Friday, July 11, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
While we're in Jezebel land, who can resist a little rubbernecking? Tracie and Moe of the site recently made a spectacle of themselves onstage in Manhattan at the Thinking and Drinking series put together by Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show, all captured on video, alas for them. Winstead is furious (clips there and everywhere), and the whole thing already has been raked over the blogosphere coals.(Best and raunchiest post title: Jezebels Gone Wild: In Which Feminism Finally Bends Over and Eats Itself From the Ass Up.) On Jezebel itself, damage control includes calling the whole thing a "fucking shame." But on her own blog, Tracie prefers blurry denial:
Anyway, I thought this thing was supposed to be a comedy show, but to be honest, I didn't really do my research on how the interview was really gonna go. I tried to make some jokes, but they fell super flat. ("I don't get raped because I live in Williamsburg, and all the guys there are pussies.") It all seemed really horrible at the time, but now, looking back, I sort of have to laugh. I mean, to our friends, it was just Moe and Tracie being Moe and Tracie—drunk, irreverent, drunk.
Wow, yes, a shame. And another lesson, if we needed one, in the perils of overexposure, oversharing, over-the-top Internet/video self-indulgence. But isn't that the whole story, really, as opposed to a broader of indictment of feminism and a prediction of its ever-impending doom, as some of the commentary seems to have it? What I wish for these women are the days when a bad small stage appearance or college newspaper column was quickly mothballed, never to be viewed again. Maybe the Web is creating a scary new boundary-free generation, and for sure talking smack about sex has gone way beyond what I remember from my decade—ago 20s (see Emily Gould). But maybe also it's just gotten way too easy to rubberneck, and so youthful errors become train wrecks. Thoughts?
-
sponsorship
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.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?