

Moor Larkin

"gentlemen, you have been warned. You know the law. Proceed at your own risk. I know biology is working against you."

I found a link to the Grand Jury testimony of the Polanski case all those years ago, a while back. What I hadn't known before I read it was that the 13 year-old in that case admitted to having had intercourse with two others before Polanski. I know that in the years since all that she has done her best to handle her life in a dignified way, so the question in my mind was not the obvious one that Polanski should really have had higher standards of his own, but also what the hell sort of Mother was parenting that teenager?

Over my own life experience most women I have known who have had issues with their parents have generally had a downer on their mother, rather than their father. This aspect of "bad parenting" is almost taboo in Anglo-American popular culture I think. You will recall that the Karin Ward biography has her being "abused" by her mother almost from birth, and the resentment seemed to stem from Karin being an "unwanted child" born to a "single mother".

It all seems to be an historical norm however, if Grimms Fairy tales are taken as speaking to some kind of human experience, viz the wicked step-mother and ugly sister syndrome. Of course nowadays the Grimm Brothers would probably be accused of perpetuating the "masculine hegemony" rather than telling it like it was.

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