By Antonia WiIliams-Gary

“Jailbait”
“The Lolita Express”
“The Epstein Files”
“Sally Hemings”
What all the above have in common: Sexualizing females under the legal age of consent, all of whom are victims.

The men who victimize minors are alternatively labeled as predators, pedophiles. Presidents?

Unfortunately, men’s behavior with minor victims are often dismissed and excused as standard activity by “men of their times,” thus offering a cultural defense of such misbehavior and criminal acts!

Take the locker room talk that Trump was excused from when he stated that he could grab women by the pussy (genitalia); that he got away with it because he was a celebrity. While I was horrified when I heard one too many women excuse this crude and crass declaration (he was just having a “boys will be boys” moment), I am forced to accept that women have lowered their own standards and expectations of men.

I wonder what these women are teaching their sons about how to treat girls? What do they teach their daughters about what is acceptable behavior from men? Perhaps some of these women are themselves victims; trapped in a cycle of shame and paralysis to act on their own behalf to fight against all forms of sexual victimization.
I wonder.

I grew up hearing the expression “jailbait” applied to me and my cohorts. We knew what it meant, and we were warned about some men in our community- the would-be predators. It was a well-organized community of caring adults, and I personally never felt unsafe walking around the neighborhood. It was also common knowledge about someone’s dad who liked little girls, so we always avoided playing inside her house.
We were being “policed and protected” by our parents, friends, and residents who held any errant man accountable. I would often hear talk about “running” them out of the community.
Standards change.

“Lolita” was a novel published in the 1950s about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a twelve-year-old girl who he repeatedly raped. It was the subject of debate for decades after its publication. The book became a best-seller. A movie based on the novel was made in 1997. The public became hyper-vigilant against such predation. Or did it?

Twenty-five years after the novel was released, Jodi Foster earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a twelve-year-old prostitute in the movie, Taxi Driver. Controversy ensued- for another few decades. But that movie has been acclaimed for acting (Robert DeNiro), directing (Martin Scorsese), etc.

Seemingly, the standard for accepting the portrayal of minors as sexualized subject matter had been lowered- again. No one was being held accountable.

The standard shifted again in the court of public opinion about when, how, and by whom it is acceptable to consider a minor as a sexual object. While pedophilia is against the law, there are ongoing debates about the age of consent, adoption of methods to protect minors from on-line manipulation/recruitment, using AI for exploitation, limiting and blocking minors’ access to social media, to name a few front-line concerns.

A new frontier has opened to prevent sexual crimes against minors, but a rocky road is in the foreground.

Let’s flash back to Sally Hemings who born into an enslaved system operating on the Monticello Plantation, owned by Thomas Jefferson, the third US President. It is now an established fact (by DNA) that she had six children for him (four survived into adulthood) after he began to rape her when she was just fourteen years old.

Salacious stories about the illicit and illegal relationship started publicly circulating in 1802, written by journalist James Callender, hoping to ruin Jefferson’s reputation. But in the end, Jefferson’s decades-long victimization of Sally Hemings was accepted or dismissed by his peers, political allies, and his family as him simply acting as a “man of his
times”. No accountability was ever demanded because Jefferson was a slaveholder who held absolute control over his property, including the bodies of his chattel.

The prevailing justice system at that time was designed to uphold the vagaries of chattel slavery so that there was no recourse available to Hemings, her offspring, or any other aggrieved property –male or female-owned by powerful men.

And that brings me to the Epstein Files which represents the current example of a standard of behaviors perpetrated by men in power and control; men who have operated in a peculiar, closed circle of self-protection and privilege which has allowed them to hide in plain sight. Again, for decades.

Society continues to slip further downward in a spiraling decent into deep denial, nose-holding, gas lighting, reversals of standards, and abandonment of any expectations of providing protections of minor females- from across all sectors.

What can be done?

A popular meme suggests that, so far, there are no Black men named in the Epstein Files. Not so fast. We have our R. Kelly, P. Diddy, and who else?

We are not completely absolved, and I hope our statistical representation in the cabal of sexual predators of minors remains small; that we are still policing and protecting our own.

I can only hope.