ageism

Bad news comes in threes every time.

A fond farewell to our dear Molly Ivins, calling 'em out and putting 'em down every time.

I'm sure you've all heard about the young woman who survived a rape and then was jailed without being given her second dose of EC. Her rape took place in the middle of the afternoon at a popular and widely-regarded as dangerous street festival near Tampa, Florida. She is 21, pre-med, and had the forethought to go straight to police to make her report. Later after most of her assault treatment, police found out she had an open warrant for a juvenile charge. The investigation of her claim was abandoned, and the medical examiner at the jail where she was taken refused to allow her after-24-hours dose of EC. The examiner claimed it would be against her religion to do so.

I've been thinking about this issue for weeks, now, and debating about how to raise it here on AGA. Ultimately, I decided, that it was important enough to include, even if no one chooses to write about it, as an old-fashioned (dare I say that?) consciousness-raising.

Since I moved, I've noticed a phenomenon that my friends tell me is far more widespread than I'd realized. In public- bars or coffeeshops- an older man, say, in his 50s or 60s, will be hitting on a girl who's clearly underage, or just barely into her late teens/early 20s.

I've been really interested lately in the development of a number of threads on the forum, from the body-hair thread, to the friendships-thread , to name just two. Because the blogs provide a different form of expression than the discussion-threads, I wondered if we might bring some common elements from those discussions into blog-entries, and see if, in carefully crafting these entries, our thoughts cohere at a deeper level even than in the forumn.

Last week, I went to see an outdoor performance with my parents and 13-year-old brother. We had difficulty locating a place for all of us to sit together, and a random stranger offered a solution, telling my parents, "The angel can sit there." By "the angel," he meant me. Laying aside, for a moment, the issue that I think it is weird to call any child an angel, and is downright inappropriate after anyone reaches the age of eight, an age that I have not been for a good decade, the fact that I am appearing in public with my parents does not impede my ability to partake in dialogue about where I can sit. I just didn't get it. Were I alone, or with a female friend, the stranger would likely have addressed me, or not said anything at all. What was it, then, about my parents' presence that made him see me and treat me as though I was not an autonomous human being? Why, by sheer virtue of them being my parents, and them being there at the time, did they somehow earn the right to be addressed in conversation directly related to me? And why, by sheer virtue of spending time with my parents, did I lose it?