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.
Anyone else who grew up seeing Saville on TV and being creeped out by his persona really really creeped out every time they scroll past the header pic? I keep going oh hey, recent comments, there’s…aargh!
@Fade
No worries. I wasn’t assuming that you condone senseless violence or anything, lol.
[Content Note: threats of rape]
I want to add, though, that in regards to threats, context matters. I don’t think violence is a justifiable response to all threats. Clearly a threat like “I’m going to rape you” is far more indicative of immediate danger than “I hope you get raped,” even though both are extremely reprehensible and shouldn’t be disregarded contrary to what many MRAs say. Just my thoughts.
@Aaliyah
Agreed. I could probably deal with someone saying* “I hope you get raped” or w/e just because they would sound exactly like the pathetic MRAs we hear all the time. But if someone told me “Im going to rape you” I do not think I would be able to maintain my cool.
*just once, to clarify, not like a bunch of threats like some people get.
It’s interesting that you seem to regard some women buying into your ideology as a black mark against women.
Haven’t we been discussing women who internalise prejudice ultimately harmful to themselves for roughly ever?
Evil Balls:
” I have nothing but sneering contempt for you all. I’ll never apologize for who I am, and you can all fuck off.”
Why don’t you just take your “sneering contempt” somewhere else? Nobody is asking you to apologize for who you because we really don’t care, but this is David’s lounge-room, so you’re the one who needs to fuck off because you’re getting mud all over his Axminster.
Seranvali, are you sure it’s just mud? It smells worse …
” I have nothing but sneering contempt for you all. I’ll never apologize for who I am, and you can all fuck off.”
Is it just me, or does this really conjure up images of poor deluded hobos having one-sided, shouty arguments with each scarecrow they happen to spot as they trudge the lonely back roads? Complete with grimy fist shaking at the sky.
It sounds like “fuck you, mom!” to me. Apparently feminists symbolize the mother whose authority they chafed under for a certain kind of angry young man.
That’s a kind description of these keyboard warriors.
The horror, the horror!
The picture of the girl you have up there is creepy not because it’s sexualized, but because she looks like a vengeful child from the realm of the dead. Seriously, what’s with those eyes? I’ve seen horrifyingly bad photoshop touch-ups, but this is something else.
And as a (future, hopefully pediatric) nurse, that part about him sexually assaulting children in hospitals made me shriek and rage!
I need brain bleach! I NEED BRAIN BLEACH!!!!
The picture’s a bit like some of the ones from Audrey Rose, isn’t it?
It is a bit Children of the Corn meets The Ring, now that you mention it.
Um, I actually do think the girl on that pic look older than twelve – if I hadn’t looked too closely on the pic I might even have thought it was a grown woman. But that’s because of how the pic is taken. It’s the lighting, the facial expression and all that which is done in the same style as photos of adult models. Posting pics where girls may look older than they are is just irrelevant to the question of whether men can know whether a twelve-year-old irl is a child or not.
And it’s really weird how JB went on and on about how it ought not to be illegal to have sex with groupies. No, that ought not to be illegal, which is why it ISN’T illegal in any country that I know of. Like, “being a celebrity who has sex with a star-struck non-celebrity” isn’t a crime IN ITSELF anywhere, and that’s not what Savile was accused of either.
@Cassandra:
I just remembered that there’s this Swedish woman who runs a sex blog, and she’s been arguing that there shouldn’t be an “age of consent” at all, it’s enough to have laws against rape. The age of consent in Sweden is fifteen (and obviously, most people who have sex at that age do it with someone of roughly the same age), and apparently she started having sex with various adult men when she was fourteen. She argues that she had great sexual experiences at that age and there was totally nothing wrong with the men who found her attractive, because she really was an incredibly smart and funny and interesting fourteen-year-old. And it’s wrong that this is illegal.
Reading that creeped me out a bit.
So, trying to follow her logic.
1. She was an exceptionally smart and funny and interesting 14 year old.
2. Note the part about her being exceptional and this not being the norm
3. Therefore it should be legal to have sex with all 14 year olds?
I’m afraid I’m going to have to take issue with the “smart” part of her self-description.
Oblivious. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she argues, in other topics, that “we’re all individuals, we’re all different”. But she’d be amazed if not shocked if someone put the two concepts together to argue that any one particular experience, including her own, is an inadequate basis for generalising to everyone in similar circumstances.
How many 14 year olds, 16 year olds, 11 year olds has she known when she herself wasn’t that age? One of the reasons for setting ages for consent and legal responsibility and the like is that we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, absolutely, that people develop and mature intellectually and emotionally at different rates and that these markers should be set to accommodate that. We can’t run the legal system according to the small minority that seem very late (or never) to acquire more mature judgement, nor for those who seem more competent than the adults in their household before they reach middle school, but we do have to use what’s generally reasonable given what we know.
Gods, does it never occur to this woman how children are manipulated by predators? Destroying the age of consent is a sure-fire way to make the conviction rate for rape even lower than it is already.
She says it’s because she had great experiences, but I’m wondering whether there’s more to her apologetics for adult-child sex. Creepy’s the kindest thing I’d call it.
I kept hoping that Hewson was a Poe but it’s starting to look unlikely.
I was sleeping with adult men when I was 16, so I can see where the urge to pretend that it’s because she (and I) were just so amazing and awesome and worthy of being treated as peers by adults comes from, but…nope. That’s ego talking, and an unwillingness to risk tainting memories. If you were a girl who men were interested in when you were that age, it wasn’t because of anything to do with your personality, it’s because they thought you were hot (best case scenario) or because they thought you’d be easy to take advantage of (worst case scenario ). No adult sees someone who’s 14 or 16 as a peer. They might like the kid, even enjoy their company, but see them as an equal? Nope.
My own experiences were pretty good overall, and I don’t regret them, but the thing is, for what percentage of kids is that the case? You can’t make policy based on the most precocious 5% of kids. The younger the kid, the less likely things are to work out OK, and the less power they have in the relationship, and if there were no age of consent at all? There would be adults preying on kids a lot younger than 14.
Also, honestly? Much like the laws about kids and booze, it’s very easy for a kid who really wants to get around those restrictions to do so. Kids who really, really want to have sex with adults in their mid teens do not have a hard time making that happen, and in those cases it’s extremely unlikely that the adult is ever going to get in trouble. What the age of consent laws are really designed to do, from a societal perspective, is draw a protective barrier around underage kids that says “these kids are off limits, leave them alone”. If the kid hirself doesn’t want that protection, it’s pretty damn easy to avoid. And I think there are very few people who don’t understand that in reality this is how things work in most countries.
So, when I hear people arguing about removing age of consent laws, I always feel like what they really want to do is remove that protective barrier from around kids who don’t want sex with adults and do appreciate what little protection from it those laws give. It’s the idea of kids being labelled inappropriate targets for predation that ticks them off, not the idea that a precocious 14 year old who wants to have sex will be prevented from doing so.
Oh lord:The Age of Consent routine again (some ideas are zombie vampires, they can’t be killed and suck up huge amounts of time).
The principle of the greatest good to the greatest number applies here. Are there precocious kids who are ready for sex at 15, even 14? Sure. Are they the norm?
No. So we protect the larger whole; since those people are vulnerable to exploitation. I wasn’t ready for sex at 15. I was lucky enough to know it, because there was a woman who was interested in me. I was also lucky that she saw me as a person, and took my no for an answer. Another kid, were the age of consent lower than it was, isn’t going to be so lucky.
If the kid is so exceptional, and the adult sees them as a person, they will wait until the kid is ready. If the kid is ready, the “law” isn’t going to stop them. If the guys in the OP had been that sort of adult, then this wouldn’t be happening.
Because the people they had sex with would have been young women, and there wouldn’t be dozens (hundreds?) of them saying they were taken advantage of.
The adult men who hit on me in my early/mid-teens used to tell me how smart and mature and special I was. It wasn’t because they thought I was special. It’s because they knew that I was like most 14-year-old kids: desperate for some validation, dreaming of the day that I would have the power and control over my life that it seemed to me adults had. It was a deliberate attempt to manipulate the way young teenagers think, because they were predators, and they would take advantage of anything that might help them successfully abuse children.
The older guys I slept with in my teens were the ones who didn’t give me the “oh you’re so mature for your age” routine, because even at 16 (or 11, which is when it started) I knew that was a load of crap.
Not that I blame kids who didn’t realize that they were being manipulated. Predators are good at manipulating people – it’s how they get away with it. I am, however, rather annoyed at anonymous Swedish sex blogger for making it easier for the predators to operate.