Dateline To Catch a Predator
It always pops into my mind when I watch this movie.
sharehaha! that's great.
:P
MovieChat Forums > Pretty Poison (1968) Discussion > Dateline To Catch a Predator
It's so strange in older movies how often teen girls dating much older men is treated so casually, often with parents fully aware of it and sometimes even consenting.
shareThe girls are going to be having sex anyway. Should they do it with the entire football team (two teams by the time they finish college), or a guy looking for a wife? The age of consent in Massachusetts is 16, so the guy isn't a predator in any sense.
shareActually, what's strange is the way people today try to portray teenagers as untouchable, non-sexual being, which they clearly are not. If an adult expresses attraction to a 17 year old, he/she is a "pedophile", but a few months later after their birthday it's okay. There's nothing wrong with a man in his early 20s dating a woman in her late teens. People just want to act like it's immoral now for some reason.
shareNothing wrong with a 20 something wanting to date a late teen. I think people have a problem with much older 30 and ups wanting to date a late teen. That's more of a pedophile type.
It's still not "a pedophile type" if the older person is in their thirties or up because as you point out yourself you're talking about someone in their late teens, by all standards an adult, or at the very least of consenting age. Not a prepubescent child, which is what actual pedophiles are into. And I think the whole teenager/older lover thing was more casual then because really for a long time no one saw it as such a big deal if a teenager was having sex. I mean, things were more conservative back in the day, and people certainly didn't talk about their sex lives. But nowadays, young people are considered "children" for a far longer time. You can't even let a thirteen year old babysit themselves or someone else anymore without someone having a right fit about them being far "too young" to be at home alone, they could get abducted, blah blah.
shareYeah...I guess it's OK...if both of them are "loonies"!
"You shot me... I can't believe you just shot me!" -- Meg Masters
When this movie was filmed in 1967, Perkins was 35 years old.
And Tuesday Weld was 24, so what?
I have no idea how anyone could think this resembles "To Catch a Predator". It's not even illegal in most states today for men to date 17-18 year old girls (unless they're teachers or something) and it's the GIRL in this movies who manipulates the man, not vice versa. Girls were also more mature at that age in 1968 than they are now. People routinely got married at 17 back then.
In the 60's they had middle-age celebrities like the members of the Rat Pack who might have been sleeping with minor teenage celebrities like Weld or Joey Heatherton, but nowadays the celebrities everyone is unaccountably obsessed with ARE teenage girls (or teenage boys). I think that's much more disturbing actually.
How old was the guy in this film, in his 20's. That's not much of an age gap.
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