KUDOS TO ROBERT B. PARKER
by Warren Bull
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t read
SCHOOL DAYS by Robert B. Parker, I suggest you stop reading this blog. Read the book. Come back to the blog. What I want to write about gives a large
part of the suspense away.
The resolution of the novel hinges
on an adult woman having sex with a barely adolescent male. The author correctly describes that
behavior as sexual abuse of a minor.
In my thirty years as a clinical psychologist I have seen men who when
they were young were sexually abused by adult women. The abuse damaged the
self-esteem of the men I saw. It
contributed to their difficulty in forming healthy loving relationships with
women.
No thinking person excuses the
damage done to girls molested by men.
However there are still serious misconceptions about boys seduced by
women. Reactions such as “he got
lucky early” or “I wish it had happened to me” by men make it harder for men
who were molested as boys to talk about what happened. I knew one woman who bragged about
seducing an adolescent.
There are movies and books that
express a young man’s coming of age by his having sex with an older woman. It is an extremely common male fantasy. Nothing in our culture tells young men
that they should refrain from the activity, or consider why an adult woman
would be interested in boys rather than men. Nothing in our culture even hints at the damage it can do.
It would have been easy for the
author to go with the “he got lucky” distortion of reality. So I salute the late Robert B. Parker
for writing about sexual abuse as sexual abuse.
Mysteries can deal with social issues
and still be entertaining. Can you
mention a mystery that highlighted a social concern?
