I'm unclear on how old the 13-yr-old's partner is supposed to be.
Eve Ensler should immediately be stripped of her position as Minority Leader, and then whipped until Hastert gets his rocks off.
It's been a while since I've seen it, but I remember getting the impression that it was about depicting the "I wish I was an adult" line of thinking typical of teenagers. The girl sees it as evidence of her maturity, hence the proud declaration; that the audience sees the obvious absurdity of her statements goes to show the warped/immature perspective of the girl.
Oh my God. I had precisely this argument with my mother when I was a junior in college because I did this monologue (and was very well-received! actually, my relationship with my first boyfriend was rekindled in part because he saw me and thought I had been all fire and music and he was the kind of incredibly stupid person who makes relationship decisions based on inspired theatrical performances). I haven't read the linked posts, but here was my position at the time: the monologue isn't about the moral status of the adult, but the experience of the girl. There are rule utilitarian reasons to make statutory rape illegal regardless of circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's inconceivable that a legal minor could ever have a good sexual experience with an adult. An adult is never in a position to know she or he is not using coercive power, so the adult's actions are never justified, but there could be some circumstances in which harm did not result. The "good rape" line is the character's clumsy way of trying to express her sense that she has a sovereign right to interpret her experience and no societal rule or interpretive frame can take that away. I know this is, like, White Bear's favorite issue in the world, so I hope she shows up to discuss.
We had a long thread a while back about the harms of underage sex. Five imaginary dollars to anyone who can find it. Anyway, Tia gets it exactly right.
Just this once.
Hey, if David Brooks et al want to argue that people in their 30s having sex with teenagers is a good or at least morally neutral thing, I will listen with rapt attention and interest. If this is a pot-kettle-black thing, then they fail the test: there's a huge goddamn difference between a member of Congress and a person who writes literature or plays. You know, imagination versus real life. Real life including supervision of real people.
I don't mean the harms of underage sex, I mean child molestation. Six imaginary dollars!
Was that the one where gswift or somebody like that was back-and-forthing with bitch about whether they should allow their children to have sleepovers?
Or no -- that would probably be the one you appear to be talking about in 6 but your clarification in 8 makes it seem like you have something else in mind.
8: Do we get an imaginary six dollar bill?
gswift or somebody like that
Don't think that was me, but "somebody like that" made me laugh.
David Brooks is, as far as I can tell, the most disingenuous writer publishing today. Ann Althouse is a close runner-up.
Whose would be the appropriate portrait for the imaginary six dollar bill? And what landscape for the back?
I know I was arguing against b in the sleepover discussion, but I don't think I'm much like gswift.
(Okay, we're both white guys. But that's about it.)
David Brooks is, as far as I can tell, the most disingenuous writer publishing today. Ann Althouse is a close runner-up.
I say Krauthammer is a contender.
I don't mean the harms of underage sex, I mean child molestation. Six imaginary dollars!
We did have a thread about the former topic, though.
Yeah, Tia's right. If one of Foley's pages wants to pipe up and say that that flirtation was the best thing that ever happened to him, well, good for him. Doesn't make Foley any less of a creep. I know people who had underage relationships with older partners that they think were really healthy and educational; that doesn't mean that, as a general rule, we ought to frown on adults who engage in that stuff.
Too bad Tia's rightness is far too complex to get an airing, should one of Foley's pages so behave.
If Pelosi was made aware of these secret "Vagina Monologues", and didn't do anything to put a stop to them, she must be held accountable.
Try this on for size: Foley hit everything of a certain age within reach and a few who weren't in reach.
He didn't have a thing with and for a certain person, he had a lot of things with a particular type of person, that type of person being an ~sixteen-year-old boy.
That's not love or affection or whatnot, that's just a kink, and in this case, a highly exploitive kink. If the 13/16-year-old in the play was just one in a long line of 13/16-year-olds that the older person was having sex with, THEN the play would be comparable to Foley's situation.
max
['Is there room for an HBO show called IMWood?']
It's probably a bit much if liberals are acting like no 16-year-olds have sex, ever, but for the love of little apples, if the best defense Althouse can come up with is 'but there's a liberal play where there's PRETEND sex', christ on a cracker.
Well, no and yes. Even if Foley's a huge perv, it's not impossible that one of the exploited 16yo boys would see the flirtation as, on the whole, positive. The point is that the kid's subjective experience doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the issue in terms of public policy.
The really shocking part about this story, the part that liberal hypocrisy simply cannot face, is that Ensler's first draft had a scene in which a teenaged girl talks about masturbating with a Koran---and Ensler took it out out of fear of provoking Muslim anger! Where is the first Amendment feminist outrage?
Even if Foley's a huge perv, it's not impossible that one of the exploited 16yo boys would see the flirtation as, on the whole, positive.
Yeah. And the other 47 didn't. The play (I assume) doesn't mention 47 other 13-year-old girls.
max
['Two sides, same coin.']
Exactly, that's my point. The subjective response of one person doesn't have to be wrong to say that, as a rule, X is wrong.
I say Krauthammer is a contender.
Y'know, I think I would pull Krauthammer out of a burning building, but I'm pretty sure I'd feel really guilty about it later. However, I'm not sure America'sWorstColumnist™ is ever being disingenuous. He looks to me to be cackling batshit insane and laying it all right out on the table.
18 -- well you both live close to Nevada.
Hmmm, the kind of person who is prepared to continue searching for an excuse for the Republican Party even if they have to cross into the realm of fiction, is the kind of person who doesn't recognise a lost position and thus exactly the kind of person I would like to play backgammon with for high stakes.
As usual, Tia's right. I've done that play, too (can we get a third?), and that piece is about a girl who has an experience she enjoys with an older woman. Insofar as a lot of play is women talking about their vaginas and their sexual experiences, it fits right in with everything else. I mean, the play talks about rape, sex work, hetero and homo sex, with old people, young people, masturbation, all of it. The point is to present people's experiences, without judging them, and yeah, it's ok not to be judgmental about a 16-year-old girl who thinks sex with an older woman was cool. If it was the older woman who was the narrator, it'd be a completely different story. But it isn't.
to 30: well, apo, what if you could only pull either Krauthammer and an Anglican bishop or Ann Althouse and a thousand frozen embryos out of the fire? what then? besides the fact that you'd be teh hero.
relatedly, Ensler has made changes to the play, as I understand it, so that when performed now the girl is 16 and the 'good rape' line is excised, on pain of copyright violation, so maybe the liberal acclaim for seductive imaginary lesbians and their hott non-victim victims is less fervid than Brooks made out. not to me, I'm just nuts about them, but, you know, other liberals.
finally, Labs, stop thinking there may be some kernel of truth in the wingnut follies du jour. you're just going to give yourself a migraine.
Alameida, you forgot the thousand rats in constant orgasm.
Would I have to pull the thousand frozen embryos out one at a time?
There are rule utilitarian reasons to make statutory rape illegal regardless of circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's inconceivable that a legal minor could ever have a good sexual experience with an adult. An adult is never in a position to know she or he is not using coercive power, so the adult's actions are never justified, but there could be some circumstances in which harm did not result.
Color me surprised that people here are in favor of the statuatory rape law. (Am I right in assuming that b/c of the expressions of support for this comment?) I'm agin' it on legal principle. And I don't for a moment buy that adults can "never" know whether they are in a position of using coercive power. I also don't think authority problems are sufficient reason to take issue with adult-adolescent relationships. (I'm not sure anyone is arguing this, but this thread is trying to distinguish b/w Foley and Ensler, and this is the only argument I've seen for why what Foley did was wrong.) After all, Foley was not the boss of the pages, and they were at a considerable distance. They could have shut down those IMs any time. There does not seem to be any problem of coercion here.
I find Foley's actions problematic b/c the IMs show a very flawed person (problems of maturity, intelligence, and uncontrolled desires), character flaws which are exacerbated by the extent of his actions.
Hi, Mr. Instapundit. It's just us powerless, marginalized folk down here, whom the Democrats refuse to talk to, chatting among ourselves. By the way, your beta-version of libertarian fascism is rad.
I'm all in favor of an aggressive "sauce for the goose / die by the sword" posture here. This is really an internal Republican problem, and we should just watch, and nudge it along as best possible.
I've said for a long time that the statutory rape laws are weird. The difference between a felony and no crime at all can hinge on which side of the street an act was committed on, or a one-day difference of date of birth. As far as I know there's no other area of law where such small distinctions have such great effects. ("Guilty vs. innocent" can hinge on small differences of fact, but I'm talking about differences in the law itself between one state and the other.)
However, this doesn't have to be about statutory rape or even sexual harassment. The House of Representatives was acting in loco parentus, and parents sent their minor kids there trusting that this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
For example, suppose a 16-y-o kid in high school were seduced by a school employee who had no power over him or her, a janitor for example. Even if not statutory rape or sexuall harassment and abuse of power, there would still be an in loco parentis case.
This could be a traffic bonanza, if we play our cards right. We could be the pro-Foley blog-- a really underexploited angle.
Emerson, in a little more seriousness: isn't the 'arbitrary line' point applicable in many other situations, e.g., whether someone is legally an adult or not, or whether a crime was committed close enough to a school or just far enough away?
Also, I thought I'd read that at least some of those laws have "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions, so that a slight age difference on either side of the line of consent isn't illegal.
I guess, with various caveats in mind, it's prima facie sensible to have laws prohibiting sexual contact with people below a certain age because of the problems involved with informed consent.
In other news, I find the Tia/Leblanc line convincing, and I agree that what's legally classified as "sexual abuse" is diverse w/r/t harms.
In recent decades the age of consent in the US has been raised everywhere, or almost, to 16, 17, or 18. Not long ago it was as low as 12 in some states, and there used to be provisos for underage marriages with the consent of the parents. There are often special provisions for the cases when the older partner is close to the younger in age.
This is seemingly odd because the laws have been made stricter during a time when sexuality has be become generally more wide open, including among young people.
My theory is that this is a version of the compromise with prohibitionism of tobacco and alcohol. In much of the US tobacco and alcohol are wide open, but with restrictions on sales to minors (however defines). Sex among adults now is more or less wide open, and the new age of consent laws have been raised on the model of the tobacco-alcohol laws.
So you can't marry your 15-y-o cousin any more, even if your uncle and aunt are cool with that.
FL -- "close to a school" is somewhat the same protect-the-children dynamic, and how often is the gradation felony-or-nothing?
Just to protect myself, I'll say that while I am theoretically more open to relationships to much younger women than some think the I should be (except for my new no-relationships policy), the age group I mean is more like 25-35, who compared to me are in the flower of youth and full bloom of innocence.
I have just found that in some states the age of consent law is inoperative if the younger party is know to be unchaste. That's quite a curve ball.
There's a lot of inaccurate and discrepant stuff up. The Wiki seems pretty well researched.
30 is absolutely correct, except the part about the burning building (burning one Krauthammer = saving six fetuses). And neither Brooks nor Althouse can hold a candle to Jonah Goldberg in disingenuousness (disingenuity?). Read if you dare, then click through to the post he's nominally responding to... and realize that not only does he not address the argument of that post, he doesn't even acknowledge its existence.
I assume that's his 'response' to ezra. I remember thinking about ezra's post, what a reasonable and cogent discussion, and then I read the corner, and jonah and j-pod were all ezra is an evil liberal who only cares about partisan positioning! wha? really, it was possibly the most hacktackular thing I've ever seen from jonah. what I think takes the cake is his oft-bruited about the right-blogosphere claim that people who complained about the unbearable whiteness of lotr were the real racists, because we looked at slavering orcs and saw black people. totally ignoring the fact that the orcs in question, under the makeup, were in fact black actors. he's like colbert; he just doesn't see race.
I've been slow to cotton on to this move: people who complain about X are the real X-ers. It's so simple, so beautiful.
LOTR was egregiously bad in that way, with the straight-line correlation between palor and goodness.
I can give LoTR a pass on the orcs; science fiction is always speciesist, usually with good reason as the other species like to chomp! on humans and occasionally have tentacles.
It's the Evil Men who serve Sauron that are the race problem, as they're dark and evil and heavily be-eyelinered.
The real question to ask of Tolkien is why all the elves are so damn gay.
49 should not provoke a rant on how LoTR isn't science fiction, or how science fiction isn't always speciesist, and how back in the day X, Y, and Z were happening. In case anyone needed to have an OCD panic attack about fantasy, science fiction, &c.
Another example of felony or nothing: immigration law and deportation of immigrant felons.
Obviously LOTR is going to be racist. It's based on medieval European legends. Duh.
"There are rule utilitarian reasons to make statutory rape illegal regardless of circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's inconceivable that a legal minor could ever have a good sexual experience with an adult."
Yeah, that sounds right.
But then, those same rule-utilitarian considerations that argue against legalizing sex with minors, also argue against celebrating sex with minors, or making it sounds as though minors just *love* getting sexed up by old people. E.g., doing so in a popular play.
Because, as you know, many rapists firmly believe that she really wants it and she really enjoys it and okay maybe she's resisting a bit but that's merely something to over-come. She'll get past that and then tell me how wonderful it was.
A depiction like this flatters that delusion.
I think that the world would be a better place if fewer rapists and would-be rapists had false beliefs of this sort.
The fact that they might be true of that one-in-a-millionth case does not mean that they are not pernicious and destructive when they inform the beliefs of people might act on them.
So, sure, Brooks and Althouse are wrong to say that whatever Ensler did somehow excuses what Foley did--these are pathetic responses from pathetic Republican apologists. And I really don't think that Brooks' position needs any "rebutting"--it's just stupid on the face of it.
But I take it that FL's post is about the question "what do we think about a fictional depiction that endorses this behavior?"
And I think: there is already enough fodder out there for rape-fantasies, thanks. The world is not improved by more depictions of women--worse than that, girls--saying how rape was really good for them.
As I said in the post, at least based on the production I saw it's an egregious midreading.
well, certainly the part of the Vagina Monologues where the orcs are wearing heavy eye-liner and then Legolas starts mincing around and all. Yeah, that was an egregious misreading, and I've heard Eve Ensler is *furious* at Jackson for having filmed it that way.
Emerson, anyone who would date a woman under the age of 30 is a pervert.
This monologue comes in the context of an entire show that returns to the "rape sucks" theme again and again. For that matter, her relationship with the woman is in the context of a monologue that's already depicted a rape and said how much it sucked. Anyway, if the Vagina Monologues is about any one thing, it's about how you are in possession of a truth about your body and your experiences of it and with it that all sorts of people will try to distort and we would do well to hear how you speak it in your language. The monologues were based upon interviews with women; for all we know her original subject used the "good rape" line, although that shouldn't matter as long as it's realistic and true to a character, and I find it so. I'm pretty sure a guideline that elevates prudence over truth isn't going to be good for art. There's no reason to be senseless about the stories you tell or the language you do it in, but I thought that "good rape," was chosen advisedly, to say to the show's exceedingly anti-rape choir, even you might not like the terms in which women describe themselves and their lives, and you too may have to work hard to understand them and to develop a moral understanding that's broad enough to contain them. Maybe few poeple can hear that, but that's really not the fault of the show qua art (though in practice VM is something of a political tool, and in that role it has to take into account the audiences's limitations). Anyway, I think a moral idea that it's wrong for adults to have sex with teenagers should be elastic enough to absorb the notion that harms will vary, or it's going to crash on the shoals of reality.
Kaysko, you've failed to normalize for inflation. But then, Origen and Cosmas Indicopleustes didn't understand inflation either, so why should you?
It's a Slovak insult. Kotsko will understand.
Maybe one of the posters can put this up on the main page, but you guys want to help out with the fight against the government's holding of people at GTMO without access to trial? Then you can help me. I need news stories of people detained at GTMO against whom the allegations are slim/nonexistent/unsubstantiated. As I understand it, there have been a lot of these stories over the past few years, but it's hard to know what to look for, because I'm not very good at remembering names. So if you want to help out, you can email links to me.
rockpaperswords at gmail dot com
Or people could just post them in a comments thread, that would work, too.
Here are a bunch of links to interviuews Seth Farber at the Talking Dog did with Guantanamo lawyers. There should be a lot of information there, and probably also contact information for some of them.
For anyone interested int eh Guantanamo project, Farber is a great contact too. He's a NYC lawyer whose politics is in the Emerson / Mcmanus zone, except that he's sane and competent.
"I'm not a Slovak"
well, see? That's a Slovak insult right there. One of the harshest.
"I'm pretty sure a guideline that elevates prudence over truth isn't going to be good for art."
Granted. If you adopt a rule-utilitarian outlook, there's no guarantee that it's going to be good for art. That depends on whether art itself is good for--whatever it is your rules are maximizing for (I assume you have in mind happiness/welfare/utility/whatits).
So it's kinda silly to say "we're going to regulate *behavior* by rule-utilitarian standards, judging everything by the criterion of its consequences for whatits. *Except art*, where we're going to adopt the MGM slogan, that it is to be elevated for its own sake, without regard to consequences for whatsits."
Not necessarily incoherent, mind you, since there are many subspecies in the genus of utilitarianisms. But silly.
(That's another Slovak insult).
Emerson, you're not a pervert according to the condition I gave because you have a no-relationship policy.
I personally think that it would be an amusing scenario for other people if I were to date someone around 18 or so. I don't think I ultimately have enough money to pull it off, though. Maybe after I get tenure.
yeah, after tenure they moved me up to fifty cents over minimum wage.
Academics is a good racket for other reasons (e.g. all the Middle English Prose treatises you can eat) but even after tenure you're never going to have the money to pull anything off.
Except the things you could have pulled off for free, all along.
LOTR was egregiously bad in that way, with the straight-line correlation between palor and goodness.
I think you're reading too much into this.
right, like the extra 'L' in 'pallor'.
the kind of incredibly stupid person who makes relationship decisions based on inspired theatrical performances
Is there any other kind of person?
I second m. leblanc's request. (we're actually working on this together--small world).
61,62,73: he's not very obscure as GITMO prisoners go, but the Committee to Protect Journalists has a long story on Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who's been held for almost five years now.
74 -- This points up an obvious way to search for news stories: look for any and all mentions of Clive Stafford-Smith. That and look at the archives on www.cageprisoners.com.
Now that is a great idea. And I can't believe I forgot cageprisoners.
Katherine, I guess the main-page posters don't love us enough to put up a post. That's sad. 18 months of commenting and this is the love I get!
Send them an email. Maybe they quit reading this thread.