Early 2000s comedy/music crossover

[ResponsibleProduction]

Name change for obvious reasons.

I don’t think I’m alone in noticing the recent change in our understanding of what was normal behaviour now being unacceptable. Grossly simplistic summary but you get the gist.

If you’re a millennial who was a teenage girl in the early 2000s and was into the alternative or indie scene, would you agree with me that similar things happened with our crowd to what is being discussed with RB?

I have heard accounts from a few women I was aware of at the time, who I wasn’t close to but who with age have revealed their experiences in hindsight. I noticed they were similar to my own, little did I know this at the time. I think we all thought we were on our own?

Is it a common theme that girls of 16 and 17 were targeted/groomed for sex, then ignored afterwards? Even after being led to believe they were in a genuine relationship with these older men who had positions of influence in industry?

I remember guys would sleep with the girls aged 16/17 in secret but get a “girlfriend” aged 18 because that looked better. Often at the same time.

At the time we all thought it was our fault that they ignored us after sex because we were over 16. So clearly no “crime”. Even though we had been romantically chatting on MSN messenger since we were 15 (and they were adults).

Now as an adult and fully mature woman, I think it’s pretty disgusting.

bump. Maybe not as many on mumsnet as I anticipated?

I think men liking the 'barely legal' thing is as old as time. I was 16 in 1988 and remember similar things happening to me and my friends (but without MSN!). We weren't naive about it though, we knew what was going on. As I got older I regularly heard men talking about it, hanging around school gates, boasting about age differences, using porn sites that featured young looking women etc.

It feels relatively recent to me that it became socially unacceptable and that's obviously a good thing. I'd be horrified if anyone was talking about my 16 year old dd like that.

Is this not a story as old as time? I was a teenager a couple of decades prior to you, but there were still predatory men preying on young girls. If anything I think it happened more then, because it wasn't seen as unacceptable.

When I started work in 1979 my backside was frequently pinched by older men in the office and I frequently had them put their arms round my waist etc., and no-one thought anything of it, it was just what happened. I am fairly sure that if any 16 year old girl had her bottom pinched by an older male in the office, it wouldn't be tolerated now.

I think it just proves that women are not designed to have casual sex because women bond emotionally to the man when they have sex. We are not men-we are wired differently. Men are designed to have sex with lots of women.
That’s why these girls were upset.
I hope we can learn from mistakes of the past. I made this error myself too (I’m Gen X) and got burned. The whole “oh if I sleep with him he will like me” nonsense. Of course he didn’t hang about.