Feminism exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence – and helped fight that culture
I
was there. I kept the receipts. I remember how normalized the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and even tweens by adult men was, how it showed up in movies, in the tales of rock stars and “baby groupies”, in counterculture and mainstream culture, how normalized rape, exploitation, grooming, objectification, commodification was.
The last Woody Allen movie I ever saw was Manhattan, in which he cast himself as more or less himself, a dweeb in his mid-40s, dating a high school student played by Mariel Hemingway. She was my age, 17, and I was only too familiar with creeps, and the movie creeped me out, even though it was only long afterward that I read that she said he was at the time pressuring her to get sexually involved with him in real life.
Manhattan came out in 1979; two years earlier Roman Polanski, on the pretext that he was taking photographs for French Vogue, got a 13-year-old girl to come alone to a house, where he drugged and raped her vaginally and anally. The probation officer assigned to him wrote: “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother,” and “that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing”. In her own account, the girl had said no repeatedly and even pretended to have an asthma attack to try to dissuade him, but the probation officer was of his era and only too willing to blame a drugged child. That was normal then.
