Have you noticed how our newspapers are full of sex stories? Some involve celebrities, but at a pinch anyone will do.
One can understand the tabloids – this is after all their stock in trade. But our broadsheets do their bit too, especially on a slow news day.
For the last couple of days they’ve been filled with lurid accounts of a universally known actor (whose name I’d never heard until the naughty stories came out) being tried for twice raping an innocent 15-year-old girl who didn’t know where babies come from.
Presumably she has learned by now, for the alleged offences took place 50 years ago. Now in her sixties, the erstwhile 15-year-old is understandably hazy about the details, such as whether or not she was indeed 15 at the time.
Apparently she went to the actor’s house to get his autograph, but got raped instead. The thespian, according to her, used no coercion, verbal or physical, so we’re really talking about statutory rape, defined as unlawful sex with a minor.
Anyway, the young lady was given a material lesson in birds and bees, which apparently she didn’t learn well. For several months later she went to the actor’s house again – with the same lamentable result.
This makes the victim so dim-witted that I wonder if the jury will see her as a reliable witness. Given the obvious fact that no forensic evidence has survived the intervening half-century, one wonders why the CPO saw fit to bring the case to trial at all. One also wonders what makes this utterly uninteresting story such big news.
Even assuming that most people are better than me at staying abreast of popular culture (now there’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and therefore know who the alleged offender is, at best this should warrant half an inch on Page 57. But I did say it was a slow news day.
Then hardly an issue comes out without yet more earth-shattering news about a female teacher in her mid-twenties having her wicked way with a schoolboy of 16 or 17, thereby traumatising him for life. Please spare me.
It’s only one man’s experience, but a zillion years ago I too was 16 or 17. Most of my energy in those days was spent on desperately, and as a rule unsuccessfully, trying to fulfil assorted sexual fantasies.
Women teachers figured prominently in those – as they do, I’d suggest at the risk of being accused of generalising, for most straight boys that age. Once or twice I tried to make a tentative pass at a teacher, only to be rebuked with richly deserved contempt.
Now, indulging in a bit of retrospective fantasy, had one of my advances succeeded, I would have been ecstatic, grateful, proud, self-congratulatory, elated – choose your own adjective. One thing I absolutely guarantee I wouldn’t have been is traumatised.
It’s hard to believe that today’s teenagers, who are much more savvy and precocious in such matters than I was at their age, will forever bear emotional scars after doing a pretty and, to them, sophisticated 25-year-old woman in the back of her car. More likely they’ll remember her with warmth and gratitude for the rest of their lives.
I’m not suggesting that a grown-up in a position of authority shouldn’t be punished for doing something unethical or illegal. But the severity of punishment ought to be commensurate with the crime, and surely any just jurisprudence must distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se.
The latter, such as murder or theft, is a transgression going against higher law; the former, such as driving after a couple of glasses of wine, contravenes only made-up, what Aristotle called positive, laws, not all of which are just.
So why are testosterone-drunk youngsters encouraged to report on girls only a few years older than they are, those whose favours they’ve enjoyed? Why do school boards bar those girls for life and why does the CPO often charge them with felony?
Why do our broadsheets, to say nothing of tabloids, cover such cases at inordinate length and with obvious approval of any draconian punishment? Do the hacks, many of them young men themselves, seriously think that those teenagers suffered serious trauma?
There’s a one-word answer to all these questions: modernity. Specifically the post-Enlightenment modernity that has to proceed from Rousseau’s assumption that we’re all born perfect.
If most of us demonstrably don’t grow up perfect, it’s somebody else’s fault: our parents’, our schools’, capitalism’s, socialism’s, society’s, the climate’s – choose your own culprit.
This puny mindset naturally encourages seeing everyone as a potential victim, which in turn intensifies a search for perpetrators.
Youngsters are reared in that poisonous atmosphere and, being impressionable, inhale it with their lungs wide open. Victimhood is top of the mind, which naturally makes it top news.
This is illogically and hypocritically combined with the blanket sexualisation of education, mass communications and society at large. Children are implicitly invited to plunge headlong into a life of sexual activity, and yet they’re somehow told to see themselves as victims when their paramours are older than they are.
Boys and girls acquire sexual experience at an age when in the past they still used to play, respectively, with trains and dolls. Then those same boys and girls, now a few years older, go to teachers’ training colleges and consequently find themselves surrounded with attractive, adoring and eager teenagers in their care.
Expecting them to remain prim under such circumstances is presuming too much on human goodness, à la Rousseau. So by all means, they should be reprimanded. But treating them as criminals is hypocrisy at its most soaring.
The more capable of those boys and girls – who were nonetheless brought up in exactly the same environment – eschew teaching for journalism. In due course they get to decide what stories are big news and how they should be covered.
The culture of victimhood thus gets a steady influx of fresh blood, while a similarly educated public gets its prurient instincts properly satisfied. The circle becomes truly vicious and it’s society that falls victim, not those randy teenagers.
My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.