Jennifer Frost’s response to the predictably brilliant question posed by Antonia Grant about how the reasoning that fuelled support for the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – that citizens too young to vote were old enough to fight – applied to women – led me to consider some ways in which our gender defines our age. Both concepts – age and gender – are social constructions; however they are both reliant on the biological facts of sex and physical maturity.
The “masculinism” surrounding draft-resistance in the U.S. of the 1970s reminded me of the famous pacifist Lytton Strachey’s response half a century earlier, when asked by a board considering conscientious objectors what he’d do if a German soldier were to rape his sister, that he would “try to get between them”. When gender is socially constructed, effeminate men and masculine women often find themselves in a dysphoric state of uncertainty, particularly when politics is involved.
The same must surely go for age. The lady I offered to carry bags for last week was offended that I considered her old enough to need help; she would likely agree that one’s physical age is disparate from how old they truly feel. This is reflected by arbitrary sexual consent laws – why must Turkish teenagers wait until they’re eighteen to have sex when their Greek counterparts are allowed to start three years earlier? Why, as Frost explained, did the ages of consent in the U.S. vary from state to state and between sexes? Physical and emotional maturity are affected by different things – in many cultures, the physical aspect of virginity is far less important than the emotional disturbance it is supposed to cause – but Turks and Greeks are so physically and culturally similar that it makes me curious as to who gets to draw the line.
Perhaps some of these differences can be examined through the lens of music. Jennifer Frost did, after all, favour a short pop song, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s L.U.V. (1969), over a piece of peer-reviewed academic literature* as a “Work” to be used as a useful historical source. I’m thinking now about how some of the music of the newer generations – Pulp’s Disco 2000 (1995) or Lana Del Rey’s Put Me in a Movie (2010) and Lolita (2012), or hell, even Justin Bieber’s What Do You Mean? (2015) – can tell us about how our modern society thinks about consent.
*Though admittedly that book did sound rather awful
Lytton Strachey by Duncan Grant
