In Chicago Ridge, Illinois earlier this month a 40 year-old woman was arrested on charges of having sexually violated four adolescent boys, friends of her 13 year-old daughter. She’s accused of having had sex with two of the boys, performing oral sex on the third, and fondling the fourth. The headline of the originating article in the Chicago Sun-Times announced the woman was accused of having had “sex” with the 14 and 15 year-old boys while the article described the act as sexual assault.

I read past this conflation at first, combining two things that can’t truthfully be considered in the same category. Can sex and sexual assault really be used as synonyms? What do we say about sex, when it can simultaneously be considered an assault?

I suspect a large part of the equivocation comes from the way men’s sexuality is often treated with two-dimensional jocularity. For men, sex is an “it” and is something that’s gotten. A man gets laid. He gets pussy. He gets lucky. The act of insertion is a victory unto itself. The emotional experience of being physically close with another person, and all the varied ways that can create pleasure, is something not to be trusted, reserved for faggy deviants.

Because of this sexual myopia—described as a “deeroticization” by Catherine Waldby, an author and professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney—it becomes much more difficult to declare whether these boys had sex or were sexually assaulted.

Had it been a 40 year-old man luring adolescent girls I imagine the story would have seemed monstrous, a debauched nightmare to play in the minds of every fearful parent sending their children over to play at the neighbors. Because the offender is a woman, and the violated are boys, the gnarled edge of the story seems to have dulled. I don’t think I’m taking too great a liberty in thinking that someone in a sports bar has already high-fived a friend over this. Probably more than once.

One of the hardest things to talk about with sexuality is the fact that it develops. Boys don’t simply go from playing cops and robbers to being led around by their penises like an insistent dog pulling its owner along by the leash handle. It’s cliché for a man to look back on his high school years and remember unquenched sexual yearnings, all the nubile sex the younger version of one’s self left incompetently on the table.

When I was in junior high, my friends and I used to joke with one another in the most vulgar and sexually explicit ways. We’d brag to one another about how huge our penises were, make exaggerated masturbating motions in the air, and emasculate each other for being sexually inadequate. Privately, we’d ask each other anxiety-laden questions about who’d gotten pubic hair, and whether or not someone had actually kissed another girl.

I was twelve the first time I masturbated. I did it mostly out of curiosity about what that strange hand motion we all made actually was. It felt like nothing at first. My erections had, to that point, been purposeless inconveniences that made an otherwise invisible part of my body suddenly tighten with discomfort. As I began to adapt those long, sneering gestures to the comparative smallness and sensitivity of my own penis, I felt nothing but that boring discomfort. I could see for a few moments why we might have made such fun of this stupid activity, it only added monkey flagellation to an already awkward experience.

Then that tightness softened. The discomfort began to recede beneath an expanding surge of something barely describable. It felt like my blood was exhaling, a slow-gathering need was forming. I went from feeling embarrassed for having seriously imitated our friendly taunt to securing everything around me to make sure I wouldn’t have to stop.

Coming was incomprehensible. It felt better than anything I’d ever experienced. I’d been a content and mostly happy kid, but discovering there was a level of physical sensation above riding roller coasters and eating ice cream was a revelation. When it was over it felt like everything that had been slowly expanding in secret exhalation retreated again, withdrawing into the hiding place where it had been for so long without my knowing.

Having that experience with another person was still inconceivable to me. I knew the literal details, but I had no understanding of why they would be desirable. I was usually mortified around women, expecting rejection at the end of every sentence. In puberty, I felt myself transforming into something bigger and ungainly, pimply and coarse, more hairy and disproportionate than the miniaturized figure I’d been as a boy.

When I first slow danced with another girl at 13, I remember just trying to hold on and keep from doing anything that would give away my utter fear. I was grateful to have my hands resting on her hips so she wouldn’t feel them trembling and sweaty. I asked that same woman to be my girlfriend the next day and, after an overnight consideration, she said no via a message written on her palm in blue ink.

That was all a world away from the person I’ve become. In many ways I remain as awkward and trepidatious as I was, but I no longer feel the need to apologize for my body and the fact that it sometimes pushes back against my brain’s logic with lusty, romantic urges. I understand in some ways the desire to look backwards at my discombobulated younger self, to be cavalier about what I’d have been able to handle at the age. It would have been a lucky thing to have found an assured and sex-hungry 40 year-old, part instructor and part co-conspirator.

It’s a deceptive idea because it imagines the most important part of sexual discovery is mechanical. As if everything I had to learn about sex was based on kinetics and volume of experience, not the combination of the physical with a corresponding emotional expansion that comes from going through those experiences with a partner who matches your own romantic feelings, someone with whom sex is less a roller coaster ride and more a road trip.

The perverse thing about a 40 year-old sleeping with a 14 year-old is not that it’s inherently violent, but that it’s a coercive violation. In the case of the Chicago Ridge woman, booze and marijuana were said to have been used to induce the boys into a state of chemical glee. I’m also sure that, in that age and state, I would have looked up to an adult, especially a cool-seeming one bearing tequila and bong loads. I imagine I would have seen someone like that for something other than what they are. That must be what makes it such an erotic thrill for the predator, to feel themselves seen as something new and better than they know they are. This trick doesn’t quite work on someone your own age, where experience and a clearer self-knowledge make it easier to see through a line of deluded bullshit.

But at 14, everything is still a discovery. Music, drugs, sex, conversation, words, movies, your parents, the world outside your suburban incubator—everything is a massive welling feeling that we don’t yet have a vocabulary to describe. This is a condition perfectly suited for predation; someone inexperienced enough to be lied to about something that triggers a deep human instinct that even adults have a hard time describing, to say nothing of understanding.

So much of the culture that caters to male sexuality still bears those traits of coercion, deception, and violation. So many of us continue to experience our sexuality through the lens of power, feeling the need to buy sex (strip clubs, pornography, always springing for the check) and consider it a sign of self-worth when we’re able to have sex. In Waldby’s “Destructive Boundary Erotics and Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body” she describes the “refusal of pleasure in order not to surrender power. To defend the sovereign ego the rest of the body is drained of erotic potential in favor of its localization in the penis, taken to be the phallus’ little representative.”

Sexuality has no single cause. But in a world where fucking is an achievement, nudity is a commodity, and money can bridge the gap when seduction fails, the dank and corrosive shadow of violation hangs over everything.

Image via Jennzebel