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  What IS the Age of Consent?

  Juliet, you're right that what's most offensive about the Jezebels' discussion of Polanski's rape of a 13-year-old is its glibness; the very title of their post, suggesting that exploiting a child might not be as bad as making a movie about that exploitation, is just galling. Sorry, a 44-year-old having sex with a drugged 13-year-old is never consensual. I'm too steeped lately in research into serious child sexual exploitation to make jokes about it. I've been at conferences where law enforcement folks are being trained in how to respond when they find, say, sex with a 13-year-old being sold on Craigslist (see John R. Miller's excellent op-ed in the NYT today). And in researching sexual harassment of teens on the job, I've seen statutory rape laws used to excellent effect in stopping predatory men from going back to work with underage girls.

  But here's the other thing that offended me about the Jezzies' post: They get the facts completely wrong. Eighteen-year-olds can legally choose to have sex, everywhere in the country. In at least 44 states, 16-year-olds can say yes. (My main source is this 2004 study, but I had a friend with a Westlaw account do a spotcheck to see if its table on Pages 6 and 7 is still accurate. Nope, the ages have dropped. For instance, Wisconsin's age of consent is now 16; so is Delaware's, with a Romeo-and-Juliet clause for 12-to-15-year-olds.)

  Here are some more of the complicated details, for nerds like me: Idaho is the only state where you have to be 18 to consent, with no Romeo-and-Juliet exception. Which means that even in Idaho, you would have been free to choose sex with your older boyfriend; he broke no laws. (And yes, I am forcibly restraining myself from making any jokes about the relevance of your name.) California puts it at 18 with a very, very carefully graded and complicated set of exceptions: At 17 or under, someone can have a lover within three years of his/her age; but the state only really aims its heavy guns at you only if you're over 21 and have sex with someone 15 or under. Many states get especially punitive when there's a larger age gap and the child is 14 or 13 or 12 or under—because the bigger the gap and the younger the child, the more coercive it is on its face.

  Your argument about how patronizing stat rape laws seem, in other words, is precisely the argument feminists have been making for decades—and because of that feminist effort, the age of consent is lower than it used to be. So why would the Jezzies go joking about it? As far as I'm concerned, they just deflect attention from Polanski's crime in coercing this child into sex. Check out the documents about his actions. Disgusting.

  Published Friday, July 11, 2008 10:18 AM by E.J. Graff

  Filed under: feminism, rape, statutory rape

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.