Steve Moxon on the current ‘stupid hysteria over normal male sexuality’ and the anachronism of the Victorian set age of consent :
If you showed photos of average girls ages fifteen or fourteen to the average man and did not label them with the girls’ ages, then all normal men would find them attractive and would react sexually. [This can be measured physiologically, so there is no need to rely on possibly dishonest verbal responses.]The age of puberty in girls – its onset (menarche) – is just eleven or below; and therefore a fifteen- or fourteen-year-old girl is several years post-puberty. Not only is she sexually mature but very near her peak of fertility, which is the age at which men have evolved to find females most attractive of all. Furthermore, the girl is not emotionally immature, given that the hormonal surge at puberty is responsible for initiating the adult organisation of the brain. It is no surprise then that surveys show the majority of people – male and female, let alone just girls — have already had full sex before their fourteenth birthday.Why, then, is the age-of-consent set in law at age sixteen? This was set back in Victorian times when the average age of menarche was at the astonishingly late age of seventeen. So the age when sex was deemed illegal even back then – in the context of a wild panic about what was the bogus notion of ‘the white slave trade’ – was set actually below the age of female puberty.The age-of-consent law is now a serious anachronism, and means that most people break the law. It is a major infringement of the freedom of young people, especially of boys given the two-year maturational gap between the sexes and the preference girls have for older males. It is also an inappropriate attack on natural sexual relationships between a girl and a considerably older man, such as in the current case of the fifteen-year-old girl and her thirty-year-old teacher. There are plenty of instances of pupil-teacher relationships that become marriages with children that long endure. That such relationships are deemed a supposed abuse of authority is no defence for the silly hysteria, because status is the very key attribute of men that girls have evolved to find particularly attractive. The pupil-teacher sexual relationship is ever likely to happen and could not make better evolutionary sense. In the contemporary context of the PC (‘political correctness’) totalitarian attack on the mass of ordinary people, the law regarding sex is a direct attack on boys and men.So how does Jimmy Savile – a notably high-status male – fall foul of what should be common-sense acceptance of the reality of sex? Only if he did indeed use coercion as alleged; but here is where the likely truth should stop anyone jumping to that conclusion. There is plenty of research showing a very high proportion of even formal allegations of sexual assault to police are fabrications (likely the majority; see the analysis in the book, The Woman Racket); and for often highly trivial reasons – especially to cover mild embarrassment. Girls and women routinely regret sexual encounters and retrospectively redefine them as coercive. [This must have been much more the case prior to the free availability of near-infallible contraception and the legal availability of abortion.] Then we must add the dimension of also well-researched ‘false memory’ construction, especially given the great elapse of time – several decades.This is only the start of teasing out multiple factors that conspire to create a bogus feeding frenzy. Savile’s incredible public profile guarantees attention for the attention-seeker. His death and the absence of any forensics or (other) witness guarantees immunity of even outlandish accusations from being challenged. The media – let alone the police – trawl is an open invitation for any of the huge number of girls who had sexual encounters with Savile to come forward with all sorts of fanciful elaborations of what actually took place.The likely reality of Jimmy Savile’s sexual behaviour is that he was a normal man in the abnormal situation, through being high-status and within the pop world in a newly ‘sexually liberated’ era, of being in the milieu of a large number of girls at the peak of their attractiveness and willing to engage in sexual activity. It would be amazing if, given the volume of sexual activity, that the ever-present problems of mis-communication between the sexes (notably female mixed come-on and coyness signals) would not lead on occasion to sex the girl did not want. A man in a man’s ‘dream’ position as Savile found himself easily could become used to the sexual activity such that his guard may be lowered as to checking that the girl was fine with what was going on. Of course, it may be also that Jimmy Savile was cavalier and in fact an abuser; but there is no basis of determining this given the nature of any evidence available. The only thing we know for sure is that his high profile more or less obliged him to be larger-than-life, so even his seeming oddness is likely no clue to anything. Myself, I’ve always found him creepy, and I never warmed to the man even in early Top of the Pops days (never mind the cringeworthy Jim’ll Fix It), but that’s probably just a lowly-male reaction to how society indulges the minority of high-status males.The upshot is that an honest view of Jimmy Savile is very much at odds with our contemporary perspective, which is a politically-driven hysteria that will come to be seen as such a madness as to be a warning from history.
Regarding the last line of Moxon’s piece – I’ve been consoling myself this week with the thought that even if it is not realistic to hope to bring to justice the instigators of the present sexual hysterias in their lifetimes, at least we can document who these monsters are, and what motivated them, for the education of those who come after us. At least we can be assured that these creatures will ultimately live in infamy and serve as warnings to future more enlightened generations against superstitious sexual savagery and the most primitive of human evil.
A very good analysis from Steve Moxon again, however there is one suggestion he made I tend to disagree with, in fact almost entirely disagree with:
I think this would be a more accurate assumption, thus more likely to be the truth:
“The media – let alone the police – trawl is an open invitation for any of the huge number of girls who
had sexual encountersare old enough and who simply know who Savile was, to come forward with all sorts of fancifulelaborations of whatstories of how they’d met him and some sexual liaison actually took place.”Remember, that now: sexual assault could simply mean something a man said (especially an OLDER man) that ‘offended’ a
privileged princesswoman or girl, which of course even further removes the need for any kind of corroborating evidence or proof. And that’s assuming the accused perpetrator is still alive and well and able to contest any allegations!I tend to think that Savile probably did fondle the occasional entirely willing underage groupie, as I haven’t heard any rumour of him being into granny fucking, animals, or curiously of being a high testosterone alpha male with no sex drive. Given that just about every celebrity was at it in that period, for the reasons Moxon gives, I find it hard to believe otherwise. Savile is being picked out as a sacrificial scapegoat for the 60′s and for men’s innate preference for youth because he was an oddball and is dead.
Yes I know and I even think that he did a lot more than just fondle them.
My point here is again, my favourite with all these anti-male sexuality laws: that a mere accusation and no EVIDENCE, PROOF or even any kind of witness testimony (even an unreliable one) is required.
In other words, these laws are the only ones I know of that not only PAY people to tell lies about another person (not to mention totally destroy them), they also ENCOURAGE people to do so.
I therefore think the reason they all suddenly ‘emerged out of the woodwork’ is the allure of compensation that greedy, sleazy lawyers have guaranteed them they will all be paid, without the need for such proof, evidence or witnesses.
Sure, there will be some (a small few) cases that are genuine, but why has it taken these ‘victims’ of Savile more than 40 years in some instances, to finally say $omething? (No, the $ is not a typo).
Any fair-minded and reasonable person would consider and perhaps suggest, that if their experiences really were that terrible and traumatic, that thousands of pounds in compensation payments are needed to help them ‘recover’, that such victims would have reported what happened to SOMEONE (anyone), soon after such incidents occurred; and any reasonable judiciary should surely also make that assumption.
Everyone knows that any unpleasant event in life (whether that be physical or emotional or combination of both), loses its potency (becoming easier to cope with and manage) with the passing of time, which is the main reason I find these allegations hard to believe; and those witch-hunters who are suggesting they were too frightened to report at the time are talking rubbish: Even if they were able to keep the incident a secret, surely at least some of those girl’s parents would have noticed sudden unusual behaviour and known something was wrong; and would not have rested until they found out what it was…
Even worse though are those who argue that the ‘victims’ didn’t think it was serious enough to report, but it IS so serious DECADES LATER, that it can only be fixed with $1000′s in compensation, as that is plain, obvious proof that they were NEVER traumatized. If the ‘victim’ herself didn’t think it even needed to be mentioned to anyone, it must have been an almost non-event in her mind, not a life-changing trauma!
The only thing that might be causing them distress now is maybe the publicity and media hysterical storm in a teacup, but more likely: how they cannot decide how they are going to spend all their thousands of pounds in compensation and money paid to them by paedo-sleaze hungry tabloid newspapers for their ‘dreadful stories’.
I agree 100% as I’m sure everybody else here does, but I’m just struggling to see where Steve Moxon denies this in the article, and where your disagreement whith him comes from.
Ah… I see what’s happened – a slight misunderstanding or maybe my too literal way of writing. When I said I disagree with Steve, I didn’t really disagree as such with anything he said.
What I said was meant to be in a more ‘tongue-in-cheek’ context, but was mainly trying to emphasize (as I did) that those women can say anything they like, not only because the accused is dead, but also because the current anti-male paedohysterical laws allow them to and encourage them to.
So in my original comment, I crossed out the words Steve used, and changed it to better highlight how (for example) they didn’t necessarily even have to prove they’d in fact met him, let alone make “fanciful elaborations” of what may have occurred to make such disgusting accusations.
In other words, I was trying to highlight what is so radically and constitutionally wrong with the law, NOT what Steve Moxon said…
Well it just seemed to miss the point of the article somewhat – which was a leading MRA and published author (although he doesn’t like to use that moniker for himself, but last time I checked AVfM they had a big link to his book on their main page) questioning the insanity of feminist Victorian age of consent laws as applied to 21st century England. The very reason why we were ready to effectively commit sucide a couple of weeks ago by declaring war on AVfM, Paul Elam, JtO, and everybody associated with that site, for having a few father’s rights and paedocrite readers who are adamant that age of consent is not a men’s rights issue to be brought up in the comments section.
I don’t doubt that people who have never even met Savile are now claiming that he raped them up their backside when they were 9 year old boys as a result of this trawl and the chance of compensation, but the point Moxon is making is to attack age of consent laws that criminalize normal male sexuality regarding young teenage girls – and how a police and media trawl will inevitably lead to middle-aged women reframing their entirely willing experiences with Savile when they might have been underage.
Steve Moxon is the published author of in my opinion probably the best researched and well argued anti-feminist men’s rights book in existance – he devotes nearly a whole chapter to arguing that existing feminist child porn laws are an attack on male sexuality (through evolutionary psychology arguments). He uses his real identity, he is something of a media personality already in the UK for a seperate matter (for getting a government minister the sack over immigration), and here he is becoming the fourth MRA blogger (after Jay Hammers, Human-stupidity, and myself – and none of us three even belong in the same sentence as him in terms of intellect or potential to influence matters) to unreservedly attack the age of consent – as a men’s rights and anti-feminist issue. As I said,he is admired by everyone from Paul Elam to Bernard Chapin.
And instead of praising him to the heaven, patting ourselves on the back and thinking ‘hey, we were right all along, feminist age of consent laws are an attack on normal male sexuality and are men’s rights issues – stick that up your pipe and smoke it Paul’, we get sidetracked into mocking his widely accepted idea (including by the msm and feminists) that the age of the menarche was 17 in Victorian times, and missing the point of the article altogether it seems.
Almost seems bizarre to me.
Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh but I am lying in bed with a fever, that might be the reason
Ok, sorry…
It looks like you still don’t understand me, I admit I totally bungled that comment, so please
DISREGARDDELETE my comment above.Here’s what I meant to say and what I SHOULD have written:
A very good analysis from Steve Moxon again, he really has totally rebuked the entire age of consent laws and laughed in the face of paedohysteria!
Although the paedohysterical and brainwashed British public will possibly want something done to silence him for daring to dissent against sexual trade union dogma, his no-holds-barred summary on this latest witch-hunt of a dead man, should at least tell them that not everyone is as stupid and as easily led as what they are.
This effective ‘lynching’ of Savile and other ‘odd-ball’ personalities from the same era is after all, only unfolding no thanks to the totally corrupt laws that feminists and their conservative puritan partners lobbied for and were granted, by submissive manginas in power, over the last couple of decades.
Many of the women that Steve Moxon’s summary discusses, quite possibly never even met Savile when they were young, or at all, but because of these ridiculous, oppressive and hateful anti-male sexuality laws that control all British men, including deceased men, they can make any accusations they like.
The situation is made even worse by the draw of compensation which is almost guaranteed, as the laws governing ‘rape’ and ‘child-sex offences’, require no evidence or any kind of witness testimony to corroborate any accusations made.
Steve Moxon is extremely courageous to metaphorically, but effectively ‘stand upon a soap box’ in the middle of a huge, frenzied and paedohysterical crowd of witch-hunters (the majority of British society) and tell them how they are all behaving far worse than their retarded, ignorant, in-bred, inquisitorial medieval ancestors!
What he said in that one brief but very public and ‘mainstream’ essay was more than all MRA blogs have said since the online MRM began.
I wrote one sentence that agreed with Ian B.
If Ian had not posted his comment expressing his skepticism on Moxon’s researched facts on the age of menarche in Victorian times, I would not have commented at all.
Just so you you know, I don’t dispute what Steve Moxon has said, I merely said that I had difficulty accepting it (“cannot really accept it.”), as Ian still seems to be.
That does not mean I think, nor did I suggest that Steve Moxon might be wrong…
O.K Alan, I apologise, and to Ian as well. As I said, I had a fever and had been violently sick all day yesterday, so I probably came across as harsher than I intended to.
EDIT : BTW, I forgot to mention of course our esteemed friend Eivind Berge in the list of brave MRA bloggers who have questioned the age of consent.
I wasn’t “mocking” Steve Moxon. I called into question one stated fact in the piece that I find rather dubious.
Claiming that the age of puberty was, in VIctorian times, as late as 17 implies, as indeed Moxon states, that an age of consent at 16 was at the time biologically rational, rather than being done for feminist campaigning reasons. Secondly, feeds into a narrative that current menarche is “unnaturally” young- an anomaly supposedly caused by ill health (obesity), processed foods and environmental toxins, all obsessions of the current crop of Puritans- and therefore male interest in girls of that age is “unnatural” too.
Also, part of that narrative is printing stories about unusually early puberty which are implied as symptomatic of this supposed anomaly, which is why I pointed to the medical descriptions of similar statistical outliers in Victorian times.
Feminists actually wanted to raise the age of consent to 21. They had been campaigning to this end for decades before the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the white slavery moral panic (which was invented by William T Stead, a puritan and male feminist who died fittingly on the Titanic, giving his lifeboat seat to the women). But yes, perhaps (after repeated rejections in the houses of parliament) the bill was eventually passed with a compromise age of 16 because there was seen to be some ‘biological rationality’ to it.
Moxon’s point might have been exactly what you say, or it could be just to point out that any possible ‘rational’ grounds for an age of consent that high no longer exist. It’s not necessary to agree with that biological justification. There are still some 17 year old girls who haven’t begun puberty and I wouldn’t describe a man who has sex with them as a child molestor. As I pointed out earlier, I’ve never read of any evidence that a girl a year or two pre-pubescent is physcially incapable of having sex – physically incapable of becoming pregnant and bearing a child, yes. Especially in a pre-pubescent teenage girl. BTW, don’t you think that a teenage girl incapable of becoming pregnant would be a very attractive proposition to both a brothel owner and many of his punters in Victorian times?
That’s a good point, and I’ve seen it once before on the comments at The-Spearhad. However, I don’t particularly agree with it – if females are sending the physical signals that they are fertile then it can never be unnatural for a man to recognise it.
I’m unsure as to whether it’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing that girls are beginning puberty earlier (if it is indeed the case). If girls started puberty later, for example if we removed whatever toxins are supposedly causing this early menarche, then feminists would have no grounds to object to men expressing attraction to pubescent females. Of course, you can be sure that if girls suddenly started puberty at 16 or 17, then femnists would be once again calling for the age of consent to be raised to 21 or beyond, and calling any man who finds 20 year old women attractive paedophiles.
From my experience, as I’ve documented here before, feminists and ‘puritans’ (it seems to me that feminist puritans are the standard bearers) try to claim that it is society’s supposed ‘sexualisation’ of young girls that is causing early puberty – and use it, for example, to press for an opt-in to internet porn and a ban on sexual MTV videos. To my mind, proof of other environmental causes such as toxins is a counter to their selfish sexually self-interested unfounded claims.
Regarding your belief that our enemy are the ‘new puritans’ rather than feminists, again I see no real evidence of this, at least not in Europe. It’s true that certain ‘child protection’ charities are staffed with a number of Christians – these tend to be women, simply using Christianity as a self-serving means to achieve their sexual ends in the same way as others use feminism. And it seems to me that most of the charities are radical feminist – if you check my article on the NSPCC, probably the most influential such charity in Europe, nearly all of their research members are radical feminists.
We’ve had this debate here before many times. As Jack pointed out recently, when sex positive feminists, or even just sex positive women, debate the prostitution issue there is nearly always a total lack of recognition of the rights of men in the discussion. Criminalizing punters puts sex workers in danger etc but never ‘a man has a right to pay for sex’. Where are all the sex positive feminists speaking out against draconian child porn laws or punishments for statutory ‘rape’? I can think of only one – Judith Levine.
The reason why the sexual revolution existed (briefly) and why many second wave feminists accepted it (even took the credit for it) was because the pill allowed MEN to fuck around consequence free. Women rationalised the new reality as sexual freedom, but as soon as they started to age, we saw a decidely more puritan attitude, culminating in what we are seeing now with Savile.
I honestly think the vast majority of men would be happy to be back in the 60′s. I mean, what percentage of the male sex have teenage daughters at any one time anyway? Puritanism, however, will always be in the seuxal interests of the vast majority of women (until they can be forever young at least, and probably also have their increasingly maladaptive inclination to monogamy changed).
Interesting quote from Ernest Belfort Bax I published the other day (writing in 1908) :
AF-
Regarding the puritans, it’s part of a larger historical analysis. There is a strong case to be made, and it is one I make frequently on the net, that the culture war is a centuries old struggle which has been ongoing since the Reformation. In this analysis, Victorianism was the resurgence of the Puritan movement, and we are currently undergoing a third wave resurgence of that Puritanism. It has now shed its religiosity, to concentrate purely on lifestyle reformation. This is why the Feminists, Temperance, Food asceticism/faddism, self-denialist environmentalism, anti-modernism, etc are all bound up together in one movement or at least one “logroll”; they are all aspects of the same ascetic philosophy which sees the sensual as sinful.
Ascetic movements and revivalism are a major theme in Judaism-descended societies. Islam is currently undergoing a similar process to our Reformation. In Christendom, there was Iconoclasm in Byzantium, and our own Protestant movement. That revived towards the end of the liberal 18th century, leading to Victorian values, spreading in a series of revivals (called “Awakenings” in America) across, particularly, the anglosphere. THeir culture impact was and is immense, and are the reason that the Anglopshere is the most consistently puritanical and the seedbed of “reform” movements (the current immensely powerful crop of NGOs, charities, etc).
I am not disagreeing with the analysis that ascetic Feminism articulates the jealousy of older women for younger ones. But that is only one element in a complex story. Besides all else it is worth remembering that the women who ignited Radical Feminism were, at the time, young women, not old jealous ones. They entered into their own womanhood with a fierce hatred and terror of the sexual, and have successfullly reignited that across our societies by simply reactivating old, semi-dormant, Puritan ideals of the virtue of sexual innocence. This is a philosophical issue, and it’s a danger to try to explain all of human behaviour on the basis of one or two sociobiological narratives. It results in every observation being re-interpreted until it fits the theory; the same anti-Popperian error that Feminist and Marxists etc make, in which the theory explains everything and thus nothing. It is very easy to confuse particular values of our own culture with general principles, or even just clinging onto ideas simply because one wants them to be true.
I sound more antagonistic than I am. I am an admirer of your site, which is why I am here after all. Your defence of sexuality is in my view essential to any correct reappraisal of gender. But we must be careful to look at the broad picture. The Feminists have One Theory That Explains Everything, and it is wrong. Opponents must not make the same error.
‘Savile is being picked out as a sacrificial scapegoat for the 60s’
This revisionism of the 60s is a really common theme among socially conservative pundits in the Murdocratic Media. Actually, the only thing that Saville and others like him were doing differently during the 60s was being more open about what everybody else was doing before.
There seems to be some illusion among Socons that women weren’t having sex before 26 years of age before the 1960s or something. My great-grandmother was pregnant with her 4th child at 26!
Revisionism or repudiation of the 60s is unfortunately now the zeitgeist on both the “right” and the “left”, as AF calls them the femservatives and the feminists. It is a straightforward repudiation of every liberalism of the 60s except gay rights- as gays were welcmed into the feminist camp having been their target during the “First Wave”, a fact which they quietly forget, blaming the Victorian homohysteria on those loveable patsies, the “conservatives”- who are themselves indeed in most ways just attempting to keep first wave progressive/feminst rules and laws in place.
As such, I think it is important to realise that the Second Wave Feminists were and are not a “liberal” movement at all, but a reaction against the liberalism of the 1960s. They arose to combat the growing equality between men and women that was rapidly occurring at the time, not to promote it. Equality- genuine equality- meant women stepping off their pedestal, and that generation of women were gladly doing so. Being “the angel in the home” is no great joy, after all. It has taken forty years of relentless, vicious campaigning and massive levels of induced moral panic- SRA/”abuse”/the “Survivor Movement”/sex trafficking etc, and whole new justifications for censorship and persecution of prostitution etc based on “exploitation” to get them this far.
So anyway, they’re now at the stage of having successfully engineered everyone, including formation who were once at least socially liberal, to renounce the 1960s and its liberal values. The next few years are going to be, in Chinese terms, “interesting times”.
IanB:
Feminism is essentially a revolutionist movement. Santanyana defined a revolutionist movement as one that seeks to displace the existing social/natural order (as opposed to a ‘reformationist movement’ which seeks to rebuild the existing order).
To the feminist mind, any and all existing institutions are constructs of ‘patriarchy’; to be used and done away with when the revolution is successful. That’s why it’s difficult to define it in historical and cultural contexts; because feminism ultimately rejects history and culture (and civilization generally).
I wonder if compensation money from the BBC is on offer here. That usually enhances memories.
Normally, offering a witness money to testify one way or the other would be called “perverting the course of justice” and result in a stiff penalty. Yet offering compensation money in cases where the only evidence is the accusation made by claimants seems to amount to the same thing. It’s like “Make a claim against Jimmy Savile. Best story wins $$$$$”
The victims are already suing the BBC for £10 million. Apparently, every one of the ‘victims’ are also in ine for compensation from the state, even though no trial can take place.
A bit off topic, but mentioned in the Moxon article- am I the only person who is sceptical about this supposedly very high age of puberty in Victorian times? How reliable is the data, and what is the source of it? Is it really credible that Victorian teenagers were pre-pubescent until 17 or 18? No breasts, no hips, no pubic hair? I just find it very hard to believe that this was the norm; it doesn’t seem to have occurred anywhere else on the planet- even in marginal primitive societies with poor nutrition, girls generally mature sexually at about 12.
Bear in mind also that the whole Victorian age of consent moral panic was about girls in their early teens working as prostitutes. The start of the “age of prostitution” from the sources I’ve read seems to be suspiciously close to the current age of puberty- starting at 12, 13 etc. If supposedly the age of puberty was 17 or 18, that means girls working for 4 or 5 years with childrens’ reproductive organs- the whole point of puberty is it readies the genitals sexually functional, including the vagina enlarging sufficiently for sexual activity. So if this high age of menarche is genuine, the girls would have been sexually servicing clients frequently with dysfunctional genitals. I can’t take this seriously.
Ian, you’re not alone: exactly the same thoughts were going through my mind as I read that part and also like you: cannot really accept it.
@Ian I think there is some good evidence that the onsent of puberty began significantly later than today in the Victorian era, although I’m not sure either about 17 or 18.
It seems to have been something of a historical blip, whatever the reasons for it.
There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that girls are begininning puberty 1 or 2 years earlier today than just a single generation ago.
Quite often when I read Victorian literature I’m struck by descriptions of girls in their late teens as ‘beginning to change into women’ and such like.
Bear in mind that pollution in London in Victorian times was quite unparalleled by just about any place on Earth before or since. It was often the case that you couldn’t see your feet because of the infamous fog.
Good points regarding the age of prositution, but perhaps the men who paid for sex with these ‘pre-pubescent’ teenagers were real paedophiles. Also note that until 1865 the age of consent in the UK was 12. I thought the reasons for puberty were primarily to prepare the body for pregnancy and to send signals that the body was capable of pregnancy (rather than functional ablity to ‘enjoy’ sex per se – for example the vaginal canal widening for a babies head to fit through it).
Antifeminist:
Did you happen to notice that Fatrelle hijacked some your anti-suffragette posters? He doesn’t want to quotemine this site anymore; but we’ve definately seen the posters here before!
HaHa, yes I did Eric. He might even have found them through Googling (and reached my site – maybe he doesn’t even realise that HistoryOfFeminism is mine).
As you mentioned before, my sites come up near the top of Google for quite a few feminist releated search terms already. I think half of my search engine traffic is probably from womyn’s studies undergrads.
Well, it’s possible that Victorian London was swarming with genuine paedophiles, but it seems to me that a quick swiped with Occam’s Razor would leave us with the hypothesis that sexual activity (including prostitution) was commencing in the early teens because then, as today, was when sexual maturity occurred.
The same argument can be applied to boys. If they weren’t reaching puberty until their late teens, why was everyone obsessed with preventing much younger lads masturbating? How could sexually non-functional teenagers be buggering each other at public schools? How could a seventeen year old Robert Ross be an active flaming queen who seduced Oscar Wilde?
Also, next time you;re reading a shock horror in the Daily Fail about young puberty as if it’s a modern epidemic, think of this article in which doctors of the time report cases of anomalously precocious puberty-
http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue42/peterson.htm
There’s always somebody at the edge of the bell curve…
I’m not one to treat the Huffington Post as authoritative, but this is quite an interesting article : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-fuhrman-md/girls-early-puberty_b_857167.html
Note that Moxon himself says ‘astonishingly late age of 17′ regarding the menarche. I find it astonishing as well, but I’m not sure if that counts as a good reason against believing something if there is evidence to the contrary. Moxon does research his claims and arguments far more exhaustively than any other ‘MRA’ or anyone writing in the men’s rights community that I know of.
I guess also the staggering differences in child mortality rates between then and now might have had something to do with it as well.
Well, colour me still sceptical. Firstly, I want to know how reliable data from the Victorian period is; were they using the same criteria as today? There was an awful lot of bad medicine done back then by “proper” physicians; medicine was astonishingly crude. Just how rigorous was the statistical recording of timings of first periods?
Secondly, that article is full of the typical obsessions of current puritan Progressives- the blame is put on all those supposed diseases of modern life- overweight, eating meat, dairy products, “toxins” in the environment and so on. That is very suspicious. “Obesity” is one of their other big panics, and they are forever blaming meat eating for all sorts of ill health, etc. It feeds into modern puritan fetishes about “nutrition”.
It is worth remembering that while the diets of the poor were impoverished, that was not true of the upper classes who would have had the most attentive medical care by far. They ate plenty of meat, rich puddings and dairy products, and so on. The middle and upper classes weren’t staggering along on a handful of rice a day. Boiled beef and carrots and all that.
17 is an astonishingly late age, and as you (and others) have pointed out over and over again, traditional societies have expected puberty at around 12.
This is one of those “well known facts” that seems enormously suspicious to me.
In europe, before the industrial revolution females had their first period around 14 and it climbed to around 17 during the early industrial revolution. Then in the late 19th century and into the 20th the age of menarche started to fall until now it’s around 12
During the industrial revolution nutrition probably worsened and with people congregating in cities infectious disease flourished, both of which likely increased the age of menarche. Height and weight also declined during that time.
Also, I was recently reading a book on the ?kung san, a hunter gatherer population in africa, based on anthropological work in the 60′s and 70′s and females reached menarche around 16.
With all of that said, those numbers are averages, and there’s variability not just in europe but among individuals. England I believe had an average age of menarche of as low as 14 by the late 19th century, which would mean some females perhaps being menarchal as early as 12.
Despite the high average age there were probably still early developers entering prostitution.
Muhr:
I’ve read the same the thing: that late puberty was anamolous to that time and period; and mostly in industrialized areas. Also, it must be included that Moxon’s figures repesent an ‘average’; most likely a skewed statistic since physicians then were probably mostly concentrated in the same industrialized urban centers. Probably rural areas saw more normal ages for the onset of puberty.
I agree. Environment is clearly the cause for the increase in pubertal age and the likely factor is diet. Any female that would be able to maintain a better diet would likely have a lower pubertal age and they would probably be rural folk involved in food production.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/10/boys-starting-puberty-up-to-two-years.html
Puberty at the age of six, uhm … Could it be that the criteria are flawed and that there’s a perverse bias to portray children as “even more in danger than previously suspected”. With so many lies and liars, so much fake expertise and manipulation, who’s to tell?
Not to mention that even if it were established girls are now menstruating say at the age of four, this would interpreted as anything except as a challenge to revise legal ages-of-consent.
Quite the reverse, the tale would be of a growing between physical maturity and psychological maturity, the latter tending in fact to arrive later than ever before, what with girls these days being soooo imature and childish. Hence the necessity for girls to become legal only after they’ve been menstruating for a decade or so.
All the same, if Nature is really playing games with the STU agenda, so much the better!
Jack:
I tend to think it’s disinformation too. One major argument the femihags have always struggled with is the scientifically verifiable proof that (under normal conditions) puberty is both the physical and psychological criterion of adulthood. They constantly argue that women are too immature psychologically at those early ages to become wives and mothers. If they can make up fake evidence that physical puberty occurs much earlier, then they can use elastic psychological criterion to their advantage—extending ‘childhood’ into the mid-20s.