Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Unprovable hysteria about Jimmy Saville that might well be mostly or even wholly nonsense
Jimmy Saville has always seemed on the odd side of larger-than-life if not a creep, but the world's gone mad in crazy presumption he was seriously weird and criminal. Is it really so hard to tell the difference between allegation and proof? And is it really so hard not to be able to see the scenario whereby the whole thing could be one big charade?
Take a hypothetical alpha-male media star of pop whose milieu necessarily is of very young women and older girls, and a career spanning several decades. He will have attracted the interest of a staggeringly large number of these very young women and older girls, and it's actually his job to flirt or mock-flirt with them. If he's a normal male then he will have gratefully accepted this interest and have had various levels of sexual encounter with lots of them over very many years. Given the usual communication issues between the sexes, then even if he were fairly careful there are bound to be a low proportion of encounters where, on the one hand, as the male he to some extent mis-read the mixture of coyness and come-on signals; and, on the other hand, the female involved either didn't know her own mind or retrospectively reinterpreted the encounter in the light of subsequent regret for what happened. With the scale of interest in him, then there is every scope for a man to become to some extent a fast worker, as they say; compounding the inevitable communication problems.
Now, factor in what is known of the incidence of fabricated rape allegations – conservatively 35% on Home Office figures [see my analysis in my book, The Woman Racket]; 50%-70% according to Sir Ian Blair's own study of the beliefs of rape investigators in the UK (and which is 50%-905 in similar studies around the world) – and factor in too that the target has been long prominent in the public eye. Then additionally take account of what is known of the false construction of memory, especially given the great elapse of time since the alleged incidents; and also the huge publicity facilitating copycat behaviour, and the chance to be the centre of considerable attention. Then there is what is known about the highly trivial reasons women and girls have for making false allegations; and bear in mind the compensation available for a 'criminal injury', and the low level of substantiation required to obtain this. ….. then isn't what we have here a perfect storm to create a self-perpetuating seemingly convincing fiction?
So what about the ages of the girls/women? Well, the first point is that whatever was the case, we are not talking paedophilia here, since that the average age of onset of menarche is about age eleven. A paedophile is someone with a sexual preference for individuals under the age of puberty. The very youngest of Saville's alleged victims was two years older than this. The category of a sexual preference for adolescent females is 'hebophilia', but note that there is nothing abnormal at all about a male of any age finding adolescent girls sexually attractive; nor even to have an actual preference for girls of adolescent age. Of course, almost all men are hardly in a position to act on such a preference. Men find most attractive of all females at or near their peak fertility, which is just a few years after puberty. This is or was somewhere around the 17-25 mark, but with the progressive fall in the age of puberty then this should be revised down somewhat. Note that catwalk models are recruited to start work at at thirteen or fourteen, and even twelve. The age-of-consent law of age sixteen is a relatively recent development, and reflects a Victorian manufactured scare of the supposed 'white slave trade', and when the average age of the onset of menarche was more like seventeen. Assuming a desire to stay within the law, and the great difficulty of accurately assessing age to within a couple of years, then most men in Saville's position would find themselves having great difficulty in avoiding a significant error rate in choosing which girls to respond to sexually. Therefore, it is not clear that there was any great peculiarity in Saville's sexual interests of 'he likes 'em young' more than his unusual position in society whereby he could act on them
The upshot is that the various allegations against Jimmy Saville could be largely accurate, or only party reflecting the truth, or largely or even wholly a complete invention. There is no way forward to tell which of those overall conclusions would be the accurate one.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 8:00 am 
