Welcome to:
Chris
Brand – Psychorealist
Download the FREE on-line 2001 edition of Chris
Brand's book, THE g
FACTOR
The Scientific American provides an
introduction to the g factor (the main factor in IQ-type
tests).
The Annual Review of Psychology provides a summary of modern research into human individual
differences, including g.
Times Higher [UK] provided a brief 'idiot's
guide' to modern work on IQ and g (2 xi 2001, pp. 16-17, Harriet Swain
and Robert Plomin).
Click here
to vote on Brand's main educational proposal – and to see how others have
voted.
For the battle against Political Correctness (PeeCee),
read Occidental
Quarterly
– the FREE journal backing monoculturalism against
multiculturalism.
QUIZ TIME
(Quiz created Summer, 2002; but occasionally updated)
What do the following Gorgeous (and Stylish) Girls
have in common?
Discover what many a woman really wants!
The beautiful and brilliant lover, Heloise (1100-1164), seen centrally here being received into a French nunnery
The famous courtesan, Marie Louise O'Murphy (1737 - 1814),
painted by Boucher after her discovery by Casanova
Filmstar Catherine Zeta Jones, b. 1969 in Wales
Ellen Ternan, 1839-1914
Cosima Wagner, 1840-1930
Sculptress Camille Claudel (1864-1943) (photo by César)
Filmstar, beauty, animal rights activist and vegetarian Bo Derek, b. 1956
Clairvoyant Georgie Hyde-Lees,
b. 1893
Filmstar Lauren Bacall, b.
1924
Québecois Singer Celine Dion,
b. 1968
Busty and artistic Dora Marr,
b. 1921 (portrait by Picasso)
(For an
enticing Playboy-style picture of Dora bathing, see New York Review
of Books, April 2002)
Soon-yi Previn, b. 1970
(with husband Woody Allen)
Singer and actress Zsa Zsa Padilla, b. c.1970
Grace Simbine Machel, 29, formerly wife of the President of
Mozambique
Tall blonde German princess, Dr. Gabriele zu Leiningen, 35 – but
looking 29
Filmstar Gwyneth Paltrow, b.
1972
Wendy Deng, b. 1968
(with husband Rupert Murdoch)
Chilean-born former Miss Universe, Cecilia Bolocco, b. 1964
Model and charity organizer Heather Mills (who lost the lower half
of her left leg in an accident with a police motor cycle and subsequently
devoted herself to helping the physically handicapped)
Toward the
end of his life, Freud said he wished someone could tell him what women really
want….
ANSWER:
All those chicas
above had the good sense to hitch themselves successfully to men who were more
than 20 years older than themselves, several of them starting their love lives
with their eventual partners when they themselves were under fifteen.
(So were England's Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II and
Henry VIII's third wife Catherine Parr [who survived Henry to marry
Queen Elizabeth I’s first lover] when they began their own love
lives).
In 1116, the brilliant and
beautiful Heloise (aka Eloise) (c. 1100-1164) had an
affair of wildly erotic passion with Abelard (1079-1142), the most remarkable
young scholar of that day and age in Paris. A child, Astrolabe, was soon the
result and the pair married secretly. The intellectual giant and elitist
Abelard – quite a one for making enemies – was then set upon and castrated by
one of Heloise's vengeful relatives, but the couple, who probably had a 21-year
age gap, continued both their frustrated love affair (in sometimes overtly
erotic correspondence) – though the uncastrated Heloise was keener -- and their
scholarly work as the heads of their respective monastic orders 60 miles apart
from each other.
Heloise had no regrets, writing to Abelard when
she was 32:
"... God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world,
thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to
possess for ever,
it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but
your whore. . . .
Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your
presence;
queens and great ladies envied me my joys and my bed."
She wrote too that she still experienced “lewd visions of the
pleasures we shared.
In 1817, the couple were re-buried in one
sepulchre at Père Lachaise.
In 1999, the dignified and
(sometimes) secretive beauty
Catherine
Zeta Jones, 30,
met Michael Douglas, 55. The couple
had a son, Dylan, and married in
2000.
In 2002 they announced a second pregnancy
The elegant
and leggy Catherine,
a tap dance champion as a child doesn't complain about her not-so-slender
husband, saying "There are a lot of women who live with pot-bellied
pigs" (Independent on Sunday, 5 v 02). Before leaving Britain for
Hollywood, well-blessed
Catherine
had claimed to friends that she was "through with men." But she told Now
(10 vii 02) that she felt "blessed in my personal life because I
couldn't have wished for a better husband or a more beautiful, healthy
child."
Catherine once said: "Older
men come on to me all the time, and I'm really happy about that. I really like
them. Older men know more about life and what's going on. I'm probably the only
person on the beach who sees a hard-bodied guy and goes, 'Oh, put it away, will
you?' Beautiful boys are far too interested in making themselves look
beautiful. They don't want any competition. At the beach, I'm more likely to be
attracted to a guy no one else notices, sitting far off, under an umbrella
reading a book." Asked what impressed her in a man, she replied,
"Words impress me. If a man can speak eloquently and beautifully to me, I
just melt on the floor."
'Basic
Instinct' star Douglas who had once checked in to a clinic to tackle his uncontrollable
libido, told Now that he proposed making babies at the couple's first
meeting and that, from the moment they met, he was "on a mission…like a
heat-seeking missile." His notorious chat-up opening line had been "I want to be the father of your children." He
supposedly promised Catherine
$5 million if she ever caught him cheating on her. Catherine says, "I do think I'm lucky I met Michael. Not just Michael Douglas the
actor and producer with two Oscars on the shelf, but Michael Douglas the love
of my life. I really do think it was meant to happen." (One reason for
Michael’s confidence in his own fidelity is that Catherine is widely rumoured
to give the best head in Hollywood….)
Prior to
teaming with Douglas, Britain's smouldering and smoking pinup had enthused about
her on-set relationship with 40-year-older Sean Connery as the pair played
romantically entwined cat burglars in the action thriller 'Entrapment'. In
1998, Catherine had starred as 'Elena' – at once the daughter and love interest
of the hero of 'The Mask of Zorro.' Catherine
freely admits having "a thing for older men." She once said: "I've never dated anybody the same age as me. I think it's because
I love the knowledge older men have." She had previously had a
two-year-long affair with Edinburgh-born TV presenter John Leslie who was
arrested in 2002 to answer 'rape' allegations by some 15 mini-celebrities from
the mid-distance past – themselves inspired to come forward by Ulrike Jonsson's
casual allegation that she had once been raped in a TV studio. Leslie,
37, 6'5", apparently did not want babies and had dumped the broody
Catherine in 1993, but he never got over Catherine and turned to cocaine.
Though John had not been invited to her wedding, Catherine stood by him as soon
as his troubles with femininnies started. Eventually, after ten hellish months
of investigation, police dismissed all of the charges (two on the same woman,
on two separate days in 1997 – why did this late-in-the-day whiner go back for
more?) and the judge told him he could walk away ‘without a stain on his
character.’ Commenting on his massive ordeal at the hands of anonymous
feminazies, Leslie especially thanked his parents and his busty yet decorous
young long-term girlfriend Abigail
(‘Abby’) Titmuss, 25 (playing age 15) and a nurse, for their support.
{Subsequently he complained about Ulrike Jonsson’s refusing to name the actual
guy who ‘raped’ her. He appeared to lose the support of Ms Titmuss for a while,
then the pair parted amidst press allegations of group sex sessions. By 2004,
Leslie, 39, faced fresh allegations of cocaine use but had the not
inconsiderable consolation of an affair with glamourpuss ex-bra model Sophie Anderton,
26.}
Catherine
and Michael share the same birthday, September 25th. They had a
daughter in 2003, company for their son Dylan. Catherine is a most popular
'celebrity mom', along with Victoria Beckham and Lucy Henman. Catherine says of
herself, "I just think I was born to breed, you
know, so I want to pop those babies out."
The delightfully intelligent Ellen
Lawless Ternan was just 18 when, in 1857,
the novelist Charles Dickens, 45, fell for her.
Dickens promptly
separated from his wife (by whom he had ten children)
and began (historians
tend to agree)
an affair with the actress that lasted till his death in 1870.
The affair was conducted in the utmost secrecy,
using homes in France and Slough; and all correspondence was burned. Dickens'
daughter, Kate, believed the pair had a baby son which died. There was a clear
effect on Dickens' novels – his heroines becoming more passionate, conflicted
and naughtier. Ellen later took 14 years off her age and married a
schoolmaster, the Rev. George Wharton Robinson, with whom she had two children
and ran a school and nursery garden.
Cosima Wagner was 24 years younger than her famous composer husband, Richard, b.
1813,
(seen on the right of her in the picture [above]).
She bore Wagner three children even before the pair married in 1870 – she was
till then in a loveless marriage with pianist Hans Von Bülow; then, after years of
inspiring Wagner,
she became the custodian of his oeuvre at Bayreuth.
The dashing and determined Camille
Claudel had a fiery 15-year affair
with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, begun when she was 19 and he 43.
As Rodin's model, Camille learned the sculptor's
art as she wanted and influenced Rodin into more simple and elegantly romantic
work. Sadly, she could not accept a position of inferiority to Rodin's
common-law wife (and mother of his son), Rose. She became paranoid to the
effect that Rodin was stealing her ideas; so the pair broke up (to Rodin's
equally great distress) and Camille's mother had her confined to a madhouse –
but not before Camille’s reputation was established (see Literary Review,
May 2002).
The sensational but
publicity-shy sex symbol and Elvis-lover, Bo Derek (née Mary
Collins), b. 1956, was discovered
when she was age 14 by 44-year-old, thrice-divorced matinée idol John
Derek, b. 1927, in 1970.
John soon split from his shapely
16-year-younger wife,
Linda
Evans
(later linked for nine years
with 12-year-younger ‘new age’ musician, Yanni),
and became Bo's lifetime lover
and artistic director.
Since the petite and nubile
Bo was a minor, the couple went on the run in Europe
before returning to the USA and marrying in 1974.
After initial successes with films like '10', and posing nude for Playboy,
Bo's film career was rather second-rate;
but the marriage was a very happy one.
John and horses and smoking
and the GOP were the great loves of Bo's life; and though John was a notorious
lover of beautiful women (statuesque 10-year-younger Ursula
Andress was a protégé and wife, 1957-66), he had no trouble
devoting himself to Bo. Bo was devastated when John died in 1998, but picked
herself up and remarried in 2000. In the same year the animal rights activist
and vegetarian participated actively in support of George W. Bush's
Presidential campaign. In 2004,
together with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, she helped lead
funereal tributes to ex-President Ronald Reagan.
In 1917, 'Georgie' Hyde
Lees, 24, married the love-sick Anglo-Irish poet W. B.
Yeats, 52
(who had failed to land either Ēirish nationalista Maude Gonne or her
daughter
and then become largely impotent according to himself).
Amazingly, Georgie brought Yeats round and, with the help of
written instructions to him on how and when to make love
– instructions disguised as trance-induced 'automatic writing' –
managed to give him a life and have two children by the tortured poet.
(She was evidently determined
that the Gonnes stayed gone….)
In the last four years of his
life, from 1935, Yeats had another age-gapped relationship – of high sexual
intensity – with the Marxist advocate of free love Ethel
Mannin, 34 when first meeting Yeats, 69. Though the attractive Ethel was never faithful to Yeats (she
had affairs with countless intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell), sensible
Georgie continued to care for the great poet while his doctor marvelled
“Strange that all his attention revolves on sex.” According to reviewer Clive
James, “Yeats was already in his dotage when he found himself between the
sheets with a 27-year old stunner called Margaret Ruddock. He cast her
horoscope, which failed to tell him that she was not only giftless but psycho.
She ended up in the bin {loony bin, madhouse}.”
The husky-voiced Jewish
filmstar with feline grace, Lauren
Bacall, 21,
married superstar Humphrey Bogart in 1945,
when 'lone wolf' (though previously three-times married) Bogart was 46.
The marriage lasted happily till Bogart's death of throat cancer in 1957.
(Lauren
had a second marriage in the 1960's, but that husband also died on her. She
still looked magnificent at 78.)
The leggy and lovely if
pointy-chinned Celine Dion
met her musical director and soulmate René Angelil, now 60, when she was
just twelve and he thirty-eight.
After they married in 1994, Celine had a career break to nurse
gambling and non-whingeing René through a life-threatening illness.
The couple have
one son, Rene-Charles Angelil, born in 2001 through in vitro
fertilization.
Curvaceous Dora Maar
took up in 1926 with Picasso,
45, when she was 15.
The affair lasted ten years and,
unlike several of Picasso's women, Dora did not actually commit suicide – though she did join a nunnery.
Picasso simultaneously ran a secret affair with another adolescent, the
greatest of his muses – see 'Marie-Therese' below. Later, from 1943 Picasso
would go on to have a ten-year affair with the 40-year-younger
Sorbonne-educated Françoise
Gilot, b. 1921, who herself (though the tempestuous Picasso had given
her two children and once taken a cigarette to her face) would go on to
international recognition as a painter, printmaker, lecturer and author, and to
marriage with Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. Françoise was the
only one of Picasso’s women
to leave him, and she had her revenge with a book calling him a ‘Bluebeard.’
His revenge on her was to take up in 1952, at 70, with Jacqueline
Roque, 27 – beginning a happy 20-year-long relationship (becoming
marriage in 1961) for 17 years of which Jacqueline was his sole muse, painted as
a sphinx or other Egyptician icon (though she doted on him and turned to drink
and suicide after his death).
The petite Soon-yi Previn,
one of Mia Farrow's many adoptive children,
seems to have fallen in love with her stepfather in her teens or earlier
– though courts cleared Allen of Farrow's charges of 'molestation'.
The pair have a
remarkable 43-year age gap, and a baby.
The exquisite part-Phillippina
babe, Zsa Zsa Padilla,
not content with the 19-year-older dentist whom she married when she was 16,
is now happily shacked with ace comedian Eric Dolphy, 36 years older than her,
by whom she has three children.
One website says:
At 36, this passionate singer
looks more beautiful today than yesterday when she was younger.
She has truly bloomed into womanhood despite the storm she had gone through.
A daughter of the happy couple:
Grace Simbine
Machel,
54, formerly wife of the President of Mozambique,
is now the wife of ex-South African President Nelson Mandela, 84
-- giving them a babe-bagger age gap of 30 years
In 1998, Gabriele zu
Leiningen, 35 married the fabulously wealthy Aga Khan, 61,
the leader of millions of Shi-ite Muslims.
The pair both have children by previous marriages and soon had a new baby
underway.
Up-market, delicate,
elegant, Anglophile and leggy
ice maiden
Gwyneth
Paltrow, b.
1973,
considered 'elitist', a friend of Madonna,
survived affairs with superstar young actors Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Luke
Wilson apparently thanks to
a very long-standing relationship with her bald director, Anthony
Minghella, 28 years her senior
(Daily Mail's gossip column (11 ii '99).
Around 2000, the luminously cool and regal half-Jewish
beauty [grand-daughter of two rabbis], who had relationships of mutual
adoration with both her father and a grandfather, was escorted everywhere
by the portly, cigar-smoking Miramax film mogul Harvey Weinstein, c. 55, who
once said:
"Older people are more cultured – they have life experience."
Weinstein calls Gwyneth "the First Lady of Miramax."
(But by 2003 she was married to and pregnant by Coldplay rock star
Chris Martin, 25
– though he hadn’t always seemed too keen on the idea. A baby girl arrived in
May, 2004.)
Wendy Deng, a senior Murdoch employee,
married her boss,
37 years older than herself, in 1999
and announced her pregnancy in 2001.
Cecilia Bolocco, at 36, married the lucky
Argentinean President Carlos Menem, 71
- though the diminutive Carlos needed consolation, for he was soon afterwards
put under house (well, palace) arrest for alleged fraud.
In July 2002, Carlos Menem announced he would stand as a candidate
in the Argentine's next presidential election. In 2003, the Observer (20
iv) carried a nice picture of Menem on the stump with the delightful and by
then pregnant Cecilia.
Heather Mills, at 33, after a fraught life,
including marriage and divorce by age 20
and modelling for laddish magazines until she lost a leg in an accident
involving a police car,
fell in love with and, in 2002, married 'Beatle' Sir Paul McCartney, 59.
Sir Paul had lost his much-loved
first wife Linda to cancer, but he and his children apparently warmed quickly
to Heather – at least, according to Heather, whose only postmarital complaint
was about press intrusiveness.
Sir Paul is the
richest rock star in the world, worth some £700 million.
The couple met the
Queen in Liverpool and showed her Sir Paul's exhibition of his paintings – many
of which feature enlarged male genitalia. Asked to comment on the paintings,
Her Majesty replied they were "very colourful."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Queen with Sir
Paul McCartney and his wife Heather, viewing McCartney's paintings during a
visit to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, 25 July 2002 |
At age
8, Stella had been 'abused by a sex pervert for three days before being rescued
by police' (Daily Record, 30 x 02); but she found subsequent medical
examination by police a worse experience.
In May, 2003, Sir Paul and Heather announced
they were expecting a baby later in the year.
PS For more age-gapped
couples of the past and present, go to Babe Bagger Update and Celebrity
Couples.
From the above
and the Babe Bagger
Update sequel, some of the more spectacular apparent successes of
age-gapped relationships involving the girl being under 20 [i.e. a teenager]
(**if under 16, *if 16-17) at the start of the relationship were/are arguably:
Abelard x Eloise**
Vivaldi x Anna Girò**
John Churchill (Duke of
Marlborough) x Sarah Jennings**
Napoleon x Archduchess Marie
Louise of Austria
Charles Dickens x Ellen Ternan
Ford Madox Brown x Emma Hill**
Richard & Cosima Wagner
Joseph Stalin x Nadya
Aliluieva**
Lu Xun x Xu Guangping
W.B.Yeats x 'Georgie' Hyde Lees
Charlie Chaplin x Oona O'Neil*
Claire Lee Chennault x Xiangmei
Chen
Humphrey Bogart x Lauren Bacall
HRH Prince Philip x HM Queen
Elizabeth II**
Carlo Ponti x Sophia Loren**
Roman Polanski x Natassia
Kinski**
John & Bo Derek**
Sir Jimmy Young x Alicia*
Rene-Charles Angelil x Celine
Dion**
Robin Williams x Marcia Garces
Woody Allen x Soon-yi Previn ??
Andy Bond x Sophie
Ellis-Bextor*
Another
notably happy and productive (though childless) romantic partnership was that
of Sir William and Lady Suzanne Walton – the pair met in the Argentine when
Suzanne was 22 and William was 46. Likewise the 1914 marriage of Chinese
Republican leader Sun Yat Sen, 48 with Soong
Ching-ling, 22, was a public success story. The over-representation of young
East Asian girls in this admittedly tentative list is noticeable. Another
especially happy union was that of British TV host Bruce Forsyth, 52, with the best-ever
Miss World, Wilnelia Merced, 22.
‘AGE GAP LOVE’ -- LINKS
Happy
accounts of age-gapped relationships can be found at SMOULDERING OLDIES
and AGELESS
LOVE. For more age-gapped celebrity
liaisons, see CELEBRITY
RESEARCH LISTS.
A popular
book about age-gapped marriage is Younger
Women – Older Men by Beliza Ann Furman. Another is Age Different
Relationships by Jack Mumey & Cynthia Tinsley.
Generally
positive discussion of ‘May-to-December’ relationships (better:
‘May-to-September’!) can be found (and contributed to very easily –
registration unnecessary) at http://pub86.ezboard.com/bmayanddecembercommunity.
Babe-Bagger
couples tend
to have sons, whereas Boy-Bagger couples have daughters.
Some say
that Capricorn-born
girls are especially inclined to the older man…
THEORIES OF
BABE-BAGGING:
1. The girl wants father-love, either because she never had it previously or
had it so generously that she was disappointed that the father didn’t also love
her sexually.
2. Girls mature quicker, so find boys of their own age are inadequate.
3. Father-daughter relations are usually less fraught than brother-sister
relations, especially if siblings are close in age.
FOR MORE ON BABE-BAGGING AND THE MERITS OF MODEST EPHEBOPHILIA,
SEE McDougall
Newsletters.
At present,
adolescent girls in the West are encouraged to wait to find 'the perfect
partner'; but this doesn't happen – either they get pregnant as teenagers* by
most unsatisfactory partners or they end up on the shelf and still
devoted to the feminist ideal of 'careers' when their fertility has already
begun its decline around 27. In
America of 1997, Leon Kass (who would become the chairman of President George
W. Bush's Council on Bioethics) wrote (Public Interest 126): "For
the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the
entire decade of their twenties – their most fertile years – neither in the
homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely,
and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this
state of affairs, but most do not." By 2001, the average British woman was
producing only 1.64 children, causing serious anxiety about the age structure
of the population. One in five women in Britain is now reaching the age
of 40 without having children (Evening Standard [London], 28
vi 02). Each year Britain has as much as half as many divorces as marriages.
In 1995, Michael Miller quoted (in his lament for modern
marriage, Intimate Terrorism: the Deterioration of Erotic Life) a
prominent American divorce attorney as saying that a common reason marriages
fail is that the two partners are too close in age - it's not marriage so much
as sibling rivalry. Miller has a great deal to say about the arrested
adolescence of his fellow citizens. Support for 'neotraditional marriage'
-- for teenaged girls being encouraged to marry mature men -- can be found at http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/marriageculture/age.html.
The case for young women to have babies early (presumably by a responsible
father) was made in the Spectator, 19
x 2002.
In 2002, Professor
James Tooley, University of Newcastle, urged in a book, The MisEducation of
Women, that girls be encouraged to delay education and careers till after
they have had a baby or two. (To discuss Tooley's ideas, go to the Times
Higher 'Common
Room'.)
In 2002, Judith
Levine's book Harmful to Minors (Univ. Minnesota Press)**, which
attacked the Christian right and paedohysteria, was splendidly defended by top
US social psychologist and wymmins' issues expert, Carol Tavris (Hall of Fame score 858)
('The latest bogeyman', Times Literary Supplement 21 vi, pp. 12-13).
Apparently the provision of 'abstinence education' to youngsters delays the
beginning of their sex lives by only seven months while resulting in the use of
risky practices that can result in unwanted pregnancy and sexual disease.
Currently, high age-of-consent laws mean that – just as in sexologist Alfred
Kinsey's day – 85% of young American males are 'child molesters'; and today they can find themselves
charged, if caught, with 'statutory rape' despite their girlfriend having no
complaint. The much-feared Internet has resulted in only some three dozen cases
of 'enticement of a minor' in the USA – and in every case
the girl was 13 or older. Not content with 'protecting' the young form
pleasure, knowledge and safe sexual practices, the educators of the Christian wymmin's right now want
to ban The Wizard of Oz in which the heroine Dorothy is finally led to
happiness with a seriously older man. Sadly, paedophiles (80% of whom have no
interest in genital sex) often come from sexually repressed backgrounds; so the
puritanism of fundamentalist femininnies (which currently sends boys caught
masturbating into therapy) may even be perpetuating the very paedofumbling they
claim to fear.
In 2003, the Observer
(9 ii, Review, p. 4) had nifty-looking Anna Stothard, 19, detail her own
six-year preference for the markedly older male. Said Anna: "Before I
discovered older men, the teenage boys [my friends and I] hung around with looked
like ill species of just-born alien, not quite men but too ugly and bumpy-faced
to still be children. Therefore I considered it completely justifiable to be
infatuated with people twice my age….. I don't think I've ever dated a man my
own age."
* In 2001, one third of UK births were to
girls under age 20. Altogether 40% of UK births occurred out of wedlock.
(compared to 10% in 1970 and 30% in 1990).
** For the controversy which
ensued, see 'Paedophilia
chic' (Washington Times, 19 iv 2002)
THE (LACK OF) BASTARDY PROBLEM
The failure of successful men to
have plenty of bastard children with adolescent girls is one problem the West
is up against today. In the past, English kings on average sired more bastards
than they had legitimate offspring. For detail, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A872408.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
1.
THE LAW In Holland, sexual contact (without force or abuse) before
the age of 12 is absolutely forbidden and from the age of 16 entirely legal.
Between these two ages, sexual contact is only an offence and punishable by law
when there is an official complaint. Not everybody can issue a complaint. From
12 to 16 years only the youth him/herself or his/her parent(s) can do that.
Sexual violence is always an offence just as sexual contacts between a child in
a situation where he or she is clearly dependent, like in a teacher-pupil
situation. This arrangement differs little from the Old Testament code:
once a girl had reached the age of twelve-and-a-half years, she was free to
engage in sexual activity, unless her father specifically forbade it.
2.
EDUCATION Schools could be obliged to employ same-sex teachers, guides
and mentors* for children; and
20% of children's time should be spent with non-teachers selected from the
outside world of work and serving part-time (with their firms being paid for
their absences). Romantic and non-penetrative sexual attachments could be
tolerated as in (1) so long as there was no complaint by both the child and its
parents.
* White male mentors are now necessary
in schools on other grounds too. White male teenagers in Britain are giving
higher education a miss, Government figures show. Only 27% of White males go on
to college or university, whereas higher education attracts more than twice
that percentage of Ethnic Minority females, 59% (Times Higher, 25 vii
02). It is small wonder that White boys spurn universities: they are taught
largely by women, they know the universities are dominated by feminism and
political correctness, and they know they won't have the money to compete
seriously for girlfriends. Male mentors would provide the necessary role models
for boys as well as offering an attractive early marriage to some of the girls.
3.
MARRIAGE Marriage should take a variety of forms – as it does in
Hollywood with the help of legally enforceable pre-nuptial contracts – and some
forms should be available from age 12 if there were parental consent.
(Departure from standard-issue monogamy was sometimes sanctioned by Christian
churches in the past – for example, polygamy was allowed in seventeenth-century
Germany to cope with the low sex ratio after the Thirty Years War (Westermarck,
E. A. A History of Human Marriage. Macmillan, 1921). Under Islam,
marriage is sometimes allowed for girls as young as 9 – e.g. in Iran Times 20
ix 03).) Marriages for adolescents
would involve substantial financial commitments by adult partners and would
need the express renewed consent of the younger party if they were to continue
beyond his/her reaching 21 – giving the 21-year-old a chance to make
alterations in the contract. (More generally, marital partners would be
encouraged to take more responsibility for each other's health care and
education, and would be encouraged by state subsidy if they did so.) (In 1958,
the 19-year-old earthy but elegant sex goddess Claudia
Cardinale ["After BB comes CC," said BB] gave the answer to
faint-hearted feminist careerism when, having been forced into a film contract
not to marry or have children, she found herself expecting but went ahead with
the pregnancy anyway, not declaring her 'baby brother' to be her own son till
the boy was 19. CC was guided till 1974 by her director Franco Cristaldi, b. 1924 and married to her from 1966.)
(In 2002, the Guardian, 12 xi,
noted that English divorce court judges were beginning to agree to enforce
prenuptial contracts so long as they were fairly and openly made and led to no
injustice.)
``Being right too soon is socially
unacceptable.'' -- Robert HEINLEIN
THE
IMPORTANCE OF LOVE
was first recognized not in the Swinging Sixties, nor in mediaeval France, nor
by Saint Paul, but in the 4th century A.D. by the mighty
Plato
"[In
Plato's Phaedrus,] Socrates first ironically praises a love affair
without love – partly to show that he, too, like [his interlocutor, the young]
Lysias, can be shallow; but perhaps also to exercise his usual recognition that
life is unsimple and love difficult. Then he more seriously moves into a
declaration of the great human importance of love. People are made real, and
themselves, he explains, by the possession of souls; and it is in their souls
that they really exist; and it is love that moves the soul, and makes a human
being learn transcendence."
Barbara EVERETT,
2002, 'Good and bad loves: Shakespeare, Plato and the plotting of the Sonnets.'
Times Literary Supplement, 5 vii, pp. 13-15.
"Love conquers all" – VIRGIL
After a thousand years of attempts at
suppression by the Church, love was re-discovered in 13th-century
France (see above, Abelard and Heloise). What is less known is that it was
England which most took to the re-discovery:
"We were….the first country in this continent where marriage
and courtship for romantic reasons took hold among all classes, accompanied by
extremely open protestations of affection. ….the quest to harden the British
elite as a "latter-day Sparta" [the phrase of historian Linda Colley]
was more or less imposed at the outset of the nineteenth century." -- Tim
HAMES, 2002, Times, 27 viii.
2002 -- Paedophilia Chic
In 2002, New York enjoyed a
surge of paedophilia – or at least ephebophilia -- chic. The New York
Observer for 25 vii 02 carried a non-judgmental front-page article about sultry
sixteen-year-olds
(under New York State's age of consent, 17) using Internet-assisted false IDs
to pursue guys in their twenties, thirties and sometimes even "much
older". Favourite reading of these sweet prowlers? – Lolita, of course!
A flash in the pan? No way! In
the New Yorker for 25 vii 02, the new film Tadpole, about
Oscar, a bright fifteen-year-old boy who loves and sleeps with
his mother's friends, was reviewed
equally non-judgmentally. Top film critic Anthony Lane concluded:
"The scene in which [mother's friend, played by Bebe Neuwirth, 43]
introduces her new conquest to her girlfriends over tea, and pretty well pimps
him to any takers, is worth the price of a ticket. The true scandal of Tadpole comes in the
closing moments, as a relieved Oscar seems to settle back into girls his own
age."
The
most heroic Babe Bagger of all time was surely Captain Laurence Oates, who committed
suicide at 32 by 'going outside for some time' during Britain's doomed
Antarctic expedition of 1912. It now turns out (in a new biography – reported Guardian 14 x 02) that, when Oates was around 20, he had
an affair with a Scottish girl of under twelve years old, resulting (unknown to
him) in a daughter (born secretly in Ireland). Oates' great-great granddaughter
today says she feels no animosity and that she and her brother are proud of
their connection to the great man.
RETURN TO HOMEPAGE
LATEST NEWS
BOOK REVIEWS BY CHRIS BRAND
FOR MORE ON CELEBRITY AGE GAPS, GO TO:
BABE BAGGER UPDATE
(includes ‘Boy Bagging’)
CELEBRITY
COUPLES – AGE DIFFERENCES
Created: Summer, 2002
Last modified: 20 ix 2003