misplaced bravery

an open letter to harry seitz

Harry,

You probably intended for outrage when you posted your essay, “My Unpopular (Secretly Popular) Opinion About Teenage Girls” with a header image of a young woman in white lingerie. In a note afterwards you wrote, “as a writer, if you aren’t pissing anyone off, you aren’t doing your job.”

I don’t believe being provocative is a job requirement of being a writer, but if it becomes so, I don’t think provocation alone makes you a very good one. As one of the most ancient mediums of communication, writing has a sacred way of moving people—towards joy, sadness, lust, fear, hunger, intrigue, grief, even boredom—with each emotion requiring its own finesse of craft. Outrage is easy and requires the deft touch of a wrecking ball. Much is lost in its chaos.

Still, destruction is dangerous work. You possess a type of bravery quite alien to me (though some of your critics have suggested you aren’t motivated by bravery at all but instead a fetish for humiliation).

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I thought a lot about whether to respond and how. I admit, my initial reaction was a furious knee-jerk, where I drafted the most acidic venom my writer glands could gleek. Before hitting send, I considered a tweet I stumbled across the other day, “i think it's important to ask seemingly dumb and obvious moral questions like "why is cannibalism bad" and evaluate it rigorously bc answers like "its just disgusting and evil" are not enough and is the same reasoning used to propagate things like homophobia” and it gave me pause. I diverted my blame to Substack for fostering an environment that’s allowed your essay to materialise, which I still maintain.

I wanted to address you directly as well because when I put my repulsion aside for long enough to re-read your essay in the best faith available, I found less rage and more questions and conclusions. Acidity may still seep out so you’ll have to forgive me in advance.

Once my outrage cooled to room temperature, the residual feeling was one of being unsettled. Not just by your essay and the glibness of your responses but the wider implication of your essay generally; what it says about this platform and the moment we’re in culturally. A phrase has been stuck in my head ever since: Is this how we’re choosing to be brave nowadays? (Men used to go to war!)

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The title and photo choice of your essay alone is a clear act of defiance, a Norman Rockwell — Freedom of Speech moment where you stand up and let the world know your truth. When discussing art, a close friend and I have this little critique we say when we find something distasteful; everything good has already been done… so maybe there’s a reason this ain’t been done before. You are not the first adult man to confess that “teenage girls are wonderful” and you likely won’t be last. I wonder if this moment was about conquering shame and encouraging others to be publicly brave enough to agree with you. Your essay has over a hundred likes now. I wonder if you’re proud of that, if the attention—good and bad—feels right or clean to you. Perhaps, your essay was a courageous attempt to pull the mask off of self-righteous hypocrites. A gotcha moment. A social experiment. I suppose, only you know what drove you and I’m probably reading too far between the lines. You probably just wanted to reminisce.

In your many high-school anecdotes, I noticed a longing that seems very common in men like yourself who look back on the golden age of their adolescence as they creep further from it. It's not inherently bad to yearn for the past but the way you recall your memories with such aggressive objectification is uncomfortable to read.

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I had a 15 year old girlfriend when I was 15, and god do I miss her. She was a 5’10” blonde who was fully developed, and to this day, I have no idea why she decided to spend a summer with me. She could have been dating an adult with a car and an apartment like some of our other female classmates.

It sounds like you were quite insecure as a teenager. Who wasn’t? But it feels like that lack of self-esteem has persisted into adulthood, swaddled in a voice that’s attempting to be bold.

You say you miss your 15-year-old girlfriend but you don’t provide any recollection of her (or any partner you mention) outside of her body type, height or hair colour.

At 49, you still don’t understand why a 15 year old girl was interested in a 15 year old boy because her being “fully developed” meant she could’ve had the privilege of being groomed by an adult man.

You’ve accepted the grooming of your female classmates as normal rather than use any of the consequent decades to consider how this might have affected their inner world and it has resulted in a mindset where you don’t even understand what your own girlfriend liked about you. You mention you were a maths savant. Maybe she thought you were smart. Maybe she was just a 15 year old girl who was anxious, insecure and changing in her body who wanted to be with someone who was also 15, anxious, insecure and changing in his body—as teenagers are supposed to do. Maybe she didn’t mind the Cheeto-dust on your fingers.

In recalling your relationship, you sound haunted by your own inadequacy. It has led you to believe that the adult men who exploited your teenage classmates were normal (something anecdotally confirmed by the girl who rejected you because you appeared too young) and you’ve carried this belief into your own adulthood, perhaps subconsciously as a promise to look forward to. But now you’re pushing 50 and your conscience won’t allow you to pursue 22 year olds and you hate yourself for it. You seem confused by ethical responsibilities and the legal restrictions but most of all, you hate the little voice in your head that is stopping you from pursuing the base desires that should’ve matured with you because it directly conflicts with the belief you’ve been looking forward to since you were a teenager; that adult men are entitled to teenage girl’s bodies.

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The implications of your internal conflict manifests as a common thread through your essay: reducing women and girls to their bodies. When you aren’t referring to them as objects; they’re sets of measurements, arithmetic equations or legal problems you’re desperately trying to reason out. Sure, you state that you can't “pull the trigger” on 22-year-olds and you flaccidly condemn hebephilia whilst calling it understandable with certain caveats but you spend the bulk of your essay fawning over minors, cycling through hypotheticals and feeling out technicalities as if you’re searching for a loophole that’ll allow your attraction to teenagers to be solved algebraically.

A 50 year old man with an IQ of 80 can vote, but a 12 year old with an IQ of over 150 can’t? Fucking a 21 year old girlfriend who could pass for 14 is fine, but fucking a 14 year old girl who could pass for 25 makes you a criminal?

Devil’s advocating for the electoral rights of genius IQ children in order to legitimise your logical fallacy about “fucking a 14 year old girl who could pass for 25” is quite absurd but I’m sure MENSA is very grateful for your support.

I want to stress that there is no such thing as a “14 year old girl who could pass for 25”.

A 14 year old looks 14 because they are 14. Any distinction you assume between appearance-based hypothetical ages and actual ages is arbitrary. Unlike the definable metric of IQ (which is still a tenuous system of measurement as studies have shown for decades that IQ scores are not accurate markers for intelligence and have also been historically weaponised by eugenicists), there is no accurate way to quantify the hypothetical age of a person—something that you prove true in your own follow-up essay:

The girlfriend I dated until we were 26 lost her virginity at 12 to a 20-year old, and while she could pass for 14 at 26, she could also pass for an adult at 12.

Frankly, this is a nonsensical sentence that proves how temperamental, unreliable and redundant your own barometer for measuring hypothetical age is, but the main takeaway should be that any perceived presentation of a teenage girl does not mean they are cognitively developed or emotionally prepared enough to engage in an adult relationship. Teenage girls are routinely coerced, exploited and abused using the logic of thought experiments like the ones you’ve presented that reduce them to their looks. The perceived age of a teenage girl should not be positioned as a technicality for consent any more than a woman’s revealing clothes are a technicality for sexual assault.

In a proceeding essay, you write:

I’ve recently gotten some heat for an article that basically says some people mature faster than others, girls tend to mature faster than boys, some girls in high school know they look like adults and take advantage of this, and that teenagers are horny.

Your summary of your own essay is evidence of a compulsive tendency to exploit technicalities at the expense of wider concerns.

You strategically present your original essay as more reasonable than it is in an attempt to garner sympathy and avoid accountability for the implications of what you’ve written. You are right. You technically say all of this. But the way you deliver your opinions in your original essay is vulgar (perhaps because you’re intent on “pissing people off”) and the level that you engage with the topics is, at best, cosmetic.

For instance: you assert that “girls tend to mature faster than boys” but make no concerted effort to explore that overgeneralisation or even understand why it might be the case.

I contest how you use the word “mature” and I believe we’d all do better if we re-evaluated our relationship to the word. I believe maturity to mean, “having completed natural growth and development” or “of or relating to a condition of full development” which is a more holistic than meaning “fully grown physically”.

The disparities in maturation between girls and boys is heavily influenced by societal pressures resulting in girls often presenting as more adult than they are.

The adultification of teenage girls is a consequence of a patriarchal landscape that hyper-sexualises women and looks to exploit their beauty as a libidinal currency. This economy is everywhere you look—from movies, to adverts, to innocuous tweets filled with onlyfans-spam replies, to the fact that women’s jeans don’t have pockets to maintain maximum figure-hugging potential. Girls are thrust into the furnace of this world early, which is why all of the things you listed—“being more self-aware, better dressed, handling themselves more maturely” is a results of their disparate, adultification in the world.

What you refer to as teenage girls “knowing the power they had over men and boys” is actually just a reductive comprehension of their existence. They are systemically brainwashed into adultifying their presentations before they’re mature enough to even understand the politics of sex. They have to negotiate a new reality of being sexualised—of coming to grips with the pros and cons, the benefits and dangers—which is a complicated set of internal and external navigations which you diminish as “looking like fully grown sexy women and knowing it”.

Multiple times, you hint at a seductive pathology of teenage girls, neglecting to realise that if it is arising in teenage girls, they’ve only just reached an age where they’re discovering it exists. You’ve extrapolated that to mean that they’re mature enough to engage with adult relationships when actually, the opposite is true. It is actually more important for them to be protected from predatory advances. But throughout your parade of hypotheticals, you communicate no ethical responsibility for men to ensure the emotional welfare of those girls beyond your concern for covering your own back—Make sure you card them, bro.

I know people who were abused and groomed. I’ve been close enough to witness how it affected them in adult life. It can create a complicated relationship with sex, and one way it commonly presents is hyper-sexuality. They deserved to be protected by the adults around them, not exploited.

There is no mathematical solution to the problems you pose—only ethical implications. No man’s desire is more important than a teenage girl’s right to be a teenager.

What bothered me the most was the misuse of the words pedophilia and ephebophilia. Being attracted to teenagers who look like adults isn’t either and robs both words of their power, and I personally think both types of people—especially the former—are disgusting.

I want you to seriously interrogate what you’re saying here. If you are an adult, you are attracted to adults. If you meet an adult you are attracted to and you later find out they are a teenager, perhaps the attraction doesn’t magically dissipate but you now have a moral responsibility to stop any further romantic contact and not traumatise a child. If you identify as being attracted to teenagers “who look like adults” then there’s something specifically about their adolescence that attracts you and the caveat of them “looking like adults” is an unquantifiable technicality that you are trying to exploit (and therefore a redundant distinction). With all this being said, the fact that you are more disgusted by a person who mistakenly calls a hebephile or ephebophile by the more commonly known term of “paedophile” than you are by people who are actively attracted to teenagers is a very telling construction of your values. You are literally more concerned with semantics than people.

Admitting you could never “pull the trigger” on any girl “who’s lied about her age to give you a shot as an adult” (which should already give you pause because why is this something that has happened more than once? If you find yourself in a compromising position like this multiple times, you might need to evaluate the behaviour that’s leading you there) doesn’t absolve you of the thought experiments you’ve published to the world.

It doesn’t mean the implications of what and how you are theorising is harmless.

Your various hypotheticals and nitpicking about the legal boundaries of hebephilia is a fascinating thing to observe when you can tell the difference between a person resisting an unjust law and a person who the law is keeping in check. You spent a lot of time in your comments section lambasting the reading comprehension of those who criticised you, but make no mistake, if the dwindling reading comprehension of a paedophile (who, of course, you dedicate a single line to oppose) gets wind of some of your “technicalities”, how long before they’d feel emboldened to bravely share their truth? To bravely act on it? I have already seen one essay that directly cites yours as an inspiration before claiming, “there’s a paedophile in all of us”.

There is a very real price to what you’ve chosen to write, how you’ve chosen to write it and how you continue to defend it. In a subsequent essay, you say “equality comes with accountability.” How accountable do you feel for the way your words can be construed? In your bravery, it seems you have greased a slope.

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I have some questions about your 15-year-old girlfriend. Why do you miss her? Beyond her height, blonde hair and “full development”, what did you like about her?

Your recollections made me reflect on myself as a teenager. When I think about my romantic life at that time, I don’t think about appearances. I remember it being an exhilarating, awkward, frantic, unsatisfying, messy, and ridiculous journey of discovery. Like most teenage boys, I suffered from a hormone-fuelled horniness paired with a profound lack of experience and a large side of self-consciousness. I wouldn’t go back to that time if you paid me—even if I could take the knowledge I have now and I’m younger than you are. The best advice about girls I ever got as a teenage boy was both life-changing and embarrassingly simple—She’s not a game, blud. Just chat to her like a person.

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What is your relationship with your own body?

You’re quite brave when it comes to expressing your desire for the bodies of girls and women but you say nothing of your own beyond functional measurements. How do you feel about your body now, as a 49 year old man? I don’t want to assume, but I wonder if your objectified fixation on the female form is a misappropriation of your own lack of self-acceptance?

I read a lot of shame your essay. Shame at not being manly enough to successfully pursue the girls you desired as a teenager. Shame that you felt inadequate to the girls you did succeed in pursuing. Shame that now, as an adult, you’re not brave enough to pursue women twenty years younger than you. Shame that you didn’t pursue more teenagers when you were a teenager. Shame is scattered throughout, like breadcrumbs in stray lines, and you do quite little to confront it head on.

It's indicative of another underlying thread I noticed in your essay—a lack of introspection. There is the admission of being “a pervert”, which feels more like a strategic confession than a self-aware declaration. Beyond admitting that you are a pervert, what do you think about yourself and how your desire manifests?

You mentioned in junior high that you nearly flunked social studies because you were gawking at a trio of girls in your class. What is your relationship with self-control now, as an adult?

You said that, “the best sex for me came in my twenties with girls in their twenties, but that might have been different—or even better—if I’d had more practice”. It's been twenty odd years since then. What is your relationship with sex like now? Are you partnered? Are you married? Do you patronise sex workers?

Have you ever satisfied a woman? I’m not asking in an emasculating way where your inability to please women is representative of your worthlessness as a man. I’m asking—do you make the satisfaction of your partners a priority? Do you care about being vulnerable enough to make a woman happy—in any capacity in your life?

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Everything in your essay is about appearance. You reduce your most meaningful relationships to appearance. You reduce the emotional, ethical and legal implications of having sex with minors to appearance. You constantly negotiate how young a woman appears and how old a girl appears.

This fixation on appearance suggests a tenuous grasp of consent; in the sense that it shows little capacity for engaging in responsible or mutually pleasurable sexual experiences. Not once do you express value for healthy communication. You tell teenage boys who are lonely that they should “fuck as many teenagers as they can while its legal” and beneath the shallow banality of that advice (which I’d add; didn’t even work for you. You were given it as a teenager and you didn’t act on it and you should consider deeper why that is)—do you actually believe that persistently pursuing casual relationships is a meaningful cure for loneliness?

Are you lonely now?

Culturally, there is a massive disconnect between modern men and women and it is almost exclusively due to millennia of men being violent and controlling on a planetary scale. Despite the courage it took for you to write about your desires you make no real effort to understand them, or women, or girls, in a way that would facilitate a meaningful dialogue.

When you address your critics, you suggest they are incapable of having an “honest conversation” but when you were with your girlfriend who lost her virginity at 12 to a twenty year old, did you ever have an honest conversation about how messed up that was? You said, “I think this guy was fucked up” but did actually you ever tell her that?

You said you were “horrified” until you saw what she looked like at 12. But she was still 12. Were you not concerned for her well-being at all? Did it occur to you that her asking, “would you have been able to say no? Especially if I told you I was 18?” was a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that she’d been grossly taken advantage of? You called her “evil” and “seductive” but maybe she just needed someone, anyone, but especially her partner, to muster up the courage and say: “hey, I’m sorry you went through that. You were 12. It shouldn’t have happened to you. It’s not your fault.”

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There are a lot of things that unsettled me about the ways you’ve chosen to be brave in your essay but they pale in comparison to the glaringly obvious ways that you are not brave.

So many reminisces on a rose-tinted past and I cannot tell if you’ve ever been in love.

I cannot tell if you’ve ever loved anyone. Everything is about “fucking” and you speak of intimacy with only a dialect of utility, athletics or violence. It is eerily detached, mechanical and vapid. You speak of sex like it’s upheld more by deceit or the aversion of deceit than actual tenderness.

When you admitted you were a “pervert”, it made me curious where that came from. Is it something that was levelled at you or were simply pre-empting it? Were you wearing the word proudly to take away its sting; a rebellious act of reclamation? I wondered if you'd ever felt like anyone cared for you in spite of “being a pervert”.

But the partners you mention read like caricatures of women. I struggle to find evidence that you cared for their emotional welfare and I have no idea if they cared for yours. I think you should really interrogate the calibre of your personal connections and your satisfaction with them. Because even in the moments when you write about being satisfied, you don’t speak about the “best sex of your life” without immediately mentioning regret.

As the dust settles on your viral moment, do you feel this was a meaningful step towards living with less regret? Or do you think you’ll look back on this moment, as you seem to look back on many others, and regret it as well?

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In the end, I am concerned for and by you. I feel a troubling kind of shame because I don’t know what to do about you or your essay after being made aware of the existence of both. Now that you have been brave enough to publish your thoughts in this form, no one can re-box the implications you’ve let out. I don’t know if Substack taking it down is the best thing to do. I don’t know if there’s anything anyone can say to you that will make you genuinely and honestly re-think what you’ve written. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I usually write to find out.

In the age of The Substance; where the pressure of youthful womanhood is more accessible, hyper-sexualised and deified than ever; there is a thoughtful version of your essay—with enough introspection and responsibility to the people you exist in society with—where you might’ve been able to excavate deeper emotions beyond lecherous desire and nostalgic regret. There is a version where you actually confront yourself in a meaningful way and consider how healthy your desires are, how healthy your relationships have been, how healthy your participation was and rather than trapping all of your joy in a polaroid of the past, you explore how you want to navigate through the world moving forward. I hope you can gather the emotional equipment to pen a version of that essay one day.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from having tons of great, consensual sex with age-appropriate partners tomorrow. Again—it's not inherently bad to yearn for the past but the way you’ve felt compelled to memorialise your youth suggests that you aren’t inhabiting your life in a way that is fulfilling for you. You might’ve been brave enough to speak about it but are you brave enough to change it?

I hope you are, for all our sakes.

Yours,
Inigo