From the recent Male Studies conference, Dr. Marianne Legato, MD, spoke on adolescent boys. She is the founder and director of Columbia College of Medicine’s Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine, editor of the first text on gender medicine, and founder of the journal, Gender Medicine. Her most recent book is Why Men Die First.

The problem with the adolescent male navigating that difficult transition from puberty to young adulthood is a disconnect in the timing of an abrupt increase in gonadal hormones that occurs in both sexes at the time of puberty, but which for boys produces intense emotional lability, and high intensity feelings, while the part of the brain that develops risk assessment and emotional control and stability, lags well behind. Girls do not have a similar retardation of that center of the brain and therefore are much less likely to incur the kinds of disasters that face adolescent boys until they are 20.

We also know that girls hit puberty earlier than boys. Girls mature faster, not only physically but emotionally. Therefore it is ridiculous to criminalize adolescent males having sex with adolescent females, when females are more in control of themselves. Recall that adolescence is defined as the period between puberty and roughly the age of 20.

In fact, an adolescent female who has sex with an adolescent male is in fact taking advantage of that male, much as is the case when a person takes advantage of a mentally challenged person sexually, and therefore if anyone should be sent to prison for two young heterosexual people having underage sex, it should be the female.

Therefore, I say lock up adolescent girls for having sex with adolescent boys. It would at least have some rational basis, unlike the current demonization of male sexuality that imprisons young boys who have been taken advantage of by more mature females.

Of course, our society prefers instead to lock up male victims. Typical.