What would a 50 year old man get out of emailing a underage girl?

Probably the same thing that anyone else gets out of friendship.

I really value having friends in other age groups, and am very grateful for the older and wiser people I’ve talked to here on Fluther, who I know I can turn to when I need advice. Male or female doesn’t really matter to me.

Could be, but if he isn’t showing any innappropriate behaviors, it’s also possible he just enjoys a casual friendship connection. I’d keep an eye out though, hate to be suspicious but…..prudent is the word. I am 52 female and I enjoy younger kids as people but I’m not inclined to develop online relationships with the kids here on fluther involving lots of contact simply because there is not enough common ground to sustain ongoing communications aside from friendly little notes now and then.

If it’s friendship with appropriate boundaries, there is no problem. The guy might like doing a parental kind of thing. He might like being helpful. He might enjoy the appreciation that a girl might respond with. You know, not all relationships have to be equal for people to get something out of them. Not all 50 year old men are predators.

I (a 38 year old man) talk to an underage jelly on facebook chat often, sometimes for hours at a time. We simply have fun chatting. I have no ulterior motives.

friends see age as only a number

I am 56, and my sister has a 12 or 13 year old niece that I often talk with at family things.
I do not chat with her online, and I do not email her, but I would.
She is a delightful child, and we have many common interests. She is the one who recommended The Hunger Games to me.
Nothing pervy here.

As long as the discussions aren’t inappropriate, and he’s not obsessed with her or something, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. It would probably raise an eyebrow if it were my kid he was talking to, and I’d probably investigate to be sure.

Considering I was 17 when I started on Q&A sites, I’d say…

a good conversation about Star Trek and the comparative merits of the many releases of Dungeons & Dragons?

Honestly, raise your hand if you’re a man of a certain age!

Now, raise your hand if you haven’t been to Prom yet.

Uh huh.

A) Company
B) Keeping in touch with what the kids call cool
C) Rock hard sinister boner of doom
D) All of the above

They talk about school, home life and stuff.

This sounds like every conversation I’ve ever had with a school age kid. I really hope they don’t all think I’m up to something.

The only part that I’d be curious about is how they initially met in order to be “friends” online. If there’s a legitimate connection nothing seems out of the ordinary there.

I know a man who’s probably in his 60’s and who seems to be fascinated by adolescent girls. He goes to their chat websites, reads their heartfelt unburdenings, latches onto cutters and tries to counsel and advise them, writes them poems, writes fictional stories about them in which young male characters seem to be proxies for him…maybe it’s all very innocent, but it creeps me out in a Humbert Humbert kind of way. I really think he ought to keep his fantasies to himself and not go messing about with young girls, even anonymously and at a distance.

@Jeruba Wow..that is pretty uh, over the top to say the least, bizarre indeed. :-?

@Jeruba are you friends with the ghost of Lewis Carroll?

He doesn’t seem to realize how avid he sounds to others in describing how he helps these troubled young girls with their emotional issues. I don’t call him a friend; he’s an acquaintance. I have to say Lewis Carroll strikes me as more wholesome in his interest, despite what I’ve read about him.

@Jeruba What could you possibly find creepy about Humbert Humbert?~

(I think I quit by page 5, which is saying something considering I somehow stomach’d one hundred pages of 120 Days of Sodom).

Some of us jaded older men simply find a young woman’s naiveté and freshness a delightful respite from the gray tedium of our days. ... their firm, yet supple breasts… derrieres…. Oops! Oh shit!

Like all men, he is a predator, they evolved that way. Beware.

Sex. Was that so hard? Lol.

It’s war out there. Mothers (and fathers) keep your female children locked up until you marry them off!

And they call this a modern nation.

Just trying to make you think about the full range of consequences of this type of thinking. It is not such a short step from protecting young women from imagined depredations to veiling them and keeping them locked up behind closed doors, separate from the rest of society.

Oh. And as you well know, most of the depredations happen behind those closed doors inside the very family that is supposed to protect them. Our system fails young women, but going after fifty year old men who email young women on the internet is not going to make women any safer. There is only one thing that will make women and girls and boys safer: education. We have to talk about sex openly and we have to get detailed and we have to teach our kids what is right and wrong in specific ways. Hiding from it doesn’t help.

Education empowers and makes it possible for people to say “no!” We can say it to fathers and priests and whoever we want to if we know that it is possible for them to do wrong things. People who want to keep children ignorant may do that with a good heart, but they are making it possible for abuse to continue. They are protecting the abusers when they say children should not be educated about sex. It is very sad. But once again, so-called “common sense” is wrong.

I know people wish I would go away so that I would stop pointing out so many inconvenient truths. Or hell. Maybe I’m wrong. But it’s still wrong to assume you know so much without checking out whether it is true or not. I raise these questions because I have children, too, and I suspect that what we assume is true is wrong. I ask that people provide data, not assumptions, as the basis for whatever it is they think. Of course you wish I would go away. I make you uncomfortable.

I will not apologize for that.