My post on Rape Apology and Joseph Smith keeps generating really interesting discussion. It’s nice to see so many people using their brains on this subject, because it’s incredibly tricky and will require investigation for some time.

I received a comment from Jack Steele that asked for a response too lengthy for comments, so here we are once again. You can read the whole thing in its original context if you like, but the summary is: “Many of Joseph Smith’s wives were young — probably young enough that they had not reached menarche. Does this make him a paedophile?” Jack’s sources for data regarding average age of marriage (20-24), eligibility (19) and onset of menses (16.5) for Joseph Smith’s time are reliable. Age of menarche is tied to nutrition. Modern girls have been experiencing earlier ages of menarche over time, topping out at around 12-14 years of age, because their bodies aren’t stressed and nutrient-deprived the way they were in preindustrial societies. Women didn’t marry young, because a man looking for a good, fecund wife would have been crazy to take a woman who hadn’t proved that she could bear a child. However, Joseph Smith not only “married” girls too young for marriage, but there is strong evidence that he had sex with them as well.

The very, very short answer to “was he a paedophile?” is no, at least not in the way we think of paedophilia in the modern day. Keep in mind that this is before child psychology, child development, and the study of the mind. The earliest beginnings of the study of mental illness would not come for at least fifty years. We take the risk of being merely sensationalistic if we just slap that label on him with no caveats. If that’s all you were looking for, stop here. For more details, read on.

We’re safe calling Joseph Smith a rapist, because both in the present day and in Joseph Smith’s time coercive sex is considered to be rape. Refusing sex, these girls were told, meant damnation for the girl and her family, or the responsibility for The Prophet’s death when an angel murdered him for not shagging comely coed parishioners. That’s rape, deflowerment, or whatever Victorian euphemism you would like to use. Sex with a young unmarried woman rendered her damaged goods and almost unmarriageable. Non-virgins had a poor to zero chance of finding a good husband. Even if the sex were the result of seduction and not coercion, Smith would have known all too well how irresponsible his behaviour was.

It’s impossible to know for sure exactly why Smith chose prepubescent girls to “marry” and have sex with. It’s possible that it was a strategic decision, made to avoid getting caught. The overwhelming majority of his first dozen or so wives were married to and living with other men. Any pregnancy resulting from his action could have been easily disguised. (Incidentally, kings generally favoured married mistresses for exactly this reason if their situation did not accommodate a maîtresse en titre.) Smith then moved into a stretch of women who were both too old and too young to give birth. Elizabeth Davis Durfee was 50; Sarah Kingsley Cleveland was 53; Delcena Johnson was 37; Eliza R. Snow was 38. In 1840 it was very possible that women of nearly 40 were no longer menstruating, and this was definitely the case with those over 50.

It wasn’t until he’d gotten away with two dozen or so serial marriages that Smith began his wedding bonanza of 1843, grabbing any woman he could get his hands on and bedding her after a proper courtship of threats of hell and bloodshed. He even nabbed two pairs of sisters, which makes sense as he’d already collected a mother and a daughter. Lots of his wives were young and most likely virgins. Many of them were too young for sex from medical and social viewpoints. But I still have to hold off on calling him a paedophile.

The term paedophilia didn’t exist until 1886. Does that mean Smith wasn’t a paedophile? Not necessarily, but we can’t apply a modern term willy-nilly to a person from a far-off land in the ancient days before psychoanalysis. We also need to add to this that a person is not considered to be a paedophile unless they are attracted to a person with the body of a child and not an adult.

It’s extremely likely that the two fourteen-year-old girls Smith bedded were not fully developed. But it’s also pretty likely that they were somewhat developed, meaning growth of breasts and hips. Although neither would expect the onset of menses for at least two more years, they probably would have begun the process of looking like an adult woman. It’s a gray area, but I must consider that he was generally regarded as being good with children and there is not one allegation of child rape in any document I’ve heard of, not even in the hysterical exposés written by the most ardent enemies of Mormonism. I believe his attraction to the girls was that of a raging narcissist, who seized any impressionable vagina that walked by, whether society would have deemed that woman inappropriately young or inappropriately old for his interest. My gut instinct is that he really just wanted to get laid, and that bedding dozens of women bolstered his need to feel powerful and godlike, with total control over his followers.

My conclusion on Joseph Smith: Rapist? Definitely. Raging megalomaniac? Absolutely. Schizotypal, antisocial, narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders? Yes. Paedophile? Possibly. But in the absence of a sexual relationship with a girl of unquestionably child-like form, I’ll have to lean toward no.