Hot Girls in Tight Clothes Do Not Keep Boys From Learning

But what about the boys? Lahey’s slutshaming couched in feminist rhetoric is so exasperating that it’s easy to miss another obvious problem: the insistence that young men can only be thoughtful when they’re not turned on. “I hate having to worry that being able to see a girl’s underwear will so addle the boys’ brains that they will be unable to concentrate in science class,” Lahey laments. She’s hardly alone in making the calculation that visible panties lead to a rapid transfer of blood from the male brain to a straining erection. To the modesty peddlers, male cognition and compassion hinge on flaccidity; with boys already supposedly falling behind in school, keeping dicks soft is presumably the way to keep their owners’ grades up.

Lahey, like everyone else promoting this myth of the uncontrollable male libido, (such as the admins and contributors to the Guys on Modesty site) refuses to consider the possibility that lust and learning aren’t mutually exclusive. Or, to be more precise, that boys can’t lust and learn. Girls — whose desires can be every bit as intense as those of their brothers — are expected to keep their horniness strictly under control, never allowing it to interfere with either their studies or their performance of “sexy, but not sexual” femininity.

Lahey concedes that girls can be easily distracted, but tellingly doesn’t hold boys directly responsible. “One day they can’t pay attention in class because they’re thinking about ponies and their pet guinea pigs, and the next they’re incapacitated by daydreams about the opposite sex.” Lahey never explains where these girlish daydreams come from, but she’s certainly not suggesting that hot male classmates have anything to do with them. In her psychological calculus, girls must do two things: manage their own nearly “incapacitating” fantasies and take full responsibility for addling the minds of their male counterparts. The modesty crowd never concedes the obvious point: self-control and lust can exist in the same mind. As long, apparently, as that mind belongs to a girl.

That modesty culture places an unreasonable burden on girls is undeniable. What gets missed is that it also sets men up for a lifetime of believing that they aren’t responsible for their own sexual urges. Boys don’t need to be protected from their own horniness (any attempt to provide that protection will end in failure), they need tools to learn to manage the intensely powerful feelings that they’re having. Teenage lust is a biological reality, but the socially-constructed assumption that it is only truly overwhelming for boys is destructive in two ways. It shames girls for being horny (because sexual desire is framed as exclusively masculine) and it teaches boys that they are at the mercy of urges they can’t be reasonable expected to control. What boys need, and aren’t getting, is the message that lust and learning aren’t mutually exclusive experiences.

Modesty culture shames women, but it does something else almost as destructive: it tells boys a lie about what it means to live in a male body. Instead of familiar laments like Lahey’s, what boys need to hear is that while hard dicks may not have a conscience or the capacity to cogitate, their owners still do. In a world that will present most of us with attractive distractions for the rest of our lives, learning to interact respectfully and attentively with people for whom we’re casually lusting is a basic social skill for men and women alike. That’s not an overask if we actually look at the evidence; as Andrew Smiler and others have recently shown: boys are more romantic, self-aware, and capable of self-control than we imagine.

Lahey’s concern for “girls who are just beginning to understand the power of their physicality” is presumably genuine, as is her longing to help them value their “strong minds and kind hearts” instead of their looks. The contradiction is obvious: it makes no sense to teach girls that their bodies have irresistible power while shaming them for trying to cultivate that allure. If we want girls to reach what Lahey calls their “unlimited potential,” we have to start by helping guys reach theirs. That means reminding guys that while their horniness is healthy, they are not completely at the mercy of exposed female flesh. It means teaching young men and women alike how to live, love, learn — and lust — all at the same time. If we want to give young women what Lahey calls the “fighting chance to change the world,” reminding them that they are not solely responsible for how men respond to their bodies is a good place to start.

Image via woaiss/Shutterstock.