Hurrah for The Sisterhood!
by Kate CopstickHurrah for The Sisterhood! The day the Guardian announces their Top 100 Inspiring Women (including Lady Gaga at No 6 just to remind us that appearance is, after all, all; followed by Stella McCartney and Emma Thompson to point up the fact that, although sisters probably can do it for themselves, it doesn’t half help to have dads and mums who help) Tanya Gold describes women in the adult industry as ‘paid-for receptacle(s) for semen’. I have worked in and around that industry for some years. I have heard what the men who buy the films call the women who make them: big on synecdoche (pussy, piece of ass etc etc) and full of hope (dirty slut). I have never heard any man anywhere reduce these women to anything approximating a ‘paid for receptacle for semen’. Is it the paying? The receiving? The semen perhaps? But congratulations Tanya! I genuinely thought myself unshockable, and that there was nothing that I could find utterly unacceptable. You got me.
This astonishing aside comes (sorry Tanya – semen again) in a confused piece having a bit of a go at John Humphries for his use of the phrase “not quite a paedophile” in reference to Jeffrey Epstein, the sugar daddy gone sour. Tanya felt it was ‘obscene’. Sensitive girl, Tanya. She peppers a rambling and confused piece with the usual buzzwords – abuse, exploitation, hell, disgust, yadayadayada – and leaps from a transcript of the Today programme to the revelation that we all subconsciously (apparently) see pubescent girls as being only good for sex so society is to blame, but we are brainwashed by fashion and advertising, so they are to blame, and porn, but we are to blame for fashion and advertising, although not porn, and a little sexual exploration can be a good thing for teenagers but only with other teenagers. So there.
Back in the land of the thinking, it occurs to me that when a girl gets to fifteen, even fourteen, it is all just geography. Her boyfriend is a sex offender in the UK, and simply the one paying for dinner in the hope of getting his leg over in any other European country.
Sex is really very simple. Did you know even animals know how to do sex?? THAT is how simple it is. Humans are evolved, of course. We are, in the main part, the only species that evolved to fuck for fun. Remember fun?
Left unencumbered by politico-socio-sexual luggage, working out sex is one of the things your teen years are for. You learn to judge for yourself what is acceptable or unacceptable for yourself.
The bevy of teenagers who went to such lengths to come to Epstein’s house and lie about their ages so that he could so ‘abuse’ them could have forgotten it all by now, could have been giggling over it, could have agreed that slimy old guys are gruesome, could have done many things that should be part of life’s great big parabola of learning and growing up.
Not now. Now they have been judged. And found to be tragic victims. Whether they want to be or not.
Very empowering.
