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

[ratcreature]

Huh. I sort of had the impression that standards have become more prudish with sex and underage teenagers, at least compared to things like kink and same-sex relationships where the tend seems the opposite to me. But I mean, the softcore porn from the seventies that my dad used to watch in late night reruns may have had legal actresses (well between 16 and 19 at least), but the stories were claiming some to be just 14, and also I think currently the they wouldn't let 16 year olds work in sex films anymore but you have to be over 18.

And okay, it has been a while since I was a teenager, so maybe it has changed yet again, but in the sex education lessons and sometimes in general discussions my teachers kind of, not really complained, but well, they thought we were more prudish and sexually conservative when it came to having casual sex and sex with multiple changing partners and such. Mostly they blamed it on AIDS and a conservative backlash or something, but to me it seemed that many teachers disapproved of the emphasis their students put on faithfulness and monogamy and actual more longterm relationships before sex in their values, rather than just fooling around as a teenager or something.

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

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?

I think that the shift is not so much, "teenagers, what are you going to do?" as "teenagers are doing this, so let's stop pretending they're not." Especially for my generation, who hit puberty right around the time that GRID became AIDS, there was a very real sense that pretending that kids weren't having sex would lead to disaster, because we wouldn't get safer sex education.

I also think that it's important to note that reactions to underaged sex vary from community to community--just as the actual definitions of underaged do. My mother was pregnant and unmarried at 16, but the family reaction was very different in black rural Louisiana in 1952 than it would have been had I gotten pregnant at 16 in Chicago in 1986.

As far as fic, well...the age of consent in the UK is 16. Then you look at the wizarding world in HP, where most people seem to get married straight out of Hogwarts, where an 11 (and 12, and 13, and 14...) year old boy is expected to save the world, and where yet anbother generation of kids is growing up front and center in a war. How do you decide what a reasonable age of consent is for kids who are watching as their classmates and teachers are being killed around them?

The real problem I have with arguments like the one from Brad you mentioned is that it presumes direct causality: people read something > they change their attitudes, always in the direction of favoring what they read. Art and entertainment can be a factor, I think, but not the only factor in shaping cultural parameters. Yes, there's more acceptance of same-sex relationships now, but that's as much and probably more because more people know gay men and lesbians in real life as it is because a lot of people saw Brokeback Mountain or watched The L Word.

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

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?

Um, not really. My grandmother eloped at 15 (with the 30-year-old guy next door, the brother of the wife of one of her brothers), and had my uncle when she was 16.

My impression is that parents are more controlling of teens than when I was one; and that voluntary virginity is more common amoung young, unmarried adults than when I was in college. At the same time there's more of an acknowledgment that sex in many, many forms exists and that we need to have a range of personal and societal responses.

- Helen

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I too remember when 16-y.o.s got *married* without it being much of an eyebrow-raiser. Fourteen was considered too young, but it was still known to happen.

(note that I am fully old enough to be hth's mother, so her calling herself "old" makes me roll my eyes a bit)

What I see is that the age of puberty has been dropping while the age at which marriage is economically feasible has been rising, so young people are sexually mature but economically & psychologically immature for a longer period. This causes all kinds of ambivalent & messed-up feelings in adults, and our society deal with it via the classic mechanisms of repression & projection. And of course, that trick *never* works.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

That last argument is an interesting one, but I still think that it's difficult to argue that media slash fans are a force for cultural change. We are still a tiny tiny minority of TV viewers, let alone the general population. Even if you one hundred percent agree with the argument, it's hard to see how it applies here. It would be easier to use this as an argument against representations of underage sex or sex between a teacher and a student in yaoi in Japan, where about 10% of women read it. For slash you could argue that it changes slashers' view of normalcy, but I don't think we are legion enough to seriously skew the jury pool.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

As always, I think has already said (http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=567) everything relevant on the topic. Um. Sort of.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake, and she and her cousin go to pick up the washing that her aunt sends out to be done.

And the woman doing the washing says she's been very busy since her daughter was just married, and as Laura and her cousin drive away, they talk about this, kind of weirded out, because the girl in question is thirteen -- Laura's age, and a year younger than her cousin.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link and these are great questions!!!

I'm wondering, though, whether movies like Kids or MTV documentaries where 12 and 13 year olds discuss blowjobs (saw it at a conference and can't remember the title) do much more to shape cultural norms than a highly stylized, clearly metaphorical PP story (or, even more stylized, yaoi fic). Or, to follow darkrosetiger's argument, the fact that the kids interviewed in Kids and that documentary are already having sex?

I mean, I agree that there are ideas that I remember shocking me years a ago that now are quite run of the mill or even turn me on...but I can't say whether that's me growing up/general cultural exposure/specifically fanfic related...

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about that, too.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

There's more in later books -- like when Almanzo starts taking Laura out, Ma objects because she thinks 15 is too young, NOT because she thinks it's creepy or skeezy that a 22-yr-old wants to take out a 15-yr-old. (Almanzo's not really that old, but everyone thinks he is.)

So clearly different people had different ideas of what they wanted for their children -- one woman married a daughter off at 13, but Ma thought 15 was too young to date -- but it was clearly at least acceptable to marry a daughter off very young indeed. (I wonder how many of these decisions were menarche-based? Old enough to bleed....)

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

Also meant to say -- today, at least in the parts of the US I am familiar with, if a 22 yr old dates a 15 yr old, that is MEGASKEEZEWORLD, and her parents would (one hopes) not care so much about whether she was old enough to date at all but about how to get this sick creepo away from their child.

Big difference to just a hundred-odd years ago, what?

[ratcreature]

Hmm, I'm actually not sure as how skeezy it would be seen here. I know that when I was in high school girls quite often had older boyfriends. I mean, usually just age differences like 14 year girls with 17/18 year old boys and such, but I think I remember one or two who had boyfriends that were out of school already. I didn't really find that very creepy.

And clearly some people have surprisingly different boundaries, like recently there was some newspaper article here about a twelve year old who had given birth and the boyfriend was 17, and well, besides finding it strange that her parents apparently didn't notice the pregnancy (or didn't want to), they knew that she had a 17 year old boyfriend, and well, I try not to judge other people's parenting, and it's not as if they could have locked her away, but still, I can't help but thinking that the parents should have done something, or intervened, considering that she got pregnant when she was eleven (and the newspaper at least didn't report anything of the kind that her parents had any massive problems of their own making them outright neglect their kids or some kind of completely broken social situation that would explain this). Still the parents let her knowingly sleep over that her boyfriend's at least according to the newspaper article (and that guy must have parents who should have at least still some idea about their kid as well even if he was nearly 18), well to me that is really kind incomprehensible. You'd think that at least they would have strongly impressed on the guy the need for safe sex (even if they didn't want to go the route of threatening him with the laws making sex with people under 14 illegal here) or had their daughter see a doctor to talk about a contraceptive prescription or something, if they felt that preventing her from having sex wasn't feasible anymore. I mean, I admit that I don't have a clue about parenting, but it seems to me that if you know or suspect that your kid is sexually active (which with a 17 year old boyfriend isn't a stretch) and still very young, it's your responsibility to at least try to make sure she's safe, rather than to go for a head in the sand approach. Though I think both the boyfriend and the parents are now in some legal trouble. But the ideas of appropriateness apparently vary quite widely.

[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.

Younger Than She Are Happy Mothers Made

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Sorry for not having a cite, but I've read that in a lot of pre-modern societies, menarche was at 18 or so and sexual activity began earlier, so there was a period of time when young women could have sex without being at risk of pregnancy. However, now menarche is much, much earlier, so most girls start having sex when they are at high risk of pregnancy--a completely different dynamic. Until fairly recently, a lot of 17- and 18-year-old women were pregnant, but it wasn't considered a social problem because they were married (whether or not the marriage was triggered by pregnancy or followed pregnancy or was unrelated to it). Post-Pill and pre-AIDS, it was also much more practical for young women to have sex than it is now.

I do find a lot of the discourse about "protecting" children online to be puzzling--I mean, whatthehell kind of parent lets their 12-year-old go out on dates with strangers they met online? And I don't think "protecting" is quite the right word for "finding a mechanism so your 16-year-old son doesn't spend so much time downloading porn he forgets to eat and sleep."

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

How old ARE you? I'm 43, and was made to feel like a late bloomer because I didn't have sex until I was 16. I remember in ninth grade half my friends had done it. In 1978-79.

And when I was 16, I dated guys in their late teens and early 20s, and it wasn't viewed with even a tenth of the opprobrium that it is today. The Seventies and early pre-AIDS Eighties were a bad old era. Trust me on this.

Re: Younger Than She Are Happy Mothers Made

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Yea, I think the word people miss is PARENTING. It's not equivalent to protecting, although that certainly is a component. It's also about educating. And setting rules and boundaries.

It completely baffles me when people say things like "oh well kids are just going to ____ anyway, so....". Uhm. Yes, kids will test boundaries, and sometimes they will make horrible decisions/mistakes in that process. But realizing that is a possibility vs. throwing up your hands, buying your kids beer, porn and condoms are two different things. Unfortunately, a lot of parents don't see it that way. So it becomes *our* job to parent someone else's children. And you know, I have one of my own. That's all the joy I can handle, thanks.

Hm. Tangential, apologies. All that's to say, I agree with you that the discourse around "protecting" and "children" and "online" is skewed.

[emeraldsword.livejournal.com]

Random but related, I had no idea until I started teaching kids that puberty hits so young. One of my 8 year olds was in a tight top the other day, and she'll need a training bra soon, which is really scary. I had one at ten, but there's a lot of difference between 8 and 10.

Also relevent, the sexist comment 'if she's old enough to bleed, she's old enough to breed' - OK, this is just an excuse for the men who like young girls, but...girls get their first period around 12, which does imply a certain amount of physical maturity. So to say that none of those girls will have sex until they go to university is very optimistic (assuming that you think that early sex is a bad thing....for the record, I think it depends)

[catalenamara.livejournal.com]

>>>>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 really. Age of Consent was 16 when/where I grew up (rural), and plenty of girls were consenting. When I first started working (in the 70s), most of the women I worked with who were half a generation or older had gotten married at 16, 17 or 18... Very few had married any later than 18. One of my contemporaries had been married and divorced twice by the time she was 18.

In an odd way, I think there's a lot more attention paid to these issues now than there was then. Of course, this all depends on where a person was raised, and rural America is very different from suburban America.

[elf]

Keep in mind that sexual activity, for humans, has pretty much always started in the mid-to-late teen years. Everywhere. It's only in the last 200 years, maybe less (maybe much less) that it was expected to wait until 18 for pretty much everyone.

Before that, 15-year-old girls with 16-year-old boyfriends were damn well expected to get married.

There's a BIG difference between "sex with minor(s) involved" and "sex involving at least one person who hasn't reached puberty." One is a matter of local law and custom--hey, didja know age of consent in New Hampshire is 12?--the other ties into ethics based on biology.

[gracecourage.livejournal.com]

Word!

In 1973, when I was 17, I was the last virgin standing in my crowd. Every other girl in my circle, in my family, had sex for the first time at either 14 or 15. (And I wasn't waiting because I wanted to, but because I was the girl boys wanted to be friends with -- chubby, geeky, kind of plain -- in a crowd of "OMG, your [friend/sister/whatever] is soooo hot; introduce me?" girls. Huh. I'm still that girl.)

[thawrecka]

Interesting. There are studies that say children are having sex for the first time younger than they did 20 years ago - the average age is now 12, apparently. It does make one wonder.

[ratcreature]

Seriously? There were some newsarticles last autumn about some global study that had been published in the Lancet, and according to the newsarticles it was a myth that teenagers had sex earlier today than ten years ago. Like here is a news article about it:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15501173/
"The study also found that contrary to popular belief, sexual activity is not starting earlier. Nearly everywhere, men and women have their first sexual experiences in their late teens — from 15 to 19 years old — with generally younger ages for women than for men, especially in developing countries. That is no younger than 10 years ago."

What kind of study did you read? Do you have links? Now I have no clue what kind of data they analyzes and where that came from (the news didn't elaborate) and obviously if the average somewhere is 16 there's bound to be some having sex earlier, but still.

[thawrecka]

Interesting. I read it in a magazine but at work, so I don't have links and there's every chance it's incorrect.