Political change often follows a change in consciousness; the process of defamiliarisation through which things we once accepted as fine, or hated but believed were immutable, gain sufficient criticism as to become suddenly absurd. There is nothing like the shock registered by young children today when apprised of banished norms of the recent past – smoking on planes, women needing a man to co-sign for a credit card – to remind us how quickly universal assumptions can change. Among the list of gross things that, at present, still induce widespread shrugs are relationships between adult men and teenage girls. You wonder what it would take to make that taboo, too.
Calls for new laws around the age of consent in the UK, which is set at 16, came this week in the wake of the Russell Brand revelations, and were made in the first instance by one of his alleged victims, known as “Alice”. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Alice, who alleges she was sexually assaulted by Brand when she was 16 and he was in his 30s in an otherwise largely consensual relationship, suggested revisiting the consent laws to recognise that men “dating” girls in their teens entails a power imbalance that she considers to be abusive.
She suggested “staggered ages of consent”, in which “individuals between the ages of 16 and 18 can have relations with people within that same age bracket” but not older. In the wake of the interview, Jayne Butler, CEO of Rape Crisis England and Wales, told the Guardian that one way of doing this might be to look at extending current laws banning relationships between, for example, adult teachers and their teenage students, which remain in place even when the teenager is over 16.
It seems to me unlikely that these suggestions are anywhere close to being taken seriously at the level of the law. It hardly matters. Raising them in public, particularly in the wake of a scandal such as that around Brand, is helpful in denormalising a widely held assumption that old and middle-aged men chasing schoolgirls for sex is OK. Not just OK, in fact, but in line with the natural order of things and still able to trigger vague boasting rights.
There are so many instances of this kind of thing happening. To wit, photos of Bill Wyman (who dated teenager Mandy Smith when he was in his 40s) inevitably circulated this week, as did those of R Kelly (who married Aaliyah when she was 15 and he was 27). A lawsuit for sexual assault of a minor was brought against Steven Tyler of Aerosmith earlier this year, who in his own memoir described being in his late 20s with a girlfriend in her mid-teens whose “parents fell in love with me, signed a paper over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state. I took her on tour with me.” Tyler denies the allegations. Even good old Jerry Seinfeld, that legendary nice guy, dated a 17-year-old schoolgirl when he was 38, without raising much of an eyebrow.
People get off on all sorts of creepy things; it is no one’s business to judge. Given what we know about grooming, however, what remains depressing about the adult man/teenage girl dynamic is how resistant it is to the view that it’s creepy at all. When stories such as Russell Brand’s blow up, a lot of women I know flip the sexes and try to imagine pursuing a relationship with a 16-year-old boy, responding in the first instance, inevitably, with hysterical laughter, because, eeew!
And in the second – while glancing in the direction of Brand and men like him, irrespective of whether their behaviour is perfectly legal – with “what the hell is wrong with you?”
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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