The story of Jimmy Saville, the BBC television personality who sexually exploited and abused teenage girls for decades, is beginning to break on this side of the ocean. It's a fascinating story.
The core story is sordid. Savile was a disgusting creep who was given a position where he would be not only in contact with but admired by millions of hormone-crazed teenage girls. Things that are entirely predictable then happened. Nobody knows the full details but my guess is that Savile's first victims, when he was still young, were compliant. As time went on, however, he became accustomed to and even began to feel entitled to sex with teenagers and he pushed, prodded and eventually started forcing himself on girls.
If you have read the story in the British newspapers, you will notice that I have interjected two elements that no one else is reporting. 1) They say he abused teenage girls. while I say he exploited and abused. 2) I am also suggesting, based on nothing but my knowledge of human nature, that the thing probably started with compliant victims, which raises the obvious question, "What in the world is a compliant victim?"
Begin Fermata
Considered from the perspective of an adult, it doesn't matter if a teenage girl craves sexual attention or even actual sex because she cannot really understand the decisions she is making. Statutory rape is called rape because real consent is deemed impossible. My friend who had sex on the train was raped even though she cheerfully acknowledged that she made it happen more than the guy did. It was his moral and legal duty, when she told him her age, to stop the thing from happening. And she knew that was the case even though she didn't regret her own actions. (She probably should regret them but that's another argument.)
And even when it isn't legally rape—say when a twenty five year old woman or man has sex with a seventeen-year-old—it is still a morally reprehensible act.
When we look at cases such a s Jimmy Savile, and it takes only a little knowledge of the world of 1960s and 1970s rock and roll to know that there must have been thousands of predators just like him at work, the most important questions are not about him but about us and our culture. There are troubling questions about the BBC, where many people seem to have known of but no one acted to stop the abuse. There are also troubling questions about the legal authorities and why they were not able or willing to bring charges against him. But the most important questions are about the larger culture. What did we do and think and say to make this possible? What did we not do that, had we done it, might have made it less possible?
A big part of the problem is that we willingly live in denial of the down side of consensual sex. We pretend that so long as two people consent to it, nothing bad can come of it. This is nonsense and we know it is but it is just too much fun to pretend we don't. It's too inconvenient to imagine what we might have to deny ourselves if we faced this honestly.
Jimmy Savile started doing what he did when he was young and attractive and lots of people went along with it. It was only when he became physically ugly that the moral repulsiveness became clear but, by then, it was too late for the people who had helped him along to act without bringing shame on themselves. That, funnily enough, pretty much sums up the history of "youth" culture and not just the sordid story of Jimmy Savile.
The core story is sordid. Savile was a disgusting creep who was given a position where he would be not only in contact with but admired by millions of hormone-crazed teenage girls. Things that are entirely predictable then happened. Nobody knows the full details but my guess is that Savile's first victims, when he was still young, were compliant. As time went on, however, he became accustomed to and even began to feel entitled to sex with teenagers and he pushed, prodded and eventually started forcing himself on girls.
If you have read the story in the British newspapers, you will notice that I have interjected two elements that no one else is reporting. 1) They say he abused teenage girls. while I say he exploited and abused. 2) I am also suggesting, based on nothing but my knowledge of human nature, that the thing probably started with compliant victims, which raises the obvious question, "What in the world is a compliant victim?"
Begin Fermata
Years ago there was a movie called The Fabulous Baker Boys about two lounge pianists. There is a conversation between the two of them recalling some of the shows they played and they remember playing some rich girl's sixteenth birthday. One brother spouts about how irritating it was to have to provide for this spoiled girl who got whatever she wanted and the other brother says something like "She wanted it, she got it!" And his tone makes it clear he is not talking about music.
Here is the thing, this movie was a total chick flick. When I saw it in the theatre, I was one of only a few guys in a room with several hundred women. When that line was delivered and the implications grasped, those women all giggled with delight.
Let's think about that a while. What we are talking about here is the sexual exploitation of a teenage girl pure and simple; well, the exploitation was pure and simple, the girl was just simple. Why was it apparently not just okay but delightful for a theatre full of women to contemplate the idea of a grown man sexually exploiting her?
It was more than acceptable because what they envisioned was not any actual events but what was a sexual fantasy for many of them. No one wanted to think about the gritty realities that go with a teenage girl having sex with an adult male.
A woman I know once told me how she, at fifteen years of age, lost her virginity to a man in his late thirties. She saw the thing as a great exploit on her part. She was traveling west on a train so she could visit family and it began when she went to him and started talking and then convinced him to buy and share some alcohol with her. They had sex in his upper berth. She told me about telling him that she was just fifteen and a virgin with particular glee. As long as she was thinking only about herself, the story was a delight to her.
But one day when I asked her what she thought of the guy, she visibly shuddered. She described him in hateful terms. The second she started thinking about him as a real person, as more than a prop in her story, she was horrified to remember what a disgusting creep he was.
Let's go back to our movie for a moment. The Baker brothers are played by Jeff and Beau Bridges. Jeff was fantastically good looking man in his day. Beau, contrary to his name, was not. Jeff played the brother who nailed the sixteen year old. That part is important. The audience of women would not have been delighted at the thought of ordinary-looking guy nailing a teenage girl because he couldn't be their fantasy.
A number of researchers have found that it is difficult to talk about rape in a non-erotic fashion. No matter how much you try and emphasize the degradation of another human being, there will be some women and men in your audience who will hear not the horror that is rape because the sexual fantasy that is playing in their heads makes it impossible to see what is really happening.End Fermata
Considered from the perspective of an adult, it doesn't matter if a teenage girl craves sexual attention or even actual sex because she cannot really understand the decisions she is making. Statutory rape is called rape because real consent is deemed impossible. My friend who had sex on the train was raped even though she cheerfully acknowledged that she made it happen more than the guy did. It was his moral and legal duty, when she told him her age, to stop the thing from happening. And she knew that was the case even though she didn't regret her own actions. (She probably should regret them but that's another argument.)
And even when it isn't legally rape—say when a twenty five year old woman or man has sex with a seventeen-year-old—it is still a morally reprehensible act.
When we look at cases such a s Jimmy Savile, and it takes only a little knowledge of the world of 1960s and 1970s rock and roll to know that there must have been thousands of predators just like him at work, the most important questions are not about him but about us and our culture. There are troubling questions about the BBC, where many people seem to have known of but no one acted to stop the abuse. There are also troubling questions about the legal authorities and why they were not able or willing to bring charges against him. But the most important questions are about the larger culture. What did we do and think and say to make this possible? What did we not do that, had we done it, might have made it less possible?
A big part of the problem is that we willingly live in denial of the down side of consensual sex. We pretend that so long as two people consent to it, nothing bad can come of it. This is nonsense and we know it is but it is just too much fun to pretend we don't. It's too inconvenient to imagine what we might have to deny ourselves if we faced this honestly.
Jimmy Savile started doing what he did when he was young and attractive and lots of people went along with it. It was only when he became physically ugly that the moral repulsiveness became clear but, by then, it was too late for the people who had helped him along to act without bringing shame on themselves. That, funnily enough, pretty much sums up the history of "youth" culture and not just the sordid story of Jimmy Savile.
This is an interesting observation, and true. We now know that the adolescent brain is not fully developed until the early to mid-20s. The parts that develop last are, among other things,the ones governing impulse control and the ability to project the consequences of one's actions. At the same time adolescence is when sex hormones are most potent, raging in fact. How's that for irony?
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