TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna talk about the subject of sexual abuse of sons by mothers. This is a taboo subject to talk about, and not surprising considering mothers are considered to be sacred in our world, in our society, in our families. Their relationships with their children is also considered to be sacred most of the time. What this means is that it’s very hard to look at mothers as being imperfect. When we talk about sexual abuse by mothers, that’s considered about as imperfect as it gets.
It’s also an extremely primal betrayal because really, our mothers are our first examples of love. They’re our first examples of what it means to have a relationship. It’s our first example of what it means to be cared about, to be nurtured, to be treated with good boundaries, to be treated with respect. So to talk about the subject of mothers sexually abusing their children, it’s the exact opposite of all these things, and it’s extremely uncomfortable to talk about.
I don’t actually find this an easy video to make at all, but I wanted to make it because I think it’s actually extremely common. I think it actually could be really helpful for people to hear about this more because really, what I’ve observed is not very many people do talk about it. When they do try to talk about it, a lot of times people, they don’t want to hear it; they just want to push it away.
So for starters, I want to note that when I talk about sexual abuse of sons by mothers, I think it can happen on a really broad spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we have the extreme end, and I think pretty much that would be considered like overt incest. I don’t think I need to give too many examples of that. I don’t think I want to give any examples at all, but I don’t think that is actually all that common, at least in my experience and my knowledge. I don’t know how common it is, but I don’t think it’s that common.
Now, on the other end, we have what’s considered to be the milder end of sexual abuse, and I think that’s actually very common. I think society doesn’t consider it common, or society denies that it’s sexual abuse at all. Now, what do I mean when I talk about mild sexual abuse? Well, for starters, I actually don’t really think it is mild at all. I think in itself, objectively, it is actually pretty extreme on an emotional level, the way it affects boys, the way it affects them as they grow up into men.
But on the continuum, compared to some of the more extreme stuff, yeah, I think it could be considered more mild. But examples of this are mothers talking inappropriately about sexual matters with their sons, sexualizing their sons in different ways by talking about them, by talking about their body. Also, mothers behaving seductively toward their sons or in different ways showing their bodies in different ways under the guise of, “oh just having an open free body.” But I think a lot of times they can do it in really sexual ways, in ways that on an emotional level, there’s a lot of actual sexual energy going on, and it’s starting from the mother, not coming from the son at all.
I think also a lot of women use their sons as surrogate partners, surrogate husbands, surrogate boyfriends, surrogate therapists, and transmit a lot of sexual material or a lot of their unresolved sexual needs on a sort of an energy level to their sons. Through this, they really violate their son’s boundaries. They violate their sexual boundaries; they violate their innocence. They can violate their emotional selves. It can really, really mess up boys. That’s why, although yes, it’s on the milder end of the spectrum, I think it actually can be really extreme and really affect them.
Now, how do I come up with saying this is actually very common? Because that sounds like an arbitrary thing to say. So my reason for saying that it’s actually very common is first, having been a therapist, having sat with a lot of men who had a lot of sexual problems, and a lot that actually didn’t even have a lot of sexual problems, but just listening to them talk about their relationship with their moms when they were younger. Hearing what they had to say and hearing some of the shocking things that they talked about.
A lot of times, it happened as the result of the men tracing the history of their inappropriate sexual behavior and going back to like, “whoa, their moms really did violate them in all sorts of ways.” A lot of times these men had no idea of it, and a lot of times it was extremely painful to look at. A lot of them still held their mom in sort of an idealistic regard, and to consider that their mothers actually did things that really harmed them was very, very painful.
Now, this helps me explain why this is such a taboo to talk about, because there’s so much pain behind looking at this. Who wants to think of our mothers as people who did horrible things to us, who really violated us and really screwed us up? But if we look at it objectively, and I think as a therapist that’s what I really tried to do, because I wasn’t out to get moms. Instead, I was out to try to help my clients figure out why they were in such pain, why they were acting in ways that were so self-destructive or destructive to other people.
Well, what I came up with by listening to so many people was that this was actually a very common phenomenon.
Now, a second way that I come up with the idea that this sexual abuse of sons by mothers is extremely common is by just looking at society and looking at how disturbed the sexuality is of so many men, if not most men. It’s like, “whoa, and where did men get this?” Now, we could say we live in a society that raises boys inappropriately with regard to sex, that tells them it’s okay to violate women, etc., etc. But I think that’s a little bit simplistic.
Because I think a lot of times, I’ve looked at a deeper level and listened to people going through what they went through, the kind of stuff that happens in society all the time. What I’ve heard is that it does come back to their primary, very basic relationships with the people that really taught them the meaning of what it meant to have boundaries and the meaning of what it meant to have relationships at all, and basically where they learned about sexuality in the first place. A lot of that was by inappropriate relationships with their moms.
I think a lot of men, when they were boys, really were treated very, very inappropriately by their moms. This doesn’t get talked about again because it’s so painful, because it goes against so much of the grain of what we hold up as sacred in our world and in our families. So I think even within families, a lot of this can be denied.
Now, another part of this is that I’m not saying that moms were conscious when they were doing that, that mothers were consciously sexually abusing their sons. I think a lot of times they didn’t even realize what they were doing was sexually inappropriate at all or emotionally inappropriate in a sexual way.
I think a lot of times what moms were doing, they were replicating what had happened to them in their histories, a lot of times in their own relationships with their own parents, a lot of times with their dads. From what I’ve heard, certainly from a lot of women, is that their fathers were in many ways very, very sexually inappropriate. Sometimes their moms were too, and a lot of times other men in their lives were.
So when they were very young, when they were children, when they were girls, or even younger, when they were babies, sometimes they were treated as objects. They were treated as sexual objects, and they were violated in all sorts of different ways. It could be emotional; it could be directly physical; it could be touch; it could be through no touch at all. But what happened is that they learned all sorts of inappropriate models for relationships, and they were traumatized by this.
What happens with traumatized people who don’t heal it, who don’t acknowledge it and fix it is…
That they dissociate from it. They split off, so they’re emotionally out of touch with what happened. Often, they’re out of touch even with the memories of what happened, aside from the emotional content, just from the direct memory of what happened.
As the result of being split off, when they get in relationships with people over whom they wield a lot of power, they replicate the dynamics of their own abuse. And when you get a mom who’s in a relationship with a child, that relationship is the greatest power differential of any relationship that we can have. Because mothers, parents in general, but I’m specifically talking about moms here, have more power over their children, especially over their babies, than anyone has over any other person.
And it’s very hard for people who have been traumatized not at some level to replicate what they’ve gone through. Now, I think a lot of moms, most moms, marry—probably a very high percentage of moms—don’t physically sexually abuse their sons. Now, I don’t know this for a fact because really who knows what happens to little baby boys behind closed doors when moms have total control, when the dads aren’t home, when there’s nobody watching, when no one sees what’s going on, when the moms don’t tell anybody.
I have ideas that probably a lot more happens than we as a society recognize, but I still don’t know how common it is. But on the milder levels of the spectrum, I think it’s very hard for moms who have suffered any degree of sexual trauma in their own childhoods and haven’t resolved it to not act it out with their children. This is part of the transgenerational transmission of trauma. What happened to the moms, they turn around and they do it to the people over whom they wield the most power.
A lot of times, I think they act it out toward boys because it was done to them by boys. Also, a lot of times when moms have been violated by their dads, it’s pretty normal to really hold some sort of anger toward male figures. And sometimes, even though they can really love their sons in a lot of ways, sometimes that anger can leak out toward their boys.
Now, also I think what happens a lot of times is moms feel very, very disappointed in their relationships with their male partners, with their husbands, with their boyfriends, with whoever their partner happens to be. Because a lot of men are really terrible toward women. They’re really rejecting, they’re really abusive, they’re really violent, they’re really inconsistent, they cheat. You know, they really don’t treat the women well in a lot of different ways.
And as the result, a lot of women I think are very, very unhappy. They’re very lonely, they feel very isolated. And suddenly, here they have this baby, this baby boy who desperately loves them, desperately needs that mom to love them back, and will do anything to gain this mother’s love. And I think sometimes, or more than sometimes, moms really can take advantage of that.
And they can see this perfect little boy as something to make them happy in all sorts of different ways. A lot of times, I think it basically happens on an emotional level, but a lot of sexuality can get charged through that emotional level. It can run down the current of that emotional connection, and through that, it can really violate the little boys, or even baby boys, sexually. And it can really, really mess them up.
So again, when the boys grow up, they have really distorted pictures of what healthy boundaries are with women. And I think this really does explain why so much sexual abuse does happen from men toward females, because they’ve really learned a lot of really inappropriate stuff in their basic primary relationship with a woman.
Now, the third way that I’ve come to really think of sexual abuse as a very common thing is that it happened to me. This mild stuff, pretty much all of this mild stuff happened to me in my relationship with my own mom, who really had a lot of really bad sexual boundaries, and it really messed me up.
And at the time when I was a kid, I didn’t really even know it. I really wasn’t even aware of it. Part of it is because I needed to believe my mom was great and perfect and wonderful. Like, although boys want to believe their mom is fantastic and wonderful. And the thing is, my mom was great in a lot of ways, and that’s what made it so confusing.
But that painful stuff, all the painful stuff that was really inappropriate, there was actually sexually violating of me in a lot of ways. I couldn’t acknowledge it. It was just like it didn’t go well. And if I had tried to acknowledge it, if I had tried to set boundaries, whoo, it would have lost me a lot of intimacy in my relationship with my mom because I really think she would have rejected me.
And what happened to me as I got older is I started looking at the patterns. I started looking at my childhood. I started reclaiming a lot of my split-off feelings, and I started remembering how I felt. And I started revealing what I went through as a kid, what I wasn’t allowed to feel. And it was extremely painful.
And what I started doing is I started talking about this, and that’s when I started realizing what an incredible taboo it was. But also, I found that I became much more sensitive to listening to other men talk about their stories and also to listen to the dynamics that were going on between mothers and their sons, and also listening to the ways that moms talked about their sons.
I started realizing, ooh, these dynamics that I went through were not really unusual. They weren’t just aberrant behavior by one mom. It’s like, no, actually this stuff is pretty common. And I think a lot of the things also that mothers do that they can get away with are things that men could not get away with with children.
And moms, a lot of the stuff can slip below the radar, partly because society idealizes women in a way that it doesn’t quite idealize men. It’s a lot easier to see dads as imperfect and screwed up. But another big reason for this is that women in general are considered to be sexual objects. They’re not really considered to be sexual subjects.
Yeah, I mean, there are people who are more advanced who can really see women as sexual subjects, but in general, I think society a lot of times is pretty primitive and backward in viewing women as sexual objects. They view women as receiving sexuality, being passive in terms of sexuality, not really having sexual feelings, not really having sexual desires, not really having sexual thoughts so much, and certainly not being active forces in sexual relationships.
They see men as being active. Men are sexual subjects. Men are sexually active. Men sexually do things. Women sexually receive things. And I think this translates into relationships with moms where it’s very hard to conceive of mothers and of women being sexual abusers because they’re objects. And how can an object who is passive, who’s there to receive sexuality, actually be abusive toward another person? It’s hard to contemplate.
Except when we look at the possibility, well actually maybe women are sexual subjects and women do have sexual feelings. And from what I’ve observed, and certainly listening to women and knowing tons of women and having been in a bunch of relationships, yeah, women definitely are very much sexual subjects.
But I think it’s important that we also consider that many of the ways that mothers sexually abuse their sons is different from how men sexually abused people. Men sexually abused children. Men sexually abused women. Because a lot of times with mothers, a lot of the sexual abuse doesn’t involve physical touch.
And I came up with that as a statement once in a book that I wrote, that most incest never involves physical touch. And I think that can be hard for people to grasp sometimes, but I think it’s like on a conceptual level, it’s actually kind of simple. That acknowledgment that a lot of sexuality and sexual violation can happen without a hand ever being laid on another person.
If we can accept this, it’s a lot easier to see how mothers can sexually abuse their sons. Now, I’d like to share two examples outside the family system showing how society has difficulty acknowledging that women can sexually abuse males at all.
The first example is female…
Teachers who, let’s say, 25, 30 years old, who end up getting into a sexual relationship with a boy, he’s like 13 or 14 or 15 years old, and end up having sex with him. Well, more and more now, society is looking at this as sexual abuse, as even rape of the child. But I still think a lot of society, certainly a lot of women, and definitely a lot of men, don’t really view this as sexual abuse.
A big part of this is because they don’t see boys as being sexual objects. They still see boys, even teenage boys, as sexual subjects, and they see these women as sexual objects. One of the great examples I have of this, of how common this attitude is, is if you look in comments on the Internet where anybody can just write. You hear about these women, 30-year-old teachers, having sex with like fourteen-year-old boys, and you go to the comments section, and man after man is saying, “Wow, he’s so lucky! Dude, why they calling that sexual abuse? I wished I’d had that chance.”
And it’s like these guys are totally out of touch with what the boy goes through emotionally when he has this relationship with an older woman. It really messes him up, just like it messes up a teenage girl if she has sex with a guy who’s quite a bit older. It’s really like that power dynamic really, really screws the child up.
Part of how I know that is because I’ve talked to a lot of boys who, as teenagers, did have sex with women and were sexually abused by women, women who were in their 20s, 30s, or even older. And it really, really messed up their head. Sometimes even those boys thought they wanted it, and they thought they really liked it, but they were out of touch with themselves emotionally. They were emotionally undeveloped, and they didn’t realize how they were being taken advantage of a lot of times until later. And a lot of times, even later, it was very, very hard for them to look at what it is, how painful it was.
Now, another example of how women can violate the sexual boundaries of children and get away with it, how it can go under the radar of society, is to look at young adult literature. I’ve seen quite a lot of young adult literature that has a lot of sexual content in it. I studied the genre a few years back with some perspective—genre for children, for teenagers, or even younger kids. And then just one quick thought struck me. It was like, wait a second, what is all of that literature with sexual content for children written for children, written by women? It wasn’t written by men.
And then I was like, well, what would have happened if it had been written by men? And then I realized it actually wouldn’t have been published. A man couldn’t have gotten away with writing that kind of stuff—all the sexual stuff happened in between children, explicit stuff. It’s like if a man had written that, it would have been considered pornography. People would have looked at his motives and said, “Why are you writing that stuff? That’s sick! You should be arrested! You should be ashamed of yourself!”
But when women wrote it, it was considered okay. The same exact stuff that had a man written it—I mean, no different. I’m not talking changing any of the content, just changing the author’s sex. Well, why? Why could the women get away with that? Again, a lot of times it was said, “Well, they’re giving good examples of sexuality for children,” or it was good under the guise of education, or it was just okay literature. But I think basically, again, women are not really considered to be sexual subjects; they’re considered to be sexual objects.
So again, a sexual object has a lot more liberty to do all sorts of sexual stuff and have it not really be considered sexual. No one really even questions the sexuality of their motives. Like, what is the sexual motive behind a woman who writes all this stuff? I think a lot of times it’s the exact same motive as a man who’s doing it, but again, women can just get away with it.
So I think both of these examples shine a light on, in a way, how easy it is for mothers to be sexually inappropriate in all sorts of different ways with their sons and get away with it. Basically, society doesn’t get tipped off that this is inappropriate, and it really shows again how messed up society is, how messed up women are in so many ways, and how messed up men are. Because where are the dads when this is going on? Why are they not stopping it?
And so I think I’ll wrap this up, and I hope this has been useful.
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