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Notes -
I'm kind of surprised that nobody mentioned Brooke Shields.
Yeah, there's a small array of that type of incident. While Shields's mother put her into sketchy stuff disturbingly far under the age range of Lords, by the time of the infamous 'nothing comes between me and my jeans' ad, she was 15 and... it seems like it was just social conservatives and some second wave feminists who even found it noteworthy? And that's only got press coverage because it could show up as a surprise in a magazine ad; far more explicit content was just getting commercial review as a product. She ended up in a lengthy court battle started when she was 16, trying to keep photos from six years before out of a Playboy Press publication. What the hell.
Which would be awkward enough if she were the only case, but nope.
There's a joke about the past being a foreign country, but it's weird to see how recently things can be so foreign. You hear about one-pants families in pre-1992 China (caveat: not sure I believe them, even as extreme outliers) or actually look at the Shakespeare-era Romeo and Juliet age ranges and shake them off as a distant. Then you look at this stuff and see 2003 in the United Kingdom or Brookes's 1980 filmography, and that's not so distant.
And then there's the broader Blue Is The Warmest Color problem, so we don't really object to the idea, so much as what's downstream of it. But then you start to see the reasons, and it's not exactly an arbitrary division.
I dunno. I don't really like thinking about this topic, so I really don't want to turn it into my 'beat'. But it's also probably important as to how we understand the world's norms, and about how new generations form romantic relationships, and there are recent court cases touching on its intersection with law and policy.
Can you please elaborate on these? I don't quite understand the references.
It does seem to me that no other group is even bringing up this bygone phenomenon anymore, and social conservatives do it to a much lesser extent than third/fourth-wave feminists whose attitude towards the Sexual Revolution and its consequences are mixed, to say the least, and are happy to dig up any example that counts in their worldview as the victimization of girls and young women by sleazebag older males in the name of sexual liberation and free love.
From a leftist point of view in general, on the other hand, the obvious problem with this issue is that the sexualization of both male and female children and adolescents that did take place after 1968 or so was only ever supported ideologically by liberal leftists, and it appears that their tribe eventually decid
For the UK: until 2003, the United Kingdom's of majority for the purpose of producing or featuring in pornography was 16, sometimes including topless sixteen-year-old girls being included in regular tabloid newspapers. It was only changed to 18 as a side component to a much larger bill. It's just weird to think that, well after Eternal September, this line wasn't some universal standard even just from the US to the UK.
Blue Is The Warmest Color is a French coming-of-age story, originally a comic and eventually turned into a well-recognized live-action film. It also features lesbian sex between an 'college student' and a 15-year-old. I haven't watched it, so I can't tell you what the protagonist's age is during the full-frontal six minute sex scene in the film version, but the story's pretty clear that they start hooking up while the protagonist is an early high school equivalent. It's mostly noteworthy because it received a pretty mainstream coverage and applause.
The general paradox applies more broadly: any coming of age story recognizing the initiation of sexual desire has to straddle the simultaneous recognition that most people start having it happen at teenage age ranges, and actually presenting it as happening at those age ranges can be a felony. Like, in reality, no, the law's never enforced that way, and probably can't be prosecuted in the United States. But also in practice, yes, because if you try to do it payment processors will treat it as illegal activity, most vendors won't accept it because it's illegal, and in most social environments it's worse than untreated leprosy. Unless they don't react that way, in which case it can be lauded by mainstream publications.
Shield's own The Blue Lagoon, 1980, is a heterosexual version. Even in written form, see the infamous underage orgy scene in Stephen King's It or various literary fiction, it's something we just accept. While not anywhere near as explicit, see Holden Caufield can hire a prostitute at the age of 16, the prostitute herself can be 16 and not new to the work, and it's assigned reading that most teachers just gloss over. Or for an extreme version, the various outstanding support of Harry Potter fanfic as a route for self-discovery that was extremely popular back before the author made her stance of transgender stuff public, and had (and has) an staggering amount of stuff that I hope you have good blocklists for.
You can avoid the paradox -- a lot of early furry fandom works handled it by having their characters wait until college to have their sexual awakening, leading to the establishment of the Off I Go To Gay Furry College genre; others by carefully not mentioning the age of their characters at all -- but this typically results or requires characters that have an unhealthy relationship with their sexuality at the start of the story, and kinda dodges the matter rather than resolving it.
I think that explains stuff like the Breendoggle being so heavily buried - even today, Marion Zimmer Bradley's stocked in stores that wouldn't consider keeping a monster like Orson Scott Card and be very cautious about Piers Anthony - but there's a pretty large faction of Red Tribers that do recognize 16-17 age sexuality as something that happens and is acceptable within their local cultural expectations. You just don't see many Borderer norms discussed as meaningful outside of their own environment.
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I'm not @gattsuru, but I assume the reference to the UK is the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which overhauled their consent structure. It kept the age of general consent at 16, but with penalties for authority figures having sexual contact with under-18s, and established strict liability for such contact with under-13s. But most of the news coverage seems to have been focused on the "equalizing" effect it had on heterosexual versus homosexual contact (previously, the "age of consent" was different in part based on sexuality).
This is presumably related to the movie Blue is the Warmest Color, which portrays a lesbian relationship beginning between a 15-year-old and a woman in her early 20s.
The cultural correlations between homosexual conduct and child abuse are sufficiently strong that even in the mid-20th century it was common to use the word "pederast" to describe a gay man as such. There are various reasons for the perceived correlations, and the "gay rights" movement has worked hard to disentangle the concepts in public perception, which is probably one reason why the Sexual Offences Act was seen as so important at the time. But at the same time, a lot of really popular LGBT media continues to positively portray a variety of statutorily problematic (i.e., ephebophile-not-pedophile) relationships.
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