Two of the biggest media brouhahas of the past few weeks inspired much hand-wringing over the sexualization of young girls.
The first was the April raid by the Texas state police on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a radical polygamist sect splintered from the Mormon denomination.
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The other big story involved Miley Cyrus, the "squeaky-clean" Disney icon, who got half-naked for Vanity Fair, prompting a titillation-tinged argument about that timeless bone of contention: how young is too young?
While no one defends forcing fifteen-year-old girls to marry fifty-year-old men, it seems we're in a state of cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to Lolita issues. On the one hand, teenage-chastity clubs, whether they work or not, have proliferated in the past decade. On the other, the New York Times runs smirking articles about such clubs, implying that their members are brainwashed by Christian ideology. Seventeen year olds who screw fifteen year olds get labeled sex offenders, while MILFs are a teen-comedy staple and teacher-student porn isn't particularly frowned upon.
In the case of the polygamists, the source of the outrage is clear and well-founded: we feel that these young women been brainwashed and physically imprisoned. Yet polygamist groups have operated ever since the Mormon Church officially ended the practice in the 1890s so Utah could become a state, and there hadn't been a raid on polygamist compound since the 1950s. Perhaps America's zeal for freedom of religion — an angle to this story that the ACLU has argued should at least be part of the debate — allows us to look the other way.
The "Maiden Tribute" helped begin a tradition in British newspaper reporting that found its ultimate expression in the Page 3 Girl.
Why do we consider adolescents to be off-limits until a certain age, and then suddenly not only capable of participating in the sexual economy, but duty-bound to do so? And why does this age seem to be constantly moving to suit our needs?
The answer lies in the original concept for an "age of consent." In English and early American common law, when society was primarily agricultural and family members were labor, the unofficial age of consent was often between ten and twelve. It wasn't until the nineteenth-century invention of adolescence — that is, a time when children are sexually mature, but still unable to make adult decisions — that things began to change.
On July 6, 1885, W.T. Stead, editor of the London Pall Mall Gazette, published the first in a series of scandalous articles, the "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." An epic piece of writing that shocked England, the "Maiden Tribute" told, in explicit detail, how innocent (and therefore syphilis-free) young virgins were being kidnapped and enslaved by brothels to service debauched men willing to pay for the privilege. Truly a landmark in journalistic history, the "Maiden Tribute" produced the same shuddering horror sought by today's daytime TV talk shows, and helped begin a tradition in British newspaper reporting that found its ultimate expression in the Page 3 Girl.
