In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Something strange has come up recently on YouTube and TikTok. There’s this spate of home-made videos — short ones — that present the following scenario: usually it begins with a girl who claims to have a boy who is her “best friend”. Some saccharine pop tune plays, and then words appear on screen to the effect that she’s secretly infatuated with him and, allegedly, he doesn’t know. So then, the girl invents some pretext for getting close to him, and suddenly kisses him … and whatever happens happens. Either he seems to respond, or he doesn’t. Then the video ends.
Immanuel Can: There’ve got to be thousands of these things. Sometimes it’s a boy who’s made them, but most of the time, a girl. But always the camera — and the viewers — are the third ‘person’ in the equation, of course. Let’s start with the obvious. Do you think it would be okay for young Christian women to try emulating this trend?
Tom: Oh please.
Sage Counsel
IC: So let’s drill this down a bit: If your daughter was telling you of her plans to make such a video, or such a gesture, with some boy she knew, what sage counsel would you offer her?
Tom: Well, first of all, she would NEVER tell me. She knows exactly how I would react. I would be horrified. It’s always going to go wrong.
IC: Okay, why?
Tom: Because from the time she was a child, I’ve taught her that the man is supposed to lead in a relationship, and I’ve tried to model that along the way. Maybe I haven’t communicated that as well as I’d like to, and maybe she doesn’t entirely agree. But what she definitely knows is that I believe it, and so she’d be unlikely to flaunt an alternative relationship model in my face, especially when it isn’t working for her. I can tell you with confidence that every time she’s taken the initiative to move a relationship forward, it has not gone well.
IC: Well, would you say it’s possible that what women might expect a young man to understand from an aggressive move from a female, and what men might actually understand from that gesture might sometimes be rather different things, perhaps?
Tom: It depends on the man, I think. Alpha male types are unlikely to think much of it, but then they are not going to be in the “friend zone” anyway. Men of lower status would definitely be very enthusiastic about the woman taking the lead, assuming that sort of thing would ever happen to them. Nerdy males write books and TV show episodes about those kind of relationships all the time, where the woman makes all the moves and saves them the bother of taking any emotional risk. It’s a fantasy scenario for them. But I very much doubt those videos you’re seeing involve attractive women hitting on nerdy males.
In the Danger Zone
IC: No, I wasn’t thinking of that. I wasn’t even thinking that the males, on some level, are not bound to be attractive to their “friends” who accost them. But I was thinking of the alacrity with which the inclinations of a young man turn toward sex. That’s a pretty powerful drive that the girls are tapping … and I wonder if they have any idea how quickly pure physicality can motivate a young man. I don’t mean just the “friends with benefits” phenomenon so common among secular young people today (though it is very common), but that the young woman is invoking a drive in even a good man that is properly kept in check by his judgment. If he has not seen fit to try to move a particular girl beyond the “friend zone” already, how is she assured that her physical advances won’t incline him to abandon his brain for another locus of decision? If he didn’t see her as the best choice for him before, what is it that is suddenly inducing him to see her as a better choice now?
Tom: Oh, I see. Yes, I definitely agree that it’s extremely ill-advised. I’m thinking back to my teen years, and I could easily imagine having gotten physical with any girl I liked even the slightest little bit provided she unexpectedly initiated it, and who knows how far that might have gone? Much of what keeps certain kinds of young men out of sexual trouble is the mistaken notion that members of the fairer sex are somehow intrinsically “purer” or more chaste than they really are. So they hesitate to initiate the physical stuff even if they’d like to because they fear being humiliated by a young woman displaying better character than they know themselves to possess. But, hey, if she’s down with it, that’s another story entirely for a young man on the fence about how far is too far. You’re right, IC, depending on the boy, girls like this may be biting off way more than they are prepared to chew.
IC: I think so. It’s quite possible that by subverting the boy’s sound judgment about her in this particular way, she’s asking him to use her in ways to which he’s not intelligently or even emotionally committed. Especially if he’s already sexually active with other girls, why would a young man balk at the opportunity of another outlet for his libido, especially one that seems to come to him so easily and without risk or commitment? I’m not saying it’s always that way, but can we say it simply cannot be like that? That would appear naive in the extreme.
Close to the Edge
Tom: Definitely. In answer to your earlier question, no, I don’t think most young women have any idea how close to the edge of doing something they shouldn’t their male “friends” may be at any given time. Women are reliably clueless about that. They are playing little cute, tactical games not realizing that they are dealing with a being of different constitution than their own.
IC: Quite so.
Tom: I will add this: many girls these days — I suspect, sadly, even girls brought up in good Christian homes — would not be overly troubled which “locus of decision” was operating in their friend so long as she achieves the desired result. She would simply reason — wrongly, I assure you — that she is equipped to manage the outcome, and that provoking a physical relationship would somehow bind her to the boy she is chasing. That is definitely not the case. In many, many cases, he would happily take whatever she’s offering and move on the next day if he’s not interested in her as a long-term prospect.
IC: Right. That’s such a common mistake between the sexes. We all tend to imagine others are more-or-less motivated the way we are, and to extrapolate from that to our conclusions about what their motivations are. Young women and young men tend to misunderstand each other very badly on such points. Remember that one of the things everybody discovers after they’re married is that they married an alien. If you imagined before that that you and your spouse were identical, you find out you were grossly deceiving yourself. Men are different from women … and marriage teaches you that lesson in spades. But how do merely dating — or just “friending” — teenagers know that?
Tom: They don’t. I have discovered that often women in their forties and fifties never really understood the sexual dynamics of the relationships they remember fondly from their teens. They somehow get within hailing distance of old age without recognizing men and women experience these relationships very, very differently.
Trending Trendy
What do you think the net effect of videos like this might be on young Christian teens, IC? If you’re watching these things, how popular are they really?
IC: There seem to be thousands of them out there. Yeah, if they reach me, they’re probably reaching a whole bunch of other, younger people first. I can’t say how they’re received, except that they seem to be their own social contagion — a case of one person’s odd idea being replicated by many, many more — and put on TikTok.
Tom: Yes, that’s not encouraging.
IC: I would say this, too: they seem to be symptomatic of a growing frustration over the relations between the sexes, particularly among young people. For various reasons sociologists are debating at the moment, youth culture has shifted profoundly since about 2012 or so, and the old markers of approaching, asking, dating, courting, marrying and so forth seem to have been wiped out, leaving no clear, consensus stages of development for such relationships. Naturally, young people are trying to establish new benchmarks that have relevance to their new realities; but unfortunately, the roles and limits of relating to the opposite sex are no longer well defined or traditional, so it’s a little like trying to build a structure on Jell-O. Things just keep shifting beneath anything they try to establish. They’re young, and have little experience with the kind of differences we’re talking about, so the way is full of pitfalls.
Tom: That is an interesting observation, and I think it’s true. There is a lot of genuine frustration out there.
Techno-Dating
Obviously, part of the reason is technology. Teens are meeting online far more often today than at any point in history. If I had to guess, I’d say more than 75% of post-high school relationships start online, and that includes Christians. The two parties exchange intimacies with increasing intensity, building up an unsustainable level of sexual tension. When they finally meet in person, almost invariably one party or another gets a reaction they were not expecting.
IC: Yes, and all the safeguards and protocols of traditional relationships have broken down. So it’s no wonder young people are having to “make it up as they go along”, rather than following in beaten paths.
Tom: More than ever, I think we’re seeing good reason for Christian parents to get involved in discussing these issues with their children early and often. There’s a natural tendency to pull away from talking to Mom and Dad in the teen years. It’s part of becoming independent, and it’s normal — even necessary. If you haven’t started those conversations before they get to that point in their development, good luck catching up when the need becomes urgent. You probably will not even know it’s happening until long after it’s happened.
IC: With more and more single parent and stepparent situations, I’m not sure how realistic a prospect that is. Another part of the problem is that the parents’ generation comes from before the time when all the benchmarks were wiped out, and their kids came after that. Even if the young people were willing to open the conversation, most parents are not experientially familiar with the realities their children are facing regarding sexual dynamics. Young people are not going to be able to shelve their need for intimacy; but the terms for negotiating for that are now more complicated and less well defined than most parents can imagine, I think.
#MeNot
Tom: We’re getting lengthy here, but there’s another element I feel like we need to talk about before we close. The #MeToo movement had a devastating effect on young Christian men looking for partners. If you recall, that movement demonized everyone from Harvey Weinstein — a genuine sexual predator using his status to threaten the careers of young actresses if they didn’t put out for him — all the way down to awkward, geeky guys who simply had no idea how to approach women and got excoriated for giving them unwanted compliments. I have talked to Christian parents who say their sons are terrified of making the first move with a girl they like because the media has all but assured them their overtures are unwanted and bound to end in rejection. Not only that, they may be publicly embarrassed for even trying.
In that sort of environment, a woman may have to make the first move to even get a show of interest. Some fairly decent guys simply deem any overt approach way too risky.
IC: Does that explain why young women would be inclined to cross the conventional boundaries and make the first move? Maybe. But it may not prove safe, wise, or ultimately satisfying to them to do that.
Tom: I entirely agree about both safety and satisfaction. But our culture, as you say, is moving into territory where we just don’t know what the rules are anymore or what will work. All the same, people still need to be able to connect, form relationships and families. It’s a basic biological imperative built into us by our Creator, and maybe these TikTok videos point indirectly to that need.
Men ≠ Women
As we wrap it up, can you offer any suggestions about what parents or churches can do to help young people trying to navigate relationships without the traditional guide wires and safety nets?
IC: I think we need to become much more proactive in explaining the psychological, emotional and relational differences between men and women to our young people. That’s a subject that the influence of the feminist movement pretty much banned since the ’60s, but it’s got to come back if we’re going to help our young people locate their own new benchmarks for relationships, courtship and marriage. We need to be content to be highly countercultural in this way, and to speak honestly about how those differences create the contours of healthy relationships.
But that’s for the Christian world, of course; I have no confidence the secular world is going to be able to do that.
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