I look at my daughter now and I know what lies ahead. Long before she is 16 and thus, in the eyes of the law, “legal”, she’ll be leered at on the bus and chatted up by men five, 10, perhaps even 15 years her senior.
Post-puberty, her school uniform will prompt heckling from louts in vans. It won’t stop once she is “of age” either, though I can only pray that this will be the extent of her dealings with creeps who are old enough to know better.
It’s only when we are older that we begin to understand these exchanges between young girls and older men, the power play at the heart of them and the damage that can be done. This is why the responsibility lies with the older party: the man looking at the luminous flesh of a teenager and wondering if he or she is worth the risk.
But what about the old days, when David Bowie was deflowering Lori Maddox, one of the so-called “baby groupies” of the era? The law didn’t sanction that. Since Bowie’s death last month, commentators have asked whether we should be celebrating a man known to have had sex with a minor, and whether it’s possible to separate the art from the artist. Bowie wasn’t alone, of course. Iggy Pop, Jimmy Page, Steven Tyler, Jerry Lee Lewis – they were all at it.
Those were different times, we are told; to a point, it’s true. Those where the days when few were familiar with the word paedophilia, and when the repercussions on a young girl of sleeping with an older man were not much considered, because the welfare of young girls wasn’t considered at all. Those were the days when men joked about bedding teenagers and the concept of consent was rarely discussed.
