Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Jimmy Savile: Stupid hysteria over normal sexuality
If you showed photos of average girls ages fifteen or fourteen to the average man and did not label them with the girls' ages, then all normal men would find them attractive and would react sexually. [This can be measured physiologically, so there is no need to rely on possibly dishonest verbal responses.]
The age of puberty in girls – its onset (menarche) – is just eleven or below; and therefore a fifteen- or fourteen-year-old girl is several years post-puberty. Not only is she sexually mature but very near her peak of fertility, which is the age at which men have evolved to find females most attractive of all. Furthermore, the girl is not emotionally immature, given that the hormonal surge at puberty is responsible for initiating the adult organisation of the brain. It is no surprise then that surveys show the majority of people – male and female, let alone just girls -- have already had full sex before their fourteenth birthday.
Why, then, is the age-of-consent set in law at age sixteen? This was set back in Victorian times when the average age of menarche was at the astonishingly late age of seventeen. So the age when sex was deemed illegal even back then – in the context of a wild panic about what was the bogus notion of 'the white slave trade' – was set actually below the age of female puberty.
The age-of-consent law is now a serious anachronism, and means that most people break the law. It is a major infringement of the freedom of young people, especially of boys given the two-year maturational gap between the sexes and the preference girls have for older males. It is also an inappropriate attack on natural sexual relationships between a girl and a considerably older man, such as in the current case of the fifteen-year-old girl and her thirty-year-old teacher. There are plenty of instances of pupil-teacher relationships that become marriages with children that long endure. That such relationships are deemed a supposed abuse of authority is no defence for the silly hysteria, because status is the very key attribute of men that girls have evolved to find particularly attractive. The pupil-teacher sexual relationship is ever likely to happen and could not make better evolutionary sense. In the contemporary context of the PC ('political correctness') totalitarian attack on the mass of ordinary people, the law regarding sex is a direct attack on boys and men.
So how does Jimmy Savile – a notably high-status male – fall foul of what should be common-sense acceptance of the reality of sex? Only if he did indeed use coercion as alleged; but here is where the likely truth should stop anyone jumping to that conclusion. There is plenty of research showing a very high proportion of even formal allegations of sexual assault to police are fabrications (likely the majority; see the analysis in the book, The Woman Racket); and for often highly trivial reasons – especially to cover mild embarrassment. Girls and women routinely regret sexual encounters and retrospectively redefine them as coercive. [This must have been much more the case prior to the free availability of near-infallible contraception and the legal availability of abortion.] Then we must add the dimension of also well-researched 'false memory' construction, especially given the great elapse of time – several decades.
This is only the start of teasing out multiple factors that conspire to create a bogus feeding frenzy. Savile's incredible public profile guarantees attention for the attention-seeker. His death and the absence of any forensics or (other) witness guarantees immunity of even outlandish accusations from being challenged. The media – let alone the police – trawl is an open invitation for any of the huge number of girls who had sexual encounters with Savile to come forward with all sorts of fanciful elaborations of what actually took place.
The likely reality of Jimmy Savile's sexual behaviour is that he was a normal man in the abnormal situation, through being high-status and within the pop world in a newly 'sexually liberated' era, of being in the milieu of a large number of girls at the peak of their attractiveness and willing to engage in sexual activity. It would be amazing if, given the volume of sexual activity, that the ever-present problems of mis-communication between the sexes (notably female mixed come-on and coyness signals) would not lead on occasion to sex the girl did not want. A man in a man's 'dream' position as Savile found himself easily could become used to the sexual activity such that his guard may be lowered as to checking that the girl was fine with what was going on. Of course, it may be also that Jimmy Savile was cavalier and in fact an abuser; but there is no basis of determining this given the nature of any evidence available. The only thing we know for sure is that his high profile more or less obliged him to be larger-than-life, so even his seeming oddness is likely no clue to anything. Myself, I've always found him creepy, and I never warmed to the man even in early Top of the Pops days (never mind the cringeworthy Jim'll Fix It), but that's probably just a lowly-male reaction to how society indulges the minority of high-status males.
The upshot is that an honest view of Jimmy Savile is very much at odds with our contemporary perspective, which is a politically-driven hysteria that will come to be seen as such a madness as to be a warning from history.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 10:32 am 
