Teenaged lust: From Fawcett to Fox

Farrah Fawcett’s lustrous locks greeted me each morning when I was a teenager. As did Raquel Welch, clad in a torn and clingy-wet blouse, her bright eyes shining right at me.

Both sex goddesses and best-selling pin-up babes adorned my ceiling on two posters I bought at Treasure City, a local department store in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Fawcett and Welch were the Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth of my pulsating teen years. My parents still joke that I’ve always had a fondness for the opposite sex―so slapping up the posters made logical and biological sense.

My 13-year-old son, Miguel, on the other hand, has not shown much interest in girls at all. I’ve teased him a few times about potential love interests, even going so far as to choose my future daughters-in-law, but Miguel has basically and not so politely asked me to “Shut up.”

I realized, of course, that if I continue to tease, I risk alienating him and giving him ample reason to shut me out when he may need me to lean on.

For the most part, though, girls have not been part of Miguel’s social orbit. He never approached anyone at the 6th grade school dance last year, and went out of his way to blend into his surroundings. He even ordered me, a chaperone, not to acknowledge him in any way―no nods, no smiles, no waves, and definitely, he said, no dancing. I wasn’t even allowed to tap my feet or sway to the music.

So, for Miguel, school and his social life have been about boys, sports, sports, boys, and video games, which is an extension of boys and sports.

Until now.

A few weeks back, Miguel mentioned Megan Fox, and reminded me she starred with Shia LeBouf in the Transformers movies.

“Dad, she’s hot. Really sexy.”

Wait―my son, the uber sports fan and player, expressing a hormonally driven desire for a female? I felt the Earth tilt slightly off its axis.

Then he asked me to buy two, not one, but two posters of her for his bedroom.

I am not ready to visit the wider implications of the Megan Fox posters, one of which displays an ample view of her breasts, objectifying women and their bodies. My late wife would never have allowed these posters in the house, not even the garage.

At some point in the next year or so, Miguel and I will have many conversations about young women, sex, how to treat women, how society portrays women and all that.

But now I am going to let him revel in having Megan Fox on his ceiling as a symbol of adolescent lust.

And, by the way, Farrah Fawcett and Raquel Welch’s images above me didn’t hinder my social development too much. I turned out well enough to treat Miguel’s mother for more than two decades with all the respect she deserved as a woman and a person. Miguel witnessed that for 12-plus years. Those lessons will be the ones he absorbs most.