Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 45

There is some support from primate studies for the idea that males with more power have higher sex drives. Men in sports teams that win have a higher testosterone level (after the game) than those who lose. And, according to historians, many great leaders (US President Kennedy, for instance) had very high sex drives, to a degree that was really rather tragic and disabling (it’s kind of hard to run a country when you want to keep racing off to have sex all the time).

One study of juvenile delinquency in the 1980s found an intriguing connection – that boys were several times more likely to get into trouble with the police in the six months before their first sexual experience. In other words, they calmed down a bit once they started having sex. Since almost all boys masturbate at this age, it can’t just have been the release of sexual frustration. Perhaps the boys felt they had ‘joined the human race’ when they found a real-life lover; perhaps they felt more loved. (We don’t recommend this as a cure for crime, but it makes sense.)

Sex and aggression are somewhat linked – controlled by the same centres in the brain and by the same hormone group. This has been the source of enormous human tragedy and suffering, inflicted via sexual assaults on women, children and men. Because of this connection, it is very important that boys are helped to relate to women as people, to have empathy and to learn to be good lovers.

Blaming hormones is never an excuse for male aggression; and it’s vital that we separate the stimuli of violence from the stimuli of sex. We shouldn’t really make or show movies that link the two. The rape-revenge plot of many B-grade movies is a bad connection to make. Most pornography in fact is pretty dismal role-modelling for good relating or sensitive and joyous loving. Where are the movie depictions of tender, sensuous, playful and boisterous lovemaking, with plots that include conversation, sharing and vulnerability, so that mid-adolescent boys can learn a fuller kind of sexuality?

Even adult men can get the wrong idea. A matchmaking agency recently had to counsel a man in his sixties who was being far too sexually forward on ‘dates’ that the agency arranged. The man, a very gentle and considerate farmer (widowed two years earlier), had researched copies of Cosmopolitan magazine to find out what today’s women liked, and was acting accordingly!

Overcoming sexual violence probably starts younger still. It may just come down to treating children more kindly. Raymond Wyre, a British expert on working with men who sexually abuse children, found in his work that while not every sex offender had been the victim of sexual assault (though many had), everyone without exception had been the recipient of a very cruel and uncaring childhood. It was the lack of empathy, resulting from never having been shown consistent understanding and kindness, that he felt was the key factor in someone being able to sexually assault another human being.