Age of Consent in Fiction
erastes is blogging today over about age of consent in fiction. I wanted to reply, but I couldn't; Blogspot limits comments to 4096 characters. (Cripes, even LJ does better than that.) So I thought I'd post here and leave a link there.
Sometimes I wonder how George R. R. Martin got away with it in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. For those who haven't read it, it's set in a quasi-medieval world. Two very young girls are married in the course of the book. Sansa is about twelve and married to a man in his thirties (though the marriage isn't consummated). Daenerys is thirteen when she marries a horse lord on indeterminate age (though I had the impression he was around forty); we not only see her have sex with him, but she's pregnant by the time she's fourteen.
The idea of teenagers having sex, getting married or both is not really a shocking one for me. Plus it's historically accurate--young girls did wed older men in the Middle Ages. We know this. And it would seem to be reasonable to write about it happening in a historical novel, since it is, after all, HISTORY.
Out of curiosity over the past few months, I've checked various publishing houses and their medieval historicals. Over and over, the same thing happens--the nobly born heroine is getting married for the first time around the age of eighteen...or is not yet wed at that age, because she has not chosen to wed the man or men that her parents/father have selected for her. Roughly the same thing happens to nobly born heroes, except that they're expected to wed at the age of eighteen, rather than being married off. Both sexes tend to fuss to a ridiculous degree--especially in a world where arranged marriages for nobles were the norm--about "choosing a bride/a husband" and "marrying for love."
This anachronistic insistence on choice and age of consent always makes me think of the Empress Maude, daughter and heir of Henry I of England. She was betrothed to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor when she was SEVEN. When she was nine, she was sent to Germany to begin training to be an Empress. Henry and Maude married on January 7, 1114. He was twenty-eight. She was not quite twelve.
Henry died eleven years later. Maude came home to England when she was about 23. She was a young, beautiful and, by all accounts, stubborn woman, not to mention the only surviving child of her father and the heir to the English throne and the Duchy of Normandy. So she should have been able to choose her next husband, right? Wrong.
Her father picked a boy with a lot of land who was eleven years Maude's junior (yes, the prospective husband was twelve) and ordered Maude to marry him. Maude refused. Henry I locked her up in a tower for a few years. Oh, she was well-treated. But she was a prisoner--because she was defying the king. And Henry kept her there until she agreed to marry Geoffrey of Anjou...three years later.
Clearly, age and consent were not the issues in the past that they are now. So I have to wonder why they're such a huge factor in novels that call themselves "historicals."
I suspect that a lot of the problem comes from the fact that history, as taught in America, at least, is less about teaching actual history and more about mythologizing. Quite a lot of "lessons" are provably incorrect but continue to be taught in order to convince students that America and her way of doing things are both good, right, progressive and just. (Check out James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.) It breeds a provincial and Americo-centric view of the world. Consequently, I don't think that it occurs to all publishers--and I'm quite certain that it doesn't occur to all readers--that there are different ages of consent all over the world even now. The age of consent is eighteen in America nowadays; why should a story set in a different time and/or place be any different?
Not only does a writer have to contend with ignorance, but with discomfort about teenage sexuality. To use the example Erastes provided, Junction X, a lot of agents seem to be upset by the notion of a seventeen-year-old having sex. I'm not sure why. I can recall plenty of seventeen-and-unders having sex when I was in school. Moreover, the text makes it clear that the seventeen-year-old Alex isn't being exploited at all; rather, he's the instigator of the relationship.
And though it's illegal for anyone in Alex's time and place to have gay sex--making age of consent irrelevant, because you can't HAVE an age of consent when the sex itself is illegal--he would definitely be at the age of consent or over nowadays in the following countries: Albania, Samoa, Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, all of Australia except for Queensland, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Southern Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dutch Antilles, Ecuador, Estonia, the Falkland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, Macedonia, France, French Guiana, Tahiti, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guam, Guadalope, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jersey, Jordan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Marshall Islands, Martinique, parts of Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Reunion, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Venezuela.
So Alex would be legal in three-quarters of the world these days. The average age of consent, worldwide, is 16.
The following areas have an age of consent of eighteen or over for gay sex: Queensland, Australia (you have to be eighteen in Queensland to have anal intercourse, whatever sex you are; apparently any other kind of gay sex is okay by Queensland), the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada (which has a federal law banning unmarried people under eighteen from consenting to anal intercourse; again, apparently any other kind of gay sex is fine in Canada), Chile, the Dominican Republic, Gabon, Gibraltar, Guatemala, Guernsey, Haiti, Indonesia, Japan (the federal age of consent is thirteen--yes, really!--but prefecture law generally ramps it up to eighteen), Malta, parts of Mexico, Niger, Rwanda, South Africa, Suriname, Turkey, Vanuatu, Vietnam...and the United States.
So two nations that have laws mandating that anal sex be for people eighteen and over, two nations with dueling ages of consent, a mass of dictatorships and ultra-conservative countries...and the USA.
It seems rather odd that America hasn't caught up to the rest of the West yet.
In addition to provincialism and a prudish fear of acknowledging that teenagers have sex, there also appears to be an unspoken declaration in publishing about "keeping things safe"--not going beyond what the audience wants to think or believe. And most of the American audience seems to cling to the notion that American ways are the norm for the world, and that the past was exactly like the present, only with different clothes. Publishers, not unnaturally, want to sell books, and they find it easier to sell books that express ideas the audience is predisposed to buying--even if they are dead wrong. ( The American Christian Booksellers' idiotic insistence that no medieval historical published by Steeple Hill feature a religious referred to as "Father," "priest" or "bishop" springs to mind.) Understandably, this makes it rather difficult for a writer to inform the public about actual historical facts.
So I repeat what I said before: how the hell did Martin get away with it?
Sometimes I wonder how George R. R. Martin got away with it in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. For those who haven't read it, it's set in a quasi-medieval world. Two very young girls are married in the course of the book. Sansa is about twelve and married to a man in his thirties (though the marriage isn't consummated). Daenerys is thirteen when she marries a horse lord on indeterminate age (though I had the impression he was around forty); we not only see her have sex with him, but she's pregnant by the time she's fourteen.
The idea of teenagers having sex, getting married or both is not really a shocking one for me. Plus it's historically accurate--young girls did wed older men in the Middle Ages. We know this. And it would seem to be reasonable to write about it happening in a historical novel, since it is, after all, HISTORY.
Out of curiosity over the past few months, I've checked various publishing houses and their medieval historicals. Over and over, the same thing happens--the nobly born heroine is getting married for the first time around the age of eighteen...or is not yet wed at that age, because she has not chosen to wed the man or men that her parents/father have selected for her. Roughly the same thing happens to nobly born heroes, except that they're expected to wed at the age of eighteen, rather than being married off. Both sexes tend to fuss to a ridiculous degree--especially in a world where arranged marriages for nobles were the norm--about "choosing a bride/a husband" and "marrying for love."
This anachronistic insistence on choice and age of consent always makes me think of the Empress Maude, daughter and heir of Henry I of England. She was betrothed to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor when she was SEVEN. When she was nine, she was sent to Germany to begin training to be an Empress. Henry and Maude married on January 7, 1114. He was twenty-eight. She was not quite twelve.
Henry died eleven years later. Maude came home to England when she was about 23. She was a young, beautiful and, by all accounts, stubborn woman, not to mention the only surviving child of her father and the heir to the English throne and the Duchy of Normandy. So she should have been able to choose her next husband, right? Wrong.
Her father picked a boy with a lot of land who was eleven years Maude's junior (yes, the prospective husband was twelve) and ordered Maude to marry him. Maude refused. Henry I locked her up in a tower for a few years. Oh, she was well-treated. But she was a prisoner--because she was defying the king. And Henry kept her there until she agreed to marry Geoffrey of Anjou...three years later.
Clearly, age and consent were not the issues in the past that they are now. So I have to wonder why they're such a huge factor in novels that call themselves "historicals."
I suspect that a lot of the problem comes from the fact that history, as taught in America, at least, is less about teaching actual history and more about mythologizing. Quite a lot of "lessons" are provably incorrect but continue to be taught in order to convince students that America and her way of doing things are both good, right, progressive and just. (Check out James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.) It breeds a provincial and Americo-centric view of the world. Consequently, I don't think that it occurs to all publishers--and I'm quite certain that it doesn't occur to all readers--that there are different ages of consent all over the world even now. The age of consent is eighteen in America nowadays; why should a story set in a different time and/or place be any different?
Not only does a writer have to contend with ignorance, but with discomfort about teenage sexuality. To use the example Erastes provided, Junction X, a lot of agents seem to be upset by the notion of a seventeen-year-old having sex. I'm not sure why. I can recall plenty of seventeen-and-unders having sex when I was in school. Moreover, the text makes it clear that the seventeen-year-old Alex isn't being exploited at all; rather, he's the instigator of the relationship.
And though it's illegal for anyone in Alex's time and place to have gay sex--making age of consent irrelevant, because you can't HAVE an age of consent when the sex itself is illegal--he would definitely be at the age of consent or over nowadays in the following countries: Albania, Samoa, Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, all of Australia except for Queensland, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Southern Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dutch Antilles, Ecuador, Estonia, the Falkland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, Macedonia, France, French Guiana, Tahiti, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guam, Guadalope, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jersey, Jordan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Marshall Islands, Martinique, parts of Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Reunion, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Venezuela.
So Alex would be legal in three-quarters of the world these days. The average age of consent, worldwide, is 16.
The following areas have an age of consent of eighteen or over for gay sex: Queensland, Australia (you have to be eighteen in Queensland to have anal intercourse, whatever sex you are; apparently any other kind of gay sex is okay by Queensland), the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada (which has a federal law banning unmarried people under eighteen from consenting to anal intercourse; again, apparently any other kind of gay sex is fine in Canada), Chile, the Dominican Republic, Gabon, Gibraltar, Guatemala, Guernsey, Haiti, Indonesia, Japan (the federal age of consent is thirteen--yes, really!--but prefecture law generally ramps it up to eighteen), Malta, parts of Mexico, Niger, Rwanda, South Africa, Suriname, Turkey, Vanuatu, Vietnam...and the United States.
So two nations that have laws mandating that anal sex be for people eighteen and over, two nations with dueling ages of consent, a mass of dictatorships and ultra-conservative countries...and the USA.
It seems rather odd that America hasn't caught up to the rest of the West yet.
In addition to provincialism and a prudish fear of acknowledging that teenagers have sex, there also appears to be an unspoken declaration in publishing about "keeping things safe"--not going beyond what the audience wants to think or believe. And most of the American audience seems to cling to the notion that American ways are the norm for the world, and that the past was exactly like the present, only with different clothes. Publishers, not unnaturally, want to sell books, and they find it easier to sell books that express ideas the audience is predisposed to buying--even if they are dead wrong. ( The American Christian Booksellers' idiotic insistence that no medieval historical published by Steeple Hill feature a religious referred to as "Father," "priest" or "bishop" springs to mind.) Understandably, this makes it rather difficult for a writer to inform the public about actual historical facts.
So I repeat what I said before: how the hell did Martin get away with it?