legal beagles?

[hth]

The redoubtable bradhicks has some doubts about the legality of fansmut with underage characters. Well, he's got no doubts; he thinks it's illegal. I don't know anything about the cases and precedents he cites, so if anyone out there who's really together on the topic wants to weigh in on his thread, that'd be awesome. He's a hugely widely read blogger, and this would be an important place, IMO, for fandom to make sure all the facts are straight, if they aren't currently.

The latter part of his post is, I think, even more interesting, and it's something I've been thinking about a lot ever since the debate started -- in brief, even if the art and entertainment we consume doesn't change our behavior, it's impossible to argue with a straight face that it doesn't change what falls inside and outside our sense of normalcy. Things that sound scandalous when you've never really heard of them before, or only in dark whispers -- well, it's much, much harder to continue seeing those things as scandalous, or even newsworthy at all, if you've seen the movie, the video on MTV, and read all the fic, you know?

And our definition of "underage" is one place where it isn't just maybe going to happen, it has already happened. Come on, those of you who are old like me, don't you remember when it was sort of shocking and awful, a Sad Commentary on Society, when fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls were sexually active? Not that it didn't happen -- it's always happened, obviously -- but there was this sort of universal tsk-tsk, because it seemed so very young. Now, post-Britney, post-Buffy, the same idea seems to pass by without much of a blink. There's a shrug response instead of a tsk-tsk, because teenagers, what are you gonna do?

And I'm not placing any particular moral value on that. Or rather, I think a pretty wide range of moral responses to that are understandable, from who the hell cares to real fear and frustration to the somewhat bizarre combination of the two that I feel. But the point is, since we know that community standards do change, in terms of what's perversion and what's kink, in terms of what's dirty and what's hot, in terms of what's pedophilia and what's a good, clean appreciation for the teenage pop princess of the month -- since we know that, can we in good conscience say that our edge-play will always remain edge-play and that we won't unwittingly produce so much of it that people start to think it's just another matter of taste? And as Brad points out, if nothing else, couldn't that make it a lot harder to convict real pedophiles, once you have a population (read: jury pool) that has come to view teachers who have sex with students or anyone who has sex with nubile adolescents as just another type of perfectly normal sexuality, perhaps one that's being unfairly persecuted by outdated and draconian laws?

Of course, that begs the question -- what if it is just another type of perfectly normal sexuality? Or to phrase it more accurately, if normal is just what we say it is, how can laws like age of consent and what constitutes sex with or porn about minors *not* be constantly in flux? And what does *that* mean, and is my lack of panic over Stuart/Nathan or my attraction to Emma Watson a genuine shaping force in changing the cultural parameters, even in ways I didn't set out to want them changed?

Comments

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

Well, right, the ideas of appropriateness are always going to vary widely, but the question is whether the variation is within cultural norms or not, and how those cultural norms can shift over time.

I mean, here, people under the legal age of consent do have sex, with each other or with older people, and some parents either ignore what their young kids are doing or don't care, but *generally* folks assume that parents *ought* to be vigilant about things like your underage daughter's boyfriend being WAY older than she is, because although some people find it acceptable, mostly people don't and consider it unhealthy and weird.

Which is something that has changed a good bit over time and also changes with social class and location and so on -- Louisa May Alcott was writing about the same period of time, but she was writing about New Englanders of some means (even the poverty-stricken Marches weren't really poor; they had a multi-bedroom house and a servant). And the girls she wrote about didn't marry until they were at least 18. Now, it's fiction, but -- fiction reflects, and she meant to faithfully reflect her times in many ways.

So 1865 in upper-class New England meant that Rose Campbell didn't marry until she was about 20, but 1865 in the one-room shanties of Dakota Territory meant that 13-yr-olds could be married off and it was a little odd, but not a major kerfuffle or anything.

Normal's all so...contextual.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I see what you mean. But here parents of teenagers commonly let their boyfriends and girlfriends sleep over with the assumption that they have sex, once they are 14 or 15 at least, and a couple of years age difference isn't too outrageous either. Even earlier sex isn't seen as that "deviant". What's really outside the norm is only when they end up with a family of their own (or even seen as stranger desire that intentionally rather than have an accidental pregnancy), because that teenagers start families isn't accepted anymore. So I'm not actually sure whether the age where having sex is seen as an acceptable decision for someone really changed that much from earlier times when more people married younger, or just the marrying part.