The Predatory Minor: Men’s Fantasy of Victimhood and Teenage Girls
By Jacqui Barron-Carton
Graphic by Alexandra Ohrim
TW: discussion of rape and sensitive topics.
“If you don’t see me again I’ll tell the police.” Diane, Trainspotting (1996). “She’s also a little girl, a fourteen year old girl…Now you be the jury.” Michael, The Crush (1993). Behind every portrayal of an underaged girl who is sexually aggressive to an older man, is an older man. Whether she and her antics are a moment in the story or the entire story itself, she is specific, she is reflective of real life, and she is an epidemic. She is jailbait, a nymphet, a sexual predator in a sexual victim’s little plaid skirt. The dial of her threat to the older man character could range anywhere from merely existing in his proximity to making an eventual and ever-false rape accusation against him. Both extremes are made explicit to the audience of the films by the writers and directors seeking to highlight this problem. However, the attractive physical qualities of the girl are made equally explicit by them, permitting us to gaze at their bodies knowing we could never victimise something with so much obvious textual power. In my focus on this topic, I will be primarily discussing male-authored Western (British and American) films from the late nineties.
One of the tell-tale markers of this trope is the way in which that initial grooming process is represented by these male filmmakers. The intentions are completely flipped from adult to child. Though the actions and desires may still spring from the man, he is afforded an obliviousness that the child is not. In the 1993 film The Crush, fourteen-year-old Adrian is acutely aware of her sexual desirability to Nick, the twenty-eight-year-old tenant in her parents’ guest house. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Adrian asks Nick to drive her from her parents’ party to a lighthouse and he does so without telling a soul. There, she confides in him about loneliness permeating her life, how everyone thinks she’s crazy and refuses her friendship. Once Nick replies, ‘We can be friends’, a grin spreads across her face, telling us that he’s mis-stepped into a Venus fly trap, as if this was his original sin and that not of transporting her at night without her parents’ knowledge. This scene is made further unsettling when Adrian takes his fingers and drags them over her lips and even manages to kiss him before he puts an end to the contact. He tells her they have to go and runs to his car. At home, this instance has distressed him so much that he drinks a shot of vodka straight and goes to bed.
The writer and director of this film, Alan Shapiro, freely admitted in the production notes that it was based off of real events from his life involving a young woman named Darian, who later sued him after he originally called the villain her real name. This fact is disturbing given the crossing of boundaries on Nick’s part written as permissible and Adrian’s endless plotting, how what may have been a very real confession of loneliness from a teenage girl to Shapiro could be painted as the inciting incident in this film. Early on, Adrian and the audience learn from Nick that the baby photo of him and his late grandfather is one-of-a-kind. As Adrian’s first offence of many, she steals it, and a determined Nick sneaks into her empty bedroom to find it when he is suddenly forced to hide in her wardrobe to escape her sights. Adrian comes in and begins to undress for a bath in front of the wardrobe, her bare shoulders causing him to jump back and make a noise, revealing himself. We then see Adrian grin again and even turn to face the hiding place, from which Nick is forced to see her naked. All in the name of retrieving the only photo of him and his grandfather. Once more, Shapiro frames Nick’s boundary-breaking to be in the name of something other than grooming Adrian - who’s sexual assertiveness is unmanageable for him. Brian Lowry of Variety magazine even describes the plot in his review as ‘Nick [Elwes] gives in to a momentary indiscretion and kisses the girl, then watches her grow gradually more obsessed’, helping Shapiro put all the onus on that kiss - a kiss Adrian initiated.
However, this framing is akin to that of Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert, the known unreliable narrator of Lolita. In the 1997 adaptation of the novel, director Adrian Lyne lays bare the paedophilic obsessions of Humbert to the audience through voiceover narration and leaves all the physical initiation - including the first kiss - to the twelve-year-old daughter of landlady, Dolores Haze. The sexual attraction of these characters to their underage counterparts is not outrightly defended nor is it condemned - it just is. Through the costuming and slow-motion cameras running over the bodies of real-life minor actors, we as the audience are to understand their desire to be natural and maybe even inspire some of our own, in an I mean just look at them fashion. This desire is something that is present but not acted on, something the child herself takes to outlandish proportions with a great deal of intention. But why was this trope so prevalent? Why does this fantasy of reverse-grooming from an attractive and predatory teenager appeal to male directors and writers? Why do male audiences insist that false rape allegations from teenagers are something a society should be wary of? A story relatable enough to tell?
In examination of this trope, I searched ‘Why do girls lie about their age?’ and was met with a myriad of speculation from men. Redditors, online forums, and Instagram comments were deeply concerned with 1) people condemning men for being attracted to minors, 2) people failing to condemn minors for presenting themselves as consenting adults in an attempt at seducing men and 3) the perceived social power at their disposal to cause a great deal of legal repercussion should any man fall for their lie. One sentiment rang true for all of them: this is a misfortune that often happens to men and it must end. Some offered stories of a near one-night-stand with an underaged girl, who revealed in some way or another at the eleventh hour that she was lying, at which point they promptly kicked her out.
However, when reviewing a collection of 2022 statistics from the Office of Justice Programs from the U.S. Department of Justice not only did I find that while 95% of statutory rape victims are female and over 99% of those perpetrators are indeed male, three out of ten statutory rape perpetrators (29%) were boyfriends or girlfriends of the victims. They weren’t one-night-stands and close calls, they were relationships. Furthermore, while 42% of offenders were arrested, the probability decreased as victim’s aged and many never resulted in any arrest directly due to a lack of cooperation from the victim. However these relationships began, they were fostered and protected by both parties, one of which was a child.
The 2009 film Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold, features another aggressive and isolated teenage girl - Mia. Mia’s world is changed when her mother introduces her new boyfriend, Conor, and the two form an attraction to one another. What could have been a harmless crush harboured by a lonely fifteen-year-old girl eventually is made too real when Conor initiates sex. It doesn’t last long and Mia’s body is mostly obscured from our view. The aftermath results in Mia’s mother blaming her for seducing him as well as driving him away, an aftermath which Conor does not experience as he disappears from the family. Mia is left to deal with the reality of their short relationship, as a child, having less freedom than Conor and, as a young girl, forced into competition with her now-heartbroken mother. This representation, particularly the lack of accountability on Conor’s part, is far truer to experiences involving statutory rape and grooming. The stakes can always be lowered for an adult.
While men preying on young girls is an epidemic, minors of any gender being attracted to adults around them is not. Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) portrayal of an underage girl, Diane, seducing and then blackmailing the adult Mark Renton aligns perfectly with the trope. Renton first notices Diane across a crowded dance floor and watches as she is brought a drink by an older man. She then drinks it as well as the one he got for himself before storming out of the club - “and with that, Mark Renton had fallen in love.” He follows her out and professes his love, landing himself in her bedroom. She gets on top of him and we watch her ride him fully exposed. Sure enough, when morning comes Renton heads to breakfast with her parents who he mistakes for flatmates and Diane enters the dining room in her secondary school uniform, the realisation hitting Renton and the audience at once, throwing both his and our potential enjoyment of the sex scene in our faces. After she blackmails him at her school’s gates, Renton leaves and we never see her again - similarly to that of Conor’s adult ability - until he experiences heroin withdrawals and visions of all his past mistakes throughout the film come back to haunt him for a second or so respectively. Beyond more material for the hallucination sequence, the injection of Diane and her malice serves very little to the story and the life of Renton, other than to say this happens and can happen.
Elaine Costillo, in her 2022 book How to Read Now, noted that white-authored fantasy - such as the Harry Potter and X-Men franchise - often relied heavily on the non-fictional power imbalances people of colour face in their lives for inspiration. She describes a longing of the oppressor to see themselves in oppressed scenarios and systems, ‘hollowed out of their historical context’. If an older man character never does engage in statutory rape with the attractive minor, he bravely faces a great deal of coercion and predation. They are stalked, manipulated, and accused.
In Adult World (2013), writer Andy Cochran gives his main character, Amy, an unrelenting crush on older poet Rat Bennings. This leads Amy to showing up at his door unannounced multiple times in an effort to be his protégée and one drunken attempt to seduce him. Being a comedy, he never feels threatened or pressured by her and continues to act as a mentor. By flipping the ages and gender of stalkers and blackmailers, male writers not only indulge in the fantasy of a young girl who is sexually desirable to them desiring them too, but being manipulated and coerced into sex with them. They also get to revel in the notion that should it ever happen to them they would fiercely and staunchly say no and still receive further sexual attention.
In The Crush, it is made clear to the audience over and over how attracted we are supposed to find the fifteen-year-old Alicia Silverstone playing Adrian - similarly to the sexual framing of Dominique Swain’s Dolores in Lolita. Shapiro has us watch her from above sprawled out in a bikini and crouch low as she swings on a swing in a small skirt. There is a notable lack of children who do not meet these paedophilic beauty standards in these roles. The directors - including Shapiro, who feels he was innocent in the real-life scenario that befell him - themselves sought a great deal of sexual merit in these children, both in casting and shooting, while condemning the actions of their characters. This is because the ultimate threat of a false allegation is not where their power over men begins; it begins in their sexuality and its proximity to them. Nick is not only plagued by Adrian, he is plagued by her nude body.
Every other character, even her father, acknowledges to Nick how “This past year she’s really blossomed.” It is even revealed to us by another young girl, Cheyenne, that before Nick there was her late camp counsellor. Despite all these men leering at her and her apparent leering back, nobody has ever taken advantage of Adrian despite ample opportunity in Shapiro’s fantastical world. There, she actually holds all the power. And when she eventually accuses Nick of raping her, swift and terrible consequences befall him, including losing his job with his boss declaring “She’s also a little girl, a fourteen-year-old girl…Now you be the jury,” to which Nick says nothing, seemingly accepting his cruel fate in an imbalanced society. He bends like a gracious dandelion under the collective understanding that Adrian is a victim - the only textual acknowledgement of his strength as a grown man is a climatic punch that knocks her out only after she has attempted to murder him and Cheyenne.
As the film ends, we see Nick back at his job and in a new apartment with his co-worker-turned-girlfriend, proven innocent. As for Adrian, she’s in a mental hospital and now infatuated with one of her doctors. We’re to understand from this that she’s just crazy. And she will continue taking the general kindness of men to extreme and unwarranted lengths with very little consequence and misreading cues (like kissing her!) as affection.
The fantasy of this trope not only appeals in taking accountability away from the adult in the situation and placing it on the child, but in making the audience complicit in crossing those lines along with them thanks to the framing of the male directors. From Diane’s central nudity in her short and dominant appearance, to the endless erotic shots of the teenage actors casted to respectively play Adrian and Dolores, not being attracted to them was never a real textual option afforded to us or the protagonists forced to be in their proximity. And therein the cornerstones of such a trope lies the fantastical elements; a sexually desirable and aggressive minor, intentional schemes of grooming an adult man, physical initiation on her part, no assault or victimisation in her past that could be cause for excuse and a happy ending for her innocent victim.
