TMI to follow.
I had just turned 16 and my first “relationship” was with a 21 year old woman. Was she a perv? Was I? More to the point, was I old enough to consent? Should she have been prosecuted?
Flip it. If the guy was 21 and the girl was 16, how would you feel about it?
It’s not clear that he was ‘around’ much at all. At least the Weide camp maintains Mia and Woody kept quite separate households.
There is no question that Woody a) likes the young ladies (i.e. high teens/early 20s), and b) behaved with epic awfulness to Mia (who may in her own way have been epically awful too… the whole thing is a train wreck of astonishing proportions).
It does not therefore follow that he is into molesting seven year olds. Woody versus Dylan is one accusation, one accuser, and one person’s word versus another. If Soon Yi facts are relevant as context, then so is everything Moses Farrow has said about Mia’s manipulation of Dylan.
How do you think I should feel about it? I was in the relationship. I knew how I felt and how she felt. That I can discuss. Now I’m asking what you feel about my particular situation. I’ll answer your question after you answer mine. Okay?
Fair enough. I think it’s wrong. I don’t expect the 16 year old to know better, but the 21 year old should’ve. If I had found out that my 16 year old daughter was hooking up with a 21 year old adult, I would’ve had words with that person. The same would apply to my son when he was 16.
I’m sure this came up in a teacher/statutory rape thread, but we have this weird double standard with boys and girls hooking up with adults. Boys get this high-five wink-wink reaction when they do it, while the older woman is seen as pathetic. Girls are victims or sluts, while the older man is seen as a pervert.
I think 5 years is at the outside edge of being pervy vsacceptable. I know that some statutory rape laws are written that if the pair are with 3-5 years of age it is not statutory rape.
We do have a double standard with respect to men and woman hooking up with minors. But IIRC there is actual research that shows 15-16 year old boy having sex with hot 25-30 year old teacher suffers little to no psychological harm, while if you reverse the sexes the girl generally is victimized. Sex is different between men and women, so I don’t think there is anything wrong society having different views.
So High Five Rich :-).
I think an 18 year old and a 13 year-old relationship would be… not okay. that 3-5 range heavily depends on the ages involved.
Please don’t do that. That wasn’t my point.
I agree. It is been a long time since I looked up statutory rapes law, so I am maybe mis-remembering the range. But the newer laws were written so that the high school senior who turned 18 couldn’t be charged for statutory rape for having sex with their freshman or sophomore partner. It seemed like a reasonable rule.
But to a certain extent any of these age rules are very arbitrary and are very much a function of modern western culture which treats people as children far longer than other times or cultures.
They’re not entirely arbitrary. You won’t find a lot of people out there who are not also pervs who think 13 year old individuals are mature enough to make decisions about sex. Child brides is also not something I would accept. A 60 year old man with a 14 year old girl, not okay. He can ask her again when she turns 18.
I didn’t realize that being anti child bride was a controversial point of view on this forum!
Does anyone think that the time is an issue? When I was involved with Susan, it was around 1975-76. Doesn’t the era speak to the mores?
I’m with you I find it gross. But 13 year old brides are accepted by a majority of the people on earth, just not in developed countries. Even within developed countries 50-75 years ago, I’m sure it was perfectly legal in most developed countries and in the 19th century commonplace. I’d like to think it is progress that we outlaw child brides.
But logically with both sexes, and especially girl reaching puberty earlier I’m not sure there is a lot evidence to prove our western values are superior to our grandparents or many Arab, Asian, African, and Latin American cultures, other than feels icky and wrong.
In those countries, how many of them afford rights to women at even a fraction of the rights the developed countries do. The one group that is victimized is the one that tends to have little to no voice in the process, so logic does dictate that if you add more voices, especially of the target group, and things change, there is a reason for that… it’s not arbitrary that when women speak they speak for girls and women.
For what it’s worth I don’t consider any age difference to be perverted in any shape or form. Be it 10 years, 20 years or more. As long as local law is respected RE: age of consent then I see no problem. Human behavior is a spectrum and who are we to judge the outliers on that spectrum?
I think it says more about us as a society that we respect others decisions rather than deriding their life choices for being “gross and icky”.
In other news…
I’m not defending Weinstein but does anyone else think Rose McGowan seems somewhat unhinged?
I’d like to see one of these studies @Strollen mentioned about the psychological effects of a 16 year old boy and a mid twenties woman in a sexual relationship. What were the tests like? What was the hypothesis and how was it tested? What was the control? Inquiring minds want to know…
Even in cultures where 13-year olds get married, it’s not necessarily considered normal or encouraged. Off the top of my head (reminded by the Gettysburg thread), Gen. Pickett in the Civil War was considered a weirdo for marrying a 14-year old. It’s not at all a modern innovation for people to wait until their late teens or even twenties to get married.
I think lots of people have dated women whom they’ve known since childhood. For instance, Anthony Mackie met his future wife at the age of seven. He, too, watched her grow up. You might ask him when he became sexually attracted to her. But I really don’t think that’s an appropriate question.
Rose McGowan appeared on The Late Show and was obviously under the influence of something. Colbert did a great job trying to engage with her stream of consciousness, gently steering the topic of discussion back to her recent work and involvement with what’s become the #metoo movement, but it was pretty hard to watch. Knowing that ex-Mossad agents were hired by a wretched man to tail and discredit you, on top of everything else, would certainly be traumatic enough to inflict serious emotional harm on anyone.
Yikes. Replies to her tweets about this interview are sort of amusing where half the people are walking on eggshells about the fact that she is clearly out of her mind here and the other half are rebuking those people and commending her for being so real. What a world we live in.