You’re doing exactly what this article is condemming, caring about the age rather than about the circumstance. As if in the case the girl was 23 the sex would have been less abusive, as if what makes sex abusive is not the abusive situation per se but the age of the woman (yes, because a teen is a woman a young woman at that but a full blown woman)

This is also disrespectful of the maturity of teens and their right to make choices about their life and their body. The girl chose and the choice was a no. Not respecting that “no” is what abuse is all about and the whole situation wouldn’t been less abusive if instead of a girl Polanski had abused a woman of his own age.

But what is the choice of the girl was a “yes”? Recently I read an article on scarleteen where the author write to have had sex at age 14 with a man of 30 and not regretting it, developing a strong friendship with this person and never suffering the popular-imagination negative consequences.
I read an article by a sexologist that pointed out that the only way to teach a young person that one has a right to say “no” to the unwanted sex, it’s also teaching that one has a right to say “yes” to the sex one wants. This infantilization of young adults just play to the hands of abusers, rapers and all people who can exploit a situation in which we have robbed the ability to choose from a person.

The more we focus on an irrelevant fact as as age (expecially when we consider the same person unable to choose about her body but perfectly able to choose about right and wrong and hence legally imputable for a crime… talk about double standard!) the less we are able to protect young woman who are physically women and naturally wired to have sexual desires and feelings.

If we say to them that they have a right to choose about their body, that they are sexually mature and that when they’re being abused or molested they have a right like any other woman to denounce the fact and protect themselves then we might obtain sensible results against abuse and pro women rights. If we say to them that they’re children, that they should beware of strangers, that they should never think of sex and that they should not denounce molestations to the police like any other woman would do but just teel mommy and daddy (in other words if we have with them the same sort of dialogue about sex we would have with a 6 years old little girl) then they will never understand how becoming a woman, how having developed a woman body have changed their responsability over their own body and their sexual choices and they will never understand the risks they must protect themselves from.

I have known girls who had been getting their periods for more than a year and still didn’t know anything about their body, about what does that mean, about how come the males in the classroom were more attracted to them and made more sexual comments about them (that’s nature folks, every human being has a “radar” for sexual maturity) and their parents still were treating them like small children, treating them in a childish way and talking to them in a childish way. I’m the only one who understand the danger of having a person developing a potential (and with that come responsabilities and duties) and still censoring the knowledge of that potential? To me that’s like, hypothetically, giving a person a remote control without telling him that remote control controls the detonation of a bomb, the knowledge of which would result in more care, more attention and better informed choices.

Kate Harding today asked the some of the same questions you did on Jezebel.com. I keep waiting for some female A-lister to wake up and shake things up. Jodie Foster? Eliza Dushku? Hell, even Jane Fonda, who still must have the ear of her ex Ted Turner.

Thanks a lot for caring about this.I know it’s not the most burning issue out there, but it’s disheartening to see so many behaving so badly.

So all this time everyone else knew– they may not have remembered, but anyone “of age” in the 70’s knows/knew. Add to that the fact that now some of the coolest indie and even not-so-indie filmmakers are leading the charge to “free the rapist,” I mean, Polanski. Is my fragile young girl mind too female, too uncool, too unHollywood to understand? I don’t get it. I mean, I really don’t get it.

…and, this happened at Jack Nicholson’s house? Where was Mr. Nicholson and what did/does he have to say about all of this?

Does money really buy this kind of power? And why does the media refuse to talk about the power dynamics here?