A Reminder: “Underaged Women” are Not Women

If you've been following the news stories around Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific sex crimes, you might already be familiar with the term, "underage women". It’s frequently used by mainstream media, including MSNBC and CNN, as well as Epstein's legal team to describe his victims, some of whom were as young as 14 years old. The term is problematic in more than one sense. The most obvious problem is that it's completely farcical - no "woman" is underage. An underaged woman is a girl. A girl is, by definition, a child. But the far more insidious nature of the term is that it muddies the waters and minimises the severity of the crimes in question, which are undeniably horrific.

Many news agencies stated they used the term to avoid confusion over whether the victims involved were legally considered children (that is, pre-pubescent, which they were not). But their usage points to a larger and more disturbing cultural trend surrounding female victims: a tendency to empathise with the perpetrators and minimise the harm done to these girls. In this case, the use of the term dismisses the fact that Jeffrey Epstein is, in fact, a convicted paedophile, and his victims, at least in the commonly understood definition of the word, were children. The term "underage women" suggests the victims were practically women, i.e. old enough to know what they were doing. Cue that old, hideous trope - asking for it.

The common usage of this term underscores the disturbing way in which our culture views teenaged girls, as sexually available save for some legal technicalities. One need only look at the way in which men and the media talk about teenaged celebrities. Several former child stars have spoken about their sexualisation by the media during their teenaged years. Natalie Portman, who reached celebrity status at a very young age, called it "an environment of sexual terrorism" (https://abcnews.go.com/US/natalie-portman-opens-experiencing-sexual-terrorism-age-13/story?id=52494099). Her local radio station hosted a countdown until she reached the age of 18, which she described as  "euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with." Portman continued, "At 13 years old the message from our culture was clear to me: I felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit my expression and my work in order to send my own message to the world that I'm someone worthy of safety and respect."

Similar campaigns took place with Emma Watson, the Olsen twins and, most recently, Kendell Jenner, about whom CNN wrote an article pondering whether the countdown clock was "gross or fair game". I wish I were kidding. https://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/17/living/parents-countdown-clock-kendall-jenner/index.html

If you're thinking Portman's testimony was simply from a different time (it has been more than 25 years since she was a 13-year-old, after all) think again. In a recent article penned for Elle Magazine, former child star Mara Wilson, of Matilda fame, called out how the media talks about 13-year-old breakout star of Stranger Things, Millie Bobby Brown. She drew particular attention to a tweet by an adult man referring to a picture of Brown, dressed fashionably for a premier, stating she "just grew up in front of our eyes."

"I felt sick", wrote Wilson, "and then I felt furious. A 13-year-old girl is not grown up ... These websites also run scare pieces about kidnapped children, teen sex trafficking, and paedophile predators. Young girls at risk, young girls objectified: It's all titillation to them. These adults fetishise innocence and the loss of innocence even more. They know what they're selling." (https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a13532407/dont-sexualize-young-girls/)

We all know what they're selling - because we're all buying it, women included. This bizarre cultural fetishisation of youth, and young women in particular, is everywhere. It's in the way marketers place female fashion models, many of whom are also as young as 14, in sexually suggestive advertising campaigns for perfume, cosmetics, clothing and accessories. It’s also in how the loathsome idea of "jailbait" persists as a "humorous" cliché and the extreme popularity of the "barely legal" porn genre.

This treatment of girls is nothing new. The trope of the "May-December" romance between much older men and younger women has been ever-present in the media since ... Well, pretty much forever. Even today, it's treated with a chuckle and a shrug, if not normalised completely. The "age of consent" trope is every bit as old, and it's flourishing just as much today. See, for example, the teacher/ student relationship, a gross plot point that refuses to die in mainstream media. These relationships are almost never presented as anything but intensely romantic, forbidden love. Most recently, Pretty Little Liars, a show hugely popular among teen and tween girls, featured the teacher/student relationship as a major plot point. In one episode, a student marries her teacher, who she started having sex with at the age of sixteen. Fans of the show were encouraged to root for this couple. Their relationship was presented as a romantic triumph, not what it actually was - statutory rape.

You might think it's a long way to jump from some light teen entertainment to Jeffrey Epstein grooming and sexually victimising teenaged girls. But it's not. In fact, the way we overlook how one leads to the other merely underscores how entrenched the problem is in the way we talk about and portray women and girls in both popular media and the news. Words have meaning. When we talk about Jeffrey Epstein's victims as "underage women", we are complicit in perpetuating the unspoken belief that teenaged girls are coyly and knowingly toeing the line between innocence and experience. Our language tries to excuse our culture's bizarre fixation on teenaged desirability and sexuality by branding them "women" except for one small, legal technicality. They are not. They are children. And they are victims.

By: Siri Williams 

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