It's illegal and morally questionable but statutory rape isn't forcibly raping someone. I know there's plenty of outrage culture in "rape is rape" but I think it's definitely a distinction worth noting.

The whole point of statutory rape laws is to acknowledge that children are taught that adults have power over them and need to be protected from adults who abuse that power for sex.

Were age of consent laws less of a thing back in his day?

Edit: Seems as though this should’ve been / is a crime?[0]

[0] - http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/230?section=primary...

The proof of this lies with pre-1980s generations of child sex abuse victims, who knew (or quickly learned) to not go to adults in authority - especially police. At best, they could be expect to be ignored, marginalized and/or gaslighted. At worst could be more abuse, even if 'only' verbal, physical, etc.

Reality is that most adults in authority didn't give a crap about child abuse until they could use abuse allegations as a weapon. Once they (police, legislators, administrators, etc) gained that power, all kinds of things suddenly became abuse, including consensual sexual activity.

"Think of the children" tends to be code for "figure out how to leverage the children".

Even if that's true about "adults in authority", doesn't make it true about adults in general, and I'd be very, very surprised if it's generally true about adults that are parents.

I also find it ironic, that some seem to see the unwarranted, power-imbalance-driven exercise of authority over other adults, as more heinous and egregious, than the unwarranted, power-imbalance-driven exercise of (sexual) authority over children.

EDIT: added a missing N and a missing comma.

For context, I'd like to note that prior to outrage being the pregurgitated social response for child abuse, parents didn't really have any go-to reactions prepared for them.

It wasn't uncommon for parents feelings of shame and confusion to push them toward quarantining their child (exasperating that child's sense of isolation and fault). It certainly wasn't standard was for parents to seek justice for the perpetrator.

My 20th century American experience is that authority wasn't there to advocate for children who've been mistreated. Most egregiously, police - who society specifically entrusted with the responsibility of stopping child abuse - weren't known as people that abused children could reach out to for protection. If they had been, child abuse scandals wouldn't have progressed far beyond the original victim.

But once child abuse could be leveraged into gobs of power, suddenly child abuse advocates were loudly everywhere.

Or, alternatively, those parents (who as you rightly point out, in previous generations, didn't really have anywhere to go), and more importantly, the victims, realised that speaking out didn't come with as high a social cost as previously thought. And that when they did speak out, the many people who would have had little, if any, exposure to this kind of thing, were horrified at the detail.

I'd also add, that in the past, many "beat cops" would have been at a loss as to how to deal with these issues. Of all crimes reported, police apparently hated "domestics" the most, as there was no clear guidelines for them to follow.

It's very easy for people to ascribe other causes to these things when you have little experience with kids, and no experience with abuse. Not everything is a deep-state ploy to entrench power and control.

EDITED: their > there. And a bunch of other grammatical errors. Seriously, why do I always spot a mistake after I've hit submit?

I think what is more likely is that millions of individuals who were were in terrible and desperate situations used the combined wisdom of their extended (& often wise) family and took an accurate read on their actual society.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/01/13/sable-starr/

The Star magazine referenced in that piece is available at http://star1973.com

Thanks for the great article. Sad to say I’ve read Legs’ book, and now recall Starr but never realized she was that young. Now I’m also wondering how Iggy hasn’t gotten more heat.

There's a lot of people that have made significant contributions to art, science, culture, etc., while being awful people, and we have a hard time reconciling that.

No one would argue that we shouldn't use any of the science advanced by Einstein, yet he manipulated and cheated on his first wife while trying to totally control her, down to giving her a list of demands she had to follow through with every day. Lots of people have beat their wives. Lots of musicians - and certainly not limited to rock musicians - have raped young teens.

Do we stop listening to the music of anyone that's turned out to be a shitty human being? Do we ever forgive them if they modify their behavior? How do we reconcile our like or love of one aspect of a person with their heinous acts? What's the moral thing to do here?

These are tough questions to answer. So it's easy to chalk this news up as 'Man those decades were just crazy! Sex, drugs, rock and roll! The girls obviously wanted it - they set out to do it!' and not think about the hard shit while still justifying to themselves why they continue to listen to the music and support the artist.

It's hard. I've thought a lot and haven't been able to answer those questions, beyond coming up with a compromise for myself - I'll keep listening to the music, but I won't do anything to support an artist further if I learn of behavior like this. No concerts, no merch, etc. It's not perfect and I'm still contributing to their finances when I stream a song on spotify or whatever, but it's one that works for me.

I do hope that it's this sort of thing that leads to the defense of the behavior, and not them actually being envious.