Tl;dr: what is the psychology behind why authority makes it so much easier to manipulate young girls?
I would like to preface this by saying I’m mostly asking this question to get a grasp on my own situation in which I fell victim to grooming. I had a teacher in high school who would buy me gifts, give me extra credit on tests for no reason, and would even come to the restaurant I worked at to have me serve him. I fell hard for this man, and the only reason it never got the chance to go too far was because I met my partner and began a life with him and forgot about my intense crush on this teacher. He knew that he had this hold over me though, because I am 3 years post graduation and he has hit me up multiple times for what seems to be a booty call, but I have never responded. The older I get the more disgusted I feel seeing his name.
However, at the time I knew what we were doing would fall under the textbook definition of grooming. I knew that people in positions of power over young girls were more likely to manipulate them, but I felt as though at the time that that was not playing any sort of role here, because I didn’t really care or necessarily get ‘turned on’ by the fact he had power over me. I truly believed that we had a connection and were sadly victims to circumstances in which he just so happened to have an authoritative role over me too.
I lived in a small town where these kinds of situations were rampant, my friends and I had many giddy conversations about these older men that were interested in us, and we all shared one belief - that we were not being manipulated, because the age/authority dichotomy was something that we didn’t care about or take into account. I guess at the time we interpreted the laws as young girls were more likely to fall for people in authoritative roles because they ~liked~ men who had power over them. We had absolutely no sense of how such a dichotomy would land you vulnerable, but it’s clear that subconsciously power was playing some kind of role (because we found every other older man to be creepy and gross, but we made exceptions for these particular men who “just so happened” to be an authority) to an extent we clearly couldn’t even fathom.
I don’t want my future children to ever fall victim to this, which is why I want to be able to grasp it as much as possible. So could anybody explain to me the psychology behind why young girls, who believe they are not allowing a dichotomy to take play, are so much more vulnerable to the manipulation tactics of a man with authority, compared to being disgusted by a man who doesn’t hold that kind of power yet uses the same manipulation tactics?
Submitted August 21, 2021 at 04:14PM by Kitchen-Pudding7835 https://ift.tt/3kfzhOZ
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