In Part II of this three-parter on the mental health of young people, the focus was on that part of the lives of children and adolescents in which adults are not present, a realm where there is the possibility of developing self-reliance and confidence in peer groups. It was concluded there is a strong case for saying their independent culture has been disastrously undermined.
It would be simplistic to suppose, though, that the present crisis of mental health begins and ends with this dimension of concern. As well as culture there is gender, for instance. In our present era of relative equality of the sexes compared to the patriarchal past that dominates the historical record, and the gender fluidity that is becoming increasingly fashionable, we tend to downplay innate psychological differences between the sexes to an extent that appears to be exacting a severe mental health toll.
One of the key lessons I took from the Institute of Ideas (IOI) forum discussed in Part I is that boys’ needs and problems remain very different to those of girls. Evidence consistent with this view is to be seen in the epidemiological data, which show that far more boys need mental health treatment than girls in the pre-teen years but the pattern is reversed in adolescence and early adulthood, with females suffering from a rapidly rising epidemic of anxiety, depression and self-harm that has not been experienced by males. Anxiety and depression in teenage boys have actually fallen in the last decade.
Let’s start with pre-teen children. Their basic needs, in addition to being part of a loving and secure family, are for the most part relatively straightforward and apply to both sexes. The Mental Health Foundation lists them, including
- being in good physical health, eating a balanced diet and getting regular exercise
- having time and the freedom to play, indoors and outdoors
I single out these two bullet-pointed factors because they both include elements – vigorous exercise and outdoor play, especially free-range exploration – that we have reason to believe boys need to an even greater extent than girls. Boys in general (though “tomboys” are a fairly common exception), tend to be a lot more energetic and adventurous. It is no accident that in the cooped up conditions now prevailing, it is boys, far more than girls, who are diagnosed with ADHD.
Boys may also be suffering more pre-teen mental problems than girls because the things they are good at – fighting, making a lot of noise, disappearing for hours on end and coming home with grazed knees, muddy clothes and a dead frog in their pocket (or worse, a live one!) – tend to be systematically not just forbidden but far more disapproved of than used to be the case. Parents have always punished boys for their wilder transgressions but usually in an indulgent, admiring way: boys will be boys, they would say. Now, though, in a world with less use for muscle-power and manliness, and with fathers encouraged to discover their “feminine side”, the pre-teen boy has no clear masculine role model to follow. Cross-gender boys might feel liberated, but most will not.
This diminished use for muscle-power, and lower levels of physical activity, are reflected in an actual loss of muscle-power among children. A survey published in the child health journal Acta Paediatrica on 10-year-olds in England showed they are weaker now. The number of sit-ups they can do declined by 27.1% between 1998 and 2008, arm strength fell by 26% and grip strength by 7% and twice as many children (one in 10) could not hold their own weight when hanging from wall bars. That is a staggering difference over a relatively short period and one likely to have a differentially greater psychological impact on boys, who have traditionally been more invested than girls in seeing their growing physical strength as a source of pride.
Even more striking is the literal disappearance of boys’ “manhood” as they put of weight through lack of exercise. Parents have increasingly been turning up with their prepubescent male children at doctors’ surgeries anxious about the boy’s penis size and asking for a physical examination. Writing in the New York Times recently, family doctor Perri Klass said what he and his colleagues have found is that increasing levels of obesity have meant boys are losing their dicks – or losing sight of them at least – as they disappear beneath layers of fat. It’s not that the todgers are tinier now, just that the boys are bigger. It’s a worry that will often resolve itself once they hit puberty and the penis grows rapidly, but only if they can get their weight under control, and that is often not the case.
But, hey, never mind, fat boys and indeed pretty well all adolescent males have a great source of consolation these days, especially if they can get online: pornography. A recent report for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner by Miranda Horvath et al. was titled Basically… porn is everywhere, which says it all. Overwhelmingly, these days, boys have seen pornography by the time they reach adolescence and often well before, although the official euphemism that they have been “exposed” to porn disguises the fact that most adolescent boys need no encouragement to go looking for it.
As the report coyly puts it, “Boys and young men generally view pornography more positively”, while “girls and young women generally report that it is unwelcome and socially distasteful”.
Disapprovingly, the report continues, “pornography has been linked to unrealistic attitudes about sex; maladaptive attitudes about relationships; more sexually permissive attitudes; greater acceptance of casual sex; beliefs that women are sex objects; …and less progressive gender role attitudes (e.g. male dominance and female submission).”
In these remarks we find an important clue as to why boys tend to feel better about their adolescence and early adulthood than girls these days, and why girls are experiencing much greater mental health problems. In traditional cultures where the virginity of young women is tightly guarded, boys in their bachelor youth have to put up with a lot of sexual frustration, albeit ameliorated through homosexual encounters with their peers or with men. Today, all underage sexual relationships have become dangerous, with negative implications for healthy sexual development within actual, fully human, person-to-person relationships.
The world of person-to-object pornography thrives, though, with boys and young men loving it. For an underage boy real girls are usually hard to get, but virtual ones are everywhere and a source of easy and immediate satisfaction. As for young men, they can find sex if they are presentable, and can even successfully demand that girlfriends do all sorts of “advanced” stuff they have seen in the porn movies, such as shaving their genitals and submitting to anal sex – or even acts where misogyny seems a likely factor, such as being urinated or spat upon. If women refuse to put up with it, no problem: males may opt to take the porn in preference: Generation Masturbation rules, OK! Not only that: young women are also under pressure to have a perfect figure and complexion, just like the porn stars, in an era when so many women fail to shape up on account of poor diet, leading to obesity. It should hardly be surprising they feel bad about themselves and self-harm more.
We know the standard feminist response to all this. Most feminists hate porn. Fat feminists even celebrate their own corpulence and insist it is the men who must shape up, not by getting thinner but by not “raping” women – an insistence which tends to mean making the rules of consensual sex ever tighter, so that everything except sex between fat man-hating lesbians is ruled off limits.
Rosamund Urwin, of the Evening Standard, had a telling anecdote along these lines when she was speaking at the IOI forum. She had heard from one poor young guy who was trying to keep up with these ever more impossible standards. He thought he had better be verbally explicit on a date, asking the woman outright if she would consent to sexual activity, so there would be no misunderstanding. Instead of being pleased by his gentlemanly determination to go through the officially correct procedure, the question “weirded her out” and she asked him to leave!
Camile Paglia, speaking in the same session, was robust against such nonsense and against the kind of so-called feminism that encourages women to see themselves as weak and vulnerable: women who cower in “safe spaces” and refuse to takes responsibility for their own behaviour (getting drunk, for instance, and then blaming men for “raping” them) do nothing for the equality of the sexes. As for porn, she is all in favour, not least because its wildness forces us to confront our repressed sexuality and the price we pay for denying it. “Toughen up!” is her message to the delicate ladies, or even “Man up!” Hearing her, in effect, urge women to be more like men as a solution to their mental health crisis came as a refreshing change to the more familiar feminist idea that men should be more like women.
Not that it strikes me as a great solution. Absolutely we need toughness in some respects, in defence of free speech, for instance, against the Snowflakes who can’t stand to be offended by unwelcome opinions. But we also need empathy, and social relationships that are not merely exploitative and objectifying – as in the worst kind of porn, which one suspects is a projection of the violent domestic abuser’s mindset – or overly competitive and individualistic.
The environmentalist George Monbiot has captured the personal appearance question from a slightly different angle:
Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do. As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer. Some phones, using their “beauty” settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone against themselves. Is it any wonder, in these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been replaced by retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress?
Touching replaced by retouching. This is very telling. Monbiot is talking not about sex here but about human connection, our vital need to keep literally in touch with each other. Last time, in a comment responding to Part II, Christian briefly alluded to the work of Tiffany Field, which is well worth elaborating on here, because her research gives strong support to a link made by psychologists between high levels of crime and societies where touching is frowned upon. It is thought, in particular, that parents who starve their children of physical affection are damaging them physically and emotionally.
Physically touching children is especially frowned upon in the US but is much more acceptable in France. So Dr Field and her team had the bright idea of comparing physical interaction between parents and children sitting in restaurants in France and America. The French, who have a strong culture of openly displaying physical affection, were found to touch their children 110 times in only half an hour. Whereas in America, which has a higher rate of abuse and adult violence, the parents only made contact with their children twice in 30 minutes. The researchers also watched children and parents together in playgrounds and found that youngsters who were not touched very often were far more violent and aggressive towards other children. Field said that people who are starved of cuddling when they are young are also more likely to grow up with depression and anxiety because they feel unloved.
I doubt anyone here will be surprised by these findings. They are not the whole story, of course. This blog series has looked at a range of factors contributing to the mental well being of the young and commentators here have identified others. I have focused mainly (in Part II) on the significance of children’s own independent culture and self reliance and (in Part III) on gender as a complicating factor. These musings barely scratch the surface but I hope nevertheless they will be found thought–provoking.
WHAT A LOAD OF FOOTBALLS
I’m not sure darts champion Eric Bristow was entirely on target when he tweeted “Might be a looney but if some football coach was touching me when i was a kid as i got older i would have went back and sorted that poof out”; but, like the little missiles he chucks for a living, he did have a point.
The lachrymose old leather bashers who nearly set the studio furniture afloat on a sea of tears in the course of Victoria Derbyshire’s daytime TV show may well have had something genuine to cry about and it is right that they are heard out.
But Bristow will be speaking for many in also tweeting that these guys are “wimps” and not “proper men”. It’s not so much that being openly emotional is necessarily a bad thing in a man, or that paedos deserve a kicking – a view one of the alleged victims rightly dismissed as evidence of a “stone age mentality”.
It’s more a feeling that whatever “abuse” (if any) these guys suffered could have been done and dusted long ago without the never-ending soap opera of trauma and tragedy now being played out as part of the travelling circus of historic abuse narratives that began with the Catholic Church and his since moved from one institutional setting to another.
It’s a feeling that this whole show is being kept on the road by vested interests in the therapy industry, the media and politics, and that what these particular victims are victims of is not, fundamentally, sexual abuse, but their career disappointments. They were hugely ambitious guys in a fiercely competitive business. They were not quite good enough, which is no disgrace; but now it seems they want to blame their bitter disappointment on someone else, and that is another matter entirely..
I see that Barry Bennell, the coach accused on the Victoria Derbyshire show and elsewhere in the media, has already served a long time in prison, apparently tried to take his own life recently and now faces further charges. I make no comment whatever on the legal merit or otherwise of these latest charges. I do not know who is making the complaint(s) or on what basis and it would be wrong to say anything that could prejudice the case either way – not that this blog is likely to have any influence.
What I will say, though, is that Bennell is the one I feel sorry for: a brilliant, inspirational coach, as all concerned admit, whose life has been destroyed far beyond any suffering of the supposed “abuse” victims, or so it seems to me. There were those among them who appeared content to be “raped”, in at least one case for years on end, as long as they stood a chance of getting to the top in football.
No, sorry, Bennell’s is the real tragedy.
Or one of them. In all the fuss over the snowballing football coach saga the loss of photographer David Hamilton, found dead in a suspected suicide by asphyxiation at his Paris home at the age of 83, has gone almost unnoticed in the UK.
Known for his work in fashion magazines as well as, more controversially, his top-selling books featuring nude photographs of underage girls, his death follows historic allegations of rape and sexual assault against a number of schoolgirls in France. French radio presenter Flavie Flament, 42, in particular, claimed she was raped by Hamilton when she just 13 in 1987. She and three other women were attempting to launch a prosecution against him. He denied all the allegations.
Unlike Bennell, at least Hamilton made it to a grand old age before coming unstuck, an element of relative good fortune we may be seeing less in France and elsewhere in future as the mania of the Anglophone countries spreads.
[…] in a three-part blog under the “driving kids crazy” heading three years ago. See here, here and here. Key themes from that trilogy will be touched on below but first let’s take a look at this latest […]
Good new Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/16/were-really-bad-at-judging-risk-to-kids-were-really-good-at-judging-parents/?tid=pm_opinions_pop&utm_term=.e3160aed7bdb
9-year-olds from round the world talk gender: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/01/children-explain-how-gender-affects-their-lives/ In the same issue, Nat Geo made history by featuring a 9-year-old trans girl on the cover. Her strikingly beautiful face, with bee-stung lips, has to be part of the reason why she was chosen. Likewise, the kids in the fascinating PBS Frontline documentary ‘Growing Up Trans’ (it’s on YouTube) were clearly chosen for their looks as well as their articulateness — but whisper it only!
The latest abuse scandal is in US girls’ gymnastics. 49-year-old Marvin Sharp, 2010 US Women’s Coach of the Year, killed himself in prison: http://www.wthr.com/article/gymnastics-coach-marvin-sharp-found-dead-in-jail-cell. Another coach was sentenced to 25 years in prison for putting secret cameras in changing rooms to video girls 8-16. Here http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2016/12/15/20-year-toll-368-gymnasts-allege-sexual-exploitation/95198724/ we’re told that a 14-year-old having near-daily sex with her coach felt she was in a “legitimate romantic relationship” with him, which doesn’t quite jibe with the linked account: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3235961-Coach-and-14-YO.html I suppose we’ll never know what actually went on between them.
A post about this on Metafilter has generated a couple of interesting comments. A man says: “I started having sex at the instigation of my then- 14-year-old girlfriend. Neither of us were anywhere near mature enough for that relationship, but we were both sure we were” and argues that adults can “be misguided in the same way, especially when their charge is seemingly invincible”.
A woman says: “I did gymnastics from ages 8-14. Not super duper seriously, but I competed, and practiced 3 times per week, and was just super into it. It was mostly very positive, though I did develop some disordered eating stuff at one point, and fortunately my dad of all people intervened and I quickly got over it. But I had a coach, a female coach, when I was 13 and she was…I think about 22 or 23 who worked with me for about 1 and half years. And man, I was so into her. So so into her! Not ‘in love’ per se, but very crushed out…strong feelings and attachments. I just felt like she was my everything for a bit. I was infatuated I guess in the classic teacher/student way. She made me feel so good about myself in that period/life stage/middle school when my self esteem just sort of sucked.
“It really freaks me out now to think if she had been a man, or hell, a woman with diffuse sexual boundaries, what could have happened. She drove me to competitions, we spent a few overnights together, and when she left for another gym, I remember writing her this long, kind of I’m so devastated email: I love you so much! Please come back!”
>…and when she left for another gym, I remember writing her this long, kind of I’m so devastated email: I love you so much! Please come back!
If there had been sex she would have been “traumatised”. They did not, but she was “devastated” anyway, when the woman left. Perhaps it should be illegal for coaches to change gyms, or for teachers to change schools!
Most people would agree that your first heartbreak is part of growing up!
I know this is off topic, But I was discussing Michael Jackson, and how his relations were not coercive (unless you think crying to get your way is coercion!), But its a while since I read your book, So I can’t remember everything in detail. Here is the response form a blogger about MJ
“Was there no coercion? That’s why I had asked in another comment what’s your definition. MJ did coerce his boys into doing what he wanted. Jordie Chandler said he would cry and run a guilt trip that other boys would do it, so Jordie felt compelled. MJ also manipulated June Chandler into letting Jordie sleep in his room by crying and saying she was preventing them from being a “family”.
And I know you have a thing about it’s only wrong if it’s coerced/forced sex, but CSA with acquaintence molesters like Michael Jackson happen in the confines of a emotional relationship as well. When James Safechuck started to show signs of pub erty, he said MJ focused on Brett Barnes who was younger. He said he felt the need to act “extra nice” and befriend Brett so MJ would still talk to him. I’d say that was pretty coercive in the sense James felt the need to act a certain way just to maintain the friendship. That’s manipulative considering many of these boys were huge fans and admired MJ; who would want to be kicked out by their idol? James clearly knew that if MJ wasn’t sexually attracted to him, he would be out in the streets (so to speak). That’s very damaging to a child”
Hi Tom, That was actually a question: From your opinion and knowledge on this subject, Was MJs relationship with James Safechuck as described above?
Michael Jackson was definitely no saint and my book did not portray him as such. But it is not fair to paint him as a monster either. I believe I gave a balanced picture in the book and I’ll try briefly to do the same here.
In a nutshell, then, I’d say he was definitely not above being manipulative, especially with boys’ parents and to some extent with boys themselves, although there is also good evidence that some of his young friends were confident and smart enough to pull Michael’s strings rather than the other way around.
Coercive, though, is a strong word. The blogger cited by Libertine asked “what’s your definition” but does not seem to have answered his own question. So here is what the Oxford dictionary says: “Coercion: the action or practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats.” Crying in order to get your own way may be considered manipulative but it does not compel anyone to do anything by force or threats. So the use of this very strong word is really just an unfair expression of hostility.
So is his use of the word “molester”, which suggests unwanted touching, or an outright assault. But that was not Michael’s style: he wanted to be with boys who were up for it, and over time he became very adept at finding them.
As for Jimmy Safechuck, his recent allegations against Jackson, by this time long deceased, confirm what I always felt to be the case, namely that there had been a sexual relationship of some considerable duration with the star. It is clear that as a boy he regarded it as consensual but has recently been persuaded (or, for whatever reason, now chooses to assert), following therapy, that it was not.
The nature of the relationship as disclosed in the complaint and written up in great detail at MJFacts.com (an excellent site) is very much in line with the wider pattern of Jackson’s life, personality and well-documented contacts with boys. I’d say Safechuck’s account rings true in most of its detail, although there is good reason to suspect that we are not hearing the full story with regard to why he is making the complaint at this point rather than years earlier.
Regarding the specific comments made by the blogger, I would just draw attention to the claim that “James clearly knew that if MJ wasn’t sexually attracted to him, he would be out in the streets (so to speak).”
So to speak, indeed! By “so to speak” what he really means is “if you buy into my outrageously emotive and inaccurate characterisation of what happened”. There was no question of young Jimmy being put “out in the streets”, which implies he might have been reduced to begging or turning tricks as a rent boy. The truth is that he turned out to be academically strong at school, with good mathematical skills later put to remunerative use in hi-tech employment.
Not that he necessarily needed much money. There are strong indications (denied in his court filing) that his family were aware of the nature of Jackson’s relationship with a boy and were bought off, like Jordie Chandler and Jason Francia.
Abnormal no-brains of mass mind raping media-philes and pseudo-scientists R inferior to those of natural kinderphiles & adultophiles, logical products of the planet’s most seXessful ever species.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/paedophile-brains-difference-child-sex-abusers-those-who-dont-study-a7378911.html
Thanks for the info about this recently-published (October) study.
As you surmise, it is neuro-bollocks. A quick glance at the academic paper on which the newspaper report is based shows that this research, as usual, fails to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual encounters. That is the main and most fatal weakness from a Kind POV. Combined with the fact that it is a very small study plus other limitations of the work admitted by the authors themselves, this paper really doesn’t amount to much even for those whose focus of concern is different to that of heretics here.
Those who want to see the original research for themselves can easily do so. See below.
Free PDF download of the original academic study:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.23443/epdf
Free online viewing:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.23443/full
[…] Driving kids crazy: Part 3, gender […]
@Nada, Dec 13
I balk at bathroom bills because my version of feminism includes transwomen, who should feel safe walking into a bathroom and feel confident that they won’t get assaulted, shot, or threatened. Sexually assaulting and peeping on people is still illegal, so why would the law suddenly give a free pass to men “taking advantage” of the freedom of transpeople to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender?
Mainstream mass mind raped Peace might wanna ‘peacefully’ chill out.
Bathrooms/BOGS in Bullshit Britain have seen very few negative seXperiences (mainstream grotesquely seXaggerated) but MILLIONS of mind-blowing BJs/BlowJobs and MUCH more.
Start with TOC’s righteous ref to same-name TOM Driberg M.P. (masturbating pedo-phile – lover of kindpeds).
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/?s=Driberg
https://www.google.be/search?q=Tom+Driberg&rlz=1C1SKPL_enBE421&oq=Tom+Driberg&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j69i60j0.4545j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
A lot of the ‘help, trans people in the bathroom’ hysteria has to do with sheer horror at the idea that little girls might see an adult penis, which clearly would KILL THEM DEAD. For that reason alone it should be given no airtime.
As the focus is on safety, freedom, and assumptions made about men, women and children, the law is irrelevant. There’s also no reason to make it only about
the feelings of transpeople.
Are transwomen to be considered victims (as women), despite possibly having male genitals? Are transmen to be considered predatory (as other men) or as victims (due to possible female genitalia)?
“A”, the articles I read mentioned the possibility of girls being offended and joked about boys wanting to shower with the girls after PE, which some braver boys, actually did when I was a kid.
A far cry from death by penis exposure .
Not sure why you decided to come back to this, but it’s not about “feelings,” it’s about safety. A female-passing transwoman being forced to use the men’s bathroom just puts her at risk, same with a male-passing transman being forced to use the women’s bathroom. In addition, while women and girls can often get away with looking masculine or “butch,” a transwoman who does not pass but still presents as a woman or at the very least feminine is at risk no matter which bathroom they choose. You could then say that such people should not present as their gender when in public, but most doctors require a patient to live their life as their desired gender for a certain amount of time, including in public, before surgery and sometimes hormone therapy can occur.
Gender and sex are complicated, and whether somebody is a “victim” or “predatory” can depend on various factors including privilege, socialization, and life experiences.
Peace, if you have any questions, information or proposals on trans issues I would be very pleased to hear them, as I aim to blog on these matters soon and will soon be attending a relevant academic forum where they could be aired.
Do you have any ideas for avoiding awkward bathroom confrontations, or taking the sting out of them? Is education the most important factor? Or agreeing and enforcing a new code of expected conduct by all concerned? Or the architecture of restroom facilities? Or what?
We could exchange info/ideas about the forum via email. You have my address.
Well, the first thing is to not criminalize an already at-risk group for using the bathroom as intended. Luckily there’s still a large amount of places that realize that such bathroom bills are ridiculous and will do nothing to improve safety. I’d like to see more gender-neutral or family restrooms available, even though it doesn’t do anything to address the already present transphobia and rings of a “separate but equal” situation.
Education about transpeople is something that I’d like to see and I believe would personally help, but such education would be largely predicated on location. In the US, there’s still a ton of states that don’t require sex ed and only 19 out of 50 states require medically accurate and comprehensive sex ed. It’s an uphill battle to even include homosexuality and homosexual sex acts in sex education, so expanding that to include transgenderism will be difficult. In addition, making books and resources for young transpeople available in schools and libraries could help cisgender kids and adolescents accept transpeople, but may be protested by parents. When it comes to education for the general public, that could be a bit more tricky. Unless they personally know somebody who comes out as trans or see a celebrity come out as trans, it’s very likely a lot of people are not aware of transpeople in life. It’s likely everybody on this very site has met or passed by a transperson without realizing it, but because they didn’t realize it they may assume that they could easily spot a transperson or that there aren’t transpeople in their community so why should they have to go out of their way to appease transpeople. I do LGBT activism and such, but I still have a difficult time figuring out ways to get the message out there, especially to people who won’t listen or believe that such problems don’t exist.
Transpeople are already doing what they can to “pass” when in restrooms, with many books and websites for transpeople having advice sections for using the restroom. I think the most important thing that people need to remind themselves of is “mind your own business.” If you see somebody in the bathroom who is using it as it was made to be used and not doing anything suspicious, then it doesn’t matter how masculine or feminine they look, they’re there for the same reason you are: to use the bathroom and get out of there. If you see somebody actually doing something suspicious, then by all means report them; but if it’s just a case of a more masculine than usual woman going into a stall then there’s nothing to worry about because there’s also such thing as a masculine ciswoman.
I’m not sure if I have much to say about basic trans issues that I haven’t already discussed. Apart from the public at large, there’s still issues in how medical professionals and school faculty deal with transpeople as well as more advanced issues such as trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and in-fighting within the LGBT community. Since you wish to blog about trans youth, issues concerning how both their peers as well as their teachers and counselors interact with and view them could be of interest.
OK, thanks.
>I’m not sure if I have much to say about basic trans issues that I haven’t already discussed.
I must re-visit your earlier comments.
Worth your while to have a look at this if you want to talk about transgender issues, and don’t already know about her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPsYWN-mW-s
Thanks, BJ!
Just seen it. Excellent. Learned a lot from this very articulate trans person.
Yes, I thought you would find what she had to say interesting. I fear that if she had not been a Lt. Col. she would have been treated rather differently by the Australian army, but as it was…
Yes, I think that’s right. Also worth noting is that she now has a high rank in a non-combat position but was a platoon commander earlier in her military career, a role with a very macho image.
There was also a famous British trans woman who had been a war hero as a fighter pilot with the RAF in the Battle of Britain. I was a young court reporter when she was in trouble for driving her car the wrong way on a motorway — or down the wrong runway, as she actually said in court, without any apparent awareness of using the wrong word. But she was quite old by then.
Indeed, of interest.
But NOT to the MOST IMPORTANT constituents of all.
MULTI MILLIONS of TABLOID TWAT SUN-readers, et al – DOH!
Quote Media Mad Dog Murdoch’s fave tabloid twat moron Homer Simpson:
“DOH! FACTS R useless! U can prove A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G with FACTS!!”
Tom, I don’t know if you have seen this, but this particular issue of Sexuality & Culture may be of interest to you in respect of the subject of this post. It is specifically about sex and sexualisation, which I consider to be one of the main ways in which we do drive our kids crazy. (Or, at least, my children’s friends, from who I have direct commentary.)
http://link.springer.com/journal/12119/12/4/page/1
Thanks, Bruce. I don’t remember all the particular articles in the ToC of this issue, but I have read and been impressed by the work of several of these authors, especially Gail Hawkes and Danielle Egan.
Also, I know Richard Yuill personally. In fact, I have had some pretty intense discussions with Richard, who is a big Foucault fan. So am I, up to a point, but I feel the cultural theorists in general are far too dismissive of evolutionary psychology as a significant influence on our modern thinking about sex and gender issues. This is where I think Camille Paglia gets it right and most feminists do not, which is why she is featured in this blog on gender and mental health.
Yes, I have a lot of time for Hawkes and Egan, and Durber, but I don’t really know Yuill apart from his work with Durber/Laplong.
I admit I had thought your would probably know thoset articles, and the authors, though I didn’t imagine you would know one of them personally. It does sound as though your discussions have been interesting.
Yes, Richard also introduced me to David T. Evans many years ago when Evans was his PhD supervisor. He was the author of an interesting book, “Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities”. There is also an article Evans did, “Falling angels? – the material construction of children as sexual citizens”:
http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/intjchrb2&div=8&id=&page=
Thanks for the Evans link, I quite enjoyed reading it, but one thing it made clear to me is the ongoing schizoid attitude we have toward children, and the ongoing schizoid research into child sexual behaviour, paedophilia, and children generally. It made me think of C.P Snow’s two cultures idea, where the two cultures are the two distinct areas of investigation into childhood sexuality/paedophilia/CSA/etc. It also made me think of Erich Fromm and his notion of a sane society. I have no idea what Fromm may have thought aboutchildhood sex, etc, but the more one reads of the pros and cons, and looks at the evidence on both sides, the more clear it seems that the society/culture is not quite sane. It also led me to think about R.D Laing and his work on “sanity and madness in the family” (he co-authored a book, as you probably know, with that title). I have no idea how to synthesise their ideas into some kind of coherent view, but all three authors seem to have things to say that bear on this issue, things which suggest that we are not, as a culture, thinking coherently about children (and their sexuality) at all.
>…all three authors seem to have things to say that bear on this issue, things which suggest that we are not, as a culture, thinking coherently about children (and their sexuality) at all.
I suppose cultures are by definition in some sense cultured, but that does not mean that they think as an entity or indeed at all. As with agriculture, or a lab tissue culture, the idea of a culture is imposed deliberately by an outside entity, although even that entity is not entirely in control; and that which is cultured, such as a strain of wheat, or a pathogen, is utterly mindless so far as we can tell.
So I don’t think coherence can realistically be expected, except perhaps in relatively monolithic, ideologically driven regimes that we may not wish to emulate. Can at least the academy do better? I am reminded of something I wrote recently in an email exchange with the psychologist J. Michael Bailey, who had asked me a question — well, one of several, actually, but the questions themselves are irrelevant:
>I would just remark that your question is quite holistic, which I welcome…. I suppose research has to focus on one variable at a time but this can too easily lead to myopia, with a relentless forensic focus either on the “offender” or the “victim”, without any meaningful consideration of all the evidence together, an exercise that could lead to a questioning of both terms.
In so many ways I think you are correct, but also wrong. Unfortunately I can’t quite pin down what I am trying to say. Which is, in itself, a way of saying that I am confused about the issue of society/culture/sanity, and so on. Perhaps what I am referring to is an overarching myopia. That would be fitting, and perhaps I could get an adequate prescription.
Yes, the myopia to which I referred was definitely more specific than the one I think you had in mind. The local and overarching aspects are conceptually close but do not map onto each other: one is perhaps a subset of the other.
But perhaps this addresses only part of what you are getting at. As for being confused, that may be the only sane response (or at least the only realistic one) to the complexity of the matter!
Yes, fair enough. I’ll settle for realism while I let the ideas bang around my head until they make some sense to me.
For her fascinating book Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labours of Love: Race, Class and Gender in US Adoption Practice, Christine Ward Gailey studied, as a participant observer, a wide range of families who had adopted children. She notes (pages 123-124) that “[t]he wealthy adoptive families…had the least community involvement of any of the adopters; their children had the fewest sleepovers and attended the smallest day-care centres. Opportunities for children to mingle with other children were almost always adult-managed, in a continuum of minimal adult supervision among the working-class children through adult-supervised groups in the middle-income sector to the dyads and triads with adult oversight that were typical of this group. … While the medicalisation of children’s — especially boys’ — behaviour anomalies is rampant in the United States and among the adoptees in the sample, the children of the wealthiest sector showed the most medical intervention.”
What is the implication here? That adoption is bad? Wouldn’t we need to know the likely quality of life for the child in the absence of adoption to make any such conclusions?
I mentioned this because it occurred to me that it was related to some of what you’ve brought up here. I saw it as more a comment on class-related parenting practices than on adoption per se.
I would be very surprised if the author were implying that adoption is bad, because she is an adoptive parent herself, hence ‘participant observer’. (I grew up with several adopted relatives myself, by the way, which is why I take an interest in the subject.) The working- and middle-class adoptive families she studied, the ones who adopted through public agencies, often adopted older children with histories of horrific trauma, such as being stabbed and scalded by their birthparents. International adoption, however, while it can be a wonderful thing, has been known to get shady — ‘orphans’ who aren’t, for instance. Gailey draws a distinction between international adoption by a group in her study she calls the NGO/academic international adopters, who as a group were familiar with conditions in the countries they were adopting from and made an effort to maintain their children’s links with their birth families, if any, and a group she calls the business/professional international adopters, which is where she came across things like someone wanting to adopt from Brazil because her agency had assured her that that’s where the white babies were, and an adoptive father wishing that there were a ‘lemon law’ so he could send back his son, who’d turned out to be learning disabled. In this social stratum Gailey noticed a culture of ‘performance-based’ rather than unconditional love, which applied to relationships between spouses as well, and would no doubt have applied to birth children. My impression is that as the adoptive parent of a traumatised child, she has a fair bit of disdain for wealthy people who feel entitled to a healthy white infant and aren’t willing to ‘get in the trenches’, as another adoptive parent put it, with a child who has suffered and who will always carry the resultant emotional scars.
>My impression is that as the adoptive parent of a traumatised child, she has a fair bit of disdain for wealthy people who feel entitled…
I see. Yes, that is very understandable.
I sometimes feel (despite the fact that I have two birth children of my own) that we shouldn’t be bringing new children into the world given the state’s it’s in and that therefore if we want children we should adopt them.
I’ve got some sympathy with that idea, especially now with Mr Climate Change is a Hoax Perpetrated by the Chinese in the White House.
Now there’s a thought: minor-attracted individuals desiring to adopt children … I somehow think adoption agencies might smell a rat once they review your answer to their question: What is your sexual orientation?
>I somehow think adoption agencies might smell a rat once they review your answer to their question: What is your sexual orientation?
Not really. You just give the PC answer: gay. Works like a charm.
Think of all the lone boys in Callas that we could help.
To explain my own position on the subject a bit further…
I certainly know of adoptions that have worked out wonderfully well. An old schoolfriend of mine, now happily making her way in the world as a caring vet, loves her adoptive parents dearly and they her, and doesn’t want to search for her birthparents: she already has parents, she says, and couldn’t wish for a better set. On the other hand, international adoption as an institution involves a huge amount of stuff about poverty and neocolonialism and racism and it gets very, very murky. A good article on this: http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/adoption/docs/FPFinalTheLieWeLove.pdf
I was raised by one of my biological parents, but the extended family I grew up with are all, one way and another, not biologically related to me. I also have first-degree biological relatives I saw very rarely as a child and only really got to know in my first adulthood. When I say ‘my family’, I’m usually talking about my social family: we are family in a way that those biological relatives and I will never be. But we also have far less in common with one another, in terms of temperament and interests and so on, than I do with those biological relatives, and that can make things difficult. Some people whom I like and respect, and who only have biological relatives themselves, have reacted rather surprisingly badly when I have mentioned this. The same people have said some things on the subject I find pretty appalling, such as that donor-conceived people shouldn’t have the right, ever (!), to find out the other half of their biological origins. There are implications here about parental rights over their children, even when those children are adult, that I find quite disturbing. I’ve seen some of my social relatives really angry that their original birth certificates have been sealed and that they have to go begging hat in hand to get them, even though in some cases they only want to do so so that they have a chance of finding out what diseases they may be at risk for. And it’s been a bit wrenching for us all to have to acknowledge that if the best-case scenario had happened, we would not have been family, because the best-case scenario would have been their birthmothers getting enough support to keep them rather than being shamed into giving them up. When abortion is readily available and stigma around unwed motherhood is low, people just do not carry pregnancies to term and relinquish the resultant children. That is vanishingly rare, because the mother typically finds it horribly painful and never fully gets over it, and if the father knows about it it’s typically awful for him too.
Consequently the face of modern domestic adoption is not relinquishment, as it was in the baby scoop era, but removal. Kids are almost always removed from their birthparents for good reason. Therapeutic reparenting of kids who have suffered more by the age of five or six than many of us will in our whole lives is a very difficult job that most people could not do — I know I couldn’t. It should be properly trained for and properly supported. But while steps have been taken in this direction, they haven’t gone nearly far enough. Especially in the US, where regulations can be laxer, money talks more eloquently and there’s a bit of a rah-rah adoption culture — adoption fits in well with a nation of fairly recent immigrants and with the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, you-are-what-you-make-of-yourself idea — people still sometimes adopt deeply traumatised children believing that a warm bed, three square meals a day and lots of cuddles will fix things. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re part of what fixes things, but a lot else is also required. Sometimes they don’t fix things because things just can’t be fixed. And sometimes things can be fixed but not through adoption, because some children are damaged enough that they can’t emotionally handle living in families. For these kids the best solution would probably be growing up in small, well-run children’s homes with dedicated, caring, highly-trained staff. But that is expensive for the state. Adoption is cheaper. In this respect, pushes for more adoptions have something in common with ‘let’s cut the public services and shove the work off on the third sector and keep smiling. It’ll be fine’. It isn’t.
Much wisdom here, “A.”
>Kids are almost always removed from their birthparents for good reason. Therapeutic reparenting of kids who have suffered more by the age of five or six than many of us will in our whole lives is a very difficult job that most people could not do — I know I couldn’t. It should be properly trained for and properly supported.
This was a scenario I had in mind when making my initial response to your remarks on adoption and I totally agree with this latest point of yours.
@ Dissident. You said I must say that I do agree with Peace on this one, BJmuirhead. There is a difference, and a huge one IMO, between telling someone “you’re a very articulate individual” and saying something like “you’re very articulate for someone your age” or “… for someone who is black.”
I have been suffering in a heat wave, as I’ve mentioned, so it is possible I simply didn’t take in that there was a qualification attached to the compliment. Obviously, a qualification concerning race puts the whole thing in another area altogether. My comments were based on a comment about being articulate without any qualification concerning race, or gender, or anything else like that. Of course you both are correct when such a qualification is attached.
I think I had best make sure I am entirely mentally present before making any more comments. It has rained yesterday and today, and the edge has been taken off the heat exhaustion (wish I had air conditioning), so this helps me read more clearly, and agree entirely.
But if there is no qualification attached, then I cannot see it as patronising or racist.
Ok, there always is an exception: I can imagine a racist saying that a black/asian/calathumpian (how does one spell that word?) is articulate in such a way that it sears with hatred, but this is not the type of situation I was imagining. Instead, I thought Peace was rejecting all compliments as racist because of a subtext. If that wasn’t what he intended to say, then my apologies to him.
As for your last comment, yes. It is a bit like the woman who, when my ex was telling everyone I was a paedophile, said that I was very friendly with the kids, for someone who claimed not to be a paedophile. But, dammit, the kids (aged 12 to 17, so barely kids at all, really) were much more pleasant and amusing. (Interestingly, my solicitor told me that that was the most common accusation made by ex-wives in child custody cases. When she—the solicitor—said this, I felt normal, in some strange and unacceptable fashion. Sarcasm/joke intended.)
All quite fair and understood, BJmuirhead. I too have done my share of misreading due to things like posting too early without my morning coffee, or late at night when I was past exhausted, etc. It’s no biggie. I hope you’re feeling better today. And I’m sorry you had to deal with all of that from your ex 🙁
The weather is gradually returning to normal, so yes, better every day.
As for the ex and her accusations, which reached a scale of absurdity that was truly impressive: that was ten years ago, and without the accusations, I never would have done the research and writing I have done, would never have talked to people about their experiences and learnt so much. So, all told, it was beneficial in effect.
MENTAL Disorders in BIG Flicks – Pedophilia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_disorders_in_film#Pedophilia
Some BIG mental gaps (‘on me EDIT son?’)
Two seXamples:
1) 19SeXty, “Never Take Sweets/Candy From A Stranger” – House of Horror Hammer real fast on the bucks of Vlad’s US/Rockin ’58 BIG bucks book ‘Lolita’ – DOH!
2) 19SeXty2, er, “Lolita” – DOH!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cITchZCLJFM
Pedophilia[edit]
M – 1931
“Germany, Year Zero” – 1948
The Mark – 1961
The Damned – 1969
Sweet Movie – 1974
“Sal , or the 120 Days of Sodom” – 1975
Pretty Baby – 1978
Tras el cristal – 1986
Singapore Sling – 1990
Lolita – 1997
Happiness – 1998
Arayannangalude Veedu – 2000
Donnie Darko – 2001
Fat Girl – 2001
Kill Bill Volume 1 – 2003
Mystic River – 2003
Birth – 2004
The Butterfly Effect – 2004
Mysterious Skin – 2004
The Woodsman – 2004
Hard Candy – 2005
Sin City – 2005
Little Children – 2006
Achchamundu! Achchamundu! – 2009
5 Sundarikal (2013; segment: Sethulakshmi)
PLUS, unspecified? SeXy ’76 “Taxi Driver”? SURELY ex-Nam vet, anti-PED-prostitution MENTAL Bickle not ‘the only one in the room’…”selling your sweet lil pussy’??
v
v
Personality disorder not otherwise specified[edit]
Taxi Driver – 1976
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWL-FwX4t4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneHDzMhbbw
Borderline example: the touchy-feely (and fat) BL science teacher in Zero for Conduct (1933), who gets roundly told where to go by the feminine boy who turns out to be the hero of the rebellion.
Forgot a new one out from Québec: Les démons, by Philippe Lesage. It’s quite a stunning flick, not least because it’s remarkably frank about prepubescent children’s sexuality. In one vignette, a ten-year-old boy and girl sneak off into the woods on a class trip, lie down together and kiss. The other children in the class find them, are vastly amused and inform the teacher they are “making love”. These two are friends, sort of, of the protagonist, a sensitive and fearful ten-year-old ironically named Félix, who is nursing an intense crush on his gym teacher, a pretty young woman named Rébecca. One day when the gym class is in the swimming pool he hugs her and won’t let go, to her discomfiture. Meanwhile, a smaller boy of the same age, the class social outcast, tags along after Félix, to Félix’s annoyance. One day when he turns up uninvited to Félix’s house and starts playing with his Playmobil, Félix sees a way to extract some enjoyment from the situation. “Let’s play husband and wife” he says, and persuades the other boy to strip to his underpants, put on Félix’s mother’s bra and skirt, call himself Rébecca and lie facedown on Félix’s bed. The other boy goes along willingly enough. Félix, still fully clothed, then flops down on top of him. The camera cuts away instantly — of course it does, or this wouldn’t be something you could go and see in the cinema! — but it’s implied, and later confirmed, that Félix ‘dry-humps’ the other boy.
A little later, a child in Félix’s class gives a presentation saying that she wants to cure AIDS — we gather that this is sometime in the 1980s — and explaining that it disproportionately affects homosexuals and IV drug users. The class teacher — a man, which is always good to see — praises her work but reminds the class that heterosexuals can get AIDS too. Félix goes home and hides in his bedroom closet, convinced he’s going to get AIDS. His doting older sister, in her mid- to late teens, finds him there, gets the story out of him and reassures him. Well, even if I don’t get AIDS, he says, I deserve to. I’ve done horrible things. You know, she says, at your age, children sometimes show each other their bodies and touch each other. It’s normal, it’s not horrible. Then she puts on some music and gets him to dance out his worries. Lesage has said that this is based on an episode in his own childhood, except that he hid in terror for three days, not just an afternoon.
And then after all this the film goes and disappoints somewhat by introducing a paedophile who rapes and murders small boys and buries them in the woods. He’s a lifeguard at the local pool, only in his own late teens, and deeply tormented by his own desires and actions, and Lesage thinks, or at least reviewers think, that this aspect is highly original. It isn’t: it was done very well in the overlooked 2002 film Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen (The Child I Never Was), which is at least quite closely based on a true story: that of Jürgen Bartsch, a teenager who committed the lust-murders of four younger boys in the 1960s. Likewise, The Woodsman, with its sugary touches — little girls as innocent little birds?! — is beaten hollow by the monologue Playing Sandwiches from Alan Bennett’s late-90s TV series Talking Heads.
Anyway, Les démons won various awards, deservedly, and is about to be released on a German-subtitled DVD.
Very interesting. It’s almost as if, in order to “get away with” acknowledging child sexuality, you have to find a way of denouncing paedophilia at the same time.
Didn’t see this earlier. I think you’re right, especially if the film in question deals with a kid’s attraction to an adult — sort of ‘they don’t know what they really want, how bad it really is’.
There have been a couple of other refreshingly frank portrayals of kid sexuality in film recently. In the 2014 Danish film Kapgang, set in the 70s when there were very few restrictions on porn in Denmark, which is a plot point, two fourteen-year-old boys kiss on the lips and masturbate each other and a fourteen-year-old boy and girl have PIV sex at a confirmation party. In the 2015 Norwegian short film Verdensvevde Kropper, set in the 90s days of dial-up internet, a twelve-year-old boy discovers online porn, experiences his first ejaculation, roughhouses with a couple of girls, starts to insist that his mother knock before entering his room and finds out his dad is looking at ‘mature women’ online porn himself. When his mother discovers the porn habit and tells the boy that masturbation is natural and OK but the porn is disgusting and she’s ashamed, he shouts that he’s not ashamed and runs to his room to masturbate some more! (It’s on Vimeo.)
@Peace, avoiding further thinning of reply.
The reason why calling black people “articulate” is offensive is because it has this underlying assumption that most black people aren’t articulate, that a black person being articulate is somehow surprising enough to comment on it. At its base, it’s dogwhistle racism
I have been wondering just how to reply to this comment, so I will begin with the following observation.
Your comment was unnecessary. This argument has been made for at least 60 years, if not longer. I do not need to be reminded of it, but nor do I believe it is either correct or substantial. Of course, there are caucasians who believe that any other race is inferior, in many ways. This does not however, provide a justification or proof of this type of analysis, which in itself requires racism for its effectiveness. (It rather absurdly requires that one accept a difference that is in actuality no difference at all, in order that one can claim that, because there is no difference, a compliment necessarily is an insult. The difference that is no difference is the subtext of racism.)
I’m not now going to say that I have had many black friends. But I have worked with, talked to and otherwise engaged with Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Australian Aborigines, Scots, Welsh men and women, an odd Irish person or two, and on even odder couple of Americans from the south (they were truly strange, especially sexually, but that is another story) and a few Canadians. Never have any of these people taken a compliment I gave the about their intellect and their ability to articulate their ideas, as an insult. (Some of the non-english speakers have become rather annoyed when I couldn’t understand their english, but that’s another story, isn’t it? Or is my inability their learner’s english also racism?)
With this in mind, all I can say is that, in my opinion, your view is wrong, and in fact bolsters racism. But, you are welcome to hold your view, and I hope it serves you well.
A visible result of “social justice warrior” culture – hysterical supression of open rational dialogue. In this particular case, the victims of SJW attack were Dr. Katherine Young and Dr. Paul Nathanson who equally criticise BOTH misogyny and misandry and calls for friendly, mutually respective intersexual dialogue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRWff4gCwTw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_490451&feature=iv&src_vid=CRWff4gCwTw&v=x_HYbk5tqoU
And I suspect these bunch of bigots were evaluating themselves as “radicals”, even “revolutionaries”. They are not. They are pain and shame for any liberatory movement they try to enter, and a sad, twisted degeneration of the principles for which the ones whom they probably perceived as their predecessors – mid-20th century liberationists – once struggled.
Agreed, Explorer. They are individuals from various minority groups allied with a contingent of self-hating, “white knight” WMHeC’s who are seeking power and entitlement for themselves, not justice and equality. They are pretending to be an extension of their liberationist predecessors, when in actuality they’re a reactionary movement pretending to follow the legacy of the great women and LGBT leaders of the past. They aren’t, because justice and equality are not their actual agenda, but rather to turn the universities, workplaces, and media outlets into one huge “safe space” for themselves. You will rarely see one of them even address the concept of misandry, and even if compelled to do so, they will rationalize it as acceptable because “white cis-gendered male heterosexuals never experienced the systematic oppression we did” — which means hatred and oppression is “understandable” if it comes from them, but a horrid crime when done by WMHeC’s only. And they claim this is not asking for entitlement and moral license to behave almost any way they please to those who are not part of their “safe spaces”? Clearly, part of the purpose for those “safe spaces” is to serve as mini-indoctrination chambers for women and LGBT people without worrying about hearing “offensive” intellectual challenges that may “hurt their feelings.”
I regret this whole thing putting a rift between me and Peace, but I’m sorry, I’m not going to lie here to spare anyone’s feelings: I DO NOT believe that contemporary Western universities are hot beds for oppression and discrimination against women and LGBT people. I’m not saying these people never experience difficulties related to their gender and orientation issues anymore in terms of family acceptance and incidental encounters with various conservative-minded individuals, but it’s no longer excessively systematic in all of our familiar community-wide institutions such as universities, the labor force, local community centers, the media, etc. Claiming that this remains the case is frankly delusional and playing the “victim card” to an outrageous degree. The minorities who follow this ideology and retreat to these “safe spaces,” claiming that oppression and bigotry is still systemic rather than relatively incidental in the modern Western nations, can no longer blather that WMHeC’s do not know what it’s like to be systematically oppressed and profiled. Thanks to this “SJW” frenzy borne out of the identity politics debacle, those who are not “eligible” for these quasi-sacred “safe spaces” understand all too well what systematic oppression, profiling, and censorship feel like.
The less enlightened and reactionary members of the WMHeC are now using this as a rationale to “push back,” which created the type of political environment where the likes of Clinton and Trump were our only choices for President of the Oval Office. The fact that Clinton ran heavily on a platform of identity politics so she could avoid dealing with the economic issues that affect all workers and get legions of female celebrities to ignore her deplorable record, and the fact she was under investigation by the FBI during the election, to rally behind her is precisely what cost her the election. This latest election cycle typified a battle between misandrists and misogynists, with everyone else paying the price for their idiotic and divisive culture-based war. In short, it’s a over which group most deserves to be “top dog” in the present disastrous global world order.
I thought the SJWs were hilarious. Ridicule is surely a good weapon in this case and I hope some top satirists come after them if they haven’t already done so.
You totally need to see this video, Stephen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eYwddllFUY
It’s a hypothetically staged but true-to-life depiction of a poor soul who finds himself interviewing a SJW for a job. Even though some exaggeration was there for emphasis on the worst aspects of these people, the level of vitriol, entitlement, and irrational demands for power and exceptionalism is all made evident. We even get usage of some of their classic lines, including an instance of “check your privilege!” and some of the very creative expletive-ridden invectives they come up with on the spot. It’s so darkly hilarious to watch that I had to pause the video periodically to catch my breath.
Of course, some SJW’s would not get so hostile during the interview process, but would feign a measure of politeness or indifference and then report the interviewer to the head office later.
Thanks, Dissident. Spot on!
Thinking about this a bit more, I obviously don’t mean to imply that satire is sufficient. I think expulsions from college may be justified for persistent offenders. If they can’t understand that a university is a place for the free exchange of ideas then they don’t belong there. Perhaps this is already being done, I don’t know. And I hope this doesn’t seem too draconian..
I look at it this way, Stephen: What’s more draconian than trying to suppress the free expression of ideas and intellectual challenge, especially in an environment that is designed for specifically that type of climate? If anyone who attends there are not happy with that type of environment, then perhaps they shouldn’t be there at all. This becomes doubly true if they openly disrupt the opportunities and attempts by other students and/or staff to elicit discussion and ideas. They’re supposed to attend universities to learn from and participate in the exchange of knowledge and ideas, not use them to establish power bases for themselves.
I don’t know what it is like in America or the UK, but in Australia, universities have largely forgotten ideas about free expression and exploration of ideas, a d have become factories for churning out employable people.I was warned that this was happening by a senior lecturer in psychology at one of our more notable universities, with whom I had a long term academic relationship. Several of his courses had to be modified or cancelled, because they did not contribute to the goal of employment in psychology.
I won’t mention the university or the man because he continues to work there, but my most recent activities at a local university seem to bear out his warnings, and a few academics I know in the UK relate stories which suggest that the same is happening there.
If this is broadly correct, then the idea of preventing some things being talked about at universities becomes easier to enforce, and more understandable as a goal. This, mind you, is just a stray thought on my part, I haven’t really thought about it or researched enough to be able to do anything other than suggest that the goals of universities have changed, and that this change enables the type of situation you have been talking about.
>factories for churning out employable people
This has been an explicit government policy in the UK in the last several decades (albeit couched in euphemisms) and not confined to any single political party. It appears to reflect the hard fact that the more developed economies have been facing ever tougher global competition from the developing countries.
Perversely, though, there has also been a totally contrary phenomenon. As basic manufacturing jobs have moved overseas to where labour costs are lower, democratically accountable governments have been under pressure to keep unemployment down by other means too. Where possible, instead of giving older teenagers unemployment benefit, they have encouraged them to continue with institutional education, vastly expanding the universities in the process. It has not been possible to do this without great pressure on the public purse, so these youngsters have been obliged to take on a burden of debt to cover their fees. Once they become “paying customers” in this way they have unsurprisingly started to take a rather demanding, consumerist view: whoever pays the piper should call the tune. They are in a strong position to demand that they should not be made to confront ideas they find offensive etc. This is likely to result in poorly educated graduates who are not very employable!
Virtually carbon copies, then. Sadly.
Picking up on what’s been said about the ‘fat acceptance’ movement: I know next to nothing about this movement and I could well be talking straight through my hat here, but I am guessing that through the heads of some people drawn to it there runs, in darker moments, something like this:
“I managed to lose the baby weight quite quickly after my first child. I know it’s going to be harder after this second one, not least because I’ll have less time. I have a feeling that if I don’t manage to lose it, or even just don’t manage to lose it quickly enough, my husband will leave me for a younger woman with a taut, nulliparous body. He’ll pay his child support no problem: he’s a stand-up guy that way. But I do the bulk of the childcare already, and knowing him, he’ll just want to be a fun every-other-weekend dad, especially if his new younger wife wants kids of her own with him. That won’t be good for the kids, and the whole process of divorce won’t be, either. As for me, there I’ll be raising two kids on my own and dealing with a career that’s stalled since I had the audacity to take maternity leave and got put on the ‘mommy track’. It’ll be hard for me to find emotional and practical support from other adults. Let’s face it, another partner won’t be on the cards for me: I’m 40 this year and my value on the dating market is a shadow of what it was when I met my husband at 25. And even if I were still a hot 25-year-old, who wants to get involved with a woman who has two kids in tow already? I have friends, but they’re busy with their own partners and kids: that’s the way it is. I have family, but they’re far away and have their own lives, too, and after taking the financial hit of a divorce I won’t be able to afford to move back to their city. And what happens when my kids fly the nest and I’m growing old alone?”
All of which amounts, I guess, to yet another indictment of the nuclear family as a thing to raise kids in and to make one’s life in generally!
This sounds a very realistic scenario. However, there are a lot of militantly fat never-had-a-baby lesbians too.
Indeed so: according to this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6366683_Overweight_and_Obesity_in_Sexual-Minority_Women_Evidence_From_Population-Based_Data , lesbians — but not bisexual women, and more women than men identify as bisexual — are well over twice as likely as straight women to be overweight or obese.
In any case, when I was gathering data for my list of CL AOAs I did notice that some stated they preferred ‘chubby’ or ‘plump’ little boys or girls. They were a small minority, but not a tiny one, and clearly knew their own minds and what sorts of kids they fancied. Likewise, there are teleiophilic ‘fat admirers’ out there, lovers of a ‘BBW’ (big beautiful woman) or ‘BHM’ (big handsome man). A lid for every pot?
>A lid for every pot?
Perhaps so, although I would never have guessed it. But one thing is sure:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in my philosophy!
Or, to put it another way: Rule 34: If you can imagine it, there’s porn of it on the Internet.
Look how many ‘pedo’ cliches are on this blog, WTF do you say to people like this!
No, pedophiles are absolutely more obsessed with sex than the average male, for example. Look at yourself! You’ve said nothing but “Lower the age of consent” (SEX), “Kids can orgasm” (SEX), “sex is enjoyable” (SEX), etc etc. Your comments further demonstrate that most pedophiles, if not instructed to try to stop being pedophiles with CBT, are no more than a big pulsating genital! Why is that? Perhaps you have internalized your so called sexual repression you claim to have experienced when you were younger and now you just can’t get over it and have run in the opposite direction. It is the evil “sexual repression” you folks rail against, correct? Many have also grew up in a less sexually promiscuous society and have turned out well (i.e. not sexually deviant), so it clearly isn’t the problem. What is?
Why fixate on kids? Why not on adults? Don’t give me you see kids as sentient emotional beings when all you people care about is whether you can have an orgasm with them and not go to prison over it. That’s pure objectification! Kids are sexual objects to pedophiles. You could only come up with the benefit of “less stigma for pedophiles” when pressed, saying nothing at all about a benefit (there is none) for the children. Completely selfish and only thinking about it from the pedophile’s point of view. Typical pedophile narcissist.
Yes, men who watch porn obsessively are likely losers and probably have a hard time in relationships, but it’s not the same thing at all. Normal adults don’t solely view their partners for sex. They desire spiritual and intellectual companionship, love, friendship, co parenting offspring. What do pedophiles want? Considering a pedophile has specific age preferences, and those dictate whether he/she will be sexually aroused only, pedos aren’t looking for anything long term. They dump the kid once he or she has outgrown sexual usefulness. So it’s only about sexual gratification. Kids haven’t the emotional or intellectual maturity to stimulate an adult.
As for parents, that’s right, the child is theirs! Theirs to love and protect and teach and help grow into hopefully law abiding, functional happy adults. That’s the goal of every parent of any species. If the protection provided by a parent is seen as ownership, just because you and your ilk can’t get your grubby hands on them, so be it. It’s the parents’ job to protect them from you people! But what would a pedophile know about the genuine love, care, and protection given by a parent to their offspring? You only see children as a means to an end, the end being an ejaculation.
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Look how many anti-libertine cliches are in Libertine’s post- WTF?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertine
Libertines (small ‘l’) are absolutely more obsessed with sex than the average Adult, Juvenile, LBGTPedAdultoGerontoZooNecro et al, ad nauseum – YUK!
What would Libertine (BIG ‘L’) say to past persecuted ‘cliches’ obsessively seeking liberation like Gays or Suffragettes, some now so liberated as FemiNazis they persecute other TRUE libertines (small ‘l’). Like MILLIONS of modern guilt-free laughing ‘Generation SeX’ proactive Selfie-SeXting ADULTOPHILES mocking crap sex laws while also grooming PEDOPHILES for mutual WHOLE Mind & Body orgasms beyond all control from anti-libertines (small ‘l’)?
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4718610.ece
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrC3BjyTEVYDGAANmkPxQt.;_ylc=X1MDMjExNDcwMDU1OQRfcgMyBGZyA3locy1pYmEtMQRncHJpZANnR2UwMEgwQ1JLcWh5V202VEVWWGtBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwMwBG9yaWdpbgNzZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tBHBvcwMwBHBxc3RyAwRwcXN0cmwDMARxc3RybAMyOARxdWVyeQNzZXh0aW5nJTIwb3V0JTIwb2YlMjBjb250cm9sBHRfc3RtcAMxNDgwOTY5OTE2?p=sexting+out+of+control&fr2=sb-top&hspart=iba&hsimp=yhs-1&type=xdds_5338_CRW_BE
About late great ex-pat Anglo, Loli lover Hamilton accused, not charged for ALLEGED rape en La Belle France ’87, twenty nine years back.
Empathy for the relatively few TRUE victims of non-consensual sex. But, unlike many thousands of lying AnglowLife freeloaders daily increasing in kidseX craZed BIG Compo/NO Evidence filthy phoney Anglophonia, La Belle France will resist that cross Channel/pan Atlantic dirty virus.
Shown by the case of PROVEN historic Loli doper-raper unkindPed Polanski.
Backed (not sacked nor cracked) by La Belle Fance v Filthy Phoney Anglophonia U$A/Uptite $exual A$$holes.
https://www.google.be/search?q=France+backs+Roaman+Polanski&rlz=1C1SKPL_enBE421&oq=France+backs+Roaman+Polanski+&aqs=chrome..69i57.17287j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#safe=strict&q=France+backs+Roman+Polanski
In 1979, Polanski gave a controversial interview with the novelist Martin Amis in which, discussing his conviction, he said “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”
Peace said: ===I personally think that allowing boys and men to “explore their feminine side” is great because for a long time they would be told to “just take it like a man” or “man up” rather than let their feelings be known. This could lead to both the suppression of emotions (often linked with higher risk of heart disease and worse mental and physical health) and the inability to cope in a healthy manner. Males have, on average, higher rates of completed suicide. This is due to the fact that male gender roles push men to value independence and strength, which causes them to not reach out for help in times of need, as well as stress caused by traditional gender roles. In addition, men use more lethal methods of committing suicide, mostly firearms. Breaking down the gender role of the “strong, silent man” is actually helpful for men in the long run.===
A. said: ===This study http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/198/1/17.full found that girls who started their periods before 11 years 6 months (16.7% of the sample) “experienced the earliest rise in level of depressive symptoms from late childhood (10.5 years) to early adolescence (13 years)” and were at the highest risk of depression at age 13-14, while girls who started their periods after 13 years 6 months (17.7% of the sample) were at the lowest risk of depression at age 13-14. I suspect this has something to do with a load of stuff about body image and the unpleasant pornographic portrayal of what sex is like for women being dumped onto kids who are too young to cope with it.===
I think: there are common factors driving these two observations, especially regarding suicide and depression.
Leaving aside known hormonal contributions to emotional instability in either sex, while masculinity and femininity are socialized in contrasting ways, the psychological consequences of normative gender policing are similar for both sexes: self alienation.
As a broad generalization, ‘womanhood’ devolves as a consequence of biological processes, namely menstruation and childbirth, while ‘manhood’ is deemed a privileged status linked to performance in symbolic trials. Nevertheless, girls and boys are both under pressure to engage in gender performance rituals from an early age and this pressure intensifies at puberty. The accompanying loss of self and the freedom to ‘be oneself’ can have severe consequences. Children who have some ambivalence about their proscribed gender, or who are simply idiosyncratic, especially struggle to subsume their genuine feelings to those expected by society.
The little girls I’ve spent time with haven’t been particularly tomboyish –most have had at least an occasional desire to dress up in tutus and fairy wings– but without exception they’ve been confident and courageous. I don’t take any credit for that but I’ve been clear with them that those are traits I love to see little girls expressing. I don’t think that’s always the message they get from adults. Similarly I don’t often see little boys being praised for being submissive or dependent.
That has consequences later, when those kids find themselves unable to acknowledge, access or express the full range of emotions they experience.
Well said, Sean.
This is of interest from the BBC VD Show, This guy was ‘groomed’ at the age of 18 and 21, Forgive my ignorance, But thought the ambiguous ‘grooming’ and ‘abuse’ was reserved for those under a given AOC — They seem to want their cake and eat it, Where have I heard that before!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jpr32
Amazing! This victim thing is getting utterly surreal. The guy, David Eatock, actually says he was 18 but he was “a child”:
DE: I was a child.
VD: An immature 18-year-old?
DE: Yes, an 18-year-old child.
Presumably he remained a “child” up to age 21, in which case he could not have done anything reserved for adults such as signing his player contract, voting, driving, smoking, or having a drink. But hang on a minute. He then complains that part of the “grooming” was that the coach plied him with drinks. As a “child”, I suppose, he had no choice over whether to drink them!
Victoria Derbyshire is really scraping the barrel with this one.
From the programme summary:
“David Eatock told Victoria he had been groomed by Ormond between the ages of 18 and 21. Mr Eatock, now 40, was not part of the court case that saw Ormond convicted in 2002 for assaulting seven boys, but has now filed a complaint to the police.”
Tom, why do you put my name inside quote marks? It is my real-life first name!
On contemporary mental health issues, one must read Dr. Tana Dineen, author of the excellent book Manufacturing Victims — What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People, which debunks with hard science the claims of psychotherapy and counselling, and explains the various ways of fabricating so-called victims. Her website http://tanadineen.com/ contains also a lot of interesting material.
Concerning gender, she notes that psychotherapists are increasingly women, and at the same time they proclaim that people, especially women, are victims needing help; although this is often presented with a self-styled “feminist” garb, for instance when bad men are portrayed as “predators”, in fact it runs counter to gender equality and it infantilizes women. As she said in an interview with Mark Sauer in Union-Tribune, November 25, 1997 (http://tanadineen.com/media/UnionTrib.htm):
“At the turn of the century, women were said to be hysterical; now we suffer from stress and trauma. We had to be protected then; we have to be protected now,” she continued. “The women’s magazines are full of this stuff. It’s terrifying to me.”
“I see the return of patriarchy: ‘Women are children,'” said Dineen. Noting how more women are therapists now than ever before, she added, “But let’s not assume that the new patriarchy can’t wear skirts. I call it patriarchy in drag.”
I would add: victims are there to ask for pity and protection, victims never make a revolution, as the latter needs courageous fighters.
Her “writer” page http://tanadineen.com/writer/introwriter.htm contains 4 interesting texts (in PDF). In “The Psychotherapist and the Quest for Power: How Boundaries have Become an Obsession” (2002), she explains how psychotherapists are obsessed by so-called “personal boundaries” between themselves and their patients, that personal relations, especially romantic and sexual involvement must be strictly banned, as it can lead to psychological manipulation. Indeed, this is the form of professional malpractice that is the most harshly repressed by their professional bodies. But having proclaimed these sacrosanct boundaries, they generally indulge in various forms of psychological manipulations of their patients.
I call this the “chaste domination principle”, it has maintained by the clergy for centuries. Noting that some types of intimate relations, especially sex, between powerful ruling people and powerless dominated ones could be an opportunity for exploitation, such relations must be banned. By targeting intimacy and sex, one deflects the opposition away from the general exploitative and oppressive nature of relations between dominant and dominated; moreover, as long as the ban on intimacy and sex is upheld, the domination becomes sanctified. Thus a boss having sex with employees, that is exploitation, otherwise capitalism is nice, and economic exploitation is thus denied. The same must be said about relations between adults and children, the ban on inter-generational sex is there to justify the arbitrary domination of adults over children, especially adults legally in position of authority (parents, teachers, judges, cops, social workers, etc.), as long as it does not involve sexual intimacy.
All good stuff, Christian not “Christian”! Sorry about the moniker: I have removed the quotes now.
The Wikipedia article on tomboys mentions that “Joseph Lee, a playground advocate, believed the tomboy phase crucial to physical development between the ages of 8 and 13”, referencing Lee’s 1915 book Play in Education. Must read that one!
Many more women than in the 1950s now say they were tomboys as children. I believe it’s even a majority these days. Girls in the age range Lee mentions who love to climb trees and run around in the mud by and large get indulgent smiles; generally, they have a great deal of freedom to be as ‘girly’ or — within some limits — as ‘boyish’ as they like. If at say 15 they’re not girlifying themselves a bit and taking some interest in the opposite sex, eyebrows will be raised, but before then girls by and large have much more gender latitude than boys. A boy who prefers drawing and baking to sports and shoot-’em-up video games is going to have a harder time of it than a tomboy: peer opprobrium, often criticism and discomfort from parents, especially fathers. Like Peace, I suggest that this may be making some contribution to preteen boys’ poorer mental health.
The boys Barry Bennell went to prison for having sex with were 9-15, so crossing both the age ranges discussed here. Every time a case like Bennell’s gets into the papers, many men, BL and not, who might have gone into boys’ sports coaching and been great masculine role models for rambunctious boys in need of them get scared off. It’s all a bit tragic really, isn’t it, as the man said in Monty Python.
This study http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/198/1/17.full found that girls who started their periods before 11 years 6 months (16.7% of the sample) “experienced the earliest rise in level of depressive symptoms from late childhood (10.5 years) to early adolescence (13 years)” and were at the highest risk of depression at age 13-14, while girls who started their periods after 13 years 6 months (17.7% of the sample) were at the lowest risk of depression at age 13-14. I suspect this has something to do with a load of stuff about body image and the unpleasant pornographic portrayal of what sex is like for women being dumped onto kids who are too young to cope with it.
I’m in favour of co-education, but I do think some exceptions are needed for certain activities. A couple of stories I’ve read illustrate why. A co-ed school for kids 4-9 ran an after-school football club. Apart from one girl, only boys joined. The school then set up two separate football clubs, one for girls and one for boys. Both clubs promptly filled up. Many girls had wanted to play football, but had been scared of playing against boys. Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire has a traditional choir of boys 8-13 and men, who sing at the majority of the cathedral’s weekly services, and a new choir of girls 13-18, who sing at the remainder of the services. Both choirs are full to capacity and flourishing. The cathedral also runs the Ely Imps, a mixed after-school choir for children 7-13. Its members are almost entirely girls, and the few boys who sing in it are at the younger end of the age range. Many boys want to sing, or would love singing if they were introduced to it properly, but only feel comfortable doing so in an all-male group.
I recently read a nostalgic blog comment by a woman about her childhood in the 70s. She played out all the time with the neighbourhood kids. Sometimes boys and girls within a year or so of each other would show each other their genitals. Once when she was 7 or 9 or thereabouts the gang of kids found a stack of porn magazines under the back seat of someone’s dad’s van. They were fascinated, and stole and hid one of the magazines and kept taking looks at it. Ah, the days of soft-core porn hidden in the woods. Now the ultra-hard-core stuff is all over the place!
Interestingly enough, a German man interviewed for Rüdiger Lautmann’s 1994 book Attraction to Children described a young friend of his in this way: “He is 11 and totally macho. Has girlfriends, two on each finger, and also plays the big shot. He himself is only into fucking. He also tried to fuck me, but his penis wasn’t quite long enough to reach…He is certainly typical of today’s children and youth: for them sexuality only consists of fucking. Fucking women. He wanted to be sucked, since then he could fuck me in the mouth, but as far as any kind of tenderness, there’s not a trace.” This guy would probably be horrified by the way things are going nowadays!
Anyone interested in children’s culture must read Iona and Peter Opie’s classic 1959 book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.
Misquote Francophile Loli Lover Anglo Hamilton, “Dreams of Young Anglo Girls & Boys”.
Dream of mucho macho manic Anglo AGGRESSION but, No Kinda Kind KidSeX Pleeze we’re all the usual shit brained BULLY Brits & Yanks. (Don’t fret finer feeling Francophiles, Its just common as muck adversarial Anglos’ lingua franca. Bish Bash Bosh SUN readers! Now Ur tawkin’ Doc Dawkins.)
v
v
http://www2.ucsc.edu/dreams/Findings/12-13.html
Call me a pansy liberal if you want, but nobody is ever responsible for getting raped. The insistence that people who get drunk and are raped aren’t “really raped” is an issue that continues to plague the way in which rape is viewed by society and often by law enforcement. No matter the gender, having sex with a drunk person who is incapacitated or unconscious and is unable to consent falls under the definition of rape. You wouldn’t let a drunk person drive, so why would you have sex with them and assume they know exactly what they’re doing? Nobody should have the experience of having fun and getting drunk and then waking up the next morning to find themselves naked in bed next to somebody they don’t recall sleeping with, and nobody should then be told that it’s their fault for getting into that situation. If someone who is drunk asks to have sex with you, simply say no.
Also, I’m unsure why a lot of people on this blog have such an intense hatred for safe spaces, and I think this might be because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a safe space is. A safe space is basically just a place where oppressed minorities can go to without fear of being harassed, made fun of, assaulted, or having their communication shut down. Is it really such a bad thing to have places where people can feel, well, safe? When they’ve spent their lives being told their opinion doesn’t matter, that they deserve their harassment, that they should just “suck it up,” it’s nice for them to be able to go somewhere to speak with like-minded people who share their experiences. If we’re being charitable, we could call this blog and many others in the pedosphere a “safe space” for Kind because it’s a place where we will not be harassed simply for being Kind and are allowed a voice.
I personally think that allowing boys and men to “explore their feminine side” is great because for a long time they would be told to “just take it like a man” or “man up” rather than let their feelings be known. This could lead to both the suppression of emotions (often linked with higher risk of heart disease and worse mental and physical health) and the inability to cope in a healthy manner. Males have, on average, higher rates of completed suicide. This is due to the fact that male gender roles push men to value independence and strength, which causes them to not reach out for help in times of need, as well as stress caused by traditional gender roles. In addition, men use more lethal methods of committing suicide, mostly firearms. Breaking down the gender role of the “strong, silent man” is actually helpful for men in the long run.
I do agree on the fact that many kids are being heavily medicated for just being kids. It’s unfortunate, but many schools actually make money off of diagnosing ADHD; many schools receive funding for each student in special education or who otherwise have sort of disability or disorder. This is especially bad in lower-income areas whose schools might not be that well-funded in the first place.
“. If someone who is drunk asks to have sex with you, simply say no”…If I like them, I may say..Yes! And I may drink and drive, I have free will.
I don’t think the P.I.E were arguing for the acceptance of what this guys allegedly done, However, He has done his time, But no time is enough in the eyes of the public. According to testimonials on the VD show, He said things like “If you want me to help you make it in football” etc, and don’t tell your parents or you say goodbye to trips away etc! That’s coercion for a start.
But I roll my eyes when people use words like ‘grooming’..Its a known word, but misused, like ‘abuse’ of course.
At my boarding school, corporal punishment was over, But beating the shit out of you was quite the norm; It made me keep my head down, So I avoided the wrath of the most sadistic member of staff (who was even a scouser)!
But witnessed some nasty beatings. Did get hit round the head once, Just for kicking a ball, When I should’ve left it on the line, That’s the sort of cunt he was. But society does expect some reserve from men, There’s probably some evolutionary theory in there somewhere.
Well, have fun breaking the law but don’t complain when you get arrested and cry that it’s not fair.
I harbour the same shame for crying in public when a depressed youth in the same was these guys have shame over unwanted sexual attention. I suppose I don’t swallow the notion of a ‘feminine side’. Can I just ask, Are you that guy who has a few MAP related videos on Youtube? If that is you, Keep up the good work, You express yourself well for someone your age.
>You express yourself well for someone your age.
Or any age.
Peace can speak without any need of my intervention, but I would just point out that Peace is not a kindergarten kid. Early twenties if I remember rightly.
I do not make YouTube videos, no. And I think that it’s incorrect to think of an emotional side as being inherently “feminine.”
I would also like to make one last attempt at explaining exactly why drunken sex is considered rape. Okay, so imagine this scenario: you wake up from a night of drunken fun and partying to find that there’s 300 dollars missing from your wallet. When you speak with your friends, you find out that the previous night one your sober friends had asked for money and, in a drunken stupor, you agreed and handed over 300 bucks. When you ask for the money back, the person in question tells you that you’re the one who said yes and gave him the money, so it’s theirs. What would you say? I doubt most people are going to just let them keep such a large sum of money. You’d probably say something to the effect of “Hey, you know I don’t mean what I say when I’m drunk. Give me the money back.” Wouldn’t you agree that the blame does not lie on you, but on your sober and fully functioning friend who had taken advantage of your drunken state?
Hello again…’Peace’ about the drunk sex scenario, That would depend on whether ‘both’ parties were drunk I suppose, When sex and ‘drunk’ are mentioned, Why is the burden of ‘do you know what your doing’ always designated to the male’, Is it because, Well if he can get an erection, He can’t be to comatose!
Reading some of your previous conversations, I thought you may be this guy below…Apologies for that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53O16Ckl6DI
Totally agree with what you’re saying here Peace and thanks for putting it so well! Dollars, you say: are you from the States? Because in Britain — as you may know: I don’t know, erm, where you’ve been — there’s a big drinking culture and alcohol is relied upon as a social lubricant to an extent I’ve seen shock and baffle many people from the US. Many British people become alarmed at any suggestion they could conduct their social and sexual lives with less drink. They’d never get laid without it! But of course there’s drunk and drunk, and there’s a huge difference between being having sex when you’re a bit tipsy with slightly lowered inhibitions and being raped when you are, as you put it, in a drunken stupor.
If that is you, Keep up the good work, You express yourself well for someone your age.
Ouch! You are certainly not a youth liberationist, are you, Libertine? 🙂
“According to testimonials on the VD show, He said things like “If you want me to help you make it in football” etc, and don’t tell your parents or you say goodbye to trips away etc! That’s coercion for a start.”
But of course we have no idea whether he really said those things. They seem to be standard accusations in cases of this kind.
The best response to boys who have had experiences of this sort would be to tell them not to worry about it. A lot of boys do it and as long as they consented (which they probably did) there’s no problem. This would probably be more effective than the standard sort of therapy, which aims to persuade them that they were coerced, which, if they believe that to be false, is likely to make things worse. Of course if any therapist were to try such an approach in the present climate they might experience some unpleasant repercussions!
>But of course we have no idea whether he really said those things. They seem to be standard accusations in cases of this kind.
The first former footballer to speak out was Andy Woodward in an interview with the Guardian on 16 November. After that he did a solo appearance on Victoria Derbyshire’s show the following day, when he appeared much calmer and less tearful than on a later appearance on 25 Nov with three other former players. The Guardian piece is quite revealing, as was the first TV appearance. There is the extraordinary revelation, for instance, that when Woodward was 18 the accused coach married his sister – Yes, Woodward’s “abuser” became his brother-in-law although the marriage broke up upon the coach’s fall from grace. Also, Woodward spend 12 years as a police officer after leaving football and is married.
There is also this, from the Guardian: “Throughout those years at Crewe, so many people used to talk about it. Other players would say directly to my face: ‘I bet he does this to you, we know he does that.’” It seems bizarre to me that if the coach’s behaviour was such common knowledge he felt unable to shop the guy if we wanted. After all, another youth player eventually did that, giving rise to the trial. I don’t see how it could credibly be argued, for instance, that he did not think he would be believed.
>The best response to boys who have had experiences of this sort would be to tell them not to worry about it.
Quite so, but Andy Woodward appears only to have gone to a therapist years later, as an adult, by which time he was probably already convinced by the mass panic all around him that he must have been irreparably damaged.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/nov/16/andy-woodward
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b082wq8v/victoria-derbyshire-17112016
Yes, I think timing is crucial to the success of the type of ‘therapy’ I have in mind. That’s why I talked about targeting the boys, not the men they later become. Of course, in an ideal world, no such intervention would be necessary.
” A safe space is basically just a place where oppressed minorities can go to without fear of being harassed, made fun of, assaulted, or having their communication shut down.”
I don’t think anybody would have a problem with safe spaces in this sense. I think the problem arises when, in the name of safe spaces, people try to prevent certain things beings discussed or to keep certain speakers out, as apparently happens a lot on US campuses these days and to some extent in the UK too.
Well, Peace, you characterisation of the Internet “paedo-sphere” as “safe space” is deeply mistaken – it is not a “safe space”, it is a classic, old-style GHETTO, where paedophiles are forced to stay, barred from the rest of social structure, against their will to come out, since they are abhorred and disgusted by “respectable” society. Yet, in some twisted and humiliating sense, this ghetto-space is indeed relatively “safe”; its existence is more-or-less defended by free speech principles maintained by institutional structures and general polyarchic sociality of modern Western countries. While they remain confined in it, paedophiles may express their views with a notable degree of freedom – but any attempt to express their views outside of this small isolated zone will provoke quick repression from the other sectors of society, be it Facebook and Twitter bans, scandals and censorship demands accompanying any publication about child-adult sex that is not explicitly hostile to it, or, in harsher cases, direct vigilante violence. And, if they’ll try to violate state-imposed rules – such as avoiding any imagery depicting child nudity or sexuality – they will be immediately crushed by state violence. And, unlike most other groups, they have no hope of wider societal support in such confrontation, almost no allies outside the miniscule circle of pro-paedophile individuals. Yet it is leaving this exile-like “safe space” of imposed isolation, and entering the general societal space where the rest of the population roams relatively freely, which is the aim of paedophile liberation – and, no matter how perilous und “unsafe” such leaving is, there is no choice but to try. I think, Tom, with his multiple attempts to reach the general audience – in the old days of PIE, even to send some legislative proposals to the authorities – would agree with it!
As for the concept of “safe spaces” in general – in my opinion, they are also, in actual effect, ghettos. Of course, there are not old-style, openly hostile ghettos in which blacks once were segregated and in which paedophiles are separated nowadays. Modern “safe space” ghettos are organised not by enemies of isolated groups, but by the people who sincerely perceive themselves as their friends; by the ones who honestly believe that that their deeds are “protective”, not oppressive. Yet, in effect, their protectionism does more harm than good, both to the apparently “defended” groups and to the society in general.
When, in the mid-20th century, black rose against the oppressive segregation system, their demand was a right not to be treated as a separate group of people; they want the whites to treat them as ones of their own kind. Their struggle for recognition and acceptance was not based on some kind of “black identity” (as opposed to a “white” one); it was based on an universal human dignity, which were equal for all people, be they white, or black, or brown, or anything. This fundamental dignity is personal, not collective, in nature; it is a condition of an individual, not of a group. The basic imperative for anyone who is oppressed is to struggle for an equal societal standing for oneself and for all other oppressed persons. Community of the oppressed fighting for recognition is good and necessary for liberatory activity, and it may use some common trait of the particular discriminated population as a mean to gather and hold together its members – as black, woman, or gay liberation movements once did. But such mutual association is helpful only as long as it does not require their members to put their communal identity as something prevailing over a personal one, and does not demand a demonstrative alienation from other groups – even from the groups perceived as “dominant”.
Yet the alienation, not acceptance, is exactly what is produced by group-identity politics and “safe spacing” which it practice. It, in an attempt to “shield” the people who are described as the members of an “oppressed group” by the discourse of the establishment, effectively isolate these people from any criticism, any debate, any intellectual challenge. Being alienated in an echo-chamber of the in-group circle, they are encouraged to think dogmatically (as long as dogma is a “politically correct” one), to “shout away”, suppress and censor the opposition (as long as the opposition tries to defend “politically incorrect” views). They are taught to perceive themselves as “victims of discrimination”, as “survivors of abuse”, ones whose feelings are sacrosanct and whose thoughts are unquestionable, and to demean their opponents as the “scum of the Earth” whose objections should receive “no platform” and whom they may attack personally – with an approval, not a condemnation, of a general society.
And the society – which “safe space” dwellers are describe in almost entirely the same way in which rebels of mid-20th century described their own one – in fact, has considerably changed. In the era of post-war liberation movements, the Power Elite was undeniably white, male, straight, right-wing, Christian etc. through-and-through; yet modern Power Elite is not like this anymore. It has successfully crushed the liberatory struggles of 1960s – 1970s, not only by repression, but by RECUPERATION – that is, by appropriation and absorption of rebellious elements.
Modern Power Elite – our current establishment – has taken once-revolutionary notions of New Left and combine them with their own reactionary ideology, thus giving birth to a modern elite. This elite is no longer exclusively white, male, straight, right-wing, Christian; It is eager to accept non-whites, women, gays, leftists, non-Christians in its ranks as well. It is only happy to invest billions into “affirmative actions”, “sensitivity trainings”, suppression of “hate groups” and hunt for the “child sexual abusers” – as long as its imperialistic ravaging of the world would not be disrupted by a massive rebellion. And how can one rebel against the state-corporate pillagers when there are so much easier targets around – “white supremacists”, “patriarchal misogynists”, “homophobes”, “right-wing reactionaries”, “child sexual abusers”, “climate denialists” etc.? And for the opposite side, a ready line of boogeymen are also standing – “lawless leftists”, “black extremists”, “feminist misandrists”, ‘sexual perverts”, “anti-white haters”, “eco-Nazis” etc.
So, nowadays our society is in the state of “cold civil war” – with “right-wing” and “left-wing” popular groups, blinded by mutual hatred and scorn, relish their own perceived “victimhood” and attack another popular groups, their opponents, whom they see as demonically powerful exploiters who control everything and spend their time persecuting them everywhere. And, meanwhile, our post-modern “centrist” Power Elite may feel its position safe, since its subjects are too busy fighting with each other.
Or, well, it FELT itself safe – until recently anti-establishment stance has become prevailing in a notable part of a population; the scary shade of a revolution, which were presumed to be gone for good, suddenly reappeared on a horizon. What is necessary for a potential revolutionaries today is to overcome blind hostility between popular movements and communities; to find courage to struggle against the authorities; to recall a primary value of a person, an individual being, which was diminished both by Left and by Right; and to create a wide anti-authoritarian Left-Right alliance which would be strong enough to stand against the state-corporate power.
And none of this measures may be actualised unless we all will leave “safe spaces” of our own and will try to listen to our opponents – that will be the hardest challenge for the masses of people who are used to thinking that their critics are so evil and delusional that they do not deserve a voice. Only then can we hope to confront the modern Power Elite and to create a better world for everyone – including the people we despise most of all.
> think, Tom, with his multiple attempts to reach the general audience – in the old days of PIE, even to send some legislative proposals to the authorities – would agree with it!
I do! I also agree with your very thoughtful and well articulated view of safe spaces.
Explorer’s well ‘explored’ view of the few safe ‘Ivory Ghetto’ KindPed web spaces equates to ineffectual intellectual lone Ped Prof Humbert’s ‘tiddle cup runneth over’.
While too cautiously overlooking the VAST wide open web spaces where a growing band of streetwize KindPeds (like defensive Hum’s POSITIVE rival Quilty) can slaughter the antis.
I.E. the obvious free-for-all YT/YouTube comments. The peoples’ back alley/bear pit for the brave and above all well armed with aggressive streetwize HARD FACTS. Mercilessly trashing the phoney Anglophone abysmal record on TRUE Child Protection from a proven VAST *96% NON-sex serious child aBuses with millions of NON-sex child aBuse VICTIMS about whom the kidseX craZed phoney Anglophone doesn’t give a damn! (*NSPCC/Childline own stats.)
While millions of aMused streetwize/webwize guilt free LAUGHING kids worldwide now mock crap sex laws by selfie seXting and increasingly including proactive, even predatory ADULTOPHILES ‘grooming’ adults they fancy!
The Future’s Bright – The Future’s ADULTOPHILE!
http://web.archive.org/web/20150713180414/http://annaraccoon.com/2015/07/13/childline/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAGeH1CjR5o
I see one of your links is to the wonderful Anna Raccoon site, which has indeed undertaken a lot of brilliant and highly detailed factual expose work.
Unfortunately Ms Raccoon, or Susanne Cameron-Blackie to give her real name, has been unwell for a long time and recently announced that she will be discontinuing the site early in the new year. As she has been paying for the server and will stop paying, it means the whole site will disappear, and all the information with it.
I hope sometime who has the time and means will be able to copy the site and re-host it elsewhere as an important archive.
Well aware of Anna Suzanne Cameron Blackie Ringtail Raccoon’s terminal health and pending loss of website plus rich archive.
Which is why NiceNonce/SoundBite/SeXentric/RURants et al the usual VILE suspect frenetic mult-eye bitzophrenic poisonality KinderPhile/KindPeds. Have long since personally stored mucho relevant texts & pix in unstuck lil/BIGabyte memory sticks. Available on request to kindred Kind blythe spirits & soaks – HIC!
Cheers, mine’s a proactive HOT Loli, stirred AND shaken, gently – natch…
Just 2 decades back, “The Lolita Story”,1998, docuvid @1m.09s our very own ProPed Non-FemNazi femme Atkins in-print KICKS in!
While other balanced belle femme viewes cum @45m.12s from homely young scribe La Homes plus earlier scene & heard fine femmes La Dicks & La Worms – WTF? Elsewhere TOC’s inside-time Irons man and other good guys give it good, while all the usual unaMused phoney Anglophone gobberati un-chic headless chickens, preDicktably SQUAWK, “CHILD aBuse!!”
Meanwhile here’s another kidseX craZed all Anglo phoney STAB at Nab’s HOT Loli.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdvJOJTUvQk
You did indeed say it far better than I did, Explorer. Thank you!
Call me a pansy liberal if you want, but nobody is ever responsible for getting raped. The insistence that people who get drunk and are raped aren’t “really raped” is an issue that continues to plague the way in which rape is viewed by society and often by law enforcement. No matter the gender, having sex with a drunk person who is incapacitated or unconscious and is unable to consent falls under the definition of rape.
Firstly, in accord with you first words, quoted above, pansy liberal! I don’t think, however, that your comments are liberal at all (they fit no definition of liberalism that I have ever used)—they seem more conservative.
Anyway, more seriously, if two people are drunk, are attracted, jump into fucking, be it in bed or the local park, wake up and cannot remember what happened…
Then what? They have raped each other, off with their liberty and may they forever be known as (mutual) rapists!
Even more seriously, and importantly, drunk people can consent. What is at issue is the quality of that consent, and whether or not they regret it at some later stage. One does not have to be drunk, however, to consent to sex, to regret it afterwards (for whatever reasons) and claim rape. (Or just, sensibly, to say ah well, I won’t do that again!)
Lastly, is there a cat anywhere? Those pigeons are just too damn quiet!
Hi, Peace!
Call me a pansy liberal if you want,
But I don’t want to, so worry not!
but nobody is ever responsible for getting raped. The insistence that people who get drunk and are raped aren’t “really raped” is an issue that continues to plague the way in which rape is viewed by society and often by law enforcement. No matter the gender, having sex with a drunk person who is incapacitated or unconscious and is unable to consent falls under the definition of rape.
I honestly do not think that is what Tom was trying to say, and why he didn’t step in to clear this up is beyond me, so I’ll attempt to do so myself. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Libertine’s response, I must say.
I think there is a big difference, Peace, between having sex with someone who is so inebriated that they can barely stand or are totally unconscious, which would indeed be rape; and someone who is, as A noted (she’s back!!), simply tipsy with their inhibitions lowered, responds enthusiastically to someone else’s advances if they do not outright initiate the advances themselves, and then a few days later cries “rape” because they are ashamed of what they did when their inhibitions were down and do not want to take responsibility for it, or because they had a significant other and want an excuse not to be accused of “cheating,” or because they are a woman and fear being “slut-shamed” for giving into their carnal side when their inhibitions were down. I think this is an important distinction, and while the former happens all too often and should indeed be spoken out against and measures taken to prevent it, the latter happens all too often as well, and it’s increased in the number of times it’s happened in recent years as the victimology movement has progressed and insisted that all accusations of rape be believed, at least if that accusation is made against a man. This only encourages individuals to lie. I do commend you, once again, for making it clear that you oppose the victimization of people of both genders.
You wouldn’t let a drunk person drive, so why would you have sex with them and assume they know exactly what they’re doing? Nobody should have the experience of having fun and getting drunk and then waking up the next morning to find themselves naked in bed next to somebody they don’t recall sleeping with, and nobody should then be told that it’s their fault for getting into that situation. If someone who is drunk asks to have sex with you, simply say no.
Agreed, and I have personally avoided having sex with women of legal age who have come onto me while just tipsy or moderately inebriated (far from unconscious or even “unsteady on their feet”), because when she is in such a state, 1) I have no idea if she is really interested in me or not, and 2) I don’t want to be accused of anything later if she should turn out to be a person of low scruples or who is not clinically sane and later comes to regret the tryst for whatever reason or because she fantasizes it happened far differently than it actually did, respectively.
Also, I’m unsure why a lot of people on this blog have such an intense hatred for safe spaces, and I think this might be because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a safe space is. A safe space is basically just a place where oppressed minorities can go to without fear of being harassed, made fun of, assaulted, or having their communication shut down. Is it really such a bad thing to have places where people can feel, well, safe?
What I think you fail to understand in taking this stance, Peace, is that if you are in a university setting, it’s supposed to be a shared community with mutual interests. By creating these “safe spaces” within the context of these shared communities instead of elsewhere, you are sending a frankly rude and hostile message to the many white heterosexual males who are genuinely egalitarian, progressive, and sans hatred or bigotry towards designated minority groups by denying them inclusion in the group essentially right in front of their faces. It creates the impression that those huddling in the “safe space” consider everyone not a part of those minority groups to be at least “potential oppressors,” and it’s a form of reverse-profiling. It’s divisive within a shared community. There are other ways to deal with people from “majority” groups who are truly oppressive and hateful, but making everyone who is a member of those groups in a strictly arbitrary manner feel unwelcome is doing the same thing to them that you believe — justified or not in any given instance — that the bad eggs among them are doing to you. This is very unproductive, and you should be working with everyone who is against hatred and bigotry, not isolating yourself from everyone who happens to be male, white, and heterosexual simply because they are male, white, and heterosexual and thus dishing out bigotry and ostracization of your own. There is a big difference between fighting for equality and striving for comeuppance.
When they’ve spent their lives being told their opinion doesn’t matter, that they deserve their harassment, that they should just “suck it up,” it’s nice for them to be able to go somewhere to speak with like-minded people who share their experiences.
By essentially treating every white, male, heterosexual the same thing that the bad among them have treated you? By doing this, everyone who is male, white, and heterosexual now fully understand what that’s like, but those who were never oppressive, bigoted, or hateful against those who were different do not deserve that type of behavior. What if they truly like you and accept you for who and what you are, just like I consider you a valued friend and have never minded that you are transgender?
And sorry, Peace, but many of us do understand what it’s like outside of even that context, and can share your experience. When I was a child of about 8 years old, I remember when my aunt was throwing her daughter a birthday party, and announced that only the girls who attended would be taken out to dinner by her to Pizza Hut, but not the boys. She thought it was funny, I suppose. Try to guess how that made all the boys feel?
As another example, are you aware that many Chinese people who were born and raised in the Chinese culture and then come to America to open businesses do not trust white people? I know that, because many of them treat me and other white friends of mine who have entered their establishments with a lot of suspicion, often following us around as we shop frequently asking us, in a paranoid (not helpful) manner, “Can I help you? What are you looking for?” I never saw this happen from Chinese people who grew up among a cosmopolitan crowd, but certainly from the more recent immigrants. And I never had anything against Chinese people, nor anyone else of a different race or ethnicity. I simply didn’t look like they did. So, sorry, Peace, but just because you’re white, male, or heterosexual doesn’t mean you don’t know what it’s like to experience bigotry and hatred. Especially these days.
If we’re being charitable, we could call this blog and many others in the pedosphere a “safe space” for Kind because it’s a place where we will not be harassed simply for being Kind and are allowed a voice.
True, Peace, but we have never disallowed friendly Non-Kind people from visiting and talking with us, especially when they have offered us support. We do not deal with bigotry against us from Nons by returning that bigotry to them, or ostracizing them from all association with us. We simply do not tolerate bigotry from them here. The same is the case on GC, BC, VoA, etc.
I personally think that allowing boys and men to “explore their feminine side” is great because for a long time they would be told to “just take it like a man” or “man up” rather than let their feelings be known. This could lead to both the suppression of emotions (often linked with higher risk of heart disease and worse mental and physical health) and the inability to cope in a healthy manner. Males have, on average, higher rates of completed suicide. This is due to the fact that male gender roles push men to value independence and strength, which causes them to not reach out for help in times of need, as well as stress caused by traditional gender roles. In addition, men use more lethal methods of committing suicide, mostly firearms. Breaking down the gender role of the “strong, silent man” is actually helpful for men in the long run.
This I agree with. What we also need to do, I believe, is to stop raising girls to most value men who display physical strength and undue aggression, because they feel they would make the best protectors and providers ,as opposed to choosing men who compliment their own personalities, interests, and needs the most. This type of mentality creates toxic relationships between the genders.
>I honestly do not think that is what Tom was trying to say, and why he didn’t step in to clear this up is beyond me, so I’ll attempt to do so myself.
Thanks, Dissy. Just one of those things I meant to do but just didn’t get around to, I’m afraid. You did a good job! You make good points about safe spaces, and there is a lot that might be added on the ways in which the concept is being invoked in an utterly bogus way to shut out information and close down serious debate, especially in the academic world, such that it amounts to a really scary assault on our ability to acquire knowledge and think in a fully informed way. So it’s not just about the avoidance of hateful trolling.
To anyone who doubts this I say started reading Spiked. The articles there will bring you up to speed fairly quickly: http://www.spiked-online.com/ I disagree with probably 70-80% of what I read in Spiked but the rest is often pure gold. Actually, the stuff I disagree with is often pure gold too: it’s intellectually helpful to engage with well expressed ideas that oppose your own.
As for rape when under the influence of drink, this was discussed to some extent here in relation to the Ched Evans case, in comments which also included an epic discussion of whether it is ever legitimate for a woman’s prior sexual history to be brought in evidence in cases of alleged rape, or whether this is always just invalid “slut shaming”. James/Jasmine was brilliant in educating us as to the potential role of Bayesian analysis in giving guidance on this issue.
Do you happen to remember where Jasmine did her bit about the Bayesian analysis? I missed that and would love to read it.
The main discussion was over two years ago when Jasmine was writing as James in response to my blog on the Ched Evans rape case. The footballer was found guilty of rape but the conviction has since been overturned. James and I had a substantial exchange in which the term Bayes or Bayesian occurs 16 times. That is here:
“When the law is out of order on rape”
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/when-the-law-is-out-of-order-on-rape/
I made a brief appreciative reference to James’s input in a later blog here:
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/paedophilia-more-popular-than-icecream-in-2007/
And James also invoked Bayes in comments responding to Ben Capel in February 2015 here:
Whither the punitive state? Whither go we?
James:
In reply to ben capel.
2015/02/28 at 1:20
2015/02/26 at 2:27
2015/02/25 at 7:06 pm
Thank you! 🙂
In regards to safe spaces, I’m not sure why everyone is assuming that I wish for people to live their entire lives inside a safe space. Safe spaces are places to go after people have dealt with life. It’s a place to go after they have done activism, after they have debated, after they have dealt with bigots, after they have spent their day convincing others that they are in fact equals. There’s disagreements and arguments within safe spaces, but the bottom line is that safe spaces are a place where these disagreements can be heard without being shut down as “not important” or “irrelevant” simply because the person espousing their opinion is of a minority group. For some people, these safe spaces are the only places where they can speak their mind without being banned, talked down to, or ignored. White heterosexual cis men should not feel threatened or guilty by the very existence of safe spaces. Many safe spaces allow the presence of allies and those who align with their goals – for example, many campuses have Gay-Straight Alliances. There’s also plenty of ways for these men to be allies outside of safe spaces and progressing things to the point where safe spaces are no longer needed.
This is not to say that I don’t understand where you’re coming from. How can racism or sexism be stopped if white men cannot be part of the conversation? There’s a really good section about this in the book “Uprooting Racism,” which is a book (written by a white guy) discussing how white people can work for racial justice. You can view the section here: https://books.google.com/books?id=MayCo-8M5vgC&pg=PA110&dq=uprooting+racism+%22separatism%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmoLq8w9jQAhVnsVQKHUDIAM4Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=uprooting%20racism%20%22separatism%22&f=false. There’s also nothing stopping white, heterosexual and cis, or male people from congregating on their own and starting their own safe spaces, either.
I’m also unsure where you got the idea that I treat white heterosexual cis men as all the same, or as being inherently evil, as I’ve never expressed that sentiment (and if I have, feel free to point it out to me). I have problems with racists, I have problems with homo/transphobes, I have problems with misogynists – but none of those are labels that apply only to white heterosexual cis men. However, it’s important to note that discrimination against white heterosexual cis men is not systematic in nature, at the very least not in the same way it is with minorities.
In regards to safe spaces, I’m not sure why everyone is assuming that I wish for people to live their entire lives inside a safe space. Safe spaces are places to go after people have dealt with life. It’s a place to go after they have done activism, after they have debated, after they have dealt with bigots, after they have spent their day convincing others that they are in fact equals.
But why leave out white, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered individuals solely on the basis of these characteristics, especially when many of them are not bigots and are as dedicated to progressive activism as anyone who is not white, male, heterosexual, and cis-gendered? One of the potential pitfalls of identity politics and and activism is to fall into the trap of fighting bigotry with bigotry, and becoming less interested in achieving equality and more interested in simply inverting the oppression and power imbalances. In other words, activism dedicated to revenge rather than justice. Don’t fall into that trap, Peace, you’re too good of a person for that.
There’s disagreements and arguments within safe spaces, but the bottom line is that safe spaces are a place where these disagreements can be heard without being shut down as “not important” or “irrelevant” simply because the person espousing their opinion is of a minority group.
But it’s okay to shut down or dismiss the concerns and feelings of those who are not considered minorities by similarly excluding them from your discussions and groupings? Again, you’re coming close to engaging in a form of bigotry that you refuse to see as bigotry because it’s a traditionally oppressed group doing it, rather than one who has been seen as traditionally privileged. This is analogous to right-wing Israel apologists insisting that what the Israeli government is currently doing to the Palestinians cannot be comparable to what the Nazi government did to Jewish people, despite the fact that both are/were done on the basis of ethnocentric apartheid. Just because Jewish people have been victims in the past doesn’t mean that somehow earned them a form of moralistic “diplomatic immunity” from becoming victimizers themselves when they engage in oppressive behavior that is very similar to the type of oppressive behavior enacted against them in the past. All human beings have this potential flaw, Peace, and this is what I’m concerned about. I already see this notion being seriously abused into misandrist revenge politics by the “SJWs”. That is not any form of liberalism, but rather reactionary politics attempting to masquerade as liberalism.
For some people, these safe spaces are the only places where they can speak their mind without being banned, talked down to, or ignored.
Peace, I’ve attended three different universities in the past, and I utterly refuse to believe that minorities are routinely shut down and banned in the general academic setting. And that was then. These days, if anything, I see them thriving and anyone who utters an opinion that offends some minorities are the ones who are shut down and banned. I think the divisive nature of identity politics has reached the point where the lines between who is part of the privileged groups, and who is the oppressing group, is blurred. Especially when it’s reached a point where all white, male, heterosexual, and cis-gendered (can we use the acronym “WMHeC” for that?) are banned from these “safe spaces” regardless of their individual ideology or character traits.
Many safe spaces allow the presence of allies and those who align with their goals – for example, many campuses have Gay-Straight Alliances.
That’s good, and that’s much more progressive. But it should be all campuses rather than just “many.”
There’s also plenty of ways for these men to be allies outside of safe spaces and progressing things to the point where safe spaces are no longer needed.
Seriously, Peace? You really think this type of exclusionary policy truly encourages WMHeC’s to help? I think it more likely puts many of them on the defensive, especially those who (rightfully) are not self-hating and are not ashamed of possessing these arbitrary physical traits that they didn’t choose. It results in the type of backlashes such as the more reactionary elements of the MRA movement (who boast that patriarchy is the normal state of things) and even outright bigoted groups who use slogans such as “Make America White Again.” What you just said sounds dangerously similar to a response a conservative Catholic gave me when I asked him why women cannot become priests and bishops, and whether he believes women are inferior to men: “We serve in different ways.” Mmm-hmm. That sounded like a euphemistic confirmation of my concerns. You’re doing the same thing here, albeit for a movement rather than a church. In all honesty, how would you feel if I told you I like you a lot as a person, but I prefer to exclude you from my group of cis-gender friends since we would feel “oppressed” or otherwise uncomfortable with you in our presence, but worry not, because there are other ways you could show what a good friend you are other than hanging out with me (like maybe picking up our restaurant tab for us)?
There’s also nothing stopping white, heterosexual and cis, or male people from congregating on their own and starting their own safe spaces, either.
That sounds even more divisive, Peace. It reminds me of the concerns my high school principal expressed when she said she found it disconcerting that white and black students tended to congregate in their own separate tables rather than sitting together and enjoying each others’ company. I’m not saying their choice should have been taken away from them, but it was nevertheless a bad choice on the part of each group, as it highlighted tension rather than unity. That is exactly what you’re doing if you suggest that every college student who is a WMHC and everyone who isn’t congregate in separate groups where the other is not allowed. These are not “safe spaces” so much as the social equivalent of what warmongers call “no-fly zones.”
Btw, I will check out that book you recommended, and I’ll reserve all judgment until I do.
I’m also unsure where you got the idea that I treat white heterosexual cis men as all the same, or as being inherently evil, as I’ve never expressed that sentiment (and if I have, feel free to point it out to me).
In a way you did, however indirectly, Peace. You did that by making it clear we would not be allowed in your “safe space.” Why insist that all WMHeC’s stay out of your “safe space” if you do not consider us at least potentially bigoted or problematic? Why not allow us or exclude us — and maybe everyone else — on a case-by-case basis, depending on our ideology and behavior, not our un-chosen physical characteristics? Are you, for example, telling me that if I was attending your university, I would not be welcome in your “safe space”? Speaking for myself, I’d never be ashamed to have you among any of my friends or circles, whether they were WMHeC or not.
I have problems with racists, I have problems with homo/transphobes, I have problems with misogynists – but none of those are labels that apply only to white heterosexual cis men. However, it’s important to note that discrimination against white heterosexual cis men is not systematic in nature, at the very least not in the same way it is with minorities.
Um, Peace, I think this is a strong example of making discrimination against WMHeC quite systematic, or at least putting the process into motion. It’s also falling into the same trap I mentioned above: claiming that bigoted, exclusionary behavior towards one group is justified, just as long as those who are doing it are groups who have been considered minorities and victims in the past, or to some degree in the present still. It’s demanding license to commit a form of reverse-discrimination and insisting you’ve earned the “right” or moral capital to go from oppressed to oppressor, rather than maintaining the moral high ground and a strong sense of principles by refusing to engage in the same type of behavior that has hurt your group in the past. It’s suggesting that you believe this type of behavior is only “wrong” if your group happens to be on the receiving end, but not if they are the purveyors of it themselves. All you’re doing is proving that, as a group, LGBT people are no more inherently better than WMHeC’s, and just as prone to trying to acquire despotic power and use it to exclude, oppress, and “other” designated groups of people if the opportunity arises. I’m sorry, my friend, but I do not agree that I somehow “deserve” discrimination more than you do, or that it’s not the same if you do it to me instead of the reverse.
As I said before, it’s now reached the point where the rise of divisive identity politics is causing different groups of people to split into separate camps, each scapegoating the other as the source of their problems rather than looking at the system of hierarchy in general, and each striving to be the group to reach the top of that hierarchy instead of opposing the concept in a united fashion. This has served to exacerbate race and gender based antagonisms in America, and resulted in a reactionary political climate that forced Americans into choosing between the likes of Hillary Clinton (backed by every misandrist in the nation) and Donald Trump (backed by every misogynist in the nation) as chief Wall Street supporter in the Oval Office, and now we’re stuck with one of them for at least four years. Congratulations to you and every LGBT person, woman, and WMHeC out there who are falling into this trap.
Here’s something to think about:
When black people make a safe space, the respectful way to react would be to politely ask why a minority group might not wish to include a majority group that has culturally and systemically oppressed them, or to respect that minority group’s wishes.
Instead, white people have said “What about me?” “What about my feelings?” and “I think black people should do this.” What part of this reassures black people that those same white people won’t say the same things in their safe space?
Here’s something to think about:
When black people make a safe space, the respectful way to react would be to politely ask why a minority group might not wish to include a majority group that has culturally and systemically oppressed them, or to respect that minority group’s wishes.
Here’s something for you and your fellow identity politck-mongers to think about, Peace: Why do you insist on singling out individuals within the WMHeC ranks as potential oppressors when none of them are responsible for what their ancestors may have done in less enlightened times, and when the majority of them today are likely not filled with oppressive attitudes? Is that not disrespecting our feelings by taking an elitist attitude and marking us as “potentially toxic” for strictly arbitrary reasons? Should this be done in a public university setting which is supposed to be a shared community? Is this not putting many WMHeC individuals on the defensive? Are you uncomfy with us in your “safe spaces” because some of us may be a bit more objective about certain topics than you’re comfortable with, or because some of us may “offend” you by not hating ourselves for what we are and not considering ourselves “inherent oppressors”? Are you forgetting that no minority group has ever won its civil rights without a sizable proportion of the “majority” group becoming more enlightened and standing up for them? Are you forgetting, for instance, that during the pre-Civil War days, many white people from the North, and even a few from the South, where abolitionists and routinely risked their lives and freedom to get escaped black slaves up North where they would be free and safe from the grip of their oppressors? And perhaps most importantly: is doing essentially the same thing to WHMeC’s who live today that their ancestors did to your group in the past, and a relative handful of them still do today, a form of social justice or is it a form of revenge that only proves what you’re seeking is an inversion of the hierarchy rather than the elimination of it?
Instead, white people have said “What about me?” “What about my feelings?”
Because we don’t have feelings, right? Because we think we do not deserve the same type of treatment that you decry our ancestors (rightfully) for doing to you? Because only the feeling of “designated victims” count? Because you think forms of moral conduct, justice, and fair play only count for “victims”? I guess in that case the Israeli government should have the right to oppress the Palestinians, because their past status as “victims” means they are exempt from conduct.
and “I think black people should do this.”
Meaning, because I think all groups should show the same type of respect for others that they understandably want for themselves, without constantly playing the “victim card” and setting themselves up as “perpetual victims” to rationalize the “right” to do the same to others that has been done to them in the past? I’m sorry, Peace, but that is not justice, it’s isolation, division, and comeuppance. Maybe you should someday consider getting off the moral high horse that you think your status as a minority entitles you to and understand that you have the same potential flaws as any other human being, and that people from your group are every bit as capable of committing injustice and even atrocities against people from other groups as us “horrid” systematically “oppressive” WMHeC’s have done once your group gets a taste of power and entitlement.
What part of this reassures black people that those same white people won’t say the same things in their safe space?
Translation: What part of this reassures those hypothetical black people in their safe space that every white person allowed in there may not be self-hating, and may say something “offensive,” i.e., intellectually challenging to the perspectives that individuals who have perpetual victim mentality do not want to hear and consider, like maybe, expect a reciprocal degree of respectful conduct.
I’ll tell you one thing, Peace: if I’m not welcome among your trans friends, I don’t want to be welcome in your life at all. Anything I say that doesn’t “respect” you as a victim will be taken as an “oppressive” comment to you. Let me say this, not against you as a person but against anyone of any race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., who holds your ideological views: identity politics are toxic and divisive, and it sets different groups within the working class against each other on the basis of who deserves to have power more, who is more oppressive, etc., which deters us from uniting on shared class interests against a small handful of truly entitled individuals who benefit from all of this; and prevents us from seeking mutual equality and understanding that would equally disburse power among all people.
If I attended your university, I would personally avoid anyone who insisted on ostracizing me in their “safe spaces” because I may say something they do not want to hear, and which they will consider “oppressive” and “offensive” because it may not agree that they deserve entitlement, or that the university setting is stacked against them in every which way outside of those “safe spaces.” That’s what it’s all about, Peace, in a nutshell: your concern that in a class room setting outside of your “safe space,” you may be subject to challenging views that refuse to coddle minorities and agree with them that they, and they alone, have suffered oppression and that they have a right to take it out on certain groups of people instead of a system that perpetuates and thrives on hierarchy in general.
In this context, IMHO, there’s no reason to expect, or grant, special treatment based on arbitrary factors.
If you believe a board etc should be made “safe” for special interest groups, could you in principle object to pedophiles demanding a GBLT board being made a safe space for pedophiles, including white and heterosexuals, such that any support of anti-pedophilia resulted in a ban?
Sure, because I personally think that pedophilia should be considered under the queer umbrella. Also I’m not sure why you included the word “white” in there, since somebody’s race has nothing to do with their sexuality.
Given your fondness for identity politics, I found reasons to doubt white or heterosexuals would be considered first class citizens among pedophiles.
As for safe spaces, I have seen no evidence of individual GBLTs being treated badly on pedophile boards, while mentioning pedophilia and pedophile rights is worthy of a ban in safe spaces for GBLTs and their allies. Why would those hostile to pedophiles be entitled to feel safe?
In trying to include pedophiles among the queers, you have your work cut out for you.
“Identity politics” doesn’t mean “hates white heterosexuals,” unlike what most people here assume. I’m white as hell but that doesn’t make me a bad person (and I’m not a “self-hating whitey” either), and being white doesn’t make anybody else bad either. Identity politics and things such as structural racism and sexism do not have anything to do with individual people but with society as a whole; however, individual people CAN do things to help break down such oppression and stop themselves when they find themselves contributing to such racism or sexism.
As for pedophiles in queer spaces, I don’t think I ever said anything about queers being treated badly by pedophiles (though I have seen it, especially towards trans individuals and identities). The reason why queer people ban pedophiles from their boards is as a defense mechanism; many people have tried to discredit the queer movement by saying that they all molest children (this has continued to this day with the “bathroom bills”), and so queers want to distance themselves from that idea as far as possible. I fully understand that the bridges between queer teliophiles and pedophiles have been burnt, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to give up.
“Identity politics” doesn’t mean “hates white heterosexuals,”
Oh, really? 😉
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-332741/Student-diversity-officer-allegedly-tweeted-kill-white-men-set-quit-claim-bullied-union-president.html
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/killallwhitemen-what-about-killallmuslims/17604
I don’t think I ever said anything about queers being treated badly by pedophiles
It was, I believe, implied by the support for SJWs on pedophile boards to make such groups feel safe.
When the exclusion of pedophiles is merely a defense of queers, with the implications that they are not anti-pedophiles or responsible for their actions, what does queers treated badly by pedophiles even mean? Pedophiles not content merely as useful idiots for the “oppressed” groups?
At worst, bathroom bills are based on the assumption that men are predating on the weak, women and children, which need to be protected. As you favor feminist consent, based on this assumption, why balk at bathroom bills? Such arbitrary restrictions on freedom sooner or later hit the groups you love and care about, not only the bad half of humanity.
Hi Diss What part confused you? I made the point that if both are drunk why is it the mans assumed duty to read out the consent tally!
Chinese people ‘can I help you’ got me thinking of League of Gentlemen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meF7NmfnXZ0
I guess your way of articulating it was confusing to me. My bad. And that old woman in the video you embedded was quite disturbing! Especially the scene where that guy asked to see her “points”!
Its especially disturbing for people like us I guess. I am in favour of youth liberation, what I meant was he was articulate and knowledgeable for his age, especially on the subject of peadophilia — Many educated kids don’t all grasp basics or seem to have common sense like in the video, its not something that you are taught . I was just giving the kid a compliment.
Are you also the kind of person who thinks calling a black person “articulate” is a compliment?
No but I have a friend from Kenya who I sometimes remind not to spear me, He laughs because he is used to my dark humour. I have had many black friends thankyou, including a black American, He was one of the best friends I ever had.
Total agreement with you here.
Peace asks: Are you also the kind of person who thinks calling a black person “articulate” is a compliment?
Although the question was not directed at me, I have to answer, because I think calling anyone “articulate” is a compliment, irrespective of race, gender, nationality, or any other criteria that can be thought up. I believe this because there are so many inarticulate people out there, everywhere, muddying the waters further.
Was it offensive when James Baldwin (http://www.biography.com/people/james-baldwin-9196635) was called articulate? Both white americans and black americans called him articulate, and he sure was.
In fact, Baldwin continues to be one of the very few writers who I re-read; I treasure my first edition of Another Country, and The Fire Next Time continues to make me, poor whitey that I am, feel like an american negro because I’ve experienced so much of what he writes about, (all of it from other whitey’s who think I am less than they are.) I’m not gay, I’m not black, I live in poverty, and Baldwin’s ability to be articulate leaves me feeling and knowing with him. (There are many others of whom the same could be said, but I chose Baldwin because of the effect his writing has had on me.)Yep, to be articulate is marvellous, and to be called articulate is a compliment from where I stand.
Could it be that the suggestion is that a black man calling a black man articulate is a compliment, but a white man calling a black man articulate is not?
You probably didn’t mean any such thing, but that is the implication I took from your question.
Anyway, enough of that. The heat wave I have been in the middle of for the last week has muddled my life and mind, and I don’t have the energy to comment further; so, I leave much unsaid.
The reason why calling black people “articulate” is offensive is because it has this underlying assumption that most black people aren’t articulate, that a black person being articulate is somehow surprising enough to comment on it. At its base, it’s dogwhistle racism.
I must say that I do agree with Peace on this one, BJmuirhead. There is a difference, and a huge one IMO, between telling someone “you’re a very articulate individual” and saying something like “you’re very articulate for someone your age” or “… for someone who is black.” That strongly implies the person making the statement finds articulate verbiage an atypical trait for someone who is young, or black, etc. When you say something like that to a young person, you’re also doing a better job of infantalizing the group they belong to than complimenting the individual.
It’s the equivalent of a Non attempting to “compliment” a Kind person by saying something like, “I must say, you’re pretty respectful of kids’ boundaries for a pedophile.”
I did explain or refine what I said in the reply, Then Peace thought it was a good idea to turn this into a ‘race’ issue absurdly, Maybe its an old habit that’s not dead yet!
Well, my friend, certain tasks are impressive at some ages, such as baby talking at just a few weeks old, an 8-year-old doing elementary math proofs, or a 9-year-old writing an opera.
Indeed…Mozart comes to mind.
“I’m not sure darts champion Eric Bristow was entirely on target when he tweeted “Might be a looney but if some football coach was touching me when i was a kid as i got older i would have went back and sorted that poof out”; but, like the little missiles he chucks for a living, he did have a point.”
I know your remark was meant somewhat humorously and you did say that you weren’t sure that he was ‘entirely on target’ but I do think that was an overly generous response to a very unpleasant statement by Eric Bristow.