Opinion

The sexual revolution has presented itself as the great emancipator of women, freeing them from the shackles of outdated misogynistic double-standards that prevented the fairer sex from engaging in as much unbridled, shameless promiscuity as men. But insisting that all women, and sometimes children, are equally capable of exercising their “sexual rights” may get a young girl 25 years in prison.

Her name is Jessica Burlew, a 16-year-old girl who is being tried as an adult for killing (one of) her abuser(s) before he could perpetrate a statutory rape. I came across her story as I was researching this story about Planned Parenthood suggesting young teens engage in sadomasochism.

Burlew, who lives in Glendale, Arizona, strangled a man the media portrayed simply as her “boyfriend” – 43-year-old Jason Earl Ash of Phoenix. The age of consent in Arizona is 18.

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Jessica Burlew

Burlew was temporarily living with her mother, Tracey Woodside, on January 18, when Woodside left their apartment so her daughter could be alone with her middle-aged “friend.” While she was out, her daughter called to say Ash had died.

Jessica told Woodside that she and her “boyfriend,” who is 27 years her senior, had engaged in a sexual game of erotic asphyxiation – strangulation as foreplay – when Ash lost consciousness. He hadn’t said their “safe word,” she said, allowing her to inadvertently strangle him to death with an electrical cord.

When he failed to respond, she began cutting him with a razor to try to get a response.

Burlew, who has a history of “cutting,” then began slashing herself to release her stress.

Woodside said her daughter, who suffers from schizophrenia and autism, then fled the scene.

The mother called the authorities, who pronounced Ash dead at 5:45 p.m. They found Burlew hiding in a nearby apartment and decided to charge her as an adult.

One month later, Burlew entered a not guilty plea to second-degree murder, a class-1 felony that carries a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison, a “presumptive” sentence of 16 years – the equivalent of Burlew’s entire tortured lifespan – and a maximum of 25 years in prison. Psychologists are currently assessing her mental fitness to stand trial, one of the few things that could mitigate her sentence.

Immediately, salacious headlines proclaimed that the teenage girl “strangled her boyfriend during sex,” often reporting Ash’s age as a minor detail in a kinky drama. This was compounded by Burlew’s persona as a Goth girl who has posted YouTube videos of herself performing homemade songs about demons. She reportedly met Ash on a website called “Vampire Freaks,” where they shared a love of the occult. [1]

The media coverage award goes to KTVK of Phoenix, which reported that “Burlew is technically a victim because she is a minor.”

Welcome to the new world of the sexual liberation. Under the stuffy, Victorian morality of the 1980s, Ash would have been recognized as a sexual offender, case closed. But, as a rock group from those bygone days would say, that was yesterday.

According to the ever-progressing sexual revolution, minors – possibly even infants – are autonomous sexual beings fully capable of deciding to enjoy sexual activity. This theory originated with the twisted experiments of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who during his experiments molested children as young as five-months-old, as well as infants, using their thrashing, crying, and violent reactions toward their abusers as proof they were having “orgasms.”

The sexual revolution picked up the ball and ran with it. Planned Parenthood tells parents talking to “kids” about sex that they must “recognize that we are all sexual beings.”

Adults sexualizing underage partners became a frequent theme in homosexual literature and sometimes feminist literature, in which the authors – who imagined themselves something other than the convenient targets of rapists – give thanks for their violation. An example is Eve Ensler’s celebrated play The Vagina Monologues, in which a 24-year-old lesbian’s molestation of a 13-year-old girl is presented as a prepubescent “salvation” that “raised her into a kind of heaven.” Perhaps more disturbing, real-life biographer Gavin Lambert once discussed how, after a male teacher molested him at age 11, he “felt no shame or fear, only gratitude.”

This skewed perspective became ingrained as guiding orthodoxy. The Obama administration even allowed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to link to a question-and-answer document that states, “Children are human beings and therefore sexual beings.” The HHS resource states, “It’s hard for parents to acknowledge this” fully formed volition of their children to engage in consensual sex.

Under this logic, a 16-year-old girl may just as freely engage in, or initiate, sexual activity as a 43-year-old pervert man.

She’s really mature for her age. … She liked it!…etc.

Sound familiar? The refrains of the sexual liberation movement are the clichés of a rapist. That leaves vulnerable victims with little recourse.

The Burlew imbroglio begs a few questions. What kind of mother leaves her 16-year-old daughter alone with a 43-year-old man? Was Burlew the first minor Ash had victimized? Was Ash the first man, or woman, to victimize Burlew?

What we know for a fact is that Jessica, a troubled minor with multiple mental illnesses, was being sexually exploited by Ash.

All the facts will come out in time, but it seems most likely Jessica simply fell through the cracks of our society – abandoned by parents, sexually exploited, filled with fear, and attracted to darkness that promised to give her power and control for once in her brief life. A society guided by right reason would impose whatever sanction is warranted, but it would have tried to rescue her, recognizing her status as a minor being exploited by an adult. Instead, Burlew is being presented as a co-equal half of a normal relationship.

That is the other side of The New Morality’s razor: Since minors can willingly engage in sex, they can also be prosecuted when they find out they are unequipped to play an adult’s game.

Sorry, due to your liberation, we’re sending you to the Big House.

Since the sexual liberation philosophy is ascendant, Burlew is about to take the fall. At least as she and other statutory rape victims do time in prison for the sins of their molesters, they can press license plates with the assurance that other minors are free to explore their sexuality in any way they wish.

Thanks to the perverse logic of the sexual revolution, a 16-year-old girl may be sent up the river, and America is going down the drain.

ENDNOTES:

1. Burlew presented herself as 19-years-old on the Vampire Freaks website, while Ash claimed to be 23. Notwithstanding, in most of the sexual revolution, it has been understood that verifying the age of one’s kinky conquests is a responsibility that falls to the older party, for self-protection against statutory rape charges, if nothing else.