Heretic TOC welcomes Peter Herman as a guest blogger today.
Peter is an occasional contributor to the NAMBLA website,
and has been a member and supporter since shortly
after the organization’s founding. He has also been
one of the editors of the NAMBLA Bulletin.
In the late 1960s in the US, child abuse briefly captured everyone’s attention. It was not sexual abuse if that is what you were thinking. It was physical abuse of children. And, no, neither was it the seat of the pants spankings that were a generally accepted form of discipline at the time. It was the broken bones and other traumas for which children were regularly brought to emergency rooms. The covering stories were that the child had accidentally fallen down stairs, run into an obstacle or experienced some other catastrophe while playing. These fictions never added up, and trauma doctors at last became aware that most of these cases stemmed from parental battering. Soon, the headlines became fewer, and little more was heard about these horrific abuses of children. Until… , bear with me…
At about the same time, boys, mostly, were experimenting with skateboards. But the fad then disappeared for a time. As we all know, skateboards eventually came back and are now more popular than ever. The fading and re-emergence of this phenomenon had to do with an important change. The early skateboards were just that: repurposed metal skate wheels affixed to unresponsive boards. When new materials and responsive suspensions developed, skateboarding became an exhilarating sport. Where am I going with this.
Shock about child abuse also came back, and the headlines today never seem to stop. What happened? There now was a new twist — sex. As with skateboarding, a catalyst emerged to change the dynamics in society’s perceptions. Where skateboarding became popular due to technological innovations, child sexual abuse became a public fascination following two major social shifts — the growing empowerment of gays simultaneous with that of women. The Stonewall rebellion in the US and the Pill (itself a catalyst freeing women from the womb) were the pivotal ingredients. Gay advances prompted a backlash in the form of protecting children from the perceived recruitment menace. Women, who had felt the tyranny of male domination, were eager to protect their children from sometimes real but mostly imagined sexual predation (almost exclusively by men). This protectiveness extended to boys as well, to the point that even eleven-year-old boys are sometime seen following their mothers into public toilets. The male child molester bogeyman grew ever more sinister in the public imagination.
It is ironic that today’s liberated women have forgotten that for nearly 500 years many were also the victims of similarly heinous characterization. In the nearly 500 years of witch prosecutions in the West, it was overwhelmingly women who were tried, punished and, more often than not, executed. Women were seen as weak, less intelligent and more susceptible to sin and evil acts. Male lust was projected onto them portraying women as evil temptresses who would have no compunction consorting with the Devil. As with the emergence of the evil pedophile, here too a catalyst can be identified — the printing press. This invention that could spread enlightenment could also spread misinformation and fear.
Early on, witchcraft was seen as simply superstition and did not provoke the fear and loathing that came later. A printed manual, the Malleus Maleficarum published in 1487, could circulate easily and act as the catalyst that transformed a superstition into a great evil. Over five hundred years later not much has changed other than the speed with which misinformation spreads. Our modern day equivalent, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is a fanciful, thoroughly unscientific compilation of mental afflictions. Sadly, it is but one example of unscientific thought that permeates much of psychology today.
Skateboarding may seem a trivial way of illustrating major social shifts, and history is certainly much more complex than what a short essay can convey. Nevertheless the pivotal points (i.e. catalysts) identified in the above examples cannot be denied.
[…] welcomes Peter Herman’s return as a guest blogger today, exactly a year after his first piece, Skateboarding as metaphor for social shifts. Peter, a veteran activist, remains an occasional contributor to the NAMBLA […]
i realise now,they were in conversation and it was an informative blog.
[TOC adds: Good! Thanks for saying this Mr P!]
thats ok then im not into slagging matches behind a computer screen,this site is important to alot of people.and this is one place we can exchange ideas without people wanting to stick there pitch forks into us.
[TOC adds: Oops, sorry Mr P! My note was meant to indicate only that Peter’s comment was intended as a reply to someone else’s post, nothing more. I’m sure He did not mean to criticise your post. It’s just that his comment ended up in the wrong reply box.]
Amen!
[TOC adds: Peter tells me he intended this as a reply to the comment by “A” above, rather than “Mr P”.]
on 5 live today they were talking about sex education in schools,and emphasizing on relationship ed they said 4 out of 5 13 15 year olds watch porn,prob being realistic one was at his mates house once and he saw some,and that goes into the figures.i didernt have some woman at collage show us how to put a condom on a bit of plastic,i soon worked it out no big deal.when discussing the younger kids asking sexual questions,they said we would only deal with the age appropriate ones perpetuating the myth that kids are “sexualised” not sexual.
Peter — “I do disagree with one thing in the study you cite, namely the inclusion of non-violent sex acts with children.” Oh, I definitely disagree too. Your anecdotes are wonderful, and confirm what a lot of personal stories and a lot of research have told us. But in many mainstream research papers such as the ones I linked above, the possibility of consensual intergenerational sex is totally ignored. You kind of have to work around that, if you can, in drawing conclusions from the research. It’s frustrating, but it’s how things are at the moment.
I should also mention that Lisak suffered what he has described as “sexual torture” when he was five, at the hands of a nineteen-year-old lodger who was himself a traumatised war refugee. As an adult, he advocates for men who were sexually abused as children. Which is important work, no doubt, but in the present climate it was probably way too easy for him to generalise his terrible experiences to all adult-child sex. I once heard a woman say that when she was eleven, she had been backed into a corner and groped by the barber, and had felt so awful she threw up right afterwards. From this, she said, she knew that children cannot consent to sex with adults. This is just as illogical as claiming that because Mr Smith, a man, were raped by another man, men cannot consent to sex with other men. But, as you were also saying above, everything in our culture at present supports these kinds of illogical sweeping generalisations and discourages more rational thinking on the subject.
Jim — I certainly agree: almost all of us do long above all to love and be loved, and most of us, male or female, feel that sex within a loving relationship is the best kind. Another species of illogical thinking is a claim made by some these days that in order to be happy, you have to stop needing other people. I hear it a lot, particularly from thirtysomething USians who’ve been in therapy. It baffles me how people come to accept such a notion. We are a social species: we need loving bonds with other people in order to function. The arguably socially atomised nature of our society can make it so difficult to form these bonds that we feel it’d be more convenient if we didn’t need them, but we do need them, and there’s no changing that.
The information that A supplied re: the studies was most interesting. Also I was interested in her comment that “Women’s sexual feelings tend, on average, to be somewhat less responsive to visual stimuli than men, somewhat more responsive to a personality, a situation, a context, a relationship.” this is close to Peter’s observation that the personality characteristics of a person affect the erotic desirability of the person. My own belief is (and this may sound a little puritanical for a blog such as this) that what we most want at the outset of our lives is loving relationships. In other words, Eros CONNECTED with a person in an ongoing situation. We become (somewhat violently) weaned away from this by society, and often settle for less. This suggests that pornography and puritanism are two sides of the same coin. Both result from a separation of Eros from relationship. Rape illustrates the point even more clearly. A person can rape someone for whom they have contempt. Zero relationship. Sex stories are in general boring. There are only so many slots and tabs to talk about. A real love story (with a bit of sex thrown into the mix) is always more arousing on all levels. That is my take anyhow, and I am a man.
Thanks for your thoughtful piece, Peter. As you rightly point out, back in the days of witch hysteria, women were seen as the more lustful sex, and their supposedly unbridled sexuality considered a danger to men. They were also seen as unclean — a menstruating woman will sour milk, etc. Inferior, unclean creatures of dangerous, uncontrolled lusts: the parallel with the modern paedophile bogeyman is pretty exact.
As a woman, I feel I should point out that a lot of some feminism’s undoubted hostility to male sexuality is born of fear. Anger and hostility are normal human responses to fear. Women usually have to worry about being raped far more often than men do. We grow up into the habit of taking precautions, but in a utopian world, we wouldn’t have to take those precautions. When I’m travelling, I sometimes have to constrain what I do and where I go in ways a man wouldn’t have to, and I resent it, and I’m right to, because it is existentially unjust. A close friend of mine was sexually assaulted; another was sexually harassed by her landlord; me, the first time I had my bottom pinched I was twelve, and, for instance, once when I was nineteen a strange man followed me in his car as I walked to work, masturbating and moaning loudly to announce that he was doing so, turning up again every time I took a side-road or doubled back and thought I’d thrown him off. Nearly every woman has stories like these. They colour our view of the world. Women hearing about sex between adults and kids are frequently going to remember being sexually harassed when they were young teenagers and assume it’s the same kind of thing. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s very different.
There’s a second problem these days which is a bit more difficult to articulate. I think of it as the imposition of a certain subtype of female sexuality as the prism through which male sexuality is viewed. Women’s sexual feelings tend, on average, to be somewhat less responsive to visual stimuli than men, somewhat more responsive to a personality, a situation, a context, a relationship. There is more variation within than between the sexes, so there are many women — me for one — who don’t at all fit the typical female pattern, and many women who fit it very closely, and many who fall somewhere in between. Ditto for men. But the patterns are still visible in the scatter of data.
So, lately I’ve been reading the blog ‘What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?’ It’s a curious mixed bag. Some of the stories are of really egregious discrimination against women in philosophy, particularly women who are pregnant or already have children. Some of them are debatable, and some are textbook cases of feminist excess. My favourite example of the latter is a post from a woman in whom a male colleague confided that he sometimes found it distracting when his attractive female undergraduate students wore skimpy clothes. She said she didn’t understand why, and he asked her, in honest puzzlement, whether she wouldn’t be distracted if an attractive male undergraduate turned up to her class bare-chested. She said she wouldn’t, because it would be so ‘inappropriate’ in that situation. In other words, she’s an extreme example of the typical female pattern: she’s someone whose arousal is so dependent on the situation, and independent of the visual, that she doesn’t get turned on at ‘inappropriate’ times. A lot of women don’t work like that, but it seems that a sizeable minority do, and from the more bullheaded among them we get, I suspect, quite a lot of the moralising about sexual attraction. A statement such as “I’m attracted to boys 8-13. I can’t help it — they’re just so perfectly beautiful!” wouldn’t cut much ice with such a person, who’d be inclined to argue that no, you’re attracted to boys because you’re looking for a partner you can dominate, etc. — because their arousal is very relational, if you will, rather than visual, and they can’t accept that many women and most men function differently. Thus for such a person it’s difficult to take even the first step, the acceptance that paedohebephilic attraction is unchosen and in itself blameless.
About public concern over physical vs sexual child abuse, have you ever seen Abuse, Arthur Bressan’s autobiographical film from the 80s? It deals with the subject in a pretty interesting way.
Thank you “A” for your insights. The sort of unwanted attention that you and too many other women have experienced and still endure makes me (and anyone else with any decency) cringe. Out of any large population the small proportion of individuals who act in grossly inappropriate ways will still add up to a sizeable number. Unfortunately, this minority gets confused with the larger group with attended fear and loathing projected onto it.
Concerning men and women functioning differently and even within each sex, your point may be well taken. In the absence of studies I could refer to, I can only rely on my personal experience. Someone whom I may find initially very attractive visually, I learned, will quickly lose that attractiveness once the individual’s personality is revealed to be unattractive. The converse also applies. A visually unattractive individual can come to appear attractive once that individual’s personality emerges as attractive. The French fairytale, The Beauty and the Beast, addresses this universal truth.
As to your statement, “paedohebephilic attraction is unchosen and in itself blameless.” I would add that this attraction is potentially a benefit to society in ways to which it is currently blind.
Do you know of David Lisak and Paul Miller? They recently published important paper ‘Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending among Undetected Rapists’ (http://www.wcsap.org/sites/www.wcsap.org/files/uploads/webinars/SV%20on%20Campus/Repeat%20Rape.pdf) Research on rapists has suffered from the same problem as research on CLs: it’s usually conducted with prison samples. These guys, however, asked a lot of men, median age 26.5, who’d never been imprisoned for anything, whether or not they’d ever had or tried to have intercourse or oral sex with an unwilling person by force or threat of force or because the person was too intoxicated to resist. The idea was to avoid the word rape and phrase things neutrally. Well, slightly over 6 percent of the men admitted to rape or attempted rape, and of those, 63 percent had raped multiple women, averaging 5.8 victims each. Only 30% of the total who’d raped someone had raped one or more strangers: the remainder raped women who were — by the rapists’ own admission, remember — too intoxicated to resist them. The rapists also tended to have misogynist attitudes and to admit to sexual assaults other than rapes, to battery, and to the sexual abuse of children — well, the ones who admitted sex with kids weren’t asked if it was consensual or not, so we can’t be sure that it was abuse, but it’s probably a safe bet that it often was, given whom we’re working with here.
Stephanie McWhorter, meanwhile, did a similar study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19459400) on men who’d just enlisted in the US Navy, average age slightly under 20. 13% admitted attempted or completed rape, with 71% of those admitting multiple rapes or attempts to rape, averaging 6.36 rapes each. McWhorter also found that the men tended to rape people they knew, that most started raping in their later teens and that a slight majority relied on intoxicants alone rather than force. The men who raped strangers relied exclusively on intoxicants.
This all means several things. Firstly, as feminists have been saying all along, men who rape mostly aren’t ordinary young guys who gave in to temptation in a weak moment and whom we should be feeling sorry for, really. They are mostly a distinct subgroup who tend to commit a wide range of violent acts and to espouse some pretty nasty ideas — but, because many rape people they know, someone you thought you could trust may well turn out to be a rapist. But, contradicting what feminists of a certain stripe have been saying, rape is not, in our society, something any man would do if given the chance, or endemic to male and female relationships: it’s committed by a small, though not vanishingly tiny, minority of men. In McWhorter’s study, 95% of the rapes committed by the total sample were the responsibility of 8.4% of the men.
I would be surprised if this conclusion were not generalisable to paedo- and hebephiles. BLs, on whom we have the most data, tend to resemble ‘regular’ straight guys in quite a lot of ways: in their sexual fantasies about willing partners and sometimes group sex, as Wilson and Cox noted in ‘The Child Lovers’, and also, I’ve observed, in their tastes — a lot of foot fetishes, a lot of guys who like long blond hair, a lot who like kids with bright and affectionate personalities (who doesn’t?), a small group who like chubby boys, etc.
All of which is to say that your point about the actions of a small group being generalised to everyone else is exactly right. Lisak and McWhorter’s studies haven’t had the attention they deserve … h’mm, I wonder why?
I have little knowledge of studies of the type you cite and get my understanding of human nature from personal experience and general reading. What seems clear is that the sex drive is a very powerful one. Without it, species would have a difficult time maintaining their numbers. I once read in a science magazine (I think it was Scientific American) that even dolphins used trickery and work in groups to essentially rape females of their species.
Human beings have supposedly evolved culture and a higher degree of morality to go beyond such crass animal behavior. Nevertheless, the following anecdote will serve to support the study you mention. I recall once, when I was living in Scotland and belonged to a ski club, arriving late at a pub where our group was granted a meeting room. As I approached the pub entrance, I saw a man leaving the building all the while upholding and leading away an obviously drunk woman. He was a medical doctor I had had friendly conversations with during earlier ski outings. Naively, I thought it noble of the man to help this woman until meeting his eyes I detected an unmistakable look of shame. At least he had a conscience even if his libido had had the best of him.
I do disagree with one thing in the study you cite, namely the inclusion of non-violent sex acts with children (though to many, but to their error, the latter may sound like an oxymoron). There is ample evidence that even young children are sexually active and welcome sexual advances. Lest this sound self serving, note that I have never been sexually attracted to young girls. But one of the incidents I do recall gives credence to my statement. The young ten-year-old daughter of a woman friend I knew had been playing in a small wading pool on a hot summer day. I had been sitting at a table nearby when some moments later the girl passed by with a large towel entirely draping her small body. Not missing a beat, she lifted a corner of the towel revealing her bare buttocks, all the while looking back at me with a coy smile. There was no mistaking the import of that look.
On the male side, I recall one colleague confessing that as a seven-year-old boy he had lusted after his grade school female teacher. For additional evidence, contemplate this. Many years ago when child sex hysteria first took off, one of our public TV programs presented a segment where children were advised about “good” touch and “bad” touch with the latter being one that supposedly made the child uncomfortable. One first grader piped up and said, “What if I like it?” This remark, made without guile, was promptly washed over by the presenter – curious that this bit of truth was not expunged from the program, but then this was at the beginning of the hysteria and sophisticated obfuscation had yet to come into its own.
>One first grader piped up and said, “What if I like it?”
Peter, do you know where I could find a clip of the video you described, perhaps on YouTube or Vimeo?
I am sorry that I cannot cite a source for the particular PBS program I saw. It was very long ago, pre-Internet as we now know it. But my memory is very clear that the boy piped out something to the effect of “What if I like it?” The statement was not expunged, I believe, because in the producer’s mind the adult advising the children on the evils of “bad touch” had countered the boy’s spontaneity with what she believed in her own mind to be a good counter argument.
Pity. I’d love to see it. If anyone else reading this is aware of a source for the clip, please share.
and they have the nerve to accuse us of grooming the public,i love that word,then what have they been doing for the past three decades.I was watching a film few weeks ago with a mate,think it was a drama about the battle of the pacific there was an attractive girl to me part of the reason she was so hot was because she looked about 13 to 14,after he said thats sick she looks to young,i could have challenged him there we known each other a long time.Im certain he is deluding himself,and that reminds me of dr james kincaids bodies at play,many adults are secretly sexually attracted to children,but use revulsion at the actions of overt pedophiles,to hide their inner feelings.