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ORIGINAL: John_O

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ORIGINAL: flowerz

I was talking to a christian man at work, and he mentioned to me that he decided to work in another part of the building for a while because there were some teen girls where he was and they were wearing tight shorts, or something like that. He was trying to keep his thoughts pure, which was great.

Considering he is in his 40's, is it normal for men this age to have struggles with lusting after girls so young?

This is an incredibly hard question to answer because if you try to answer it truthfully everyone thinks you're a perv. But since I have a long history of "taking one for the team" and being the sacrificial lamb. here we go....

First, biology has no age. When a girl reaches sexual maturity certain changes happen in her body and she becomes a woman. A guy glances around the room and sees what appears to be a woman who looks very nicely formed. Most guys are visual so this can lead to problems right off the bat.

Then he finds out she's 16 or so (Or these days even younger). Problem gets multiplied.

A few years ago (well closer to 10 actually) there was a girl attending church with us who was about 15 or 16. She was physically mature and was in the habit of wearing blue jeans that "displayed her assets" in a most distracting way.

This caused a problem for me. But how to fix it? I couldn't talk to her, that would be just too creepy (even I would feel creepy about it). I couldn't talk to her parents ("why are you looking at my little girl's bottom?"). I couldn't talk to church leadership for much the same reason. I had no recourse to get the situation fixed.

Guys are in a very difficult situation at times like this (in fact for any sexually related matter at all). If we don't say anything the ladies continue to dress immodestly and we spend the whole service struggling to look elsewhere. If we do say something we're seen as perverts. [Catch-22]

I mentioned this on a secular site and ran into exactly that reaction. Very few were the people who understood the point.

(So ladies, please do us a favor and police yourselves and the younger set. If they want to dress like that away from church where we can avoid them, fine. But give us a break in church OK?)

(10 bucks if this was not a "he says" thread some lady would chime in and say "You shouldn't be looking there")

So is it normal for men to "lust" after teen girls? It's kind of an unfair question as we don't know whether your co-worker was lusting. Seems to me he was trying to avoid the temptation to lust. Which was the proper thing for him to do.

As to the teenage thing. Our minds may recognize that they are teenagers, but our eyes sometimes do not. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman.

How did I handle my situation? We were fortunate in that the church was L shaped and we could move to the other wing. Of course I had no liberty to tell my wife why I wanted to sit over there for a while but she never asked so it ended up OK. After about two weeks or so that family changed churches. Problem solved for me but I'm afraid no resolution to the larger problem. She just moved churches.

[edited by moderator]

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ORIGINAL: randy146

I would wonder why the man spoke to another woman about this. And let me explain that as far as men are concerned, asking this question is not "bashing". If a man is truly worried about becoming intimate in thought or deed with another woman, why would he go and confide (emotional intimacy), with another woman. Now he has compounded his problem.

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Unless this man is a pedophile I would assume he is referring to the older teenage girls there. Some 16, 17, 18 year old girls look much older physically. Depending on how they look body wise and how the clothes fit I could see why he would want to stay away as not to lust.