They deserve to feel safe.
I once overheard a couple of men in their mid-thirties discussing their sexual desire for teenage girls. Earlier that day, one of them was treated to a good, long, unobstructed look when a group of school girls crossed the road in front of his vehicle at a stop sign. He was talking about how sexy the adolescent girls looked in their school skirts, and they were laughing about it as if it was normal.
I was disgusted.
The conversation got worse after I injected a slice of abhorrence, saying that these girls are just 14 to 17 years old and are off limits. “They have no interest in men old enough to be their fathers, and you shouldn’t have any in them,” I told them.
They didn’t appreciate that. One of the men had recently slept with a 15 “…or she could have been a 16-year-old” girl at a bush rave and boasted about it like it was a prized notch on his belt.
Yeah.
Some people believe that an adult having a sexual relationship with a teenager isn’t particularly problematic or even worrisome. They’ll argue that pubescent teenagers aren’t children — they know right from wrong, can make their own choices, are fully developed and mature, or even want it.
Have these people lived with a teenager? Teenagers are not as mentally, physically, or emotionally mature as adults, even when adults choose to behave immaturely. Their brains are still developing, particularly in reasoning, impulse control, and emotional regulation.
Argument debunked.
Can we stop excusing grown men for preying on teenage girls?
It doesn’t make girls feel “special” or “attractive.” It makes them feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and the worst thing about it is that this behavior is primarily considered okay in our society — a misogynist-seeped society, I might add.
We Must Stop Normalizing Predatory Relationships
We have successfully normalized “relationships” between older men and teenage girls to the point that male attention creeps in at the edges of a young girl’s consciousness before she quite knows what it means.
Most girls aren’t shocked when a creepy old dude tries to hit on them. We’ve all experienced it. For too many girls, teenage years are a time of unwanted attention from older men.
It’s essential to understand that it is particularly challenging for young girls, from their early teens to their early twenties, to recognize when this attention is predatory. This difficulty is compounded by societal conditioning that teaches them to see male attention as a measure of their worth.
As a result, early experiences of male sexual aggression are perhaps one of the most predictable rites of passage for female children.
These experiences are more common than other rituals that mark the approach of adulthood, such as bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, sweet 16 parties, or proms. By the time a girl reaches these milestones, she has likely already acquired the skills to navigate unwanted attention from adult men, learning to signal her lack of interest or deter their advances without escalating the situation.
Are teenage girls expected to view these advances as flattering? Or are they left to deal with them alone, relying only on their instincts and the sympathy of their equally young and confused friends?
I think so.
For my part, I vividly remember my mother pulling me out of a corner store when I was around 13 after a man had been trailing me up and down the aisles. Later, when I was about 15, walking home from school, a man in a car pulled up beside me, lavishing “compliments” and asking if I wanted to go for a drive with him. Honestly, it was frightening.
My youth wasn’t a deterrent to their sexual interest. Instead, it was part of the allure. It signaled ignorance, naivety, and insecurity — qualities that some men find attractive in women because they make us more accessible to manipulate and control.
Take this Sydney ex-teacher who allegedly started grooming a 16-year-old female student as soon as she entered his mathematics class. Within a week of meeting her, he began asking private questions about her family. Shortly after, he suggested picking her up from her home and driving her to school until, eventually, they had sex. She was told to keep it a secret or be expelled.
She said she felt trapped. “She didn’t know how to say that she didn’t want to have sex.”
This isn’t an isolated incident. It happens all the time.
Too often, adult men exploit this power dynamic that usually leaves one partner — the younger girl — with little sense of control or choice. It’s a form of sexual aggression, and it’s a widespread, persistent issue worldwide, most often perpetrated by men against women.
Alarmingly, a recent study found that nearly 1 in 6 adolescent girls will have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence by the time they turn 20.
Young girls are being dehumanized, approached, harassed, objectified, coerced into sex, raped, groomed, or leered at by older men in ways that scare and harm them and make them uncomfortable. They are frequently exposed to grown men relying on the “age of consent” to justify their sexual relationships with teenagers.
While these laws exist to protect minors, some men exploit the legal threshold to engage in relationships that, although technically legal, can be ethically questionable and manipulative. This reliance on legal consent overlooks the significant power imbalances and potential for coercion, stressing a disregard for genuine moral considerations in favor of legal loopholes.
These are men who think women and girls are “things” to start puncturing their self-esteem and sense of safety early. They deliberately make young girls sexually uncomfortable to remind them men are in charge when they are at their most vulnerable age.
And the misogynistic mindset seeps into boys early.
For instance, in May 2024, a highly esteemed private school in Victoria, Australia, faced severe criticism after it was discovered that its Year 11 male students had sexually categorized their female peers into groups such as “wifeys,” “cuties,” and “unrapeable,” and ranked them accordingly.
We’re talking about boys, merely 16 and 17 years old, conditioned to believe this behavior is acceptable. Boys grow into men who go out into the world with little to no respect for women and girls, carrying sexual aggression forward.
And girl’s learning that womanhood primarily involves enduring unsolicited male attention — some of it benign, but much of it threatening, exploitative, or hostile, suggesting that their control over their bodies, their right to move through public spaces peacefully, and their right to be seen as children can all be undermined by the whims of a man’s desires.
It’s not okay. Not by a long shot.
Sexual aggression has a profoundly adverse effect on young girl’s health, education, future relationships, and overall life prospects. Health-wise, it raises the chances of injuries, depression, anxiety disorders, unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, and various other physical and psychological issues.
I’m amazed at the number of older men, some even my age, who think they can hit on teenage girls. They don’t want or expect it from you. They lack life experience, and as mentioned, they are not yet mentally, emotionally, or physically fully developed. This makes teenagers vulnerable to risk-taking, unable to foresee consequences, easily influenced by others (especially admired adults), highly naive, and easily manipulated.
Easy pickings for predatory men.
For those who feel sickened by the idea of adult men preying sexually on adolescent girls, please raise your hand.
These grown men should be held accountable for their actions and treat adolescent girls with the respect they deserve. We must provide proper guidance and support for our youth rather than subjecting them to unwanted sexual attention.
And this may be startling to some, but every teenage girl is someone’s daughter. They are not objects of desire. They are people who have the right to go about their lives safely and without fear. Our collective responsibility is to ensure that every girl can go about her day with the security and dignity she deserves.
Let’s commit to creating an environment where respect and safety are the norm, not the exception.
They deserve to feel safe.
