General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: So I have a story for you: [View all]soldierant
(6,791 posts)is the number of people who are just now coming to this conclusion. Has not this been obvious to everyone since the Garden of Eden was vacated? It was once customary to provide old men with young sex slaves to restore their youth, and not just in some cultures. You can find it in the Bible, certainly.
If the two-pronged fact that (a) the GOP is known for projection - look at what they are decrying and you will see what they are doing, and (b) the GOP claim that Democrats are all a ring of pedophiles (In fact, pedophiles isn't a strong enough accusation - baby-killing, face-eating pedophiles).
The truth is that power and access to sex have gone hand in hand all through recorded history, and probably long before that. This is not new.
What is new is the entire concept of consent. Not just consent to sex, but consent to anything. Whose consent to a business transaction is or is not valid ... the requirement that certain contracts must carry a cooling-off period... that one must be a certain age before one can complete a financial transaction...and what age that would be...all this is quite new. From antiquity we have "Caveat emptor."
And consent to medical procedures, whether or not those procedures are part of a study. We all know the name Tuskegee, and that is was not only the base of the Tuskegee Airmen, but of - something else. We've all heard of Henrietta lacks, surely.
And the concept of consent is not yet a legal standard. Only this week a judge ruled that if a woman freely agreed to drink alcohol, then anything that happened to her after that decision was nor and could not be rape.
Granted that there have always been people who were repulsed and appalled at the conjunction of power and sociopathy, yet it has always been known that this is just how the world works, like it or not.
We have a lot more growing up to do before we can call ourselves civilized, I think.