"‘It's a very hard word to define, which is the cause, the root of a lot of our problems with it. I think a really helpful place to start is where the law always defined seduction. And there are, throughout three centuries there's been a legal understanding of what seduction constituted, and it was always held up in contrast to rape. So rape was obviously forceful, without consent, seduction assumed that consent had been granted, but that that consent had somehow been degraded by the methods by which it had been obtained. So this is where we get all this fancy language about, you know, wiles, art, deceit, fraud, and so forth, which was written into the laws to understand why although consent had been given, it shouldn't have been trusted by their, by the, by the person who gave it and nor by the courts or by society...
Another way I like to think about it is if you ignore sex and just think about seduction in other contexts: politics or the marketplace, often we assume that when people, you suggest that someone’s been seduced into voting for someone or seduced into buying a product or something, that that is kind of, somehow an impulsive decision, that someone has been a calculating, somehow calculated, how to make the pitch to prey on peoples who have, you know, passions or instincts or, or to lead them to make a decision that if they were in their hundred percent control of their faculties, they wouldn't do and that's how I kind of try to bring in that whole argument which propels the book, which is that seduction is really about are we creatures of reason or creatures of passion, and how that conflict plays out over time...
We like to think that thinking about sex in terms of power is quite a modern idea... if you date modern times to say the Enlightenment, it's been around for a few hundred years at least’...
'We always forget that James Bond was a product of the sexual revolution. And the kind of the sexual values he embodied were very much those of swinging London and the sexual liberation era. I think again, if you look at James Bond, it's very much that no one, no one's getting hurt in his his his sexual games at least, this is about empowering men and empowered women meeting on terms of parity. Again, if you go back to the Enlightenment, this is the kind of stories that surrounded people like Casanova, people like Voltaire, and I mentioned before, Henry Fielding… in the villainous seduction narrative when there's a male seducer, and a female victim, and you know, again, in that mode, even using the word seduction is quite charged because as we've learned recently, it may be more helpful to see these things in terms of exploitation or abuse or grooming'...
'I do talk about some of the modern sexual heroines like Brigitte Bardot, or the flappers in the F Scott Fitzgerald novels. But you know, this was very much the case in the 18th century. It's just that nowadays, we have a harder time accepting the reality maybe of a female empowerment in the 18th century, just because to our mind, it seems okay. They don't have the vote. There are no legal protections. They're basically confined to domestic roles in the economy. How can we consider people in those situations to be sexually empowered? Nonetheless, they were'...
'So it's not necessarily that the unequal power dynamic in these relationships is always gendered in terms of male with power, female women without power.'...
'One of the reasons that America has age of consent laws is because of WT Stead, who was an English journalist who never actually, didn't actually go to America until the 1890s, and then, very tragically died on the Titanic, trying to get to America on a later date, but he had enormous influence on the course of British legislation, and consequently, of American legislation. And he was a journalist based in London. He was a socialist, he was a Christian, and he was this avatar of this kind of Victorian muscular Christianity, intensely concerned with social issues, very critical of the elite establishment, which he considered corrupt both morally and sexually.
And he went on a campaign in 1884, 1885, to reveal a trade in British girls and women into the sexual, sexual slavery in the brothels of London, but also of France and Belgium. And he tried to create public interest in this and, and failed, because Victorians were extremely class conscious. And the last thing that people in the House of Commons, in the House of Lords wanted to do was empower working class women with new laws which they could use to basically level the playing field with their male masters and in their minds their male betters.
And so what WT Stead did was he decided to basically go undercover in the seamy world of London brothels to try and get a first person proof that you could buy a virgin in London, and then take her to France to sell into sexual slavery. So he found someone who was willing to sell him her daughter, or so he claimed, and deliver her to an apartment in Regent Street, where he could basically take possession of her and do whatever he wanted. So this is what he did. And WT Stead was a teetotaler like all good Christians, but because he was undercover, he decided to drink champagne to be a convincing rake. So he has his first ever drink of champagne to get drunk, appears in this kind of theatrical outfit in this walkup on Regent Street, takes possession of this kind of terrified 13 year old girl who’d been put under ether to kind of tranquilize her, and then he takes her to France where, you know, having proven this was doable, he delivers her into a rescue home run by the Salvation Army, and then goes public with this story and he calls this kind of series of reports from the London Underworld the Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon, which as the name suggests, he's kind of drawing upon ancient myth to kind of describe this, what he considers a virgin sacrifice of British female chastity, to the kind of insatiable desires of men.
So, so he's very hard hitting on the subject of gender. There's also the class aspect to this, he actually uses the term 1%, he doesn't pull any punches. And the upshot of all of this is kind of farcical and chaotic, but also very serious, because what he succeeds in doing in the summer of 1885, is passing through House of Commons and the House of Lords and getting a royal signature, a bill called the Criminal Llaw Amendment Act, which changed the age of consent upwards, it introduced new laws to cover sexual assault, to cover things that we would not say is date rape, so we use kind of drugs or alcohol, to knock people out.
And there were other aspects of this as well, it covered, you know, regulation of prostitution, people being procured in prostitution, and even covered homosexuality. This was the law that resulted in Oscar Wilde going to jail. But the twist in the tale was that when he went public, people realized that he had obviously committed a crime, because he had more or less, committed slavery himself, and kidnapping, and so forth. So he ended up going to jail. And he was a very happy prisoner, because for him, it was the best publicity in the world. And for every year afterwards, on the day that he was sentenced, he would get dressed in his old prison uniform, and have a photo taken of him and his admirers loved this…
This is kind of a forgotten aspect of the special relationship that Britain and America enjoy. Is that often, the Americans taking cue from what's going on in England and vice versa. And at this point in America, the age of consent was as low as eight years old. So that was the low, as low as it was. That was in Delaware. On average, it was between 11 and 13. And one consequence of WT Stead’s campaigning was that the WCTU, in America, the Women's Christian Temperance Movement, which was an enormous, enormously influential, early feminist organization, said, this is disgraceful that the English have managed to pass this law, and yet we can't. And within 20 years, every US state had a age of consent, which was 16 or 18'"