Inquisition 21
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The age of consent
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The question central to our sexual absolutism
The age of consent
What is the age of consent?
It varies by country and for male-female, male-male, and female-female sex. The age of consent in countries where you must be married to engage in sex is synonymous with the marriageable age. According to the Wikipedia, 'the marriageable age for Iran is 15 for males, 13 for females. For Pakistan it is 18 for males, 15 for females. In Yemen, in 1999, the minimum marriage age of fifteen for women, rarely enforced, was abolished; the onset of puberty, interpreted by conservatives to be at the age of nine, was set as a requirement for consummation of marriage'. From Human Rights Watch: World Report 2001 on Yemen.
There appears to be no age limit for sex with girls in Saudi Arabia as long as you are married to the girl (that she is one of your wives). It is 12 in Chile, Colombia and Paraguay and appears to be undefined or irrelevant in Ecuador and Mexico. It is 13 in Guyana, Korea, Nigeria, South Korea, Spain and Syria. It is 14 in Canada and China, the latter with the world’s largest population of over 1.2 billion, and 14 also in many other countries. Most of the balance varies from 14 up to a few countries where it is 18. For a full list see Ages of consent around the world.
Sex between males, homosexuality, is illegal in Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei, Burma, Burundi, Cameroon, Georgian Russia, Grenada, Guyana, India, Iran, Jamaica, Jordon, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mauritius , Mozambique, Namibia, Oman, Papua-New Guinea, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Syria, Tanzania, Tonga, Trinidad, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Zaire, Zimbabwe, and in the following US States – Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North and South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and in the US military. Note that India, one of the countries with the world’s largest populations, is on this list, together with many of the most repressive regimes, some of which would use the death penalty against convicted homosexuals, such as certain Muslim countries and the US state of Alabama (for sodomy).
There is a wide range of ages of consent for male-male sex in the countries that have recognized it. Most appear to be 18, while a few are 21.
Sex between females, lesbianism, is unknown or ignored in many countries which was true of almost all countries until Western culture began to recognize and publicize, and even celebrate, it in recent times. Amongst the countries that we can assume ignore it are many African states, Cambodia, China, some central and south American countries, Indonesia and Nepal. It is illegal in Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Benin, Brunei, Guyana, Grenada, India, Iran, Jamaica, Jordon, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mauritius, Oman, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Swaziland, Syria, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Zimbabwe, and in the following US States – Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North and South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and in the US military (the same states that ban homosexuality).
One can see that some of the countries that forbid homosexuality ignore or do not know about lesbianism, and that the list of those that do forbid it is dominated by repressive regimes. Once again, India appears to be in strange company.
There is a wide range of ages of consent for female-female sex in the countries that have recognized it. Canada may be the most interesting – 14 for male-female, 18 for male-male, and 14 again for female-female. Korea is consistent with 13 the age for all three. Some of the Muslim countries have 12, or any age, for legal male-female sex and forbid both male-male and female-female sex altogether.
So, can we make some kind of summary? The most important factor affecting our lives and the creation of oppressive legislation is the male-female legal age of consent. When we take India’s 16 and China’s 14 into account, it appears that most of the world’s people and their governments accept 12 to 16 to be an appropriate age for a female to have sex with a male, with the largest proportion being in the 14-16 acceptance group. Against this outstanding figure, we should consider that Western countries criminalizing child pornography, including nude or erotic images of young people, are setting the age for illegal underage depictions at below 18.
Not only does this result in the anomaly that while most girls in the world can legally engage in sexual activity under the age of 18, they cannot be photographed or allow themselves to be photographed either engaging in sex or posing graphically. As hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of them, have in the past engaged in such posing before the legislation was enacted, huge numbers of images, which were formerly legal, are now illegal, making it possible for police and prosecutors to criminalize individuals who already posses them or who intentionally or accidentally may now access them.
The historical perspective
What part if any has the underage girl played in the human imagination before she became the designated holy object of our times, to be both revered and feared? Where was she between the time when noble men romped with rosy-cheeked boys in Ancient Greece and her appearance in the ‘Internet pornography’ of today? One answer may be that she did not exist in the human psyche as she does today. The historian Will Durant tells us that a girl in Europe could be betrothed at the age of three but that marriage was usually delayed until she was twelve, and that by the fifteenth century an unmarried daughter of fifteen was a family disgrace. It was the later opening up of education to girls that delayed marriage. Durant adds that the marriage ages by the Reformation had become fourteen for boys but were still twelve for girls, and that sexual relations after betrothal and before the wedding were condoned. He mentions the practice of ‘bundling’ in Sweden and Wales, and later in the US, where the unmarried lovers could sleep together, but were encouraged to avoid full intercourse by placing a sheet between their bodies.
There were also huge numbers of children being born and high infant mortality, dire poverty and hard, grinding labour. This resulted in the compression of childhood, while a general licentiousness between adults meant little time or energy, or perhaps the sexual frustration required, to begun contemplating children as objects of passion. Chiefly, however, the practice of girls marrying at twelve would have virtually eliminated at a stroke any large scale contemplation of the pubescent female as an object of virginal titillation, capable of conjuring up the magic of eroticism. We would look in vain for romance in the poor brats of Dickens, and what would have become the unfortunate young heroine of Les Miserables had she not been rescued and brought to the convent?
As far back as the year 1300, Beatrice had entered human history and cultural consciousness through the mind and pen of Dante, having been first seen and loved instantly by him when she was a nine year old girl, a creature of beauty and innocence, through whose eyes shone the eyes of God. She may have become the archetype of what was to emerge eventually as the most honoured of the human species.
In the sixteenth century, Caravaggio painted raunchy male cupids which engage us with what some commentators describe as their ‘provocative soliciting gaze’. This description could suit many of the female models that were to follow in our own times.
Almost 500 years after Beatrice, in 1787, our world received the first published account of what today we would call ‘child pornography’. Here, in the words of the author, is the child as the perfect model for the coming depravity, as she is a twelve year old girl. “(Her features had) delicacy, timidity, and the most admirable modesty. For (she) had a virginal air, great blue eyes, gentle with concern, a clear dazzling complexion, a small slender body, a voice of touching softness, ivory teeth, and beautiful fair hair. These were the subtle charms - - -, whose innocent grace and delicious features were so delicate and ethereal that they would escape the very brush which would depict them.”
She is Justine as presented to us by the Marquis de Sade, and what is most shocking about these words is that as we picture this innocent, trembling virginal creature, we know that the author has created her for us thus, so that we may participate in her ravishment and defilement, and even torture.
In what is extant in Western culture we appear to have gone from the adoration and celebration of an earthly angel through Dante to her rape and debasement through de Sade. Shockingly, her very innocence and virtue fuel the lusts that also ravish her. Here in these two, Beatrice and Justine, we have the formula for the child pornography moral panic of the late 20th and early 21st century. We are afraid to look at Beatrice less we see her through the eyes of de Sade. Worse still, no matter how much we cloak her in our moral burkha, visions of what our human imagination can do to her persist, so we scream out in hatred at the monster that threatens our ideal. But, because of the persistent moral panic about her, and our obsession about hiding and protecting her – indeed denying her very essence, that monster is now firmly within all of us.
From about this historical point, the romantic child begins to appear, as images of both boys and girls are used to decorate books and greeting cards, little female fairies in particular becoming very popular. By the nineteenth century, many more boys and girls are appearing in salon and anecdotal art, especially the latter, which allowed erotic (soft porn) treatment of a subject as the picture was allowed to tell a story. Typical was the beautiful draped, or half naked, young woman accompanied by Cupids, and, as the Victorian era picked up pace, the Cupid boys got bigger and more suggestive. Around the 1860s some artists were showing cupids embracing ‘the young woman in love’, in the case of a few Royal Academy pictures with the barely robed young woman seated with legs apart, Cupid standing between her knees, the wings that legalized him sprouting from his upper back, but under those wings presented to us was his well-developed fourteen year old bare bottom.
Apart from the cupids, little girls with cute tummies and slight suggestions of budding breasts began to appear, both in decorative borders around poetry pages and in their own right as nymphs and fairies. The sweet little girl had begun to show some sensuousness. The anecdotal story also allowed more liberty with girls, but because the picture could tell a story there was still no admitted concept of eroticism in little girls.
But a new device had entered the world and was about to focus on both young women and little girls and produce another erotic genre.
In 1861, almost 600 years after Dante’s Beatrice, the first single-lens reflex camera was patented, and a year later Lewis Carroll began his Alice stories as he took Alice Liddell and her friends on riverside outings. Alice Liddell begged him to write them down and the results produced the first fully-rounded and defined young girl in the human imagination, the Alice of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, and not just the pictorial image of her we all soon came to know, but her firmness, determination and sense of aggravation. She romps through our imagination. But before we sigh with the relief of assuming that her freshness and frankness had banished any possibility of girlish eroticism, we are reminded that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used the new camera that he also fell in love with to photograph his little girl friends in the nude, with the permission of their parents.
While printing was the first vehicle to make mass pornography through stories possible, the camera began to give it its visual dimensions, leading to full moving images. Before the printing press and the camera, paintings and storytelling were the only mediums for delivering pornography to a wide audience as the handwritten scroll had poor transmission potential. The Romans had to travel to Pompeii to see and enjoy the erotic paintings.
By the early part of the 20th century, at first halted by the world wars, thousands of photo magazines began to emerge, and by the 1950s and 1960s these included many devoted to child nudity and child eroticism, pre-teen and early teenaged girls being by far the most popular. Scans of these constituted the majority of what was to become known as child pornography on the Internet, but most were originally on open sale in magazine stores, with a few countries such as Holland being major sources.
At the turn of the 20th century, James Joyce gives us a glimpse of profound beauty and eroticism through the pain of Stephen as he beholds a maiden bathing her feet and legs on Sandymount Strand and wants to cry out about her to the heavens. Then near the mid 20th century, almost 100 years after Alice, Vladimir Nabokov uttered the hitherto unspeakable, and launched his bombshell, Lolita, not just admitting that underaged girls could be sexually enticing, but allowing his character to have intercourse with her. Here is how he introduces his subject: “Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’.” See how Brona Balfe advances a similar theory in The laws of beauty. In reading Brona, we could also remember that Nabokov also described true nymphets as constituting an ‘enchanted island’, as distinct from millions of ordinary girls, who are certainly not nymphets, and says that we need to be artists to spot them.
Later in the book, Nabokov becomes clinical in his definition: “The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) - - - the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years).” And here is how his character first saw Lolita: “My Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. - - - frail, honey-hued shoulders, silky, supple bare back, chestnut head of hair- - -.”
There are at least two major aspects of Lolita to be wondered at. The first historical - that it had it taken so long for the world’s writers and artists to openly admit to the powerful sexuality of certain twelve year old girls, indeed to define them as objects worthy of adoration. De Sade’s interest almost 200 years earlier had been brushed away as sadism. The second aspect of Lolita to be wondered at is how it got published at all. Indeed at the time the publisher suggested that both he and the author could go to prison. Today both of them certainly would.
Child love – the crimen exceptum
Around the same time that the TV crews were rushing to
Aristotle's Bookshop in NZ, news trucks and TV crews were camping out front and back of the Indiana home of Kevin Brown. Central to the hysterical media interest in both cases was the organization, NAMBLA, the North America Man-Boy Love Association. Jim Peron had little or no contact with NAMBLA, whereas Kevin Brown was openly and rashly defending the rights of ‘child lovers’ against lynch mobs. Jim however was known to harbour and express ideas about human sexuality that some conservative heterosexual New Zealanders might not agree with. For example, he had written what one could consider to be one of the best exposes of the moral panic of child pornography. See above- 'The claptrap over child porn'.
Already on this Inquisition21 web site were two other stories of significance concerning ‘boy love’, both of which had implications for all love of, or between, legal minors. The first was the strange case of Tom O’Carroll, whose expressed ideas brought ruin and imprisonment upon him. The second is the still developing story of Gerald, whose former underage homosexual lovers married women counsellors and turned against him. That case above all exposes the reality of the ‘age of consent’ quandary, and it is a quandary, and even more so for boys just under or above 18 who have younger girl friends, who might one day also turn against them and make them criminals.
The same age of consent quandary has created thousands of criminals and ushered in an age of fear that may destroy the new freedoms offered by the Internet through the designation of thousands of existing under 18 year old images, of girls in particular, as ‘child pornography’, simply by raising the age of the legally ‘underaged’ (See above).
What Peron, Brown and O’Carroll, however, were attacked for was for their expression of ideas, their very questioning of both age of consent issues and the attitudes of society towards child sexuality and adult-child sexuality. Writing on this subject, it is almost mandatory to stress that the argument is not about promoting child sexuality, but about the right and necessity to discuss it. One can go further: the necessity is that we must acknowledge how the censorship of any ideas about it is being used as an instrument of inquisition.
If we believe that such suppression will remain with child sexuality only, leaving all other ideas free for expression and discussion, that belief will soon vanish as we acknowledge that censorship and criminalization have already spread from the subject of child sexuality to any criticism of race, gender or sexual orientation (other than child love ironically), and are moving steadily in the direction of the suppression of ideas deemed to be socially inappropriate and even to the criticism of the legislation itself. Such as writing like this, here on this web site.
See also Parents your children are at great risk!
where we examine the great dangers already created in the area of the age of sexual consent itself.
The age of consent stories
The main age of consent story on this web site is that of Gerald, whose former underage homosexual lovers married women counsellors and turned against him.
There is also A 21st century tragedy.
His art became his life.
And several stories about Sex and children.
How it could be
Brona Balfe takes us into a magical kingdom in Beauty is immanent.
The age of consent
The women victims of the sex witch hunts
Grotesque eleven year sentence
A question of intent
Meet an American teenage sex monster
"It was awesome!" A child sex abuse case for salivating over.
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