Shocked by Epstein's birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism | Rebecca Solnit

"I was there. I kept the receipts. I remember how normalized the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and even tweens by adult men was, how it showed up in movies, in the tales of rock stars and baby groupies, in counterculture and mainstream culture, how normalized rape, exploitation, grooming, objectification, commodification was. The last Woody Allen movie I ever saw was Manhattan, in which he cast himself as more or less himself, a dweeb in his mid-40s, dating a high school student played by Mariel Hemingway."

"Manhattan came out in 1979; two years earlier Roman Polanski, on the pretext that he was taking photographs for French Vogue, got a 13-year-old girl to come alone to a house, where he drugged and raped her vaginally and anally. The probation officer assigned to him wrote: There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother, and that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing."

"Jodie Foster was 12 when she played a prostitute in Taxi Driver. In Pretty Baby, an 11-year-old Brooke Shields played another prostitute in quaint New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off, and who appears nude in some scenes, as she did in a Playboy Magazine special sugar and spice issue at age 10. In Milos Forman's 1971 Taking Off, the runaway 15-year-old daughter of the protagonist reappears with a rock star boyfriend."

Sexual exploitation and abuse of teenage girls and tweens was normalized across 1970s mainstream and counterculture. Films and celebrity culture frequently presented underage sexualization as acceptable or titillating. High-profile examples include an older filmmaker portrayed dating a high-school student, a director who drugged and raped a 13-year-old with institutional minimization of the crime, and child actors cast in sexualized roles and images. Groupie culture and rock-star tales often involved minors. Institutional responses and public attitudes at the time frequently blamed victims or treated consent claims from children as dismissible.

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