Former Rolling Stone’s Child Lover Says Raise the Age of Consent

LONDON, April 20, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Mandy Smith, the former child-lover and later wife of Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman, believes that the age of consent should be raised to 18 in order to protect young girls, who are emotionally vulnerable when it comes to sexual relationships at that age. In an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail, Smith said that she had slept with the much older Wyman when she was 14 years old, beginning a relationship that stole away a childhood she “could never get back.”

Smith, 39, revealed to the Mail that she has come a long way from being the Wild Child on London’s celebrity scene in the 1980s to a woman who is now single, celibate, and living out a revived Catholic faith, mentoring young girls, and involving herself in charitable work.

But the experience of her child sexual relationship with Rolling Stone Wyman, 34 years her senior, taught her that teenage girls are not emotionally equipped for sex by the age of 16.

“It’s not about being physically mature. It’s emotional maturity that matters,” Smith told the Mail.

“I don’t think most 16-year-olds are ready. I think the age of consent should be raised to 18 at a minimum, and some girls aren’t even ready then,” she said. “People will find that odd coming from me. But I think I do know what I’m talking about here. You are still a child – even at 16.”

“You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could.”

Smith revealed that her father had been absent in her family’s life since she was three, and her mother was perennially ill around the time she met Wyman. The rocker had met her at a club where Smith and her sister Nicola, both teenagers, would party and try to dress and act twice their age.

Smith said she saw Wyman in part as filling the void of a father figure in her life. They began dating when she was 13, and revealed publicly for the first time to the Mail that Wyman had criminal intercourse with her when she was 14. When Smith reached the age of consent at 16, their relationship became public; by 18 she and Wyman married, and two years later the relationship ended in a bitter divorce.

Looking back on her past, she said that she believed Wyman never “would have made a move if my dad had been around.”

But her biggest concern is for teenage girls she sees today being caught up in a highly sexualized culture and its expectations.

“My concern is that everything – clothes, films, talk – is so sexualised. The girls I talk to are under pressure to be a certain way,” said Smith. “They think they should be having sex, living a certain life. I try to say to them: ‘Hold on. You don’t have to do this.’”

Smith is the mother of nine-year-old son, Max, from a brief relationship with model Ian Mosby. She says she rediscovered her faith in 2005 and tells the Mail that “God is the only man in my life now.”

“The great thing about the Church is that you can go back. It's never too late,” she said, adding that it was a note from one of the nuns who taught her in school that helped bring her back.

“She said that Jesus does not look at mistakes I had made, or the times I had ignored him. Until then, I'd felt a terrible guilt about the life I'd led,” added Smith. “I realised that there was another way.”

Parliament first established the age of consent in the UK at 13 years in 1875 in response to concerns that young girls were being exploited for prostitution. The age of consent was amended to 16 years in 1885 under the Criminal Amendment Act.

But in the United Kingdom recently the tendency has been to lower the age of consent. A furor erupted two years ago when Parliament passed a bill requiring Northern Ireland to lower its age of consent from 17 years to 16 years under the Sexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 2008, to be in conformity with the rest of the kingdom.

Members of Northern Ireland's Legislative Assembly accused London of acting with "contempt for democracy" by pushing through the measure despite their opposition. MLAs warned that the change would encourage sexual predators from the Republic of Ireland, where the age of consent remains at 17, to go north in search of younger victims.

Belfast's Rape Crisis Centre also objected to the change, saying the new law would make it more difficult for them to protect vulnerable girls from sexual predators.

This is a very long article, the longest ever written on The Futurist. The Misandry Bubble
Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that socialism and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive? What if everything from unsustainable health care and social security costs, to stagnant wages and rising crime, to crumbling infrastructure and metastasizing socialism, to the utter decimation of major US cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore, could all be traced to a common origin that is extremely pervasive yet is all but absent from the national dialog, indeed from the dialog of the entire Western world?
/snip/
“The reasons that marriage ‘worked’ not too long ago were :

1) People married at the age of 20, and usually died by the age of 50. People were virgins at marriage, and women spent their 20s tending to 3 or more children. The wife retained her beauty 15 years into the marriage, and the lack of processed junk food kept her slim even after that. This is an entirely different psychological foundation than the present urban feminist norm of a woman marrying at the age of 34 after having had 10 or more prior sexual relationships, who then promptly emerges from her svelte chrysalis in an event that can best be described as a fatocalypse.

2) It was entirely normal for 10-20% of young men to die or be crippled on the battlefield, or in occupational accidents. Hence, there were always significantly more women than able-bodied men in the 20-40 age group, ensuring that not all women could marry. Widows were common and visible, and vulnerable to poverty and crime. For these reasons, women who were married to able-bodied men knew how fortunate they were relative to other women who had to resort to tedious jobs just to survive, and treated their marriage with corresponding respect.

3) Prior to the invention of contraception, female promiscuity carried the huge risk of pregnancy, and the resultant poverty and low social status. It was virtually impossible for any women to have more than 2-3 sexual partners in her lifetime without being a prostitute, itself an occupation of the lowest social status.

4) Divorce carried both social stigma and financial losses for a woman. Her prospects for remarriage were slim. Religious institutions, extended clans, and broader societal forces were pressures to keep a woman committed to her marriage, and the notion of leaving simply out of boredom was out of the question.”

http://futurist.typepad.com/

Let’s start with the entire “people are animals” part. Yes, people are animals, biologically. But if you live like animals, as some socialist idealists suggest, you suffer like animals, and you die like animals.

It was a very, very long time ago when people decided that they didn’t want to do this. So people came up with two primary ways to improve our lives: protecting young girls as valuable, and marriage.

Treating young girls as valuable *tended* to protect them from male family members, and outsider, predatory males. This meant that the dominant adult man and woman were in charge, and had to watch over girls, one way or another, and punish interlopers.

Once adults, socially enforced marriage then provided a contract between a woman and her husband, that in exchange for monogamy, offered them both biological advantages, and their children advantages as well. This proved to be a LOT better than just animalistically reproducing, but was only effective when enforced by society.

However, over time, these two principles collided. The concept of girls as valuable turned into girls as valuable *monetary* property—a very different thing, which resulted in the “bride price” and the dowry, the former money paid by the family of the groom to the family of the bride, to “buy” her. And the latter from the family of the bride to the family of the groom, to get rid of her.

This royally fouled things up. It turned what was originally intended to *protect* the girl from underage sex and pregnancy, into a purely monetary arrangement.

In doing so, it interfered with some basic biological rules of reproduction, which is asking for disaster. One of these rules is that women are supposed to mate with men of about the same age; or, when times are hard, with somewhat, but not too much older, but more financially better off males. Whichever is better for them and their offspring.

Second, while men have the biological prerogative to spread their DNA around, women have the double prerogative to get the best male DNA for their offspring, and to couple with an effective “provider” male, to help her raise her offspring. However, when there is an abundance of males, these will not likely be the same male.

This is where marriage steps in. Enforced by society, it helps guarantee to the male that the children are his, in exchange for him only making children with one woman. It also guarantees the woman that the man will help raise her children, in exchange for her using just his DNA to make them. And the advantages to children, of having two providers and role models, is obvious.

But with “bride price” and dowry, these biological advantages are overridden by money. Things like wealthy, old males buying underage females, which often produces defective offspring or none. Likewise it leads to polygamy, where provision is divided between several women’s children.

Even worse, a problem with dowry, which is being experienced in both India and China in a big way, right now, is that males, who are paid to get married, are seen as far more monetarily valuable than females, who cost money to get rid of. It elevates men over women in society.

It also leads to horrific violence and murder of women. Since females “are a disaster” to families, female infanticide is common. And since there is no stigma to males who remarry, but females are seen as “damaged goods”, and no longer part of her family, if the family of the groom is greedy, once they get the dowry from the bride’s family, and the couple are married, they throw gasoline on the bride and ignite her. It is called “bride burning”.

And the bride’s family just shrugs. “She is not our problem anymore.”

Third, since widows are often destitute when their husband dies, no longer supported by her husband’s family either, the practice evolved that she would throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre instead of starving. Or if she didn’t want to, she would be thrown on it, out of “respect” for her dead husband.

So it is no surprise that in both India and China, there are now some 30-50 million men with no chance to get married, because their potential brides were all killed off. This really got a boost with liberal abortion policies and the use of ultrasound. If it was a female fetus, kill it.

In the western world, because the practices of “bride buying” and dowry were seen as loathsome, they were forbidden. But the mistake was made to also eliminate the social enforcement of marriage, and to just look at it as another contrivance, of no real value.

This proved to be pretty disastrous as well, if at first not so murderous. Since marriage was just a contrivance, divorce and remarriage should be easy.

And instead of being seen as monetarily valuable, society changed so that girls stopped being seen as valuable at all. No real need to protect them from predatory males, or underage pregnancy.

We know where that led. Since girls became “free agents” barely past adolescence, pretty soon there were a lot of unwed mothers. And because this quickly became expensive, it paved the way for easy and cheap abortion.

While we do not see the demographic effects of abortion, because it is evenly divided between males and females, unlike in India and China, it does not mean that we are not suffering terrible long term biological consequences due to it.

Fortunately, when you break biological rules, biology will often intervene to put you in your place. India and China, though they probably don’t know it yet, are both facing horrific civil wars, soldiered by unmarried and desperate men. Or they might throw tens of millions of such men at each other in a war solely to exterminate them.

In the western world, with underage pregnancy, abortion, and venereal diseases, more and more females will be incapable of bearing children at all, the consequences of early damage. Males as well will also be deprived of their ability to reproduce.

Even we are not so entirely dim as to not see the value in socially enforced marriage, however. So though the institution itself is under siege, the courts have taken it upon themselves to reproduce, in the law, some of its advantages.

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