Monday, August 28, 2017

Famous Ephebophile: Serge Gainsbourg | Teen Oral Sex, "Lemon Incest" & French Schoolgirl Seduction

Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin

Serge Gainsbourg, the infamous French songwriter, poet, artist, actor and director, had a famous age-gap relationship with Jane Birkin, but their affair didn't fit the strict definition of ephebophilia, because Birkin only looked like she was 18; however, their eighteen-year age is close enough to warrant a honorable mention. 

Interestingly, in 1966 Serge wrote “Les Sucettes [Enlgish: Lollipops]” for 18-year-old blonde songstress France Gall. 


The song is about Anna, a young girl who is in paradise every time that “stick slides down her throat”. Gall emphatically claimed that, even after shooting the video while seductively holding an ≈ 12-inch long lollipop, she didn't know that the song, which admittedly on the surface appears to be a children's song, was about oral sex. Unsurprisingly, “Les Sucettes” was Gall's biggest hit.


In 1971, Serge released the ephebophilia themed French concept album, Histoire de Melody Nelson. The theme of the album explores an affair between Gainsbourg and nymphet Melody Nelson. 

The song “Melody” reveals that the age-gap couple met after Gainsbourg accidentally knocked Melody off her bike with his Rolls Royce. As Gainsbourg exited his “Silver Ghost from the nineteen hundreds”, he noticed: “Melody Nelson has red hair\And it’s her natural colour.” And he noticed: “Her skirt pulled over her white Knickers.”

“Ballade de Melody Nelson” informs that Melody is f15-years-old: “Fourteen autumns\And fifteen summers”. And Gainsbourg describes Melody as “such a delicious child.”

It's implied in “Hotel Particulier” that Gainsbourg and Melody made love in room forty-four, the Cleopatra room, of the private hotel: 'While above us a mirror reflects our image\Slowly I embrace Melody.'

The album concludes with “Cargo Culte” and the conclusion of their age-discrepant relationship with Gainsbourg hoping for a miracle: '[t]hat would bring me Melody back\Juvenile girl veered off the disastrous attraction.'

The February 2010 French edition of Rolling Stone ranked Histoire de Melody Nelson the 4th finest French language rock recording of all time.

Lemon Incest (1985)

In 1985, “Lemon Incest” was released on the Gainsbourg's album Love on the Beat. The duet, which was written by Gainsbourg, was performed with Charlotte, his 12-year-old daughter. The song was controversial, because it contained lyrics with, you guessed it, incenteous themes, and Gainsbourg was (incorrectly) accused of promoting pedophilia. And it did not help that in the music video the father and daughter frolicked in bed while Gainsbourg was topless and Charlotte was in panties. Despite the controversial aspects of the song, it reached number 2 on the French charts.


However, ≈ 14-year-old Charlotte appeared topless in a number of scenes in Charlotte for Ever (1986) while her father, the film's director, caressed her in bed.  And it's worth noting that 13-year-old Charlotte appeared topless in Claude Miller's L'effrontée (1985) as well.


Serge Gainsbourg wrote the screenplay for Stan the Flasher (1990) - in seven days in Paris' Hotel Raphael. In the film, which Gainsbourg directed as well, Stan Goldberg, an English teacher, attempts to seduce Natacha, his English tutee. 

Natacha rejects her English teacher's aggressive advances (e.g., a hand under her skirt and down her blouse). But in the end, she appears to be intrigued by his flashes.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Calvin Klein, Lulu & Sexualized Children in Advertising and on Social Media

We recently received the new issue of Vanity Fair (September 2017), and the photo below got our attention due to the youthful look of the model. The caption reads: "Lulu, the new Calvin Klein jeans model." Besides the picture of Lulu, the article, "Capturing Calvin Klein", included a reference to the book The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes and related that nineteen-year-old Paris Jackson has been named the face of Calvin Klein.

A Google search revealed that Lulu's last name is Tenney, but it did not reveal her exact age. Model agencies do a great job of keeping that a secret; however, she is at least eighteen-years-old, because an underwear model has to be at least eighteen in Britain. 

However, that didn't prevent Rachel Ashby, a concerned parent of an eleven-year-old, from complaining about a Calvin Klein advertisement outside of the House of Fraser boutique. The advertisement pictured Lulu tugging on her black Calvin Klein bra. Ashby posted on her Facebook wall: "This huge billboard outside Cavendish House advertising women's lingerie...It's 2017 ffs and Calvin Klein are [sic] still using what look [sic] like 12 year old girls in their campaigns. It is just  me..??!!"




Ashby told the Daily Mail, “The fact that she looks underage in terms of body shape and somewhat vulnerable facial expression, combined with the fact that she is wearing very little and is adopting a strangely provocative pose means it could be deemed to sexualize children.”

We agree 100% with Ashby. There is absolutely no doubt that Lulu was chosen by Calvin Klein, because she looks like a nymphet.  However, orthodox Muslims and Jews would argue that no one, no matter the age, should be on a billboard modeling underwear. And Ashby missed another point. Her very own eleven-year-old daughter probably has more provocative pictures, videos and snaps on her social media than Lulu's underwear advertisement.

For example, here's the text to a link next to Ashby's article on the Daily Mail': "Cindy Crawford's model daughter Kaia Gerber shares candid [Instagram] images from the family's fun-filled vacation in Canada, as they play host to A-list guests like Harry Styles and singer Madison Beer"


But the above pictures of fifteen-year-old Kaia Gerber and eighteen-year-old fellow model Charlotte D'Alessio, which were posted on the Daily Mail, are tame compared to some of nymphet's other Instagram photos. For example:

Instagram / @Kaiagerber
 
Instagram / @Charlottedalessio

Ashby is correct to complain about what she refers to as "sexualize[d] children" in the advertising and modeling industries, but "children" "sexualize" themselves on social media far more often. 
 
 

Saturday, August 5, 2017

A History of the Age of Consent & Ramifications





A History of the Age of Consent

I related in The Allure of Nymphets that Mary E. Odem shared in Delinquent Daughters that until 1897 the age of consent in California and in most states was ten. It was twelve in seven states and, even more shocking, it was seven in Delaware. How did the ages get so low? Our early age of consent laws originated over the pond. And how did the age go from ten to seventeen in most states? Feminists are to blame thank.

Odem wrote that after the 19th century, many young women started working outside of the home and consequently became more promiscuous. Feminists blamed the raunchy behavior on "dirty old men" who paid for the services of nymphet prostitutes and successfully lobbied to have the age of consent raised. However, it backfired, because a number of young women became even more licentious.

To give an example of how raunchy things got, Odem related that during World War I, when the problem of female sexual delinquency assumed national proportions with the spread of prostitution and consequently venereal diseases among soldiers, a five-mile radius moral zone was implemented around military training camps. In those moral zones, alcohol and prostitution were prohibited. Surprisingly, the military discovered that it was not professional prostitutes who were loitering around military bases - it was thousands of teen prostitutes.

Consequently, feminists realized that issues like abuse, education, and poverty had more to do with the nymphet's erratic behavior than "dirty old men", but it was too late. The damage had already been done. The age of consent laws had been changed. However, there were two unsuccessful attempts to lower the age of consent.  In 1889, there was an effort in Kansas to lower the age to twelve, and in 1890, there was an attempt in New York to lower the age fourteen.




"Childhood" in New York

New York magazine had a April 8, 2013 cover story on "Childhood in New York" and printed Jennifer Senior's article "Little Grown-ups and Their Progeny". Senior's report was consistent with the research that I related in The Allure of Nymphets about childhood being a relatively recent invention.
 
Senior related that up until the end of the WWII, children were expected to contribute to the family financially. Particular to New York City, newsboys were rampant, but delivering newspapers wasn’t their only source of income. They "blacked boots, scavenged for junk, and shuttled messages and goods.” But “child poverty, child abuse, and exploitative labor practices” lead to an effort by reformers and the government (e.g. Children’s Bureau) to protect children.

However, Steven Mintz, the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of Childhood in America, said, “They [reformers and the government] viewed kids smoking at 10 and 12 and having independent money and walking into bars as the worst thing in the world. It reminds you that "child" is a label, not a reality.

Clearly, prior to the end the WWII and before the American economy prospered, young people (i.e., children) were expected to behave as adults in terms of earning a living wage. And their adult behavior, in terms of vices, was condoned. It was even common to see ten-year-old prostitutes in New York City.

Just like Neil Postman related in The Disappearance of Childhood, things have gone (almost) full circle. Today, children\teens behave like adults. For example, they drink, smoke, take drugs, have sex, and are (virtual) teen strippers. The Internet has broken the barrier that the invention of the printing press once erected after The Renaissance. In Porn Before Puberty?, an ABC News feature, Winnifred shared that when she was in eighth grade, "boys mostly, were watching porn during school [...] during independent reading, they would do that." In addition, the feature related that nine out of ten children between the ages of eight and sixteen have viewed pornography on the Internet. However, age of consent laws and high school continue to keep (most) "children" and adults separated. 



"Children" and Adults

"Why You Truly Never Leave High School" was printed in the January 20, 2013 issue of New York magazine. The article is about how high school is a sadistic institution and how new research suggests that high school may be worst possible place for a vulnerable sixteen-year-old mind. Here's an excerpt:
Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.
Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.”



Anne Rice's sixteen-year-old Belinda had an affair with forty-four-year-old  author and artist Jeremy Walker after she had a fling with her step-father. Belinda exemplifies that a consequence of "children" being separated from adults is that when they do get together it's often done illegally due to age-of-consent laws - whether it's consequential, like in the case of Belinda, or non-consequential like in the case of incest. Belinda expressed her frustrations with being considered a child:
"Look, I had my first period at nine. I was wearing a C-cut bra by the time I was thirteen. The first boy I ever slept with was shaving every day at fifteen, we could have made babies together. And I found out the kids here are just as developed. I wasn't any freak, you know? But what is a kid here? What can you do? Even if you're going to school, even if you're a goody-two-shoes who hits the books every night, what about the rest of your life?"

"You can't legally smoke, drink, start a career, get married. You can't even legally drive a car till you're sixteen, and all this for years and years after you're a physical adult. All you can do is play till you're twenty-one, if you want to know. That's what life is to kids here - it's play. Play at love, play at sex, play at everything. And play at breaking the law every time you touch a cigarette or drink or somebody three or four years older than you."
Interestingly, the age of consent is still low in most of countries across the pond. For example, in Germany it's fourteen, in France it's fifteen, and in Spain it's a whopping thirteen. However, this shows that lowering the age-of-consent is not enough to remove the barrier between "children" and adults. The author's of Escaping the Endless Adolescence and The Adolescent Society may have surmised correctly that an additional culprit is the invention of high school.