I’m not a David Bowie fan but now that he’s died I’ve become even more aware of the profound effect he’s had on the world. Many people are grieving (some more than they expected to!); if that’s you I’m sorry for your loss. Hopefully, you’ll have also seen something in your social media feeds today about Bowie’s statutory rape(s).
It’s hard to know how to refer to it since Lori Mattix who was 15 at the time does not consider it to be rape, so I’ve opted for statutory rape as something legally accurate. You will probably be interested to read Mattix’s story here.
This is important to think about if you are a Bowie fan. Here are 6 perspectives that I recommend you check out in full.
From Louise Pennington, we have #DickheadDetox : David Bowie, Jimmy Page and that Small Issue of Child Rape. This one predates Bowie’s death. Excerpt:
The media sources I have read about these two men claim that the 13 [failbluedot: apparently the interview above says 15] year old “lost her virginity” to Bowie and was in a consensual loving relationship with Page. She was a child abused by two adult men who have never really taken responsibility for their behaviour.
Bowie and Page may be brilliant musicians but they deserve to be on the #DickheadDetox.
From Elyse Anders, we have Mourn, Don’t Use Mourning to Silence. Excerpt:
In learning of David Bowie’s death I was upset…Bowie was an advocate of learning and science to the point that he wrote songs about it. He was an artist and it showed in everything he did. I grew up with that as one of the few images I had that showed me that being different was OK. I didn’t have many reassurances like that. As an adult, though, when my peers informed me that David Bowie was a rapist, I had to listen. It doesn’t minimize the feeling of loss in a culture I loved. Instead, it makes me even sadder…Yet, as I crawled through my social media, and all the people mourning the loss of Bowie, each time the fact was brought up that he raped teenage girls, there were people who defended him. There were people who prioritized their dead hero over the lives and well-being of people who were hurt.
From Aoife, we have David Bowie was wonderful. He was also an abuser. How do we handle that? Excerpt:
I think that this is the expected response: to put Bowie into the Terrible People category and be done with it. To stop caring, never listen to his music again.
I get why people expect that…But I can’t…We want to live in a world of heroes and monsters. We want to be inspired be wonderful people, and to condemn the human excrement who do terrible things. We’re not comfortable with how grubby it is, here in the grey areas…Because we can’t make Bowie into someone who didn’t inspire. And we can’t make him into someone who never abused his power. All we can do is sit with that, and work towards this generation of extraordinarily talented white men knowing that they are as human as the rest of us, and that nobody’s immune from consequence.
From Heina Dadabhoy, we have Strange Overtones: My Mixed Mourning of David Bowie.
Does my saying that eradicate any of the good he has done? Suggest that we trash his entire body of work and shun his surviving family and friends? Pretend as though his influence on certain LGBTQ+ communities doesn’t exist? No. It simply means that he was not “too good for this world,” as the sentiment I’ve seen repeated across social media and news story comment sections would have you believe. Rather, he was most definitely part of it and influenced by it as well as an influencer of it, for good and for ill…The music industry has a sexism and sexual assault problem and historically, things have been even worse. That the sunlight being shone on it is finally hitting disinfectant level at around the time the musical idols of those prior times are dying or dead is unfortunate but necessary.
From Alex Gabriel, we have David Bowie, 1947-2016. Excerpt:
It’s hard to know what to do with this knowledge except rehearse it. I know the above to be true, according to Mattix’s nostalgic account, and that it deserves to be remembered. I also know without Bowie, my own obit would have been written long ago, and I can’t help but remember that too. How do you find room in one eulogy for both those facts?…I do live in David Bowie’s world—the world where everyone followed his tune, where he was sometimes a hero, sometimes a monster, always singular. I don’t feel good about all of that. All the same, I’m glad it was my world too.
From Amanda Marcotte, we have a public Facebook post. Excerpt:
[T]he takeaway from hearing this story…is that changing the culture *works*. And that is far more interesting and important a topic of conversation than whether or not you personally are a righteous person because you listen to David Bowie records.
For my 2c, a decentway to navigate this would be not to invalidate anyone’s feelings, including your own. Nobody should be telling you whether to grieve, or not to grieve, or how to grieve. Nobody should be shaming you about how “trivial” it is that you dare feel something about the death of someone you’ve never met (fetch the fainting salts!), making themselves out to be more sophisticated if they don’t give a shit. On that, see Aoife’s great post I’ve linked to above.
But on the flip side, if you think the coverage of the statutory rape is too small, or that the tributes are too one-sided, no Bowie fan should defend or deny or deflect. The grief of the victims (including those who have been in similar situations to Mattix but DO consider it rape) is not some sacrifice to be swept away by the wider culture. As if holding “rape victims and anti-rape advocates” in opposition to the “wider culture” isn’t part of the problem.
And while I don’t agree with all of Marcotte’s post, I think on this she has that part right. Being for a better culture — which includes not invalidating the two “competing” cultural feelings here — is what’s important. Questions about the personal purity of consuming/boycotting works by the now deceased Bowie, not so much.
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