British barrister Barbara Hewson caused a bit of a stir last week when she called for the age of consent in Britain to be lowered to 13 so as to end the alleged “persecution of old men” like those arrested in the wake of the recent Jimmy Savile scandal, which revealed a widespread culture of sexual exploitation of underage girls (and some boys) at the BBC in the 1970s.
Now one female Men’s Rights Activist connected to hate site A Voice for Men has done Hewson one better, arguing that the real culprits in these scandals weren’t the predatory adult men but the girls they victimized.
Janet Bloomfield, a fairly regular contributor to terrorist-manifesto-posting AVFM who is better known as JudgyBitch, writes on her blog that:
[B]asically, the girls were groupies. They wanted all the benefits of hanging out with a big star and they understood it came with a price and they paid it, perhaps reluctantly, but with full knowledge that the trips to London and the fags and the sweet weren’t free. …
And now they are claiming the MEN abused THEM? Looks to me like it was the other way around.
Yes, Bloomfield apparently feels that these poor little rich men were robbed of cigarettes and candy and trips to London by predatory teenage girls. She continues:
It’s a story as old as bloody time. Young women with nothing to offer but their youth and sexuality chase after powerful men in exchange for favors. If we are going to arrest every powerful man who has ever availed himself of willing women, we are gonna need to build a whole lot of jails.
Uh, Judgy, in case you missed the point of the whole debate here, we’re not talking about women. We’re talking about girls. In the case of BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall, one of the victims that he has admitted to assaulting was nine years old at the time. Nine. Savile’s youngest alleged victim was an eight-year-old boy, and dozens of his alleged assaults were upon children in hospitals.
In the end, Bloomfield kind of, sort of, admits that the men may have behaved badly in these cases. But she still wants them to face zero legal repercussions.
Powerful men always have and always will delight in young women hunting them. Young women always have and always will hunt for powerful men. Both sides are equally culpable. Both sides are engaging in abuse. Both sides are behaving shamefully. Both side are being idiots.
But only one side is being held criminally responsible? Bullshit. If the girls are not going to be strung up on charges of solicitation and prostitution, and I absolutely do NOT think they should be, then fairness and equality under the law dictates the men get a pass, too.
Again, you may notice, Bloomfield cannot seem to decide whether or not these girls are in fact girls or “young women,” and in the two consecutive paragraphs right above you’ll notice she slides effortlessly between the two. Perhaps her desire to tag these girls “women” is an admission that, at least on some unconscious level, she knows what she’s arguing is beyond the moral pale.
Elsewhere in her post, she puts up pictures of underage girls whom she seems to think would be impossible to distinguish from adults. Here’s one, of a twelve-year-old model. (She also includes a creepily sexualized picture of the same model at age ten.)
Anyone unable to tell that this is a picture of a child, not an adult, shouldn’t be having sex with anyone.
And anyone as morally deficient as JudgyBitch shouldn’t be judging anyone.
Thank you Amused. I’d glossed that. This isn’t about, “nature”, it’s about how people interact with each other.
No, nature doesn’t decide anything since it’s not a person. Heck, even if “mother nature” was a real living supernatural being and she showed herself and told us that “I think the age of consent ought to be thirteen”, why should we dogmatically follow her, in this case stupid, commands?
Besides, I know a lot of dog breeders, and everyone agrees that it’s way too early to mate a bitch the first time she goes into season. I’m not quite certain how it works with wild wolves… I THINK they come into season before they leave their parents, because that usually makes them lactate, and they can help feed their younger siblings. In any case, they don’t leave their parents and start a pack of their own and have kids until they’re like two-three years old. Two years old is also an age where most bitches are considered mature enough to be mothers. Yet they usually have their first season around six months or so.
But perhaps we ought to change the Swedish Kennel Club rules as well as dog breeder’s private morality since Nature has apparently decided that bitches ought to start reproducing at six months.
I keep getting the feeling that MRAs saw the old saying that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and interpreted it as a helpful suggestion.
Btw, I was just out doing tracking exercises with one of my dogs. I’m also doing a bit of protection training with her. The reason for all this training is obviously so that I can eventually tell her to track down a man and attack him when she finds him. Then I’ll call the police and tell them that this poor and now severely dog-bitten man tried to rape me and I had to put the dog on him in self defence. Then he’ll go to prison for life, since no more than a woman’s word is required. I’m just doing this for a hobby. Like you do.
@Cassandra: Well, that’s Hobbes conclusion of what life would be like/had been like before civilisation and the state was invented. Considering the MRA dreams of an island of their own away from society, that does seem to be what they yearn for.
If there’s one thing I know about powerful anthropomorphized forces of nature it’s that they feed on suffering; how else can you explain the way mother nature treats baby ducks? Therefore any prescription she gives us ought to be treated as an act of war.
And don’t even get me STARTED on Santa Claus…
My cats seem to have forgiven me for leaving them with strangers for 2 weeks while I was on vacation. In fact, the way they greeted me was adorable, more like dogs — as soon as they heard my voice they jumped up and came running. Now Hazel’s sleeping on top of my right foot, and Buster is sitting next to the laptop with her paw resting on my right wrist. I am immobilized by drooling kitties, just the way I like it.
I know you were all wondering, so I just thought I’d share. 🙂
Cat-love!!
My cats are like that when I’m gone for a day or two, and it’s awesome.
I’d never left them for longer than 2 days before this, so I was a bit worried they would hate me forever. Phew.
Apparently I too was fully adult at age 11. According to that entity Nature.
“…and that is all that matters in the end.”
No it’s not. It’s really not. Idiot.
@Howard Bannister:
“In this recent UN update, the security council unanimously decided declare war on Mother Nature, also known as Gaia, Planet Earth, the Blue Planet and or The Third Planet From the Sun. Peacekeeping forces have been mobilized to go shoot a bush”.
Here’s some bleach. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwxl_-DHqKo
[Note: The Onion video, mild humorous cruelty to… everything]
A much better response than JB’s to the problem of adult men forcing kids to have sex with them. Money quote, which seems to describe the MRM more generally, as well as the reaction to this “scandal”:
@cloudiah
And on that same article I find the comments of someone who thinks that most rape victims who think they are being blamed for their rape are really just deluded because trauma.
I need to stop reading comments on news websites.
The kitties used to get so sad when bf would go on a trip. He’d ask a friend to come in every day and make sure they were fed and got a little attention, but that’s not the same as having him home. I remember them mewing plaintively every time he would go to the door for a couple days after he’d come back from somewhere, like they were worried he was planning to leave them all alone again. 🙁 Poor kitties! Now if he travels I stay with them and they cope a lot better. Second Favourite Human is apparently an acceptable short-term substitute for Favourite Human.
I was staying with my former housemate back in Mar. The kitties were glad to see me (well, one of them was a bit upset with me for having been gone). After I left she sent me a photo, they were all in “my” room, sleeping in a pile, “waiting for you to come home”.
:/
One of the most heartbreaking things I ever saw happened when my mom had to drive me to my dad’s place (which used to be our family home) one day. She hadn’t been there in almost two years, and the dog saw her (or smelled her, more likely). That was probably the happiest day of that dog’s whole life. But then of course we had to leave, and she couldn’t explain that she couldn’t come back…
…Okay now I need to snuggle somebody/some critter.
Cloudiah, I haz a happy imagining Hazel and Buster!
Our kitties (all the generations) tend to be more “Oh, yeah, I think I remember you. Have you been away? And where’s my dinner?” 😉
Has this skeevy rape-promoter “Yasmine” posted here before? Zir crap sounds familiar, though given the MRM is the rape lobby, that’s no surprise if this is more socking.
VISCARIA, DEBBIE DOWNER Esq.
Pets should be included in the divorce decree honestly. They are family members and should be treated at such.
Even my dog who drives me up the wall with her incessant attention demands gets all the attention and cuddles she needs because that is what you do for family!
Sneak hopes to get a pet someday. For now, zie has to settle for a plant.
To be fair, zie really does adore that plant.
@LBT
I don’t live in Portland any more, sadly. But I see you’ll be in the Old Port! I can probably recommend a couple of good restaurants.
I loves me some plants. I have a Olive I grew from a 4″ pot. It’s about 10 years old now. I also have a grape I grew from a cutting. The parent plant is dead now (eaten by horses).
I mailed both of them to myself when I moved.
RE: emilygoddess
Alas, I can’t really afford any restaurants. But thanks anyway!
RE: pecunium
Sneak’s gone through a series of plants, including mint, basil, airplane, and some purple fuzzy monstrosity that I can’t remember the name of. The majority of them have died at some point; zie’s currently tending zer aloe which freaked out after being left in the direct sun for a few days.
Evil Balls, can we talk about how you came into a post about the sexual abuse of children, and someone making excuses for said abuse, and you decided the important thing was to rub it in the faces of the (straw) feminists? All while the feminists were actually decrying the abuse and the abuse apologia? Yeah, we’re obviously the ones who should fuck off…
Look at all the skeevy fucks in this thread.
I could become pregnant at nine. Carrying a pregnancy or attempting to deliver a baby would have killed me.
Ovulation and menstruation =/= sexual maturity. They most certainly aren’t indicative of psychological maturity, even if sexual maturity has been reached. There are people well over the age of consent who cant consent to sex because they don’t possess the psychological maturity required to assess the risks and benefits of sex. Age of consent has sweet bugger-all to do with biology.