The evolutionary psychologists would tell you that EVERYONE is supposed to want to make it with 16-year-olds. …Well, at least all men.
So Mark Foley–that’s Mark Foley (R-FL), despite the O’Reilly Factor’s bold, thinking-outside-the-box damage control strategy of captioning him as (D-FL) in its coverage–is being hung out to dry, and not just on the internets.
And don’t get me wrong, he deserves it, although I’m pessimistic about party leadership really being held accountable for its equally damning failure to do anything about him during the long period before the story went public in which they totally knew all about it.
When the news first broke, a friend expressed skepticism about how inappropriate Foley’s behavior had actually been, suggesting that it was really just another gay witchhunt. I didn’t think so, but I could see how someone might: the first chat excerpts were pretty tame. It was only subsequent excerpts that made it abundantly clear that no, Foley really had been making professionally and ethically indefensible sexual advances on 16-year-old pages. However, I’m really annoyed by the constant tossing about of the term “pedophilia” here.
Hanne Blank puts it very well; most of what I have to say would be repetition:
The tangle of age, agency, majority, and what defines a “predatory†or “exploitive†relationship has always been a very difficult and sticky one as far back as the age-of-consent reform campaigns of the 1880s. Determining who is and is not a child, who is and is not capable of consent, and where the legal lines should thus be drawn in relation to sexual communication and interaction between persons of disparate ages has never been cut-and-dried.
My considered opinion, after having spent most of the last four years of my life working on issues pertaining to the sexuality of minors, is that when it comes to sex, Americans define “child” for the convenience and comfort of adults who are terrified of adolescent sexuality.
It’s hard to imagine a situation where I would think a 16-year-old high school student having a sexual relationship with a 53-year-old politician was not, to a greater or lesser degree (mostly greater), exploitative. Similarly, high school teachers who have sex with students are behaving extremely unethically, although, depending on the state, not always criminally. These are cases where even the absence of a direct supervisory relationship does not erase an extreme power imbalance–and certainly, when you’re talking about teenagers, age alone is a big part of that imbalance (although not all of it). As Hanne points out elsewhere in the post, teenagers, while physically mature sexual agents, are just learning how to handle themselves AS sexual agents. The gap between a 16-year-old and a 26-year-old (let alone a 52-year-old) is much bigger, qualitatively, than the gap between a 26-year-old and a 36-year-old.
Being sexually attracted to a 16-year-old, however, even if you are a 52-year-old Representative who should really, REALLY be able to control yourself sufficiently not to send that 16-year-old dirty text messages, does not make you a pedophile. In general, we hope that 52-year-olds, while they may find some 16-year-old bodies attractive, would prefer to have actual sex with people to whom they are a LITTLE more intellectually and emotionally similar. This is, of course, open to the snarky observation that some 52-year-olds are still pretty emotionally similar to high school students, but obviously we hope that most of them have not made it into Congress.
So yeah, a lot of people should lose their jobs over this, and it’s possible that some criminal charges might also be appropriate, depending on how much coercion Foley may have employed. And obviously I don’t put a lot of credence into Rush Limbaugh’s theory that evil lascivious teenagers conspired to ruin Mark Foley’s good name by drawing him into temptation. But I also think that this culture’s refusal to recognize adolescent sexuality, to the point of insisting that being attracted to a 16-year-old is pedophilia, is pretty fucked up.
October 4th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Yep, good point, and I just blogged extensively while failing to make appropriate distinctions over this. As I pointed out in a reply to my own post, attraction to post-pubescent adolescents is “ephebophilia”, not “pedophilia”. However, in Foley’s case it is clearly the abuse of power that is the most egregious problem.
October 4th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I’ve been increasingly irritated by everyone bandying about the “pedophile” remarks, too. Skeezy? Oh god yes. Pedophilia? Fuck no. I see your dad beat me to the “ephebophilia” clarification already, but that’s not even the point. (For one thing, 16 is, if I am not mistaken, the age of consent in Washington D.C., as it is in a great many states, though I don’t know if that enters into the debate very much, if at all.) The point is that he is a Congressman and the page is, well, a page who also happens to be nearly 4 decades younger, which creates two fantastically huge balance-of-power problems. (And it damn well ought to create a hell of a sexual harassment suit.) And regardless of every other nasty thing you could undoubtedly say about Mark Foley, that he is a pedophile isn’t one of those things.
October 4th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
I’ve always heard of the attraction to teenaged boys refered to as “pederasty” but Webster.com says that word only applies if there is buggery involved.
You know, the Greeks had it right: The older man would make himself available. If the younger man was interested and pursued, whoo-hoo! If not, the older guy kept his hands to himself. That was the ideal anyway, as I recall from my classics course.
October 4th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Hanne Blank actually made the “ephebophilia” clarification in her post, which was made yesterday.
So far, the only documentation I could find on D.C.’s age of consent is here: http://teenadvice.about.com/library/weekly/qanda/blageofconsentchart.htm
This dates from 2001, and identifies the age of consent for heterosexual sex as 16; it says there was no current law for homosexual sex, which makes it a bit tricky. In Foley’s home state of Florida, as of 2001, the age of consent for heterosexual sex was 18 and homosexual sex (F/F or M/M) was illegal.
October 4th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Judith Levine’s _Harmful to Minors_ is awesome on this very topic. Well-said, RWS.
October 5th, 2006 at 6:08 am
Of course, the age of consent for inept IM ickiness is even harder to pin down.