Happy Monday everyone! Thank you for our Monday post, Stephen!!
The news cycle has been dominated for some time now by various sexual allegations against various entertainment and political figures. It is a topic, which no matter how hard I have tried, I cannot continue to ignore.
It has provided not some small measure of amusements, along with the revulsion, where feminists have spend years declaring that every alleged victim must be believed, except of course when they accuse a leftist. And this hypocrisy continues unabated.
The tide seemed to break for a time with the accusation against Harvey Weinstein, followed quickly by other celebrity figures including a number of prominent actors and directors. Corey Feldman reiterating his allegations about rampant pedophilia in Hollywood, seemed to encompass the entire industry ranging from pedophilia to the casting couch to tales of exhibitionism.
As everyone knew it would, the social angst inevitably was redirected away from entertainment and onto the political arena, specifically directed towards one who could be labeled “conservative”. Never mind that the accusation run against liberals by a factor of ten to one, the media focuses the spotlight on the one so that people stop paying attention to the many, in particular they have focused upon Judge Roy Moore in Alabama.
It has all the necessary elements for a media distraction: the allegations against him are salacious; the state is rural; he’s a Republican; and it is so far in the distant past that there is absolutely no danger of ever having to prove such allegations in a court of law.
Weinstein, Tekai, & Spacey are off the hook, there exists a conservative politician for the media to attack in your stead.
However, rather than have an entire post just listing the numerous sexual scandals, I would rather discuss the nature of such sexual scandals itself. Let us look to classify the allegations rather than discuss the relative merits of the accusers and the media approach.
First, let us look at the majority of “accusations” against Roy Moore, that as a 32 year old man, recently out of the Navy, some 40 years ago, did date, court, woo, and make advances towards and with young ladies who were still in high school generally of the ages of 16 or 17, half his age.
This, the classic May-December romance, also known in some knitting circles as “robbing the craddle” is not exactly a new phenomena, and while relatively unusual, shows no signs of abating anytime soon. So let us look at the phenomena of older men dating younger women.
It is a phenomena existent in every human culture, going back into the recesses of time, that young women are attracted to older men with resources, and that men are naturally attracted to women of greater fecundity. A woman’s peak child bearing years are between the ages of 16 and 32, it is in this window that most women have their children. Men on the other hand, naturally tend to grow wealthier over their lifetimes.
Such disparities are apparent even in the Chinese Zodiac paper place-mats at your local Chinese restaurant, which measure off people’s romantic compatibility with people of age differences in the multiples of four, but a romantic aversion if the age difference is a multiple of six.
(For purposes of brevity in this article, I shall assume that the younger of the relationship is female without constantly having to add the caveat that it doth also occur the other way around.)
Verily, my own mother was 15 when she started dating my father of 23 (there is that Chinese Zodiac multiple of an 8 year difference); they got married just nine days after her 18th birthday. For me to condemn the dating of teenage girls by older men would be to condemn my own parents, indeed my very existence being myself a progeny of such a union. Nay, I shall not condemn my very own existence.
Roy Moore is being vilified for dating girls of 16 being 32, rather than my father’s 23. A few eyebrows were raised when a 39 year old Jerry Seinfeld was publicly known to be dating a 17 year old. Humphrey Bogart was 49 when he married a 19 year old Lauren Bacall. Such a list could be quite extensive indeed.
Thus, according to this precedent and my calculations, I ought to by all rights be dating a 19 year old model or singer. (However, Alizee is already remarried and I’m getting tired of waiting for her; Selena Gomez is currently dealing with some health problems and there is that whole “Beiber” thing to consider; I wonder if Sabrina Carpenter is available? Or Lucy Hale?)
On the other hand, I have been made to understand that it can be difficult to maintain a dating relationship while simultaneously yelling at them to get off of your lawn. I am also of the understanding that every so often they will want to actually talk to you and hang out with you, thus on further consideration, I shall remain the happily reclusive bachelor that I am.
The point being that we make some clear legal demarcations, but because the history and culture around this area has evolved over the millennia from different conceptions and ideals, our legal approach and classifications have become a muddled mess.
Cultures universally agree that the use of physical force to engage in sexual intercourse against the will and without the consent of another is considered “rape”, and thus not merely illegal, but classified as one of the most serious crimes in society.
Rape is traditionally distinguished by the act of intercourse, as opposed to what the law classified as “unnatural sex acts” of sodomy, fellatio, et cetera (grouped under the general classification of sodomy). Such unnatural sex acts were often considered illegal regardless of whether or not such acts were consensual.
Our modern understanding tends to view such acts from the point of view of consent rather than the nature of the acts themselves. However, all societies are not in agreement on this point, which is why acts of sodomy often remain a capitol offense under certain legal systems such as Sharia.
Societies are also in agreement that pedophilia is wrong and one of the most heinous of crimes, that sexual engagement with a child is strictly forbidden. Rather than debate the correct demarcation in calendar years, there is at the very least a universal consensus that a pre-pubescent child is off limits. They are considered too young to even be capable of giving consent, thus true pedophilia (pre-pubescent) is automatically and universally worse than rape.
(We shall leave of the discussion of the Islamic demarcation which cuts off the childhood at the time of the girl’s first menstrual cycle.)
The law and custom become much more murky in the ages in between with a large degree of variation in attitude and approach to what is criminal and what is allowable. Understand that in history marriages did occur with people between the ages of 12 and 18, 12 being the essentially lowest possible age of consent with almost no exceptions and 18 being the upper limit on the other extreme.
The normal age of consent in most places being 16 years of age but with some variability, even when it is technically permitted, that age is generally the rare exception, not the rule. (Although I recall being in Jordan when I was 13, and the waiter asking me if I was married yet. When I told him I was only 13, he told me that was okay, I still had a year or two yet.)
While there is not nearly enough space in this post to begin to delve into this topic, I think it just to point out the origin of most of the “statutory rape” or “age of consent” laws were not originally designed to protect children, but rather to “make an honest woman of her” by forcing the man to marry her or go to jail, a legalized form of the shotgun wedding.
Up until fairly recently, it was still in the Virginia code that if the girl was at least 14, and the couple got married and stayed married for at least a year, the man could not be prosecuted; however I believe that statute has since been repealed.
The mixture of the “statutory rape” with the forcible rape laws is just part of the muddling of this topic and the difficulty in actually having any real or meaningful conversations on the topic without people’s emotions getting in the way. “If that was my daughter” generates a different perspective than the “my wife was that young when I met her” viewpoint.
Getting away from the hot button statutory age laws, to the forcible rape and pedophile laws, such laws differ in degree but not in concept from what used to traditionally be considered sexual assault, before they modern lawyers decided to obfuscate the concept of rape by incorporating it into the umbrella term of sexual assault.
Sexual assault was generally limited to some physical attack on the sexual organs of the victim, limited to the breasts and genitalia, which would include groping or fondling as well as some more violent assaults too graphic for this post.
Sexual assault did not include grabbing a woman on the rear end or forcing a kiss upon her, not that such things were kindly looked upon as a society, but they were considered of a less serious nature. There is even a word for such a person, fallen into disuse over the years, who would be called a “masher”.
That is much, albeit not all, of what both Moore and Franken have been accused; not so much a crime of sexual assault in most instances, but the social faux pas of being a masher.
Then there is the sexual crime of exhibitionism, often labeled “indecent exposure” which would include a number of the allegations which have come out about those Hollywood allegations. We want to express moral outrage at the indecent exposure of people masturbating in front of young starlets, but at the same time excuse similar starlets for appearing naked on a wrecking ball in a music video. Our society is not as clear and consistent on this issue as it really ought to be.
