I note that Damian Thompson’s Telegraph blogpost accusing the late Jimmy Savile of ‘disgusting sexual practices’ had its comment thread closed within minutes. This is either because (1) the comment threads were descending into a predictable stream of ignorant paedomania or (2) a lawyer somewhere at the Torygraph pointed out that the article was evidence-free and highly defamatory.
For once, the lawyer was right: The headline alone – ‘the BBC was at the centre of a shocking paedophile cover-up’ – is unproven and inaccurate given the contemporary definition of ‘paedophile’.
Now I see in the Guardian a ludicrous piece by Dan Sabbagh, in which he asserts that ‘”it was well known to most at the BBC that Savile had an interest in pretty teenage girls”. Count me in on that hobby: when I was sixteen, I had a 24/7 obsession with teenage girls. Earlier in the piece – right at the outset to be precise – Sabbagh again asserts that ‘A brave woman came forward on Tuesday and told the Daily Mail she had been raped by Sir Jimmy Savile when she was 15 and on work experience at the BBC.’
There’s a first: all of a sudden, The Grauniad thinks the Daily Mail is an oracular source of information. And ‘a brave woman’….is she? How does Sabbagh know? Why could she not be a fame-by-proxy attention seeker? Talking of attention seekers, I note also that Esther Rantzen had this to say to Sky News:
“For the first time there’s more than one single child complaining. There are five adult women producing very similar statements about the way they were attacked. You see, one child’s word against the word of a television icon, one who was renowned for raising money for charity, who knew everyone from the Prime Minister to Princess Diana, who was knighted by the Queen and the Pope, I think no single complainant dared speak out before. There were always rumours that he behaved very inappropriately, sexually, with children.”
OK, let’s deconstruct that one: ‘there’s more than one single child complaining’. No Esther, sorry: there are no children complaining here: they were 14 or more years old at the time, and they’re middle-aged now. Or how about ‘no single complainant dared speak out before’? Cobblers: as Rantzen herself admits, “there were always rumours”. A serious complaint against Savile would’ve been welcomed with open arms – certainly by the Manchester constabulary, who had been trying to nab Savile on statutory rape charges for decades.
And there’s the nub of it: statutory rape. Hands up all those blokes who have never been guilty of it, knowingly or otherwise.
There are some very complex issues in play here, and we must examine them frankly…not run away to hide behind the sexually manic hypocrisy of those two very odd bedfellows, ice-cold feminism and faux tabloid sanctimony.
Real paedophilia – and the truly deranged blokes who worm their way into social care systems, teaching and grooming rings – is something I have posted about and railed against since 2006, when I first came across irrefutable evidence of its endemic presence in our society. Before that, I had interviewed paedophiles as part of a research study in the 1980s, and formed the view that their conviction – nay, absolutely certainty – that innocent infants enjoyed being penetrated was creepy beyond belief. Further, the cunning I saw in these perverts convinced me that mainstream paedophiles suffer from a form of psychopathy: one which, in certain circumstances, can become murderous.
But was Jimmy Savile a predatory rapist paedophile? I very much doubt it.
From the late 1950s until around 1964, Savile was the resident DJ at Belle Vue’s Teen & Twenty Disc Club in Manchester. My elder brother – aged around 15 – went there with his mates to pick up teenage girls. From 1963 until some time after 1966, Savile owned Beat City, a basement disco in Manchester’s financial area. The Slog – aged around 15 – went there with his mates to pick up teenage girls. Back then, Jimmy Savile was in his mid thirties.
It was perfectly obvious to everyone at the time (including a shy teenager by the name of George Best) that the DJ was a celebrity, and attractive to young girls. Throughout his DJing sessions, Savile was besieged by girls asking for his autograph. More often than not, he’d pick two or three out and chat them up. More often than not, he’d disappear with them at the end of the session. I don’t think any of us imagined that the sexual activity to come later would represent rape.
Many of you will find this crude, but it needs to be recorded: a Mancunian guitarist later to become famous confided in me at the time, “Jimmy likes his girls slim and tight”. There was a nod and a wink….but no sense of his tastes being a perversion. If anything, I detected a sense of envy.
Homosexual givers, lest we be in any doubt, like their boys slim and tight too. Are we really looking at anything different here?
The key issue is consent.
The Law chooses to draw the line between statutory rape and paedophilia at age 14. For once, the law displays some common sense in doing so. The overwhelming majority of females in 2012 are ovulating by the age of 14. This doesn’t mean they are adults; but equally, it doesn’t mean that they are sexually innocent.
Some of the hypocritical hacks having a field day at the moment should think on this: I have a close chum who seven years ago married a girl thirty years his junior. At the time, he was 60 and she was 30. When he was 45, she was 15. When Jimmy Savile was 37, many of the girls invited to his bedroom were 15. But none of them were 7.
Apologies to regular Sloggers who’ve read this before, but I must nevertheless repeat it: if having sex with a 15-year-old is paedophiliac, then most of Europe’s royal families are the progency of perverted rape.
Part of me detects a degree of ageism in all this. Rich older women attracting toyboys are an object of amusement….for those who aren’t older women. Rich old men marrying nubiles are an object of amusement….for those who aren’t older men. If Jimmy Savile can be shown categorically to have forcibly had sex with girls aged ten, then I will pipe down and admit I was wrong. But if all that comes of this moral incontinence is feeble judgementalism, then I shall remain unimpresssed.
The Slog 