Grooming Girls on Snapchat & Instagram
A High School teacher used Snapchat and Instagram
to lure a teenage girl into having sex with him.
The first incident happened when he contacted the girl
via Snapchat saying he was going to visit her where she worked.
He then showed up and suggested they go into
a restroom and have sex, which they did.
He later messaged her suggesting she delete their message
thread and add him on Snapchat, which she did.
Conversations then took on an adult nature, asking her
if she liked a particular sexual position.
He then sent her a photo of himself naked and a video
of himself taking his pants off and suggested
she send him a photo in return.
He continued to send her messages over the next week,
saying he’d be free in the mornings for sex and that
his wife would be out of town so she should come over.
The victim then began to feel uncomfortable
and told him to stop contacting her
The two of them then stopped communicating.
He was charged with two counts of sexual assault
of a teen, sending information to harm a minor,
and obscene communication using a computer to seduce a child.
He argued that the girl in question had
given her consent. No force was involved.
As far as he knew, she was over the age of sixteen.
Consent is permission for something to happen
or agreement for something to happen.
.
If a 16-year-old is educated properly about sex
and knows how to practice sex safely, then how do
they not know what they are doing?
If they give their consent, understand the consequences
of practicing sex, and their sexual partner is safe and
responsible, then why should it even matter if they have sex?
I bet the real reason behind this “consent” bullshit is
that parents can’t cope with the fact that an older man
is sleeping with their daughter.
Teen Girls Are Honey
Pots for Most Men
I remember when I was 14 and out with my father. In a rare bonding experience, he accompanied me to the open mic night where my parents dutifully dropped me off every week. I love it there, a weird kid hanging out with friendly adults who used to be weird kids in a college town pizza place re-imagined as an evening home for acoustic guitar strummers and frustrated Oklahoma poets. My dad wishes he had a cigarette.
“I can get you one,” I say, maybe adding a “Watch this,” before flouncing over to a nearby table seating a group of young (older than me) men. I lean over their table and press my tits together, smile brightly, put on a honey-sweet voice like a Southern waitress peddling my own teenage ass as I bum a Marlboro Red. My clumsy sexuality is too obvious, cloying, annoying probably, but then, I’m 14. 15? It works, anyway. It’s hard to be too obvious for most men.
I’m aware of my father’s eyes behind me. I am trying to impress him with my newfound skills, to show him how I can get men to give me things. I have been groomed for this; I think he will approve.
I don’t think I’d hit my teens when I first realized how to be powerful in this way. It’s like finding out one day that you’re a teen witch, or that you own a shiny red Porsche you aren’t licensed to drive yet. That doesn’t stop groups of men from gathering around and low-whistling talking about “Look at them headlights” and “I bet she rides fine.” Your engine idles and roars.
By the age of 12 I had the kind of overstuffed body that a lot of men like, and low levels of seratonin and self-esteem, which a lot of men also like. Murmurs and nasty whispers followed me home like stray kittens. In the slender period between my development and the vicious assault that would precede my rapid weight gain, I was pretty but felt ugly, the most dangerous combination for a girl.
I lost my virginity a week after I turned 12, to rape, then commenced giving it away to whoever wanted it from then on.
During my teen years, it never occurred to me to consider my own wants and desires when it came to being sexual with another person. Each time anyone desired me, it felt like an unexpected gift, each lusty, husky-voiced compliment a diamond. I was astounded, genuinely, every time someone found me worthy to copulate with. What was attraction, anyway? All I needed to see was a favorable reflection of myself in his eyes. The yes was a foregone conclusion.
I have never found anything that feels more powerful to me than that moment, that intoxicating twilight when I had something that a man wants, desperately; when I held all the cards and his undivided attention. It’s power — some may think it an empty, silly little girl version, but wielded deftly, it can do all the things “real” power can do, if only by manipulating the men who hold it. Besides, it was the only power I had access to.
So Young
So Desirable
On Being Desired
She has to embrace signifiers of either “taken-ness” or “availability” in order to be seen. A woman’s (re)presentation of herself is always assumed to be designed to cater to the male gaze – located inwards or outwards. There is a price we pay to remain desirable an even so, to remain “invisible”.
Let me share with you my own experience of body-shaming from my “pre-feminist” days. As the story usually goes, to my family and the society’s respite, my “thinness” was comforting till I reached a certain “marriageable” age.
That meant that my dependents would have one less thing to worry about when scouting for grooms – shedding excess weight off of my body. A brief moment of “victory” in the world of body-shaming, if I may consider the opposite of shaming to be appreciation.
Following the words of appreciation on having “maintained” myself well (read remaining thin in a world which idealises thinness), I get a quick word of advice, in a hiss, “Work that ass! Men don’t like hugging skinny girls with their bones sticking out and poking.”
While growing up, I was aware of my privilege of being thin. I was thankful for my thin frame, because it saved me from being subjected to distasteful jokes and bullying.
Yet as a teenager, when I had only begun to grow awareness of social expectations and values of femininity and beauty, that awareness of my role to re-enact my womanhood dawned on me. The unsaid demands of voluntarily self-fashioning and self-subjection planted the first seed of resistance.
I began to understand that the regulation of body was not simply restricted to refusal of fatness, but also about “looking a certain way” which is considered “appealing”.
As a teen, half-knowingly, I suppressed my desire to be desired when desirability was constructed on patriarchal terms. As a result, in the impulse to both suppress feminine bodily development and to resist the influence of my family, I restricted my eating.
“I don’t care if a guy doesn’t want to hug me, I don’t want to hug him first. I won’t grow boobs for him to want to hug me,” I said to myself. I was out on a mission to neither sexualise, nor desexualise myself, or so it seemed at the time.
In fact, the idea of being desired by a man itself was what I was most tormented by. How could I want to be desired when I wanted “to rupture everything men see as desirable about me.
Because I know by now that this catalogue of desirable girl types only exist to make you feel as small as possible, to slot you so they don’t have to see you.
How could I want to have sex with a man when I don’t even see anything desirable about me – because realising these things about how men see you can actually make you terrified of being seen at all”.
For me, at that point, to be “desired” just simply meant nothing but an idea I must rebel against for it was a totalising imposition of a body “ideal”.
I remember having thought to myself trapped in a deeply antagonistic dynamic of desirability, “I’d rather not be ‘desirable’ because as much as men believe their validation of women’s experiences and appearance are indispensable to women, it’s not.”