PREPUBESCENT SEX LIFE: AGE AT PUBERTY
The average (median) persons of the control and prison groups reached puberty at 13.8 and 13.6 years of age respectively. Puberty is here identified with the development of pubic hair and the ability to ejaculate; a more detailed definition is to be found on pages 182-189 of our earlier volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Puberty is, of course, one of the major turning points of life, and as such has been publicly noted and celebrated in some fashion by most human societies. At this time the boy acquires not only physical secondary sexual characteristics, but also a whole new set of obligations and privileges. However, societies often define puberty on a social rather than a purely physical basis, and of a group of boys undergoing tribal puberty rites a number may still be prepubertal and others may have reached puberty several years previously. Similarly, while our own society treats puberty as an important dividing line, we too tend to define puberty rather arbitrarily. The boy who reached puberty at ten gets into the theater at age twelve on a child’s ticket, whereas the prepubescent thirteen-year-old must pay an adult admission fee. The wearing of certain sorts of clothing and cosmetics is an age-graded affair with chronological age (socially defined puberty) being as important a factor as physiological status. This use of social rather than physiological puberty raises a number of problems for the unfortunate children who attain puberty far in advance of or long after the socially determined age, which in our society roughly coincides with the average age of physiological puberty, i.e., around thirteen to fourteen in boys and a year earlier in girls. Society has made no provision for the boy who reaches puberty at nine or ten; his intensified sexual needs are ignored or looked upon as problems verging upon the pathological. The boy with belated puberty suffers from the gibes of his peers and is often thrust by social pressures into unwanted dating and dancing.
The group with the most delayed puberty—the median person attaining it at age 14.5 years—is the incest offenders vs. adults. Following in order are the heterosexual offenders vs. minors, the heterosexual aggressors vs. children, and the heterosexual offenders vs. adults. The most precocious group is the homosexual offenders vs. adults (13.1); in fact, the average individual of all homosexual-offender groups reached puberty relatively early, between 13.1 and 13.6 years of age.
Whereas only 24 and 31 per cent of the control- and prison-group members reached puberty before age thirteen, no less than 47 per cent of the homosexual offenders vs. adults did so, and a relatively large proportion of the other homosexual offenders. At the other extreme, those who reached puberty at or after age fifteen, we find the incest offenders vs. adults leading with 39 per cent, trailed by the aggressors vs. children and offenders vs. minors.
This phenomenon of early puberty in the homosexual offenders suggests that if the sexual drive develops at an age before society sanctions heterosexual activity, the drive, blocked from heterosexuality, may turn toward homosexuality. In this connection it is noteworthy that the heterosexual aggressors vs. minors, whose median individual reached puberty at the second youngest age, are also second only to the homosexual offenders in the percentage with both prepubertal and postpubertal homosexual experience.
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