarried female.
The family is the foundation of human society and the husband and wife are the basis of the family. Sexual gratification is indisputably one of the prime motivations for marriage, especially for the male, and later serves as a bond to maintain the marriage. Society has a vested interest, therefore, in fostering heterosexual desires, restricting them so as to encourage marriage, and insuring the durability of the marriage by discouraging sexual gratification with anyone other than the legal spouse. This latter point would seem to prove the necessity for laws against extramarital coitus. However, such laws conflict with some inescapable and unfortunate facts: couples are often mismated in their sexual needs; people become old, ugly, and sexually unattractive; years of sexual intimacy frequently make one’s mate less and less sexually attractive, and a growing desire for at least occasional novelty manifests itself. Although we resist the idea, man, like his primate relatives, is not a wholly monogamous mammal.
Because of these facts our laws and attitudes concerning adultery sometimes destroy rather than preserve marriages: the dissatisfied spouse ends the marriage, whereas if it were socially permissible to find sexual gratification outside the marriage, the spouse would in many instances wish to maintain the marriage. In southern European and Latin American nations there are many stable and socially effective families in which the husband (and occasionally with consent of the wife) obtains most of his sexual satisfactions elsewhere. This is, of course, done discreetly and with suitable regard for the feelings of his wife who, in turn, is careful not to pry. This sort of arrangement is no complete solution to the problem of society’s need for a stable family versus the individual’s need for a more varied sex life: some degree of jealousy and friction is almost inevitable. Aside from jealousy, even the most liberal, sophisticated wife would be vexed to find that she could not buy the new coat she so much desires because her husband has just paid the rent for his mistress’s apartment. The broad-minded husband, gratified by his wife’s happiness in an extramarital lark, still bitterly resents the innuendoes of his associates.
Lastly, it is axiomatic that while emotional involvement leads to sexual activity, such activity also leads to emotional involvement, and deep emotional involvements with a person other than one’s spouse are a distinct hazard to the continuation of marriage. The “emancipated” person who feels that an occasional extramarital adventure adds spice to life and keeps the marriage from lapsing into sexual tedium is sometimes surprised to find that his or her emotions have gotten out of control to the detriment of the marriage.
Within our present culture the problem is insoluble, and as a byproduct of its insolubility a substantial number of men and a few women are being supported in penal institutions at the expense of all of us who have failed to devise some workable solution.
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