Russ' “America is Hard to See”: A Play | Teen Sexual Seduction

I read Collins-Hughes’ intriguing review of “America is Hard to See” in the New York Times. Consequently, I saw the play at the Here arts space. Collins-Hughes summarizes the “piece of documentary theater” that she describes as “smart and troubling”:

“A group of ex-cons in a therapy session introduce themselves, outlining the crimes that landed them in prison.”

“A bearded guy, Thomas, says he fondled his step-granddaughter for a year and a half before he was stopped. Chris, a fresh-faced 22-year-old, says his girlfriend turned out to be 14. And Chad, a handsome [gay] man with haunted eyes, a soft drawl and an aw-shucks charm, says he used to be a teacher. He would rather not go into details, but he molested one of his students.”

Travis Russ, the playwright and director, relates in the programme: 

“Every character in this play is based on a real person. The script is based on interview transcripts and archival research documents.”

Russ conducted the interviews at the Miracle Village Ministries. The Florida institution’s website states: 

“Our staff has years of experience providing help and hope to registered sex offenders who have served their time and would like to rejoin society.”

I watched the performance, there were several issues that I noted:

1. Both of the heterosexual age-gap affairs were consensual but, as usual, only the men went to jail. For example, Thomas’ 12-year-old step-granddaughter initiated the affair by sitting on his lap in a bathrobe before she put her hand on his penis, but she didn’t go to jail - as well.

And Chris passed a polygraph test stating that he didn’t know that his girlfriend was 14-years-old. She lied about her age, but she didn’t go to jail and have to undergo years of counseling at Miracle Village Ministries.

2. Ironically, Miracle Village Ministries’ mission is to prevent ephebophiles from having relationships with nymphets, but nympholepsy is condoned in the three major religions. For instance, per the documentary Are All Men Pedophiles? (2013), Mary, the mother of Jesus, was 12 or 15-years-old when she gave birth to Jesus, and Muhammed (صلى الله عليه وسلم), the prophet of Islam, married Aisha when she was 6-years-old but consummated the marriage when she was 9. One would think that the Miracle Village Ministries’ mission would be to prevent pre-marital sex.

3. Lastly, Thomas and Chris didn’t have trouble getting into relationships despite their humbling pasts. For example, as Collins-Hughes related: “Pastor Patti introduces her college-student daughter (Gareth Tidball) to Chris, and they fell in love.” 

This reminded me of Academy Award nominated film director Roman Polanski whom shared in his autobiography: 

“Many women seem irresistibly attracted by notoriety, and many – especially since the Los Angeles affair – are eager to meet me.” 

The "Los Angeles affair" is in reference to when 44-year-old Polanski gave drugs to 13-year-old Samantha Geimer before he raped and sodomized her.

The Allure of Schoolgirls

The Allure of Schoolgirls (2017)

The Allure of Schoolgirls: A Cameraless Documentary (2017) chronicles man's fascination with schoolgirls as shown in literature, films, plays, television, music, and the advertising industry. Parts 1 through 6 can be viewed here and part 7 is coming soon. 

Famous Ephebophile: James Franco - Old\Young Teen Sexual Affairs On & Off the Screen?

[UPDATE 2/18/18] When I first wrote this post, I didn't include a review of James Franco's Actors Anonymous, because an Amazon review led me to believe that the novel didn't contain any ephebophilia, but a recent post on the Daily Mail proved me very wrong. 

1. By page 43, the protagonist took an acting class on Lankershim Boulevard in LA where he participated in an improvisation scene from Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

“So, last night, how’d it go? […] “Don’t bullshit,” he said.

“No bullshit.”

“So tell me. And no bullshit.”

“So tits like melons, no bullshit.”

 “No shit?”

“No shit, and an ass – momma.”

“A momma ass?”

“No, an ass like butter. An ass like candy.”

“An ass like that?

“An ass like an onion, bring a tear to your eye.”

“Like…”

“Like eighteen […] Sheeeit, you think she’s a virgin? […] Little slut, hungh?”

2. It’s mentioned on page 51 that it’s usually no fun to be the actor, director and writer of a film unless you’re Charlie Chaplin or Woody Allen.

Joyce Milton shared in her book, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, that Chaplin acknowledged: 

“I had a violent crush on a girl only ten or twelve. I have always been in love with young girls [...]” 

In addition, Milton clarified that Chaplin developed a crush on 12-year-old Maybelle Fournier, he met Mildred Harris when she was 14-years-old, and impregnated her when she was 16. Furthermore, he was smitten with 15-year-old Hetty Kelly, and impregnated Lillita Grey when she was 15-years-old - allegedly before they were married.

And the 33-page decision from the presiding judge in the case between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen revealed that in 1990, 19-year-old Soon-Yi asked 55-year-old Allen, her adopted step-father, if she could attend a New York Knicks' basketball game with him at Madison Square Garden. Soon-Yi "opened up" to Woody (no pun intended) after attending several basketball games and in 1991, after she had enrolled in Drew College in Madison, New Jersey, Allen and Soon-Yi began speaking regularly on the phone. And in January of 1992, Farrow found six graphically nude photographs (e.g., "legs spread apart") of Soon-Yi on a mantelpiece in Allen's apartment. Subsequently, Allen married Soon-Yi.

3. The perils of fame are often mentioned in the book. For example: “[…] I’m like Santa Claus: Everyone needs a picture sitting on my knee. The ones I don’t mind are the young pretty ones.” (52)

4. The protagonist had sex with a drunk and unconscious girl in her Ohio University dorm room, but despite the fact that she was a college coed, she was described as: “[…] a little blond girl, pretty cute.” (60) Freshman?

5. The famous ephebophile Charlie Chaplin was mentioned again: “My stare was the stare of an uncompromising carnivore that saw her young flesh as food; like Chaplin’s companion in The Gold Rush who is transformed […] into the Platonic form of the Female, a pinup bent-over in a tingly blue G-string. She was only eleven, but I never broke my vampiric stare as I went through our moves with the other zombies.” (104)

6. It’s shared in the novel that: “Errol Flynn once owned a Gauguin painting, but he had to sell it when he became dissolute and was two million in debt […]” (157)

Beverly Aadland’s mother wrote in her book The Beautiful Pervert: “My Beverly was only fifteen and still a virgin when she met [forty-eight-year-old] Errol Flynn. A few hours later, she was still fifteen…but she wasn’t a virgin anymore.” Beverly went on to co-star with Flynn in Cuban Rebel Girls (1959).

And Nancy Mowll Mathews related in Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life that 13-year-old Teha’amana was offered to Gauguin by her mother and that: "[...] Western tourists were commonly offered young girls, usually by the girl's parents, to serve as companions [...]" and that Gauguin had a "[...] genuine delight at having an adolescent lover [...]".

7. The Actor had a beautiful girlfriend, but that didn’t prevent him from having: “[…] an uncontrollable need to fuck every young thing he could. In France that summer, he fucked.” (181)  “Young thing” is elaborated upon: “[…] there was something nice about fooling around with her young body and having her say things like “You’re fucking the mayor’s daughter” over and over […]” (186)

8. The Villain shared: “[…] I was in Paris sleeping with college girls literally half my age, but underneath I have a good heart. Just as The Actor had a good heart.” (191)

9. The ephebophile shared his technique for procuring young girls: “One of my favorite approaches was to ask the young girls that requested to take a photo with me to email me a copy of the photo; that way I can give them my info very quickly in front of a crowd of fans and later work out a way to see them.” (213)

10. Kim was carried out by two orderlies, “grunting and thrashing”, but, inadvertently, her “flat young chest was exposed for all to see.” (225)

11. 17-year-old Cent, the star of “Day’s End, a film about teenage vampires […] was screwing the 38-eight-year-old producer, Mark Steely.” (266)

12. Lastly, The Actor had “a lifelong love of literature” that wasn’t shared by his father who didn’t care about The Actor’s: “[…] discovery of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, or Raskolnikov, or Hamsun’s Hunger.”

Underground Man is the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. In part two of the novella, 40-year-old Underground Man has a brief sexual relationship with Liza, a young prostitute. Underground Man met Liza in a brothel where she had been sold into prostitution by her family. 

Figure 1.

James Franco posted the pictures in figure 1 on his Instagram. The pictures are inviting Franco's fans to see a trailer for his new movie Palo Alto (2014), which is based on Franco's book. And as you can see from the pictures, Franco's character is a teacher and soccer coach "who gets too close to a teenage girl on his team".

James Franco & Lucy Clode Selfie (Figure 2)

In a classic case of art imitating life, Franco invited Lucy Clode, a Scottish teen, to a hotel rendezvous after he signed her autograph and took a selfie (Figure 2) with her outside of the Longacre Theatre after he starred in a performance of Of Mice and Men. Clode tagged Franco when she posted the selfie on Instagram, which allowed Franco to directly contact the 17-year-old.

This is how their conversation went:

As you can cull from the conversation, there were two sources of contention - Clode wanted to verify Franco's identity and (initially) she didn't want to meet him until after her 18th birthday; however, she decided that if she could unequivocally verify Franco's identity, she would meet him at the hotel. 

This is the headline of an article posted on the Huffington Post -  So, Is James Franco's Use Of Instagram Innovative Film Promotion Or Just Kind Of Creepy? The Franco/Clode selfie and subsequent conversation may or may not have been to promote his film, but clearly the reporter, Lauren Duca, is middle-aged women who is, unsurprisingly, against age-discrepant relationships between ephebophiles and teleiophiles. In contrast, Franco got between 49,000 and 51,000 Likes, mostly from young women, for the pictures in figure 1. 

Lastly, it's not clear why Clode (initially) wanted to meet Franco after she turned 18, because the age of consent in Scotland is 16. And it's 17 in New York, which may explain why Franco didn't have an issue with inviting the nymphet to a hotel.

[Update 11\02\14]: What's James Franco's favorite book? You guessed it. He posted on Instagram that it's Nabokov's Lolita.

[Update 03/04/15]: This is a GIF from “Agent Provocateur” an episode of Law and Order: SVU  which was based on James Franco's encounter with Lucy Clode. Here's the episode's (partial) plot summary: A 15-year-old girl, answering a social media invitation, sneaks out to meet her movie star crush […]

Famous Ephebophile: John Casablancas | Old\Young Teen Model Sexual Affairs

The February 5, 2018 New York magazine "Reread" section features a cover story about ephebophile John Casablancas, the founder of the Elite Model Management, that originally appeared in the January 25, 1988 issue.

The article shares one of Casablancas' techniques for procuring nymphet models, which is to target the teen model's low self-esteem:

“My rule of life is that I want to have a good time,” he told Prince. And also: “One afternoon, Casablancas calls Jeanna Cie, a seventeen-year-old model and pop singer, into his office to discuss her weight. He uses a strategy that he later suggests is sure-fire. ‘I explained to her how turned off I was by her,’ he says.”

Casablancas & Stephanie Seymour

Consequently, 41-year-old Casablancas had a two-year extramarital affair with Stephanie Seymour, a "ravishing" 15-year-old aspiring model:

The centerpiece of the story is his involvement with Stephanie Seymour, whom he’d discovered via a contest at a shopping center in San Diego. 

He’d actually noticed her mother first—“absolutely ravishing,” he says—and then homed in on her daughter, who was 15 years old at the time. (He was 41.) 

Over the next year, he brought Seymour to Acapulco for the final round of that contest, then to New York. By the time of Prince’s story, he had begun and ended a two-year extramarital affair with her. And his description of looking at Seymour is downright chilling. 

“She is a girl of extremes,” he told Prince. “And the way she developed—there’s a quality that developed about her that is this incredible sensuality that a woman-child has, a true woman-child … her voice is a child’s, her attitudes, the way she holds her feet and her hands are those of a child, at the same time with an incredible sensuality to it. And that mixture was and is so explosive … This was something like a forbidden fruit for both of us.”

Seymour described their relationship quite warmly in the story, and stayed with the agency thereafter; in 2017, she still spoke well of him, telling the Post, “He was my first love, my first boyfriend, my first everything.” 

Casablancas & Aline Wermelinge

Unsurprisingly, Seymour wasn't Casablancas' only nymphet:

Casablancas remained at Elite until 2000, leaving after a BBC exposé about drug use and exploitative behavior at modeling agencies tarnished the company’s reputation. He moved from New York to Rio that year, by which time he’d married [at the age of 51] his third wife, a 17-year-old [Aline Wermelinger].

THE DAILY MAIL: Old\Young Teen Rape in Hollywood

Just like Lifetime and their movies and NBC's Law & Order: SVU, The Daily Mail benefits from ephebophilia. If The Daily Mail isn't writing about sexualized teen models, almost daily, pun intended, there's a post about nympholepsy. 

In addition to our recent post about Dane Cook and his nymphet, these are some recent screenshots from The Daily Mail's app:

Rose McGowan revealed that she was allegedly raped at 15 by a man who has won oscars

TLC's The Willis Family shared the horror that they suffered under their alleged rapist father

Uma Thurman claimed that when she was 16, she was raped by an actor

And Eliza Dushku says a Hollywood stuntman rubbed his body all over her until he was 'finished' when she was just 12 

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Chucky Lee Byrd | The Poet of Old\Young Teen Love

The subtitle on Saturday Night Live’s YouTube channel from last night’s (S43E12) "Chucky Lee Byrd" skit reads: “The songs of Chucky Lee Byrd (Will Ferrell) have a disturbing theme.”

In the skit, the “incomparable” Chucky Lee Byrd, The Poet of Teen Love, sings “gems” and “hits” from his five-disc boxset that “[…] will bring you back to a simpler time in music. A time of innocence [and] purity."

Here’s a list of songs with some lyrics from the A-side:

“Beauty Queen”: “She’s my little beauty queen. And she’s only seventeen. But she’s my beautiful – beautiful beauty queen.”

Candy Baby”: “And she’s sugar, sweet and clean. What should I get her for her sweet sixteen?”

“Farmer Girl”: “She grows corn. She grows beans. Her daddy hates me, ‘cause she’s only fourteen. Fourteen. Fourteen. That’s her age. She’s fourteen”

“My New T-Bird”: “She purrs so fine. She’s fresh off the line. I wanna make her mine. And this song is about a girl who’s thirteen. A thirteen. OK, she’s twelve.”

Here’s a list of songs on the B-side:

1. “Cruising in My Windowless Van”
2. “Girl Scout Cookie”
3. “I Left My Heart Across State Lines”
4. “Simple Girl from Across the Street”
5. “Our Love Is a Crime”
6. “First Day of School … Ever!”
7. “Baby You Can Drive My Car If I’m In the Passenger Seat Because You Only Have a Permit”
8. One and One Equals Eleven”

A number of people wrote in the comments that Chucky Lee Bird is an allusion to Jerry Lee Lewis whom married Myra, his 13-year-old cousin.

[UPDATE] MARGARET (2011): A High School Student Performs Oral Sex on Teacher

The current issue of the New Yorker (Jan. 8, 2018) has a review of Margaret (2011). The review mentioned that the film is: "[...] romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the intellectual and poetic abstractions on which the great machine runs." And that the film: "[...] stars Anna Paquin as Lisa Cohen, a headstrong private-school teen-ager [...]" However, the review strangely failed to mention that Lisa was an aggressive teleiophile. Below is my original May 8, 2013 post:

Margaret (2011)

I wrote in The Allure of Nymphets that nymphets do not want to be treated like children, and they do not want ephebophiles to act like children. 

For example, in the film Margaret (2011), high school student Lisa (Anna Paquin) went to visit Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), her high school teacher, at his Manhattan sublet to get advice, because she: "[...] didn't have anyone else to talk to." 

However, Mr. Aaron became distraught after Lisa performed oral sex on him, but Lisa was unsympathetic. 

She said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anybody. If that’s what you’re worried about. I totally initiated the whole thing. Anyway it’s just sex. You’re acting like a little kid. I’ll see you in [high] school.” 

The portrayal of Lisa as a sexually aggressive high school student is an accurate one; thus, Mr. Aaron should have been just as aggressive in rejecting her advances.

The MET Refuses to Remove Balthus' “Thérèse Dreaming” | Art or Teen Sexualization ?

Balthus' “Thérèse Dreaming” (1938) @ The MET

I wrote in Nymphalis carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre that Nabokov shared in Strong Opinions: "A contemporary artist I do admire very much, though not only because he paints Lolita-like creatures, is Balthus." (167) 

And Balthus shared in Balthus the Painter (1996), in reference to Nabokov: “I think we feel the same thing in the presence of young girls.”

We've done a number of posts on this blog about the debate between art and (teen) pornography.  Coincidentally, Peter Libbey reported in the New York Times that, despite over 8,000 virtual signatures on an online petition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), is refusing to remove Balthus' “Thérèse Dreaming” (1938) where a nymphet reclines with her hands behind her head with her left foot resting on the chair, which causes her panties to be exposed below her petite jupe.

According to the petition's website: "The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children." And Mia Merrill, the petition’s author, opined that the painting is: "[...] blatant objectification and sexualization of a child [...]"

However,  Ken Weine, the MET’s chief communications officer, responded: “[...] visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression.” 

 

Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker (Jan. 1, 2018): Thérèse was the daughter of a [...] a neighbor of Balthus's in Paris. At the time, she was twelve or thirteen years old, and Balthus was about thirty. He had been making paintings of her since she was around eleven [...]" 

Schjeldahl opined that the painting has an "erotic charge" and, as a side note, related that Balthus: "[...] had an affair with a teen-age daughter of Georges Bataille."

New Book & Blog: Nymphalis carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre

Our new book, Nymphalis carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre, and blog, Nabokov's Nympholepsy, are live. 

Nabokov's Nympholepsy

BLIND FAITH & VIRGIN KILLER: Nude [Pre-Teen] Nymphets on Albums Covers

 

Blind Faith & Virgin Killer: [Censored] Album Covers

Just like (some) publishers use the allure of nymphets to sell books, (some) record companies use nude pre-teens to sell albums.

For example, Blind Faith (1969) is a certified platinum album by the English band Blind Faith. Unsurprisingly, the album cover sparked controversy due to the topless nymphet who is holding a very phallic toy (airplane). The cover was designed by photographer Bob Seidemann - Eric Clapton's friend and former roommate.

Per Feelnumb, here's Seidemann's rationale for the concept:

“I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a space ship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The space ship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.”

“The space ship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweler at the Royal College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?”

Initially, Seidermann planned to use a 14-year-old Brit but was smitten by Mariora Goschen, her 11-year-old sister.

Unsurprisingly, the album was released with a different cover in the US.

 

*****

An 11-year-old nude nymphet posed seductively on the album cover of the Scorpion's Virgin Killer (1976), which was designed by Steffan Böhle - the product manager for the West German branch of RCA Records. Wait. Virgin killer?

Here's an excerpt from an interview on Blabbermouth with Scorpions' guitarist Rudolf Schenker:

Blasting-Zone.com: In hindsight, do you regret releasing the album Virgin Killer with the original uncensored cover?

Rudolf: "No. .We didn't actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, 'Even if we have to go to jail, there's no question that we'll release that.' 

Once again, unsurprisingly, the album was released with a different cover in the US and per AllMusic, Virgin Killer was "[...] quite popular in Japan." 

High School Summer Reading List: LESS THAN ZERO | Teen Rape & "Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage"

This is an actual summer reading list from a Manhattan high school, which is located in the Riffs' old neighborhood near the Drummond's street. 

Over a third of the students are white, 15% are Asian and according to Great Schools: "This school is rated above average in school quality compared to other schools in the state." 

It's what we would call a public\private school since only 10% of the African-American students were submitted after a review of their applications.

We could have written this post about any of the books on the summer reading list except for maybe Jay Z's Decoded. For example, in Junot Diaz's, Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Ana Obregon is, " [...] a pretty loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller [e.g. Sexus] while she should have been learning to wrestle logic problems."
 

13-year-old Ana was introduced to Henry Miller by her 24-year-old boyfriend before he left the east coast to join the military. "He used to read passages to her all the time: That made me so hot," she said.

However, Ellis' Less Than Zero peaked our interest based on the teacher's disclaimer: "Note that this novel contains some disturbing content, including rape and drug use.

But we never would have imagined that there was not one, not two, not three but four nymphets who were raped in the novel!

18-year-old Clay, the novel's protagonist, who is visiting his hometown of Los Angeles during a winter break from his east coast college, attends a party in Malibu where: 

Everyone in the room is looking up at a large television screen [...] There's a young girl, nude, maybe fifteen, on a bed, her arms are tied together above her head and her legs spread apart, each foot tied to a bedpost [...] The camera cuts quickly to [...] this fat black guy, who's also naked and who's got this huge hardon [...] he has sex with the girl and then walks off the screen.

It's a snuff film, but the viewers at the party debate whether or not the Black man really killed the nymphet with "an ice pick, and what looks like a wire hanger and a package of nails and then a thin, large knife".

After Clay visits Daniel's house, Daniels tells Clay about a girl he knows but he doesn't share her name:

"She's pretty and sixteen and [...] she goes to Westward Ho on Westwood Boulevard and she meets her dealer there [...] And this guy spends all day shooting her full of smack again and again..."
"And then he feeds her some acid and takes her off to a party in the hills or in the Colony and then...and then..." Daniel stops.
"And then what?" I ask, handing him back the joint.
"And then she gets gangbanged by the entire party."

Subsequently, Clay describes a visit: 

"[...] to Rip's apartment in Wilshire, he leads us into the bedroom. There's a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are tied above her head. Her cunt is all rashed and looks dry and I can see that it's been shaved. She keeps moaning and murmuring words and moving her head from side to side [...]"
Rip says something.
"She's twelve."
"And she is tight, man," Spin laughs. 
"Her name is Shandra and she goes to Corvalis" is all Rips says.

Clay declines to have sex with the nymphet but her later shared:

"A young girl from San Diego who had been at the party [in Palm Springs on the desert with kids from L.A and San Francisco and Sacramento] had been found the next morning, her wrists and ankles tied together. She had been raped repeatedly. She also had been strangled and her throat had been slit and her breasts had been cut off and someone had stuck candles where they used to be. Her body had been found at the Sun Air Drive-In hanging upside down from the swing set [...]"

Interestingly, Clay's blond younger sisters (approximately 13 and 15) enjoy listening to Killer Pussy's "Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage". Admittedly, the younger nymphet does cocaine, and both nymphets watch porn with the sound off but one of them "hates it when they show the guy coming".

Here's an excerpt from the lyrics to "Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage":

Teenage, green age, awkward in-between age
(Teenage enema nurse)
I turned fifteen, thought it was a teen scene
(Teenage enema nurse)
Thought it would be easy, but it makes me queasy
I'm a teenage enema nurse

They told me, "Stick the nozzle in
There's really nothing to it
It's not a very pretty job
But someone's got to do it"