But this was straight up child rape, not some hippie free love misunderstanding. Not sure how the 70s got dragged before the court, this shit’s been going on for a long time.
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Sigh. I did read the upthread, but I still feel that everyone who observed and didn’t say anything is complicit in some way. I understand WHY people don’t say anything when they observe crimes, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s ok to remain silent. I might not have said anything either in similar circumstances, I just don’t know, but I do know I’d find it very difficult to ever forgive myself for not speaking out and I’d feel complicit.
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A high age of consent plays to the patriarchy by infantilizing young women, and practically guaranteeing guilt by placing it so high after puberty. Also, plays into the notion that girls must remain pure for their eventual mate. It’s essentially puritanical.
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Power is a powerful thing. I prefer not to blame those who appear to be its victims.
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Child rape? maybe not. Glorification of sex with minors? Oh hell yes. Rock stars boning underage groupies was a HUGE part of the 70s rock culture - how could you pretend otherwise?
Sure the Big Bopper’s Chantilly Lace or Ringo Starr covering You’re Sixteen are mostly cute, cute. Take a look at the lyrics for:
Rolling Stones - little queenie, stray cat blues
NIck Gilder - Hot child in the city
Donna Summer - Bad Girls
Kiss - Christine Sixteen
Rod Stewart - tonight’s the night
Dr. Hook - only sixteen
Randy Newman - it’s money that I love
Jethro Tull - Aqualung
I could keep going, but you get the picture - chock full of sexualization of teens by 20-30 year olds. And Gary Glitter, Ted Nugent and Jimmy Page, at minimum are easy proof it wasn’t all just lyrics and fantasy.
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You’re telling everybody IN the room…and the implication is if they don’t care than nobody else will…It is way of attempting to use people’s shocked inaction to create implicit complicity and to, in effect “normalize” that behavior. Sexual predators are often quite good at trying to create the impression in their victims that their behavior is “normal” and “okay.” They usually feel this way and they tend to choose naive victims that can be convinced that “this is just how it works.”
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Yes, but I wouldn’t say that Aqualung glorifies it in any way…
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true. The Kinks - Art Love is sort of the same. But then we can move into the 80s with Stray Cats’ Sexy and Seventeen, Billy Idol’s Cradle of Love and keep going. It’s a whole genre of music.
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“Power is a powerful thing. I prefer not to blame those who appear to be its victims.”
How were the people who didn’t speak out and/or stop the rape the victims?
Perhaps complicit might be too harsh a term to use, but people who saw this happening and didn’t say anything DID participate as observers - rather then just being told about the rape by Jackie (which was my original point in my reply to Boundegar).
Fear of a powerful person doesn’t explain/excuse people who saw this and then went on to repeat this story and ridicule Jackie.
And I highly doubt that Kim Fowley had that amount of power over EVERY person at that party - too bad NONE of them spoke out and stopped this from happening.
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You don’t think all of the Runaways were victims of his?
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Sounds like they might have been, but not at that particular point in time and I doubt everyone at the party was a victim of Fowleys.
No one was “told” anything, people participated to varying degrees and from the sound of things I doubt that many of them were very surprised by what was happening. Fowley’s actions were more of an interactive performance, rather then a narration. He actively recruited other participants and had someone else give Jackie the drugs.
But beside quibbling with the use of “told”, I agree with the rest of your post!
You wrote: “Power is a powerful thing. I prefer not to blame those who appear to be its victims.”
I asked you: “How were the people who didn’t speak out and/or stop the rape the victims?”
I had already said I understood some of the reasons people didn’t speak up, but neither of the reply links you posted in response said that people who don’t speak up ARE victims. They MIGHT be victims, they might not be - we don’t really know. I also would “prefer not to blame those who appear to be its victims.”
I have no more to say in response to that than has already been said here. I’ve heard it said that some things bear repeating because some people need to hear them again and again and again, but I’m just not feeling up to that doing that work today.
I understand that you have no adequate response…
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How unsurprisingly presumptuous of you.
I don’t find describing bystanders as victims particularly helpful.
These situations have a tipping point and collusion is a key part of that. Those who collude with such display of destructive power, I would call collaborators.
They are victims only in the sense that we are all victims, victims of society, of misogyny of patriarchy of the class system, of racism and the rest. Along that line of thought we could construe that Kim also was a victim–victim of an ideology, that teaches you that to be a real man you have to dominate and destroy the weak, that teaches you that empathy is a deficiency that needs to be conquered.
Every single person in that room (except the drugged, semi conscious victim) had the opportunity to intervene, not to collaborate, to make a difference to the outcome of the situation. The interesting question for me is what social dynamic contributed to a situation where virtually everyone present abdicated their responsibility, and denial by either leaving the scene of the crime, or by denying any recollection of it seemed the only viable action.
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How unsurprisingly insulting and dismissive of you.
Mod note: No victim blaming.
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