We don’t expect anything much to happen at 9.30 on a Sunday morning.
It’s a time when usually I would be mooching about with a cup of coffee and looking forward to another coma-inducingly complex Brexit analysis on the Andrew Marr Show, where we are no longer, it seems, stuck on the “backstop” (that’s the ordinary backstop), or even the “backstop to the backstop”. We have made great progress. We have moved on, so that instead of failing to come to any agreement on backstops we are now hopelessly mired on the “transition”, and even the “transition from the transition” – and no, for those of you who haven’t been following closely, I am not talking about trans persons or any aspect of sex or sexuality.
But I soon will be, as you will be relieved to hear.
So. Sunday. No comforting coffee or mystifying Marr. Just an empty platform in a quiet London Tube station as I make my way to the start of a conference. With only the sound of my own footsteps for company I make my lonely way to the exit. As I turn a corner onto a staircase I see my first humans. A couple. Or so I think, as the stocky man and slim woman appear to be walking together side by side some distance up ahead of me.
So when he gives her a firm spank on the backside I guess it must be a relationship thing. You know, playful. Pert enough posterior, I must admit, barely covered by hot-pants of a provocative shortness I haven’t seen for decades in my own sartorially challenged thigh of the woods. The young lady was about 30. Had she been only 20 years younger I would certainly have envied her “boyfriend” or “partner”.
Expecting some lively banter between the two, I was quickly disillusioned. Without a word, and without looking back or in any way acknowledging the man, she quickened her pace up the steps. As the distance between spanker and spankee grew it became apparent he was drunk, lurching from side to side. I gave him a wide berth as I overtook. Not that I thought he would spank my elderly male backside (no hot pants there, I assure you!) but I didn’t want any sort of confrontation.
That same morning, though, I found myself voluntarily confronting about a hundred people over this incident when I raised it as a question in a conference session at the Barbican Centre titled “Consent classes: from school to parliament and beyond”. By the time I spoke, several of the feminist platform speakers had come on strong in various ways (no surprise), suggesting that teaching strict rules for consent to schoolchildren or students is vital but not enough; basically, the consensus was little short of “All men should be castrated”.
In this atmosphere, I confess, I didn’t have the balls to suggest that even young children can consent – I might not have kept them for long had I tried! In any case, I was curious to sound out opinion on the Tube station spanker.
“A funny thing happened on my way to the conference,” I began. Well, not really: to me it had been “funny peculiar” but no way did I want anyone to think I meant “funny ha-ha”. I was also acutely aware that many women complain of sexual harassment such as uninvited spanking on an almost daily basis. So I took pains to emphasise that in all my many years I had never before actually witnessed such an incident in front of my very eyes.
“What should I have done?” I asked. “Should I have intervened in any way?”
It was pleasant, I have to say, to find myself in a good-guy role for once, the role of the Concerned Bystander. OK, so I hadn’t actually done anything good. A proper “English gentleman” might have taken the scoundrel by the scruff of the neck and given him a damn good thrashing, but that would have been far too aggressively masculine to win the approval of this conference session.
No, just thinking vaguely the right thoughts in an ineffectual way was apparently good enough for this surprisingly easy-to-please audience. One of the sterner panel speakers, law professor Susan Edwards, author of Sex and Gender in the Legal Process, seemed to think it was important that my consciousness had been raised. Alisha Lobo, a university students’ “community officer”, said she would have intervened herself, but only to go and ask the woman if she was alright. As a man, though, could I have done this without raising worries about my ulterior motives?
A guy in the audience pointed out that everyone, including the perpetrator, knows that spanking a complete stranger in a Tube station is bad behaviour. Consent classes would make no difference.
The best answer came from panellist Joanna Williams, author of Women vs Feminism and associate editor of Spiked. Instead of getting all worked up over “someone touching someone’s bum on a Sunday morning at Barbican Tube station”, she said, women should be celebrating their freedom, gained not so long ago, to go out in the world as independent people. The present emphasis on victimhood through “harassment”, “micro-aggressions” and the like, risked sacrificing spontaneity, freedom and intimacy. The Tube spanker’s behaviour was definitely unpleasant but the cost of trying to eliminate such incidents through ever greater vigilance and sex-negativity was far too high.
I am happy to say she got a very vigorous round of applause.
The conference was the excellent annual Battle of Ideas chat-fest on topical controversies, from #MeToo to Brexit to climate change, organised by the Institute of Ideas, whose director, Claire Fox, will be known to many heretics as a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze. Those with an elephantine memory will recall that I wrote about this gathering a couple of years ago in “Are we (or they) driving kids crazy?”
With Steve Freeman, my successor as chair of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), barbarically incarcerated on an indeterminate sentence of “imprisonment for public protection” (IPP) for the last seven years for child porn offences , I thought I should also attend the session on the policy of offender rehabilitation in prison, and whether it works.
Much of the session was focused, reasonably enough, on the lack of funding for getting offenders back on their feet when they leave the prison gate. Instead of getting the help they need they are left to wallow in unresolved problems, especially as regards drugs and alcohol, and a lack of skills that would enable them to gain and hold down a job. As a result, they soon find themselves back inside after re-offending: it is known as the revolving door syndrome.
I would have preferred a session given over entirely to the horror-story that the IPP system has become. The idea was supposed to be that “dangerous” prisoners, including sex offenders, should only be released when they are no longer considered dangerous. In theory this need take only as long as necessary to successfully complete a treatment programme aimed at rehabilitation – which might mean a matter of months rather than years. In practice, staffing and other difficulties have meant that the required courses have often been long delayed, and the Parole Board has been reluctant to release anyone labelled “dangerous” for fear of the media shit-storm that would ensue in the event of any further offending.
Also, there has been a huge problem for heretics. In order to “pass” the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) the offender has needed to convince the assessors running the courses that he (it’s usually a male) has changed his beliefs and no longer has an “offence supporting attitude” or a so-called “cognitive distortion” that makes him think consensual sex with minors is OK. A lot of us would struggle with this test, wouldn’t we?
Then, last year, came the shock news (no surprise to me but it was to the authorities) that the SOTP doesn’t actually work, and that those who have successfully completed the courses re-offend at a higher rate than those who do not! Logically, then, if you cannot “cure” offenders who are too “dangerous” to release, they must remain locked up.
So it’s a nightmare scenario for the remaining IPP prisoners, who find themselves stuck in a legal limbo that neither the parole authorities nor the politicians dare tackle. It has become a gulag system, much like the endless “civil commitment” faced by many sex offenders in the U.S. i.e. continuing detention behind bars long after their sentence has ended, waiting for a “cure” that does not exist. Note that the IPP is officially a life sentence, although the offence leading to it can be relatively minor, with a minimum term (sometimes called the “tariff”) that might be under a year. In Steve’s case it was two and a half years and he has so far served seven.
Nobody at the Barbican even mentioned sex offenders until I raised the subject.
Wouldn’t it be a far better use of resources, I asked, now that the SOTP is known to be useless, to spend the money instead on practical post-release help, making sure ex-offenders have somewhere to live and so forth? Whether the remaining IPP prisoners should in justice be released immediately, after completing their tariff, was a follow-up question I had in mind, albeit the session was too short to take it.
The panel included Jerry Petherick, previously a prison governor responsible for HMP Dartmoor and now the director in charge of all the G4S prisons in the UK, including HMP Rye Hill, where all the inmates are sex offenders. To my surprise, this guy from the hard-nosed capitalist business of making money out of locking people up came across as surprisingly pleasant and well-meaning, notwithstanding the terrible mess his company has made of riot-stricken HMP Birmingham, now taken back into state control.
And judging by the answer he gave me he is pleasant and well-meaning but with little to offer but waffle and bureaucratic bullshit. He spoke of the “demise” of the SOTP, saying it had caused “real uncertainty as to how and how effectively it will be replaced”. How indeed. He didn’t get much further.
In the chair was Pamela Dow, a former director of strategy with the Ministry of Justice. She claimed the SOTP had worked well in its early phase when it was in the hands of experienced clinical psychologists, but when it was rolled out over the whole prison estate it was not given enough funding and was delivered by poorly trained staff.
I totally believe her. But again unanswered was the question of what comes next?
Nobody mentioned the new Kaizen programme, perhaps because there is some embarrassment over this fancy-sounding rebranding of the SOTP, re-launched with a few untested tweaks. This is designed to be a more “holistic” (great buzzword!) course for supposedly high risk offenders such as Steve, incorporating “biological, social and psychological factors”, whatever that means. There is also the Horizon programme for lower risk offenders. As a blog associated with the journal Sexual Abuse pointed out, these courses may be evidence-informed but they are not evidence-based. Citing forensic psychologist Ruth Mann, the bloggers suspect that we can see “the evil twin of evidence-based policy-making” at work in this case, namely “policy-based evidence-making”.
But there may be some faint hope for better policy. The holistic approach (soothingly served up to me by Mr Pecksniff, sorry Petherick, when I button-holed him at the end of the session) could actually have something going for it. In the damning academic evaluation of the SOTP, one of the possible reasons given for the programme’s failure was its one-size-fits-all nature, with violent young rapists considered just the same as gentle and often elderly kind inmates.
I could have told them this. In fact I did, in an article published in the house journal of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) a few years ago. Maybe someone has noticed at last. My main point was that heretics like us do not take kindly (pun intended!) to having it dinned into us that we must have “cognitive distortions” and lack empathy. Either of these failings could be a factor (as one would expect when children are manipulated or coercively molested) but it ain’t necessarily so. And if it ain’t so we won’t buy it. We will instead either be in open revolt against the objectives of the course or seethe in quiet resentment. Either way, the programme will fail.
Far better, I said, would be to have programmes that respect the individuality of the inmates concerned, giving participants the opportunity to discuss their beliefs freely, and any evidence they know of that supports them. Resistance to the prescribed ideology should not on its own be taken to indicate that an inmate is still dangerous when a fair and intelligent evaluation of their expressed views would suggest the opposite.
Steve could pass that course, and rightly so.
The Belgian researcher Jean Michel Chaumont (Université Catholique de Louvain) did a lot of work to debunk the hyperbole about sex trafficking. Most of his publications are in French, in particular his excellent book “Le mythe de la traite des Blanches : enquête sur la fabrication d’un fléau”. But one of them has been translated into English: https://nome.unak.is/wordpress/09-1/c66-interviews-memoirs-and-other-contributions/the-activist-the-ideologist-and-the-researcher-on-guesstimates-and-trafficking-in-women-2/
One sees there that activist groups, but also some UNO “experts”, rely on “guesstimates” of numbers of traffic victims, which are simply ever-inflated hearsay.
Sean, you raise the question of the roots of FGM.
It & footbinding both arose from extreme polygyny. When a man has many concubines (and Chinese emperors had thousands!) and/or sex-slaves (Moslem men are allowed an unlimited number) keeping them emotionally and sexually happy or satisfied (and therefore ‘faithful’) becomes a huge problem, since they have only one man to turn to for all those needs.
Solutions to these problems include harems, reducing the girl’s mobility (footbinding), exaggerated ‘honour’ codes, veiling, child-marriage and, of course, FGM.
In such societies a girl can expect to have a better life as the ‘nth’ wife of a very wealthy polygynous husband than being the only wife of a poverty-stricken monogamous husband. This means that polygynous societies are also strongly hypergynous (the tendency for women to marry men of higher rank) and families and daughters have very strong ambitions for their daughters to marry ‘up’. This means that they will ape the marriage practices of the elite, including their chastity measures. In this way – as women cascade ‘up’ the ranks, the elite chastity practices ‘cascade’ down. Only the poorest families can’t have their daughters cut (or have their feet bound) and being uncut becomes associated with poverty and also infidelity and unchastity and unmarriageability.
Polygyny also creates ‘bride-vacuums’ at the lower end of society – leaving significant proportions of males with no hope of ever having a wife. This creates violent societies, where rape is endemic, thus making a secure marriage more vital and requiring more chastity-protection measures and taking place at younger ages, and also the guarding and seclusion of females.
Polygyny is the norm with mankind. Monogamy is (I understand) largely an invention of the ancient Greeks and has been credited by some sociologists with being the most important factor in creating Western civilisation (see Joseph Henrich – The puzzle of monogamous marriage) – so it is not surprising that there have been pockets of polygyny (and thus FGM) all over the globe.
The question is not so much why FGM existed in the past, but why it has not been universally eradicated today, especially since the benefits of monogamy and of not cutting are so evident. The evidence appears to be that BC polygyny was near-universal other than in one or two places in Europe. Civilising forces have eridicated FGM from most places, and where it persists it persists for religious reasons. And where it is unsupported by religious doctrine it is being abandoned very rapidly – the Embera of Colombia are abandoning it, the Beta Israel Jews of Ethiopia abandoned it as soon as they emigrated to Israel, Ethiopian and Egyptian Copts likewise are abandoning it contagiously.
The hygiene explanation is occasionally cited by practitioners of FGM – though any medical evaluation shows those claims to be 180° erroneous. There are no objective benefits to FGM in any form – but there are perceived benefits – for example the anthropologist Hanny Lightfoot-Klein reports that:
“it is believed in the Sudan that the clitoris will grow to the length of a goose’s neck until it dangles between the legs, in rivalry with the male’s penis, if it is not cut.”
So for someone believing this, clitoridectomy is a rational choice. Likewise nearly all practitioners of FGM believe that female sexual desire is so dangerously strong that unless it is in some way hobbled, it will become problematic.
>”However, I agree that adopting a culture centric attitude of outrage and moral superiority is unproductive.”
Hmmm… I AM outraged, very outraged, by FGM – and cultures that don’t cut their children ARE morally superior to those that do – at least WRT to the mutilating of children’s genitals – and I have no problems saying this.
However, if one cares about an issue one must move rapidly beyond mere expressions of outrage. I try to use the energy that would otherwise be wasted on outrage in better more productive ways – studying the issues, informing myself and thinking about things. But I wouldn’t want to lose an ounce of the outrage, because it is also ‘fuel’. I aspire to be like the swan – elegant and unruffled above the water, whilst my webby feet, fuelled by outrage, work hard against the current, out of sight. .
[SNIPPED BY TOC: THE SECOND HALF WAS A DUPLICATE OF THE FIRST.]
Lots of interesting stuff here, LSM. I look forward to all this and more being given greater prominence as a guest blog from you in due course.
Thanks Tom.
Sorry about the duplication. I thought, that like a Twix bar, my words were so damn good that your readers might want to read them twice 😉
We would benefit, I am sure, from reading your post as many times as it takes to fully digest its rich contents!
thankyou for this LSM, as sweetly and lucidly informative as always. I for one am still trying – without success thus far – to find that point in the “What I Think” blogposting Christian urged me to revisit where you supposedly first signalled your capitulation to wilful “trafficking/sex slavery” rhetoric. My failure to do this maaay indicate no more than the state of attention-spans here at Turpitude HQ, but I promise everyone I will persist! Meanwhile, apropos your closing line, may I ask if you have considered changing your operational handle to Leonard Anseriforme Mann?
Glad to be of service, Warb!
FGM is, once you get past the horror of it, a very fascinating subject – over the past couple of years I’ve found myself studying Arabic, koranic and Hadithic epistemology, the biography of Mohammed, Chinese, Liberian, Egyptian and Ethiopian History, Liberian secret societies, kinship structures, Game theory, Coptic theology, statistics, gyneacology and obstetrics, Sharia law, pre-islamic archaeology, ethics,….
If it weren’t all so bloody interesting I think I’d be at risk of becoming an FGM-bore!
>”Leonard Anseriforme Mann”
– haha – is that because I’m unruffled like a swan? or because I’m like a goose-neck-length clitoris?
This is a response to Warbling Turpitude down below, since things were getting stretched pretty thin down there.
I reckon there is every reason to believe that, without a certain measure of ‘obsessiveness’, and indeed emotional investment in what s/he does, a person can lose motivation all too easily. And ‘obsession’ could just as easily be applied – from ‘the outside’ – to one of your very own *activist* ilk. Hope you’re with me so far!
There is a difference, I believe, between passion for the truth and the establishment of justice, and obsession connected to a need to believe and emerge a savior in your own eyes against all else. The former endeavors to keep emotions in check; the latter gives in to them entirely, and goes where they lead them rather than where the evidence does. One should never confuse commitment to a cause with a fixation based on belief.
I would dearly appreciate knowing just which of my posts – the post considered in totum? – you would judge as being “absurd”, and why.
You often use a lot of elaborate wording to spread convoluted assessments and accusations that one has to read several times to make any sense of. That may be your style, but it can at times come off as an attempt to bury discourse in a load of deliberately difficult-to-interpret wording to create the veneer of “sophistication.”
As a devoted student of generative anthropology, sometimes referred to as the ‘little bang theory’ of the origin of language, I have certain fundamental components of what is human never far from my mind, and I apologize if something might sound a tad ‘obscure’ to you at any point. But absurd?
What you intend and how it comes off can differ wildly. Which, in turn, can put the validity of those very intentions in question.
I need to state clearly that I know nothing of Lensman’s lapse into “hysterics” and most especially nothing of any capitulation to blindly dysphemistic ‘sex trafficking’ hyperbole.
Bingo. This suggests you have not been following his blog as thoroughly as I was during its awesome heyday, as I was one of his most ardent followers and supporters. You need to understand this context in order for your firm critique of me in this thread to hold a full glass of water.
As you should have noted already, I reacted immediately when he seemed to touch on that type of talk in a recent reference made to ‘Rotherham’ (I was, in fact, surprised to receive no response on that from him).
I wasn’t. Which is precisely my point here, and is precisely the pattern from him over the past year since this change of focus from him began which I was referring to.
Neither do I know anything about any talk on his part of nefarious ‘paedo-sadists’ at large on the “dark web” .
Ibid. My main combination of concern and critique of Lensman being that he has shown a pattern of being increasingly susceptible to these emotionally potent hoaxes, provided they take on a secular or overtly anti-religious form, caring little for the evidence compared to the emotively charged fears and images they conjure forth in his mind. I actually composed a two-part blog about this psycho-emotional phenomenon that underlies these often sexually based and/or general child-endangerment moral panics right here on TOC about two years ago. Check the archives!
All I DO know is that Lensman’s writings about FGM specifically, and about Islam more generally, have been fresh, cogent, penetrating and wise – at every point I can think of.
Except they are heavily biased towards a very specific extremist sect of Islam, Wahhabism, much as the extreme Christian Right in America is so often used as a blanket condemnation of Christianity in general by some of the more zealous atheists and materialists–even though they are prone to similar types of extremism as long as it takes a decidedly secular form. In both cases, liberal Catholics and many mainstream Muslims who do not follow the extreme tenets outlined in their antiquated holy books written a few thousand years ago are bastardized along with the extremists, with the latter garnering so much disproportionate attention due to their “loudness”. This does not gel with my many years of experience living among many Muslims, including women who work jobs, earn their own income, and make many of their own decisions.
Granted I do not live in the Middle East, but this puts doubt in my mind that mainstream Muslims in these nations–for all the problems I concur that Sharia law causes–are anywhere near as barbaric in the modern world as the popularity of the Muslim-hating secularists claim. Especially when you consider the number of Middle Eastern nations that are quite secular themselves and do not rigidly enforce Sharia law. And especially when these claims are made by individuals who display all the disturbing hallmarks of a moral crusader in many of their other beliefs and claims. Including Lensman’s belief that forced child marriage remains prevalent in modern Middle Eastern nations, which is utterly absurd. This puts doubt on all of his other allegations.
So, ask yourself this, Warbling, and give yourself an objective answer: Are you truly following the supposed “wisdom” of his words on this topic, one that is clearly pushing him to emotional extremes? Or, are you going along with it because you loathe Islam–a popular thing these days–and he is telling you things you want to hear? Much like people in America who dislike the Jehovah’s Witnesses (often with good reason) accusing them of “harboring pedophiles”.
I followed many of your comments, Dissident, in direct relation to these, and could never see any actual reasoning IN them, other than that you *believed* that Lensman had, with his very critique, breached some crucial tenet of what you yourself hold most socially sacred (after all, the sacred IS the social..).
I consider going by actual evidence and keeping your emotions and desire to be a “savior” in check to be extremely important to upholding one’s principles. Not “sacred” as something akin to a belief that is not backed up by evidence. It’s truly bizarre, to be honest, that you read my statements this way, since throughout I was asking for evidence and in no way promoting a fixation on belief. But I think your bias in favor of Lensman due to his extreme anti-Islam stance is tainting your perceptions. You provided more evidence of this when you admitted you found it odd that he made comments alluding to an actual belief that the sex trafficking epidemic was actually true; and when you admitted you did not follow his own blog as I did.
HOW do you measure in your mind what is the correct degree of focus?
Demonstrable evidence provided through objective research, not beliefs based on an emotional need to believe this or that.
Can there be anything more deserving of increasing focus than a transplanting RELIGION that governments and states all across the ‘free western world’ have now placed officially beyond the reach of normal criticism?
When that focus becomes a total obsession that compromises the objectivity of the person in question, and sends them into the opposite extreme of the one you mentioned… then yes, it becomes a huge problem for both the many non-extremist Muslims who are unjustly targeted along with the extremists, along with the ability of the person in question to remain rational. Obsessions are by definition compromising to one’s objectivity, emotional control, fealty to demonstrable truth, and ability to reason effectively. They too often lead from righteous passion to unbridled hatred and bigotry. Just like the censorious American approach to properly criticizing the SJW movement does not justify one going to the opposite extreme and embracing white supremacy and misogyny. That is the line in the sand I’m referring to, my friend.
An unassented-to sacred being in our midst that has the potential to change everything on a scale comparable to ..even Americanization? How do you set about justifying your relegation of all this to so much pitiful pathology when it is the perpetual and relentless *auto-critique* generated by our own religious bedrock that might well be said to constitute the driving-force of all we should most love about our civilization?
Again, you are mistaking firm passion and commitment for obsession that leads to a compromise of one’s emotional control, objectivity, ability to reason, and ultimately, the jettisoning of the moral high ground in place of the same type of hateful extremism they purport to oppose. You can only triumph over a perceived evil by not becoming the flip side of the same.
Never forget, what one blithely calls the secular is just the sacred in a different form.
Thank you again for underscoring my major observation and making a strong point in support of my contention, however inadvertently. That which is “sacred” too often confines one to belief over reason.
For I ask you, Dissident, how could it possibly be otherwise?
I reiterate: Passion vs. obsession. Reasoned commitment vs. emotional fixation. Righteous indignation vs. hatred. Justice vs. revenge. Lines in the sand that can be too easily crossed if one does not keep their perspective and keep one’s emotions channeled in positive directions/pursuits.
>Granted I do not live in the Middle East, but this puts doubt in my mind that mainstream Muslims in these nations–for all the problems I concur that Sharia law causes–are anywhere near as barbaric in the modern world as the popularity of the Muslim-hating secularists claim.
I lived in Qatar for seven years and worked alongside many Muslims. I encountered a few extremists but most were moderate, reasonable people. The emir (ruler) in my time was keen to introduce western higher education, working in cooperation with Cornell University, one of America’s top Ivy League institutions, which set up a campus in Qatar with a medical college. There are female students:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University#Qatar_campus
Sheikha Moza, wife of the emir, has shared a conference platform with Michelle Obama, at which the latter was speaking out against FGM and calling for more education for girls, including higher education. Sheikha Moza has been a driving force behind the latter, helping to establish Education City near the capital, Doha. Six American universities, one British university and one French university now have branch campuses at Education City.
Hotbed of Wahhabist extremism? I don’t think so, despite Trump’s ignorant assertions along these lines.
first of all, i do need to bristle for a moment at the idea that I have ever been guilty of deliberate pretension! Your “an attempt to bury discourse in a load of deliberately difficult-to-interpret wording to create the veneer of “sophistication.” astounded me (I won’t even mention, of course, your bland confusion there of discourse with dialogue!). If I am not always instantly digestible, I must maintain that this is a good thing, for all I am ever doing – I apologize if this might sometimes be at others’ ‘expense’) is attempting to find fresh expression for certain understandings-of-things that have moved me very greatly in reading the uncommonly insightful and wise! Case in point might be my shot at saying why free representations of violence – and even of violent-sounding desire – may have everything to do with deferring actual violence.
And that’s where – may I say your all-too-familiar, auto-assimilation to a matter of internal ‘belief’ of what I identify as the sacred, is of the essence here. . What i mean by the sacred is NOT a mysterious, otherworldly quality in which one ‘believes’ – no, what *the sacred* does is measure the community’s sense of danger posed to itself by the mimetic desire aroused by by different phenomena. (I cannot be sure if you’ve detected that the whole conception of mimesis, and indeed its very relation to desire itself, is central to much of what I ‘go on about’).
And whether you Dissident fully realize it or not, mimesis is what your talk too finally converges on. As in the culmination of what you say in the recognition that, if we are to claim any moral ‘ground’ at all for our ‘own’, we must not end up indistinguishable from that which our entire motive has been to peg as falling morally short of the mark.
All the talk about distinguishing ‘passion’ from ‘obsession’ and ‘objectivity’ from ’emotion’ etc etc comes crashing right down to the sheer problem of differentiation, and the fear of its potential loss. That we might actually become what we fear and loathe the most. And that all our fine criticisms and discernments might be so much fuel for the mimetic crisis in which we are no longer capable of fully representing ourselves as individual minds and have thus opened the floodgates for violence alone to carry the day.
And nothing brings this reality to the fore more than the now global confrontation of a religion whose God is a jealous lover who demands nothing less than love in return, with a religion whose God is a sovereign demanding the discharge of religious duties. As has been pointed out often, there are no ‘moderate’ Christians. There are only Christians and soon-to-be-no-longer-Christians. As anyone can see today, ‘moderate’ priests are an ever-increasing redundancy. What I have to offer you Dissident, after consideration of many possibilities, are the following passages from Fr. Samir Khalil Samir:
“Many Westerners fear Islam as a “religion of violence”. Muslims often call simultaneously for tolerance and understanding as well as for violence and aggression. In fact, both options are present in the Qur’an and the sunna. These are two legitimate manners—two distinct ways to interpret, to understand, and to live Islam. It is up to the individual Muslim to decide what he wants Islam to be. . . . (p 18)
. . . If the Qur’an was indeed “sent down” by Allah, there is no possibility of a critical or historical interpretation, not even for those aspects that are evidently related to the customs of a particular historical period and culture. In the history of Islam, at a certain point, it was decided that it was no longer possible to interpret the text. Hence, today, even the mere attempt to understand its meaning and what message it aims to communicate in a certain context is regarded as a desire to challenge it. . . . (p. 42)
. . . In modern times as well, many efforts have been made in this direction but almost always in vain. The weight of the tradition and, above all, the fear of questioning the acquired security of the text have created a taboo: the Qur’an cannot be interpreted, nor can it be critically rethought. . . . (p. 43)
. . . I speak about the violence expressed in the Qur’an and practiced in Muhammad’s life in order to address the idea, widespread in the West, that the violence we see today is a deformation of Islam. We must honestly admit that there are two readings of the Qur’an and the sunna (Islamic traditions connected to Muhammad): one that opts for the verses that encourage tolerance toward other believers, and one that prefers the verses that encourage conflict. Both readings are legitimate. . . . (p. 65)
. . . Consequently, in the Qur’an there are two different choices, the aggressive and the peaceful, and both of them are acceptable. There is a need for an authority, unanimously acknowledged by Muslims, that could say: From now on, only this verse is valid. But this does not—and probably will never—happen. . . . (p. 71)”
I for my part lived in close proximity to Muslim communities in la France, not that long ago. I mostly hung with hilariously dissonant groups of well.. teenaged reprobates, with little psychedelic Korans swinging from their rear-view mirrors, but for me no description comes closer to summing up the spirituocultural atmosphere of this community in its entirety than ‘this is the sea in which the sharks may swim unobserved’; the intrinsic doctrinal ambivalence and fear of all challenge, not to mention permanent pressure of blackmail from counter-insurgency forces, ensuring an ocean of utter passivity along with acquiescence to the western-encouragement of their ‘culture’. Just please, please nobody ever mention the ideology or actual fulfillment of religous duties!
I’ve truncated what could prove to all too easily spill in every direction here…
>the whole conception of mimesis, and indeed its very relation to desire itself, is central to much of what I ‘go on about’
Fascinating! I’m sure this means a great deal to you, Turp, and I, for one, would like to hear more from you on this. Being reminded (not that I ever, ahem, knew a great deal on the subject!) of what mimesis is all about, I see in Wikipedia that it is about so many things, and has so many interpretations, that it is pretty much impossible to know what any individual writer means unless they explain in some detail.
The WP article says mimesis is “a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self”.
So that clears that up! Now we know what “go on about” 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis
>As has been pointed out often, there are no ‘moderate’ Christians. There are only Christians and soon-to-be-no-longer-Christians.
There is, to be sure, a very important sense in which Christianity (and Islam) are passionate religions: being willing to die as martyrs is seen as the true mark of sincerity.
I would suggest, though, that in recent generations there have been relatively few “real” Christians in this sense, and that a similar fate awaits Islam. Among most western Muslims I suspect it applies already.
It really does mean just exactly that, Tom – imitation. Its role in the structure of human motivation. The study of mimesis then, is the wholesale shifting of psychology from an individual onto an interdividual basis. Everything changed (well it apparently did in France and also in the US for a while) when Rene Girard published Deceit, Desire & the Novel in 1961, the reading of which can virtually tear your heart from your chest and yes, your mind from your brain! The book concerns the revelation, found in the great novels that define our passage from the 19th into the 20th century (think Flaubert, Stendhal, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Proust, et al) that the nature of human desire is mimetic and not, as heretofore understood, ‘romantic’.Think Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream; “Oh Hell! To choose love by another’s eye!” Think of the entire social transformation from external mediation, when fixed social and intellectual distance between subjects ruled the day, to internal mediation, where we all present to one another as models, rivals and obstacles for objects (and objectives) which we now share in common. Think of a child’s greater interest in what the other child has, even when that is exactly the same possession.. Mimesis is the open secret at the very heart of culture. One that we overlook in a thousand shades of meconnaissance or misrecognition…(sorry, my accent-keys are not working) Today mimesis is openly *fomented*, instead of being the thing most strictly suppressed and socially controlled, by every advertisng agency and marketeer on the planet.
Think of mimesis per se, the capacity to imitate, as the the trait that above all may be said to most profoundly characterize higher intelligence in animals… and how those countless ways in which that very capacity messed with instinctual ‘programming’, for which it was not prepared, so to speak,
led us directly towards the advent of humanity (here is where I will break off for now, so as to not err on the side of lecturing or something..) Suffice to say that for any Christian who had read Girard (crucial aspects of whose ‘fundamental anthropology’ are at the root of my own discipline ‘GA’), passion and sacrifice (martyrdom etc) are no longer at the centre of his thought. Rather, what has taken the place of those once structuring/containing functions – ie one mimetic crisis after another and the ever mounting potential for uncontainable violence on a global scale, is. Girard’s last work “Achever (‘completing’) Clausewitz” would probably be the greatest work of ‘apocalyptic’ thought you could ever hope to read. Based on RG’s insight that Christianity, uniquely among religions, clearly foresaw the possibility of its own failure. And then there’s the story of Peter Thiel…
But I have of course, only touched on any of this…
Even more fascinating!
Looks as though Rene Girard was a great ideas guy. His work appears to have anticipated the focus of current science on gene-culture co-evolution, especially with regard to the significance of language for the development of large-scale cooperation based on group loyalty via symbolic forms of allegiance to wholly imaginary entities such as “the nation” and “the church”.
However, great theorists have a way of generating cults. Freud is a good example. His work was long ago largely superseded by later science; but later Freudians continued to cling to outdated theory.
I find myself wondering whether Generative Anthropology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_anthropology ) might be going the same way, preferring theory to investigation. There is so much scientific work going on now. Palaeoanthropology, for instance, is being massively informed by DNA studies. Evolutionary psychology is no longer just a theoretical extension of Darwin into the human mind and social world: it actively tests hypotheses experimentally and draws on the great advances being made in neuroscience.
Is GA perhaps a bit wrapped up in itself, or am I doing it an injustice?
Magister Turpitude,
Strange as it is, I have no memory of running into ideas such as these (or I did, and said be damned with this shit), so I must ask if there are any easily retrieved works on this to which you can refer me.
Yes, I will do an appropriate search through the good old university library, but I am interested in work which you particularly think informative and worth reading.
Dear BJM…i have finally selected what I’m hopping over hopesville will be GIST-Y enough to take onboard ‘overnight’, so to speak, and yes, here ’tis .. as they might say in Texas, you don’t have to, go uptown, to get lowdown with (this) https://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4167
I fear that ‘over-week’ may be just a tad more appropriate.
I should have perhaps included there the observation that violence may be usefully defined as the convergence-of-now-mutually-indistinguishable-desires on a common object of desire
first of all, i do need to bristle for a moment at the idea that I have ever been guilty of deliberate pretension!
Then you must not re-read your posts very often, especially not before hitting the “send” button, and taking heed of the surfeit of fancy language you use, and a number that ends up rivaling any of my infamously lengthy posts in the past. This too often gets in the way of the person you’re engaging with understanding you rather than clarifying it, and can easily come off as a disguise for evading the point in a hundred different ways rather than addressing it.
Your “an attempt to bury discourse in a load of deliberately difficult-to-interpret wording to create the veneer of “sophistication.” astounded me (I won’t even mention, of course, your bland confusion there of discourse with dialogue!).
You make it very easy to get so confused, Warbling.
If I am not always instantly digestible, I must maintain that this is a good thing
No, it’s not. I may go way overboard with wordiness at times and consequently repetitive with the points I make, but I think most of the time I strive to make my points clear to the reader. I am one of those readers who do not dislike lengthy posts, but when they take more than a single reading to fully contemplate or digest…
— all I ever do… I apologize if this might sometimes be at others’ ‘expense’) is attempting to find fresh expression for certain understandings-of-things that have moved me very greatly in reading the uncommonly insightful and wise!
Then you too often confuse “fresh” expression with convoluted.
Case in point might be my shot at saying why free representations of violence – and even of violent-sounding desire – may have everything to do with deferring actual violence.
Anger-filled rhetoric, maybe. But actually outright asking for violence against this or that group… no, I think that intention is pretty clear.
And that’s where – may I say your all-too-familiar, auto-assimilation to a matter of internal ‘belief’ of what I identify as the sacred, is of the essence here. . What i mean by the sacred is NOT a mysterious, otherworldly quality in which one ‘believes’ – no, what *the sacred* does is measure the community’s sense of danger posed to itself by the mimetic desire aroused by by different phenomena.
Which can often be a mis-measurement based on uninformed opinions or beliefs that do not actually have actual evidence to back them up. This is what happens when emotion is used in patently destructive ways.
And whether you Dissident fully realize it or not, mimesis is what your talk too finally converges on. As in the culmination of what you say in the recognition that, if we are to claim any moral ‘ground’ at all for our ‘own’, we must not end up indistinguishable from that which our entire motive has been to peg as falling morally short of the mark.
We often fall morally short of the mark when we chase after phantasms rather than actual, objective entities or forces.
All the talk about distinguishing ‘passion’ from ‘obsession’ and ‘objectivity’ from ’emotion’ etc etc comes crashing right down to the sheer problem of differentiation, and the fear of its potential loss.
Fear of potential loss becomes a problem when that fear is far out of proportion to the possibility of actually losing what you love in that way. More often, it’s borne out of a deep-seated desire to play savior (and thus manufacture victims), or borne out of hate for a certain group that you then go out of your way to demonize as much as possible to rationalize your hatred. Such groups have, or do, take the form of the following examples: all Jewish people; all Muslims; all men; all white people; all black people; all MAPs. Etc., et al.
I for my part lived in close proximity to Muslim communities in la France, not that long ago. I mostly hung with hilariously dissonant groups of well.. teenaged reprobates, with little psychedelic Korans swinging from their rear-view mirrors, but for me no description comes closer to summing up the spirituocultural atmosphere of this community in its entirety than ‘this is the sea in which the sharks may swim unobserved’; the intrinsic doctrinal ambivalence and fear of all challenge, not to mention permanent pressure of blackmail from counter-insurgency forces, ensuring an ocean of utter passivity along with acquiescence to the western-encouragement of their ‘culture’. Just please, please nobody ever mention the ideology or actual fulfillment of religous duties!
Jeez. All of this, yes, warbling rhetoric sounds like you have been around pockets of extremists, who also happened to be reprobates (as extremists often become; which is part of my point), and then painted all Muslims, and to some extent, all religious people, that way.
I’ve truncated what could prove to all too easily spill in every direction here…
Thank you for that much.
well Mr Dissident sir, I believe I’ll bow out of this here particular exchange at this point, as you are now sounding (to me at least) all too ‘authoritarian’, and are evincing way too much of that familiar tendency for Americanos (you will forgive me please for so recklessly assuming your provenance) to assimilate what is said to them in a way that seeks only to absorb it in a sponge of readymade pre-conceptuality – as when for example you turn my attempted focus on the fundamental matter of just how humans go about differentiating between one another to a lecture on “rationalizing hatred”. What you so happily refer to as my “fancy language” is indeed no more than my efforts to find voice for things that are NOT usually expressed at all, and if you cannot tell the difference, and insist that I adhere to some mode of ‘clarity’ that you have already determined and prescribed as normative for all, then hey… What’s more you’ve obviously bypassed altogether my most carefully selected offerings on the realest problem we encounter with Islam, which I dare say you cannot really be bothered to think about seriously… haha, and this is nothing compared to the problem of how on earth I’m gonna effectively tackle what Tom has just laid :), without frisking too many (understandably) sensitive feathers all at once!
>this is nothing compared to the problem of how on earth I’m gonna effectively tackle what Tom has just laid 🙂
Relax, Turp, take your time. I await with both interest and patience.
Maybe it’s time to remind one an all that this is supposed to be the season of goodwill and merry festivity!
[…] At the Barbican: bums and barbarism […]
HELLO ALL, nice to see you —
I haven’t much time at the moment to read & reply to all these interesting posts I’ve missed while Real Life has had me busy, but, Tom, I hope it’s all right with you if I swing by and drop a few notes on Heretic-related info I’ve encountered in recent months, just in case they’re useful to somebody sometime? If not, moderate this post away, I quite understand, no hard feelings!
1.) Drew Gilpin Faust’s 1996 book Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War contains an interesting passage in chapter six. With so many men away in the war, and so many killed, “middle- and upper-class women met and were courted by men of much humbler social origins, men they would not normally have encountered before the war. Conventional notions about age differences began to crumble as well. In 1862 Ada Bacot bemoaned a new ‘fashion’ that she believed had ‘crept into society…that of a woman marrying a man younger than herself’ and an Alabama observer commented on ‘little boys not over thirteen or fourteen…flying around grown young ladies in Montgomery.’ ”
2.) I have finally read Khaled El-Rouayheb’s Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, here reviewed on Ipce by Steven Wozniak: https://www.ipce.info/library/journal-article/homosexuality-arab-islamic-world-1500-1800 For me it was a real eye-opener. The pederasty El-Rouayheb describes was a phenomenon not of a warrior caste, but of cultivated urban belles-lettrists. The mentoring aspect was present, in the close personal relationships between teachers and their pupils, but not as institutionalised or otherwise emphasised as it seems to have been in ancient Athens or among the medieval samurai. And while the boys admired and sometimes courted by men were typically somewhere in the 10-16 age range, they could be as young as 7 or 8 and as old as 20 or 21, which leaves room both for people we’d call exclusive paedophiles and for people we’d call teleiophiles. 14 was often considered the ideal age but this was in part a literary convention allowing comparison of the beloved’s face to the full, or 14-day, moon. A European traveller to the region said that local catamites were “likely of twelve, or fourteene years old, some of them not above nine, or ten.” In the poems some fans of beard-down composed for boys when it first appeared, we find hints of the age of puberty in that time and at that place: one dedicatee of such a poem was sixteen at the time of the big event, another seventeen, another eighteen and a fourth only fourteen. A few of the sources suggest that women as well as men were sometimes known or thought to find beardless boys attractive. And El-Rouayheb suggests that while sex with women — wives and prostitutes — was pretty freely available to men, courtship with women was less so, and therefore that the attraction of boys was that they offered men the opportunity to enjoy courting somebody. The tricky situation resulting for the boys seems to have been much the same as that existing for ancient Greek boys and, in many societies, for young women: don’t seem cold, but don’t seem too keen either; damned if you do, damned if you don’t!
3.) Lately there’s been some interest in Regency Tory landowner and diarist Anne Lister as “the first modern lesbian”. The BBC did two programmes on her, a documentary and a biopic, and frankly acknowledged in the biopic (Revealing Anne Lister, 2010) that Lister had her first romantic and sexual relationship at 13, with another 13-year-old girl, her schoolmate. The ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Posonby, who spent 50 years living out a rural idyll that attracted both admiration and disapproval, have also drawn attention as lesbian pioneers. This may be quite wrong: they were scandalised by the implication that their relationship was sexual, and it may not even have been romantic, but they clearly loved each other. They met in 1768 when Butler was 29 and Posonby 13, developed a close friendship, corresponded a whole lot, and finally succeeded in running away together when Butler was 39 and Posonby 23. And finally, the very with-it lesbian website Autostraddle posted a few years ago a list of remarks made by women interviewed for the famous Hite Report on female sexuality, which includes this: “At seven, I used to become highly aroused fantasizing kissing a certain girlfriend. By about twelve, I was fantasizing necking with both sexes. By about fourteen, I wanted to fuck; or, more mysterious and exciting and forbidden, do whatever it was the lesbians did! Now I do. And it’s great.”
No time for more at the moment but will be back again at some point — take care, all!
Lovely to have you back with us, “A”!
And it’s great to see you on good form, coming up with a goodly crop of very interesting information!
Thanks for this interesting stuff, A.
I was intrigued to read this passage in the linked review of El-Rouayheb’s “Before Homosexuality”:
===The book begins with a brief review of what the author calls the essentialist versus the constructionist views of homosexuality. The basic idea of the former is that the way in which sexuality is expressed and understood does not vary from culture to culture or from time period to time period. This is in contrast to the latter perspective, which finds that each culture and time period develops or constructs its own forms of sexuality.===
This is a somewhat misleading summary of an extremely interesting dichotomy in approaches to conceptualizing sexual orientation (essentialist v constructionist), which is as relevant to paedophilia as it is to homosexuality. I’d put the contrast this way: an essentialist asserts the slogan “born this way” while a constructionist aligns sexual behaviour with culture.
On this subject, I highly recommend (even tho I disagree with his conclusion) Jonathan Dollimore’s “Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault”.
Much of the book addresses the contrasting perspectives of Andre Gide and Oscar Wilde, who discussed their sexual exploits with boys in Morocco in precisely these terms. Gide considered his sexual orientation to be innate while Wilde insisted his interests were purely aesthetic and a conscious rejection of prevailing social norms.
One question Gide asked of himself was “why would a person choose to be homosexual when that condition is so despised?”. It’s interesting to ask, in the same way, why would anybody choose to be a paedophile. More subtly, is child loving an aesthetic or an instinct, or perhaps aesthetics is an instinct.
Thanks for the rec sean, I really must read that. Have read Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt of course. I’ve idly wondered sometimes if *some* CLs are people with a highly developed aesthetic sense who just can’t overlook flaws, e.g. in skin texture, present in older potential objects of desire.
Indeed, in sexual variation, there is much more than just differences in gender or age of attraction. Love can mix several components (called eros, storge and philia in ancient Greek), it can be materialistic or sentimental, and it can emphasise to various degrees its aesthetic and poetical aspects. I discuss that in several articles on my blog (see for instance ‘Poetic Eros’ in November).
I’d like to share the following if I may – my initially great excitement that someone was actually speaking forth – and in a prominent place – about the appalling deference shown (via PC natch) to FGM practice in the UK and US; this was the voice of one Elizabeth Yore:
“Women are supposed to be subjected and submissive and not to enjoy sex–period, end of story. That is its whole purpose. …. Its purpose is to rob females of sexual pleasure. As we speak, little girls are, for the rest of their lives, be robbed of sexual pleasure because of this hideous, ancient, barbaric practice. And it’s happening in the United States.”
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2018/11/21/elizabeth-yore-on-fgm-silence-from-feminists-has-been-deafening-on-this-issue/
but then, but THEN, locating Ms Yore (a pretty fierce Catholic “child protection” attorney) on Twitter, I saw her guidelines for conducting a little girls’ sleepover party!!! It was unbelievable! She wished only for the long shadows of absolute adultism to preserve them in such perfectly sterile darkness those little gals might well be heading to a coma party!! Plus of course she’s got about ten million ants in her pants about “priestly abuse”, and waits *only* for the day when the new pope will be NAMED Pope Scandal IV,
Whereupon I dispatched a comment (on her ‘sleepover’ post), claiming she was clearly in the business of unconsciously substituting the crushing of little girls’ sex drives for (no longer crushable) women’s ones!
I realize nobody’s big on self-extinguishment here, but this image is just too sweet not to share https://imgur.com/wEZTwN6
And things have gotten much worse in the USA these past few days:
“A historic ruling that declared unconstitutional a US law banning female genital mutilation (FGM)” (22 November 2018)
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/22/us-is-moving-backwards-female-genital-mutilation-ruling-a-blow-to-girls-at-risk
I fear that laws protecting children from FGM will start tumbling throughout the Western world as we stand passively by.
As it is, in the UK, laws against FGM are not being implemented. Social workers, courts and police preferring the same ‘cultural sensitivity’ that turned a blind-eye to the child-sex-traffiking scandals of Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Huddersfield, Oxford and countless others…
Nor, it seems is much concern from #metoo and other so-called ‘women’s rights’ activists.
But the saddest irony is that so much of the paedophile community – a community that prides itself on being at the vanguard of children’s sexual rights, arguing for the importance of children’s consent – seems silent and unconcerned. Sometimes almost complicit.
Is FGM not a test case for our integrity? for our disinterested love of children?
Do we defend children’s sexual rights because we truly believe in them?
Or do we defend children’s sexual rights because the granting of those rights might give us sexual access to kids?
As the sole western democracy that routinely mutilates the genitals of boy babies, it doesn’t seem too surprising that the US should take a soft approach to FGM. It is, after all, the home of J H Kellogg, who advised the application of caustic chemicals to the clitori of masturbating girls.
It is interesting tho, that attempts to introduce compromise procedures, where the clitoris of a girl child is pricked with a pin in a clinic, are vociferously rejected by anti-FGM activists, even where this compromise can be shown to reduce far more harmful underground practices (and, incidentally, represents a minute fraction of the harmfulness of male genital mutilation).
Ultimately this whole question of mutilating children’s genitals is a very interesting study of real world articulation of the formal concepts of ‘harm’ and ‘consent’ that are so relevant to children’s sexual agency.
>”It is interesting tho, that attempts to introduce compromise procedures, where the clitoris of a girl child is pricked with a pin in a clinic…”
I can’t help wondering – if pricking is so harmless, why do it in a clinic?
Pricking is acceptable to some Indonesian immigrants – but this is simply because pricking is what they practised in their native land anyway. I have seen no research that indicates that immigrant communities that practice the common forms of FGM (clitoridectomy, excision or infibulation) are ready to accept pricking as an alternative (if you know of any I’d be grateful if you could point me towards it).
FGM is not a ritual or an initiation rite. For those practising it FGM is a rational and functional choice. In the Sudan, Somalia and Egypt, if the hole left after the infibulation is too large, parents are known to have the child reinfibulated to have its size reduced – this indicates that the parents see the procedure as very much functional, not symbolic. Therefore it will make no more sense to a pious and loving parent to just symbolically and nominally ‘mutilate’ a child, than it would for a western parent to have their child symbolically and nominally ‘educated’. When a practice is functional, ineffective substitutes are unlikely to be acceptable.
FGM is tied up with questions of religion, purity, marriageability, honour and chastity – and has the function of subduing the sexuality of child, and of the woman she will grow up to be. Since it is thought that an uncut girl is guaranteed to be unfaithful and promiscuous, being cut reassures potential husbands of her chastity, fidelity and purity, and thus gives her access to her community’s marriage market (this in societies where marriage is the only means of security and status for a girl/woman). Immigrant communities tend to marry their daughters and sons within the original intramarrying group, often looking to their native land for husbands – this puts great pressure on the parents to maintain the original FGM practices.
Pricking may be part of a solution. But I feel it serves more as a bone for the guard dog to keep it quiet, whilst real FGM establishes itself and normalises itself (as we are seeing in the US and elsewhere).
Yes, probably shooting from the hip there, maybe reading to much into reports such as … https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/health/policy/07cuts.html
the esprit de l’escalier strikes…
>” it doesn’t seem too surprising that the US should take a soft approach to FGM”
I think it is somewhat unfair to blame the USA for this, rather than those who have forced this through and who will consider this as a ‘victory’. If there is a ‘victim’ here it is the USA, including those girls who will be ‘cut’ with impunity as a result.
This is ‘Lawfare’ – a form of war consisting of the use of the legal system against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, tying up their time or winning public relations victories. It works and there are daily examples of it working. We must not overestimate the capacity of the courts and legal systems to resist such attacks.
One should note that Judge Bernard Friedman, who presided on this case, was reluctantly forced into this verdict:
“As laudable as the prohibition of a particular type of abuse of girls may be … federalism concerns deprive Congress of the power to enact this statute. Congress overstepped its bounds by legislating to prohibit FGM … FGM is a ‘local criminal activity’ which, in keeping with longstanding tradition and our federal system of government, is for the states to regulate, not Congress.”
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/11/20/female-genital-mutilation-michigan/2074239002/
To achieve this kind of ‘victory’ requires a great deal of resources and funding. I don’t doubt that powerful and influential interests, such as Saudi Arabia, the Moslem Brotherhood and others, financed this. These groups have exploited vulnerabilities and widened loopholes that frequently exist in complex human rights-based legal systems.
I can’t pretend to understand the distinction between a ‘union’ and a ‘confederacy’ here.. What constitutional device allowed congress to outlaw slavery, for instance, but not MGM?
Where I live, FGM is against the law and MGM is permitted but discouraged.
In general, I’d interpret the Indonesian form of FGM, which often involves nothing more than a pinch with fingernails or some cayenne pepper, as a historical, culturally driven amelioration of the obvious harmfulness of excision, infibulation, etc. Is it not possible to encourage African immigrants on this path, with a bit of stick and a bit of carrot?
I mean, as you point out, what’s the alternative? A default tolerance for a harmful practice that violates human rights?
“but not MGM”
I meant to say .. but not FGM
>”I can’t pretend to understand the distinction between a ‘union’ and a ‘confederacy’ here”
Me neither!
>”In general, I’d interpret the Indonesian form of FGM, which often involves nothing more than a pinch with fingernails or some cayenne pepper, as a historical, culturally driven amelioration of the obvious harmfulness of excision, infibulation, ”
I understand that pricking and other mild type IV procedures in Indonesia are pre-Islamic practices that have been maintained. Pricking is practised by syncretic Moslems and constitutes only about 4% of FGM practices in Indonesia.
The historical evidence is sketchy, but I recently read that Syncretic Moslems rejected the islamic FGM practices imported by Arab settlers in the 13th Century, referring to them dismissively as ‘an Arab practices’. As such I don’t think it is a mitigated form of Islamic FGM.
>”I mean, as you point out, what’s the alternative? A default tolerance for a harmful practice that violates human rights?”
I really don’t know.
My instinct is zero tolerance in countries where FGM is not yet an established practice, whilst the problem is still sufficiently small for zero-tolerance to be effective (part of this would be regular inspections of at-risk girls, as well as education programs in at-risk immigrant communities concerning the law, risks and penalties. As to penalties – if a person who ‘sexually abuses’ their child loses custody of that child, then I don’t see why a person who GBH to their child should be treated any differently).
As to countries where it is established … well, that’s a very difficult problem indeed since FGM is so tied up with marriageability and religion that one has to tear up the roots of the culture to eradicate it.
Gerry Mackie draws interesting parallels between footbinding and FGM. In China footbinding was eradicated in a single generation through the use of ‘pledge associations’ – in which families would agree not to bind their daughters’ feet and also, crucially, to have their sons marry only girls with unbound feet.
http://investigadores.cide.edu/aparicio/dape/LecturasOptativas/5_Mackie_Footbinding.pdf
Similar pledge associations have been tried in Africa WRT FGM, but with (I would argue) only limited success. There has not been the kind of sudden mass shift that was seen with footbinding – in fact FGM, taken by most metrics, is a booming phenomenon, spreading, taking on harsher forms and increasing numerically. The fact that FGM is now a problem in the West is a sign of this.
I think the crucial difference is that whilst both footbinding and FGM essentially function as gatekeepers to marriage, footbinding had no religious dimension to it.
A prima facie reading of the Quran (in particular verse 30:30 “…adhere to the fitrah…”) and the sahih (authentic) Hadith, and applying established islamic hermeneutics, at worst, mandates FGM, at best, leaves islamic jurisdictions unable to forbid it.
Very interesting, thank you!
“I understand that pricking and other mild type IV procedures in Indonesia are pre-Islamic practices”
I wasn’t aware of this. It would be extremely useful to plot separate culture streams practicing genital mutilation and determine how and where it has originated independently. For example, does the traditional MGM practiced in Oceania have roots in SE Asia? Does the subincision practiced in Australia also have roots elsewhere? Have these practices arisen spontaneously all over the globe or is there some archaic Ur-circumciser? Is hygiene a valid explanation for multiple origins, or are the risks always greater than the benefits?
“Gerry Mackie draws interesting parallels between footbinding and FGM. In China footbinding was eradicated in a single generation through the use of ‘pledge associations’”
I love this idea but I think an aspect of genital mutilation that may be less evident in footbinding is the level of disgust evoked by the unmodified body site. I think this goes beyond aesthetics.
For example, a common perception in the US, shared by men and women, is that the foreskin is an intrinsically smelly and offensive appendage. This perception is echoed in countries where FGM is the norm, where an uncut female vulva is smelly and offensive. Tellingly, medical journals in Egypt and elsewhere continue to publish papers extolling the health benefits of FGM and its effectiveness as a prophylaxis against STIs.
Also worth noting that sexual matters are commonly shrouded in secrecy, especially in the very countries that reveal a subconscious hostility toward sexual expression by mutilating their children’s sex organs. This makes the conversation especially difficult to initiate, precisely where it is most needed.
However, I agree that adopting a culture centric attitude of outrage and moral superiority is unproductive.
Sorry, not to have gotten back to you Sean – my wordpress notification system sometimes goes quiet on me. To avoid the spaghetti – I’m going to post my reply as a fresh comment thread.
Wonderful it is to hear from you LSM and of course I had your good self very much in mind when I made my post! I’m very glad you raise the sorts of questions you do here, but ‘freak’ when I see your (seemingly casual?) deployment of the term “child sex trafficking” which I would not expect one of your calibre to do! Having long followed the work of that indefatigable wonder Maggie McNeill, I am ‘alert to’ every single instance in which the marauding great political-blunderbuss of a term ‘trafficking’ occurs in print. As MM points up without surcease, the term can be used to mean almost anything at all, and is invariably employed in just such a way at almost every point of the political compass. Attached to the explosive term ‘child’, it passes swiftly into dysphemism-land.
Once upon a time the likes of Rotherham* was less, or perhaps more, than what I will call for the moment an ‘Instant Signifier’, one so instant in fact it can be used in conversation pretty much as a ‘blunt weapon’, No qualification of terms required! It’s just ‘Rotherham’! But I recall when it was still possible – at the likes of Spikedonline, to examine at close hand the claims made in the notorious “report”, to assess the veracity of that figure “1400 girls” (creeping up and up ever since to where I have seen it hit “1700”), and indeed the great ambiguities running through what personal testimonies (from girls) are actually supplied in that report. The kinds of vagueness and ambiguity that revealed to any attentive reader the part played – by these girls’ own various desires and resentments as (what I’ll call for the time being) disaffected cultural agents in the overall unfolding of the scene.
It’s my strongest feeling that if we let ourselves be swept onto the level where we KNOW the dysphemistic power that words like ‘Rotherham’ (et al) automatically have, we risk losing all sight of and trust in fact-gathering in favour of well, producing effect. The engagement of a ‘novel’ immigrant population with largely bored and frustrated locals is I think, a complex encounter that should never, ever be subsumed into an all-singing, all-dancing sponge-term such as ‘trafficking’, to be subsequently brandished at will. It can only degrade the potential dialogue.
And now for the use of “rights”, which I think is (almost) equally subject to misuse! But here I think I should make an *attempt* to address that one in context of my reply to our correspondent who has raised, most excellently, the matter of abortion…
Again, LSM, I am pleased as pie to have you right here on the playing-page with us!
Good to see scepticism over those Rotherham numbers etc, Turp.
I could well become engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the coming months with the author of the Rotherham report (well, face-to-face combat at least), as you will discover in my next blog, coming shortly. An opening skirmish is already underway.
dear Tom, all I can say for the moment to that is a straightforward – and joyful – WOW!
Dear Mr LSM,
A long time ago you commented on a very early draft of a paper I was working on. I’ve finally got a fair bit of work done on it, and would love to show and discuss with you (haven’t done a show and tell for long time!) if you are interested.
I realise you have stated a disinterest in returning to consideration of past activities, but if you are even vaguely interested, let me know, as your comments have created a large change in the work in question.
Cheers, and I hope you don’t mind posting this Mr Tom.
(Apparently I am returning to my childhood, or some strange mental place …)
>Cheers, and I hope you don’t mind posting this Mr Tom.
No problem!
hi BJ,
Yes, I’d be happy to read through your paper – but it’ll take a while – I’ve got quite a heavy work-load for the next few months. Email me the paper, and if I don’t get back to you in a month’s time, feel free to give me a reminder.
>”you have stated a disinterest in returning to consideration of past activities”
Hmm, did I say that? I will be returning to blogging, but my concerns have shifted somewhat from ‘paedophile rights’ to ‘children’s sexual rights’.
Away it shall go, to the old email address I assume (?).
Childhood sexual rights — a good area to look at, and I’m glad you are going back to blogging about this.
Let me be honest here, Lensmen. There was a time, not that long in the past really, that I would look forward to your posts on your own blog and over here more than the vast majority of others here in the Kind community. You had some of the best, well thought out posts and blogs that I had ever read in the pro-choice community. You made me think about numerous topics very hard, and left me truly awed by your brilliant analyses. Then… this obsession with Islam started, and now it escalates to this.
Let me answer your query regarding your out of line and very old saw accusation. Maybe others in this community do not have these obsessions of yours about forced child marriage being a global epidemic, or genital mutilation being a comparably extreme problem, or that sexual trafficking of kids is a global epidemic yadda yadda yadda. What’s next from you, claims that Satanic ritual abuse is a worldwide problem again? Maybe it’s not because we objectify kids as sexual objects and care nothing else about them, but simply because we pay more attention to actual empirical evidence and have better control over our emotions. We have more interest in actual facts than emotional crusades that causes us to see variations of “Pizzagate” everywhere in some form or other, and more interest in empowering kids so they can confidently and competently make their own decisions rather than dealing with an overpowering emotional need to play “savior.” You know, the way you used to be before you somehow got caught up in all of these out of control emotions.
Now you say your focus has changed from “pedophile rights” to “child sexual rights.” Considering what I have seen from you since this change in you started, I can’t help worrying that this use of the term “rights” will turn out to be an emotionalistic euphemism for protectionist rhetoric.
As it is, I feel I can take no claim you make seriously any longer. I am not giving up on you, but I see this progressing further rather than receding from you with this post, close to a year after I last saw you post. I hope you take this for what it is, a final request that you please do an objective introspective self-analysis, with the same skillful alacrity you did about so many topics in the past, instead of personal attacks (which this isn’t). I may sound unfair here, but I have seen more than enough of this from you, especially concerning the high standards you made us expect from you.
Just who the HELL is the operational “we” in these your assertions, Dissident?
In every possible respect this post of yours verges on the absurd, or on a quasi-pathological need of yours to pick a fight concerning *wrong thoughts* about the obviously never less than profound matter of ISLAM and its variously insidious fruits? It is with pure incredulity that I read your prefatory mumble about the wonders of Lensman’s ‘former glories’ (choke), all of them achieved BEFORE he was suddenly overtaken by what you, his appointed therapist and adjudicator, have decided are his “obsessions”….? Yours would be the most egregious departure from controlled, constructive flight that I think I’ve ever seen from a regular contributor to this blog. Not since you dispatched an unbelievably simplistic sentiment on the notion of “othering” (as if perceived sameness wasn’t at least as much the problem before us as perceived difference, etc etc..) have I been moved to express such as dismay as I do now…
Do consider FGM, consider female genital mutilation. You probably don’t want to, but just for a few seconds. In this charming ethnic custom, several women grab a terrified pubescent girl, pry her legs apart, and cut her private parts with a razor blade and no anesthetic, thus screwing up her sex life forever. The girls only occasionally die from an ensuing infection, so it doesn’t really matter. Unless, of course, you are the girl.
But you are, in fact ‘Dissident’, whose ‘reasons’ for wishing that we bypass altogether the culture behind this and loft ourselves into an atmosphere where we can both bang on about “empirical evidence” and speak of it from a standpoint of the “empirical we”, are beyond all intelligibly-moral comprehension…
I’ll be glad to respond to you, Warbling. Even though you have a lot of nerve to call anyone else “absurd” based on some of your posts, I will nevertheless do so with as much due courtesy as I can manage, both because it’s rightfully expected by Tom and because calling people names is not actual productive discourse.
Just who the HELL is the operational “we” in these your assertions, Dissident?
That would be those of us who came to like and respect Lensman very much and thus to continue to expect the type of critical thinking standards and control over emotion that we previously came to expect.
In every possible respect this post of yours verges on the absurd, or on a quasi-pathological need of yours to pick a fight concerning *wrong thoughts* about the obviously never less than profound matter of ISLAM and its variously insidious fruits?
Um, no, Warbling. It’s about finally having had enough of this from Lensman, someone I came to respect immensely, after seeing it continue to escalate to this point. I have already gone over and over with the matter of Islam, and despite my dislike for Sharia law, I continue to disagree that forced child marriage is widespread under its banner, or that the majority of its adherents continue to take it to extremes, or practice its more antiquated historical tenets to the letter.
It is with pure incredulity that I read your prefatory mumble about the wonders of Lensman’s ‘former glories’ (choke), all of them achieved BEFORE he was suddenly overtaken by what you, his appointed therapist and adjudicator, have decided are his “obsessions”….?
I call it like I see it, Warbling. And I have, sadly, seen it numerous times over my many years as a social activist, both within and outside this community. Learn to look past your emotional image of Lensman to the reality of what his posts have been like for the past year or so, ever since his obsessive focus on the evils of Islam started. You do not have to be an MHP (mental health professional) to see that; you simply need to have lots of experience with social activism and to have been a dedicated follower of his blog.
Yours would be the most egregious departure from controlled, constructive flight that I think I’ve ever seen from a regular contributor to this blog.
Because I have seen enough of this from Lensman, and IMO, he finally crossed several lines when he accused the pro-choice camp of possibly not caring about the actual well-being of kids and only wanting carte blanche sexual access to them. One of the oldest of the old saws and characteristics of antis, and members of the Kind community who look for Strawman fodder to turn against their own community in order to rationalize their emotionally out-of-control savior complex.
Not since you dispatched an unbelievably simplistic sentiment on the notion of “othering” (as if perceived sameness wasn’t at least as much the problem before us as perceived difference, etc etc..) have I been moved to express such as dismay as I do now…
If you knew of my many, many years of honesty and commitment to the principles I adhere to, you would not be so dismayed. I try to go where the evidence takes me, not my feelings. In fact, others who truly do know me well (i.e., Christian) have actually expressed surprise that I took this long to respond as I did to this escalation of behavior from Lensman contrasted to the man whose blog I followed so assiduously in the past. And I waited this long precisely because I had a lot of respect for him, considered him a friend, and kept hoping he would get over these fixations that were gradually leading him down the dark side of the emotional spectrum. In fact, I had often engaged with him on the matter, both on his blog and here, in the past. When I saw him make the typical remarks about the faux sex trafficking “epidemic” (which he should know better about) and the out of line attack on the pro-choice camp here that I mentioned above… that was enough for me.
Do consider FGM, consider female genital mutilation. You probably don’t want to, but just for a few seconds. In this charming ethnic custom, several women grab a terrified pubescent girl, pry her legs apart, and cut her private parts with a razor blade and no anesthetic, thus screwing up her sex life forever. The girls only occasionally die from an ensuing infection, so it doesn’t really matter. Unless, of course, you are the girl.
To the contrary, Warbling, I have, and always have, been very concerned about all aspects of youth rights, including their medical rights. What I have not done, however, is obsessively fixate on one aspect of it that packs a particularly big emotional punch, and use it as a rationale to attack entire groups of people or take my focus away from the specific principles that underlie establishing full political empowerment of younger people. As opposed to the obsessive emotional focus that leads to the belief that forced childhood marriage, international sex trafficking, Satanic ritual cults (Lensman is too secular for this one, but he can and has readily adopted its secular versions — e.g., the child sex trafficker), real hidden torture sites to be found all over the Dark Web, the hysterical crusade against vaccines (Lensmen hasn’t gotten to that one to my knowledge; but others have), and goddess knows what next, are rampant. This is what such a fixation causes, and the lack of such a fixation should not be taken as an indication that we do not care about that specific matter.
But you are, in fact ‘Dissident’, whose ‘reasons’ for wishing that we bypass altogether the culture behind this and loft ourselves into an atmosphere where we can both bang on about “empirical evidence” and speak of it from a standpoint of the “empirical we”, are beyond all intelligibly-moral comprehension…
Not if you put your hysterics and hatred for Islam in general into proper perspective, take a metaphorical chill pill, and put your reasoning cap on. Anyone who espouses belief in the absurd notions that these cultures in the modern world are rabidly practicing forced child marriage on a wide scale, or that sex trafficking with kids (or even in general) is rampant, or that the Dark Web might be full of actual torture photos of youths kidnapped on a wide scale to provide such “entertainment” for an eager array of (presumably Kind) customers, gives me pause when they allege that pre-pubescent girls in huge numbers are actually held down and have part of their genitals cut off with no anesthetic, while they are kicking and screaming in agony all along. You can dislike a culture, a religion, and any of their specific practices without resorting to such hysterics and making them appear more barbaric than anyone in the modern world may actually be, and without causing you to go over the deep end emotionally that sends you down the path of the moral crusader. After seeing everything Lensman has come to embrace over the past year, I am going to do research on this specific practice and determine if it is factually correct–you know, that evidence over belief thing you seemed to have scoffed at, Warbling.
Evidence, Dissident? Go and live in a Middle Eastern city where the divorced women gather on street corners and beg after being thrown out with their daughters, as I have seen with my own eyes.
The husband keeps the sons, but throws out the girls and the mothers can’t even return to their birth homes because, being divorced, they are forever dishonoured.
Evidence about FGM? The university libraries are full of it! Read about the ‘pharaonic degree’ of FGM, if you have a strong enough stomach!
M T-W.
And there are no homeless men in these Middle Eastern cities? Men are provided all the material abundance they require? Only divorced women and kids find themselves in this type of situation? This sounds more like a class issue than a gender-based issue to me.
As for the FGM issue, I am going to do some research on it, as I find it difficult to believe that it’s done as callously and barbarously as is claimed. This is especially the case when said claims are made by those with both a passionate hatred of Islam in general and who are believers that so many refuted emotionalistic claims of a similar nature–the sex trafficking “epidemic”, the authentic “torture sites” allegedly permeating the Dark Web–are rampant in the world today. Such beliefs do not leave much credibility to the emotional objectivity of the person making them.
You misunderstand me, Dissident. It is not Islam I hate, it is the people who do those foul things to helpless children whom I hate.
Read the research on FGM, though. You will find that a great deal of it is written by educated Islamic women. One of whom wrote that the ultimate betrayal was looking around and finding that one of the people holding her down so that she could be cut was her own mother!
And of course men and boys suffer in Islam, but I would suggest to you that being entirely infibulated and then sown up and only being able to pee through a tiny hole… Should I REALLY go on? Do you insist, or shall I tell you how the man has to cut his bride open on their wedding night?
You think I’m lying? READ THE DAMNED RESEARCH!
M T-W.
My remarks earlier in praise of moderate Islam in Qatar were definitely not meant to deny that the extreme forms of FGM really are ghastly. Moderate Muslims would agree,
OK, Tom, I take your moderate, civilised views for granted! And yes, there are many moderate and highly civilised Muslims, but I have lived for years in Iran and in the UAE and I have worked in Qatar, too.
Thanks for the calming words! Best wishes, Mike.
This is a response to Michael-Teare-Williams down below, regarding the FGM issue.
Here is the thing, Michael. I too hate horrible things done to children. The fact that I do not fixate on one or two in particular and “crusade” against them does not mean I am “okay” with it because I may only care to get my loins off from kids, as Lensman suggested in that thread. This is why I focus on emancipating kids from being under the all-powerful authority of adults, so that any type of religious ritual–whether violent or not–or anything else for that matter, can be forced upon them by adults that “own” them. This should put the kibosh on any of the moral crusaders in our community (and elsewhere) who claim we do not care about the well-being of kids simply because we do not obsessively focus on a particularly emotionally jarring example of the many awful things done to kids, which always suspiciously seem to be attached to some wider bias (e.g., against religion in general, or a specific religion, or some secular-based issue like the anti-vaccine, dark web, or sex-trafficking nonsense).
Also, I find it hard to believe that young girls, of such an age that they are old enough to remember clearly, are literally held down, fully conscious and with no anesthetic, and forced to painfully endure part of their anatomy being cut off. This makes me suspicious for many reasons, and I certainly do not believe this to be a widespread practice in Muslim nations, let alone among Muslims in general, any more than the nonsense that forced child marriage remains widespread among them. As an example, I was circumcised, and I understand that is widely considered to be an uncalled for form of boy genital mutilation that is said to be terribly painful. The thing is, it was done within a few days of my birth, not when I was old enough to remember it and with me held down kicking and screaming in agony all the while.
Oops, this was meant to go at the top of the comments!
Dissy (and others) I will be on the road and very busy for the next few days so please expect delays with posts held for long periods before moderation.
Once again, Dissident, I urge you to go go to a university library and read the actual accounts of women who were held down as children and so cruelly butchered.
Are you saying that these women are lying?
Secondly, I too was circumcised as a child, but only because, aged six, I contracted a persistent infection. My father was a doctor and even he couldn’t fix it, so I had the operation because this was during World War 2 and penicillin was only available for the troops.
Whatever, but I will remember the AGONY until the day I die.
You can temporise all you like, but you will never make the sexual mutilation of children permissible for any other reason than MEDICAL NECESSITY. As in my case?
M T-W.
Dissy, if you email me at my “agapeta” address as I have suggested, I can in reply send you a few academic papers on GM (both F and M). Currently I do not have your email address.
Thankyou for responding, Dissident. (Oh god, I so hope this doesn’t get turned to a broken necklace down the page..it’s looking thinner there at your last paragraph..) First, let me say that my choice of ‘absurd’ was motivated by thought of the (cognate) ‘dialogues de sourds’, which as I’m sure you know means ‘exchange of the deaf” – a situation that your resort to the language of ‘obsessive focus’ ‘excessive emotion’ and so on, can ultimately only result in, I feel.. I reckon there is every reason to believe that, without a certain measure of ‘obsessiveness’, and indeed emotional investment in what s/he does, a person can lose motivation all too easily. And ‘obsession’ could just as easily be applied – from ‘the outside’ – to one of your very own *activist* ilk. Hope you’re with me so far!
I would dearly appreciate knowing just which of my posts – the post considered in totum? – you would judge as being “absurd”, and why. As a devoted student of generative anthropology, sometimes referred to as the ‘little bang theory’ of the origin of language, I have certain fundamental components of what is human never far from my mind, and I apologize if something might sound a tad ‘obscure’ to you at any point. But absurd?
I need to state clearly that I know nothing of Lensman’s lapse into “hysterics” and most especially nothing of any capitulation to blindly dysphemistic ‘sex trafficking’ hyperbole. As you should have noted already, I reacted immediately when he seemed to touch on that type of talk in a recent reference made to ‘Rotherham’ (I was, in fact, surprised to receive no response on that from him). Neither do I know anything about any talk on his part of nefarious ‘paedo-sadists’ at large on the “dark web” . All I DO know is that Lensman’s writings about FGM specifically, and about Islam more generally, have been fresh, cogent, penetrating and wise – at every point I can think of. I followed many of your comments, Dissident, in direct relation to these, and could never see any actual reasoning IN them, other than that you *believed* that Lensman had, with his very critique, breached some crucial tenet of what you yourself hold most socially sacred (after all, the sacred IS the social..).
HOW do you measure in your mind what is the correct degree of focus? Can there be anything more deserving of increasing focus than a transplanting RELIGION that governments and states all across the ‘free western world’ have now placed officially beyond the reach of normal criticism? An unassented-to sacred being in our midst that has the potential to change everything on a scale comparable to ..even Americanization? How do you set about justifying your relegation of all this to so much pitiful pathology when it is the perpetual and relentless *auto-critique* generated by our own religious bedrock that might well be said to constitute the driving-force of all we should most love about our civilization?
Never forget, what one blithely calls the secular is just the sacred in a different form. For I ask you, Dissident, how could it possibly be otherwise?
>(Oh god, I so hope this doesn’t get turned to a broken necklace down the page..i
The view I see from the moderator’s “desk” is full page. By all means re-post at the top of the comments page if it is too narrow.
WJT: to have an idea of the problem raised by Dissy, go to the comments on LSM’s post https://consentinghumans.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/what-i-think-part-2/ and see there my comment with scholarly references, and the way LSM responded to it (just search “Christian” there).
I THANKYOU for this directive, Christian, to which I shall adhere ASAP. I do for sure need to update myself on the terrible fate of Sisyphus’s current boulder…;)
Dissy, I am not astonished by your comment, I rather wonder why this did not erupt before. Indeed, I share your concern since one year ad a half. Write me at the email address indicated at the bottom of any post on my blog, and I will privately explain you why.
As I told Warbling, no need to be astonished that I took this long. I was one of Lensman’s most firm supporters, and I admired him immensely. I went back and forth with him about these matters before (particularly the Islam thing), but I had too much respect for him for a full confrontation. But enough is enough. I say this as much out of concern for him as I do over the disillusionment and anger at his statements and accusations. I went through this before, including with Todd Nickerson, and it is quite disheartening to me when this happens. I will email you soon, my friend.
>”we pay more attention to actual empirical evidence”
I get my statistics on FGM from UNICEF, WHO, and other reputable agencies and researchers who work directly with communities in situ.
Where do you get YOUR statistics on FGM from Dissident?
I am not astonished that the US is soft on female genital mutilation. This is the country that invented medically justified child genital mutilation. Before that, child or adolescent genital mutilation existed only in tribal rituals (for boys and for girls) or under religious prescriptions (mainly for boys in Judaism and Islam). In the 19th century, US doctors mutilated boys and girls to prevent masturbation, and various health benefits were also invented for the operation. Girls have been mutilated by doctors also in the 20th century, and the mutilation of baby boys (neonatal circumcision) is now still routinely practised by doctors for spurious health reasons. The practice is not without danger for health and sometimes life, and anyway it removes one of the most sexually sensitive part of the penis. The US-dominated UNO condones male circumcision, and turns a blind eye on brutal tribal practices when victims are boys. This under usual sexist cliches that girls are “fragile” but boys are “tough”.
The current justifications for mutilating boys in the US is similar to the one for mutilating girls in Africa: http://www.fgmnetwork.org/intro/mgmfgm.php
Child genital mutilation has always been linked to imposing gender stereotypes. Where you abuse one gender, you will necessarily abuse the other. Ashley Montagu fought to abolish all child genital mutilation, both male and female.
And the rights of children in their mothers’ wombs?
Abortion is not a woman’s right. There is no right to kill beyond self-defense. To have an abortion is not like choosing between going to the beach or the mountain. By definition, a personal decision (or a question of rights) is one that does not bind or affect third parties. Abortion, on the other hand, involves the discrimination, dismemberment and murder of millions of CHILD human subjects so that society gets rid of those it does not want and then feeds the cosmetic and organ industry with their corpses. Since women in the 99% of cases do not need to have abortions in order to save teirs lives or for health reasons, such action is both unjust and unjustifiable. Pro-Life activists try to explain that what is unjust is not that we have abortions before the fetuses reach certain month, but that we create ourselves with legitimacy to eliminate them if we do not need them for our purposes. They, the unborn CHILDREN, like us, have inalienable rights such as the right to life. If you value such interests to yourself, you must also value them to the unborn.
The pedophile movement prefers to look the other way when they do not openly support this crime, why are they so enthusiastic about defending children’s rights and then throw to the toilet the rights of unborn CHILDREN? is it because they are not sexually attracted to fetuses and therefore their rights do not matter?
Seems there are two seans, one with a white avatar (the one who comments all the time) and the other with a green avatar who speaks aggressively and even parodically like an aggressive misandric feminist with spelling mistakes (that don’t seem to be intended), I think we have an imposter (as has happened with several commentators below it seems), and I’m inclined to think that imposter is an agent provocateur, and in fact we only have to see how other commentators have reacted against feminism to his provocations.
I’m not going to accuse gratuitously with a name, but his characteristic use of short paragraphs with links, the laughters and use of taunts and defiance resembles a certain commentator who is not a very close friend of feminism.
Incorrect. Tom, would you mind veriifying this.
Apologies for my maniacal laughter.
>Tom, would you mind veriifying this.
I can confirm that there is only one Sean.
test
I precisely agree with Lautmann’s contextualizing of the term ‘abuse’ …
The current readiness to stigmatize any erotic signal received by children as “abuse” dilutes the meaning of the term. Unfortunately this means that very sensible distinctions as to content, intensity, and possible consequences important for understanding and making sense of things – and for preventive, legal, and therapeutic intervention – get lost.
Attraction to Children (Die Lust am Kind) by Rüdiger Lautmann.
Please keep this in mind whenever this term appears in any of my replies.
Yet another victim of the Twitter censorship – Alain Manes:
https://twitter.com/Alain_Manes6
He was not even pro-contact… He described himself as “neither pro/anti”. And he was on Twitter for a long time.
Nobody knows whose Twitter page is next to be suspended.
The religious right is not our ally, not even our potential ally, it is our declared enemy:
https://all4consolaws.org/2018/09/janices-journal-pedophiles-deserve-death-penalty/
“The son of Rev. Billy Graham, Rev. Franklin Graham, declared on National Public Radio this weekend [September 06, 2018] that pedophiles deserve the death penalty. He also declared that we are a nation of laws.
Not only is Rev. Graham’s first statement outrageous, it is undermined and contradicted by his second statement. Why? Because the laws in many states do not include the death penalty. Furthermore, most of the 31 states that do have a death penalty law do not apply that law to an individual who is convicted solely of a sex offense.
It is noteworthy that Rev. Graham made this outrageous statement during an interview that was not on the topic of either pedophiles or the death penalty. Instead, the topic of the interview was advertised as an evangelist’s view of President Donald Trump.”
Response to Sean up here, to prevent the spaghetti effect down below.
I may argue for some constraints on sexual behaviour and ‘rights’ but I also champion sexual liberty.
Except when you don’t, Sean. Sexual liberty is not about arbitrary compromise so much as common sense. We all know that it’s unwise to sexually penetrate pre-pubescents, and that younger children do not ordinarily seek out full intercourse. There is a big difference between that and placing a blanket ban on younger children choosing adults they like and trust simply to “play doctor” with, much as they do with peers.
Tom understands that there are limits to sexual liberty (such as forbidding penetrative sex with prepubescents) while Dissident seems to evade the issue by casting everything in terms of ‘youth’, as if younger children don’t exist.
Um, I just agreed with Tom a few days ago, either here or on his previous blog (I am at work right now, and do not have the time to check which, but I know Tom and others have read it), that a legal limit for penetration should be in place for kids under 12. I have also said this numerous times through the years elsewhere. Do you read my posts here clearly, Sean, or do you read only what you want to read, and avoid what you want to avoid, when it comes to anyone in the pro-choice camp? This is why you beginning to become annoying and lose some good faith here. It’s a clear sign of emotional bias tainting your analyses.
Overall, I’m detecting a strong rejection of the term ‘sexual abuse’ in favour of something more neutral like ‘sexual conduct’. I understand the clinical argument for this, but I don’t see what such ideological neutrality accomplishes in the context here. After all, heretics are not neutral.
in some cases, we are. It depends on context. And “sexual conduct” or “sexual contact” strongly suggests neutrality. Making a case to always say “sexual abuse” even when there is clear ambiguity or even outright denial of coercion or force is practicing the exact same bias as the media and culture at large. It is pigeon-holing, plain and simple, based upon more of that emotional bias.
Some sexual conduct is abusive, so why not call it out?
If it is, of course. But why use “sexual abuse” all the time? It depends on what type of contact we are talking about, as Tom said.
Is the concept of sexual abuse absolutely incompatible with a greater tolerance for paedophilic behaviour? Personally, I don’t think so.
Nor do full pro-choicers. Where do you get this idea from? Clearly not from reading our posts clearly. It is my honest opinion that you dislike being challenged for your “middle of the road” view, and you are reading in an increasingly biased fashion out of annoyance on your part.
I think we need to traverse this terrain, not skirt around it. It’s a question of compromise.
I think many of us compromise when we clearly draw the line at consent. We also compromise where we see it quite obvious to do so, such as fully understanding that younger children are not physically compatible with, or desirous of, full “kinky” adult level sexual conduct. But you do not seem to see any of this, no matter how often it’s brought up. I place all underaged people under the rubric of “youth” when I am discussing legal or socio-political matters that pertain to all of them, but often enough differentiate between younger children and adolescents where applicable. Claiming any one group cannot ever give consent, or playing numerous nigh-impossible hoops to jump through before it becomes “acceptable” consent, is deliberately throwing mud into the water, to to speak, to prevent any type of consensus from being formed based on common sense and judging on a case-by-case basis. This is why we often insist on evidence, and insisting on that as a principle does indeed accept compromise. We just refuse to compromise where that is instead used as a euphemism for completely capitulation or absolutist laws.
“Except when you don’t, Sean. Sexual liberty is not about arbitrary compromise so much as common sense. We all know that it’s unwise to sexually penetrate pre-pubescents, and that younger children do not ordinarily seek out full intercourse. There is a big difference between that and placing a blanket ban on younger children choosing adults they like and trust simply to “play doctor” with, much as they do with peers.”
‘Sex play’ would fall into a category of sexual conduct that, in my opinion, adults and kids could safely share – if it weren’t for the negative messaging attached to sexuality in general and child sexuality in particular by puritanism, ideals of childhood sexual innocence (ignorance) and aversion to the risk of sexual harm to children.
But while it might be ‘unwise’ to sexually penetrate a prepubescent, it still happens often enough to be a problem, and this is precisely the basis for much of the social anxiety around children’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation. No doubt you’ll refer to research that shows that children are never raped or otherwise sexually abused, but I think your interpretation of the research is wrong. Rind et al., for example, never claimed that adult/child sexual experiences were never negative, they simply challenged the idea that they are always negative,
You draw attention to the high percentage of adult/child sexual interactions that are experienced positively and don’t cause problems, which is fine, but you’re speaking as if those interactions that do cause harm are therefore not significant. If you were the one being sexually penetrated against your will, you might think otherwise.
So, to me, a refusal to confront the reality of sexual abuse of children simply reinforces the dynamic that makes society so implacable in the face of suggestions that adults and children might play sexually without abuse or harm occurring. What MAPs need to demonstrate is not that sexual abuse doesn’t occur (it does) but that sex play can occur without encouraging abuse. Your denialism doesn’t contribute to this, imho.
You have an extreme emotional need for both personal and ideological acceptance, but extreme, and you are using us to relieve that pressure that you have accumulated by years, because you can not even express with the primary circle that in your case would be the feminists.
No Sean, no one here denies that there is no child sexual abuse, just as no one denies rape, terrorism, street crime are real and are problems that must be addressed. Nor do they oppose feminism, they oppose the whitening of feminism that you do consciously or unconsciously.
This is the pedophile movement, child abuse is adressed and opossed by majority but this is not the anti-child abuse movement.
If you want to do something useful go to the anti-child abuse groups and people and convince them that paedophilia has nothing to do with abuse.
For now, please, cut this for good, you have repeated the same thing many times, you are making this slightly unpleasant, do not make it totally unpleasant.
‘Sex play’ would fall into a category of sexual conduct that, in my opinion, adults and kids could safely share – if it weren’t for the negative messaging attached to sexuality in general and child sexuality in particular by puritanism, ideals of childhood sexual innocence (ignorance) and aversion to the risk of sexual harm to children.
Which is why so many of us call out sociogenic factors as being a serious problem that society at large practices but does not want to be held accountable for.
But while it might be ‘unwise’ to sexually penetrate a prepubescent, it still happens often enough to be a problem,
Where do you get this evidence from? Or is this just your assumption based on your disdain for the thought of it?
and this is precisely the basis for much of the social anxiety around children’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation.
This is once again a set of assumptions and disproportionate level of legitimate concern that pro-choicers often–and wisely–criticize the anti-choicers for. Draconian laws should never be passed based on assumptions and a pre-emptive, inherent mistrust of people.
No doubt you’ll refer to research that shows that children are never raped or otherwise sexually abused, but I think your interpretation of the research is wrong.
Wait, “never”? Again, where do you get this from, Sean? Not from us, that’s for certain. Of course we understand that actual rape of children can occur! We simply strive to differentiate between actual abuse and societally perceived, and to make it clear that when it does occur, it does not most often occur at the hands of MAPs. There is also evidence that it is not an “epidemic,” which was Tom’s point to me the other day in a response. Saying it’s not an epidemic is not the same thing as saying it is utterly non-existent. If you want us to take your points seriously and in good faith, Sean, you need to dispense with these wild and frankly disrespectful assumptions and baseless accusations, both of us in the pro-choice camp and of the more open-minded research data.
Rind et al., for example, never claimed that adult/child sexual experiences were never negative, they simply challenged the idea that they are always negative,
And where do you get that we ever say otherwise? Focusing on these assumptions or legitimate (?) misunderstandings of what we are saying due to a heavy emotional bias against the subject (and likely, those of us fully in the pro-choice camp) is not coming from a standpoint of intellectual honesty or accuracy. You’re arguing with an entire cornfield of Straw Men.
You draw attention to the high percentage of adult/child sexual interactions that are experienced positively and don’t cause problems, which is fine, but you’re speaking as if those interactions that do cause harm are therefore not significant.
Um, we do? Again, Sean… where do you get this from? We consider iatrogenic and sociogenic harm quite significant. This is why most pro-choicers scrupulously obey the laws. What we do criticize and seek to change, however, is society’s culpability in the issue.
If you were the one being sexually penetrated against your will, you might think otherwise.
Now I know how the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz felt.
So, to me, a refusal to confront the reality of sexual abuse of children simply reinforces the dynamic that makes society so implacable in the face of suggestions that adults and children might play sexually without abuse or harm occurring.
Except we are not doing that. You are reading very incorrectly and very selectively, seeing only what you want to see in order to make and rationalize a serious of emotionally-charged assumptions.
What MAPs need to demonstrate is not that sexual abuse doesn’t occur (it does) but that sex play can occur without encouraging abuse. Your denialism doesn’t contribute to this, imho.
You keep saying this over and over, Sean, but the fact that it’s not evident in our postings makes it clear to all objective readers that you are guilty of extremely selective reading and heavily tainted by extreme emotional bias. This is not intended as an insult, but as an honest critique. What you need to demonstrate is that you are willing and/or capable of reading what we see honestly so we can engage you honestly.
>You’re arguing with an entire cornfield of Straw Men.
This is true, Sean, and Dissy has nailed it well with a series of examples.
It is good that we challenge each other’s views here at HTOC but many of the points you have been making lately, Sean, have lacked quality control.
You can do far, far better than this. To be fair, you often do put in top quality posts but do please adjust the balance: cut out the crap. Or to echo Dissy’s metaphor, give us the wheat not the chaff.
I don’t see what I’m saying that’s so controvefsial. Ok, maybe there’s not an ‘epidemic’ of child sexual abuse, but where did I ever say there was? Ok, MAPs do not feature markedly among the abusers, but that’s a point I’ve made myself, over and over.
All I’m saying, and will go on saying if necessary, is that child sexual abuse is something that exists in the real world.
However much it’s frequency and severity is amplified by ‘feminists’, there is a core of lived experience that needs to be accounted for.
Why? Because denying or minimizing it is no less propagandistic than deploying it as a political weapon.
Don’t you recognize that there’s genuine anger underlying the moral panic, hysteria and hyperbole? Maybe I’m preaching to the converted and setting up a lot of straw men, but that doesn’t explain why it’s so problematic for me to champion a feminist pov.
Some of these women have a genuine grievance. If a ‘pro-choice’ argument exists, these are the people you need to sell it to. So don’t caricature them as revenge hungry harpies fueled by fevered fantasies of Sadean excess, just admit to your worldview the possibility that pressure on women to be sexually available begins before puberty, and some of them are sick of it.
Okay, you crossed the line, enough of this.
We don’t sell it to feminists. We don’t sell it to Nazis. We don’t sell it to religious fundamentalists. We don’t sell it to criminal, murderous and totalitarian ideologies. There is nothing to talk about with radical feminists.
Radical means to going to the “root” of something, all true and original feminism is radical, there is no “liberal” feminism, that is watered-down feminism, like a Nazi in favor of racial mixing is not Nazism. Feminism is a criminal and intolerant ideology that seeks to criminalize men in order to increase the sexual market value of older women.
A pedophile or a simple normal heterosexual man selling himself to feminists is like a Jew selling himself to Nazism, for God’s sake.
Get totalitarian feminism out of our society! We got rid of Nazism, after millions of dead, then communism, after billions of dead and now we need to get rid of feminism, those daughters of satanas, for men and born and unborn children every day is a holocaust. Soon there will be a Nuremberg.
We should to prevent the infiltration of feminism into our movement before it becomes mortal, as has happened with socialism, the political left and right, Christianity, animal rights, atheism, anti-racism, etc. All past free movements now slaves dancing to the music of feminists.
DEFEND MALE SEXUALITY.
https://theconversation.com/clementine-ford-reveals-the-fragility-behind-toxic-masculinity-in-boys-will-be-boys-103760
ha ha ha lol!
I wonder which universe feminists, such as Ford, inhabit where women are kept from position of power, due to being women?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6qJXLNL8Ik
http://redpilluk.co.uk/Alessandro%20Strumia%20Theory%20Gender%20Talk%20CERN%20Sept_18.pdf
TLDR
TLDW
The (very) late Don Mannison, reader in philosophy at University of Queensland, once said in reply to a tea room question, that the feminist project was a very long term one, displaying all sorts of extremes and nonsense along with very sensible ideas.Perhaps we need the extremes of radical feminism in order to attain some sort of sensible change. Perhaps we need it, e.g., to see that most men are not toxic, but merely misled by our social situation, and need to change not everything, but just enough to avoid behaviours which in some way mimic toxicity.This, at least, is something like what I want to think. But extreme positions also damage, and fail to look at evidence.This is something we all need to take to heart. As I have said before on this blog, I was rabidly anti paedophile, until I read Tom’s book, which sent me on a search for more information. This is what so much radical feminism doesn’t have: the willingness to look at evidence which opposes their position, because such evidence is toxic. Let’s face it, I have read so much literature which suggests that all paedophiles, and all men generally, should be shot, or in some other way put out of life. Such views, by men or women, are nonsense because they react to a position, but do not deal with it.
This doesn’t mean that I think Ford is lying when she talks about abuse from men, there are idiots around always, and they will attack from fear and lack of understanding, much as I once did. But it does mean that I suspect many radical feminists take it all too far, just as many who are “anti-paedophile” take their views too far.
All I can say is: we should try not to be idiots, we should try to understand and moderate our views when necessary, which is what I see most commentators here doing (fortunately).
>we should try to understand and moderate our views when necessary, which is what I see most commentators here doing (fortunately).
Yes, and I see this as very encouraging. It might seem a modest achievement at first glance but when we think about the ferocious, unbending dialogues of the deaf on Twitter etc we may conclude otherwise.
Do you also reject logic, reason and empirical evidence in order to account for the ‘lived experience’ of Creationists in biological models of evolution?
Now you jump on the typical SJW nonsense claims regarding women, Sean? This is yet another example of the powerful anti-maie bias that connects both the SJWs’ attitudes and those of the anti-choice crowd, and the common source from which both spring. I can’t help but note the common demand for an end of due process for men when it comes to accusations from both women and kids, always considering men to be guilty simply because they are men. I hardly think this is a coincidence.
> We consider iatrogenic and sociogenic harm quite significant.
I’m aware that these harms are significant and that a change in social attitudes could ameliorate many of them. For example, boys who have positive sexual experiences with men sometimes suffer the effects of internalized or overt homophobia after the fact.
But you don’t mention any other kind of harm, and I’m not talking about the iatrogenic or sociogenic varieties. I’m talking about harm as a consequence of sexual abuse, which includes rape, covert photography, revenge porn, ‘locker room talk’ and all the other nasty, selfish bullying that men (typically) use against women (typically) and children (sometimes).
I agree that the term ‘sexual abuse’ is problematic, but I believe it has a useful and correct meaning, and I’m using it in that sense here. Like you, I don’t believe it can be correctly applied to sexual behaviour purely on the basis of the age of the participants, and I’m not using it in that sense here. I don’t see the point in inventing a new term to describe the harmful behaviours I’ve listed, and I see even less point in using a neutral term to describe them.
The term ‘rape’ is also controversial, and somewhat arbitrary, when combined with the term ‘statutory’. I’m not using it in that sense, I’m talking about forced or coerced sexual penetration and nothing else.
I’ve been busy in other blogs arguing with other people, I know this blog is not about animal rights so I preferred not to continue with an off-topic fight but I’ve synthesized my arguments broadly in case someone wants to get into veganism, no matter their age, condition or ideology, since it’s suitable for everyone.
First of all we have to make it clear that veganism is not a diet or an ideology, but a moral imperative based on the ethics of the principle of equality, that is to say being vegan means not participating in animal exploitation, be it food or clothing, is not a “lifestyle” nor is based in using creative vegetal recipes or dressing in a certain way as an urban group.
Anti-vegans exhibit remarkable confusion about these issues:
First, a vegan or 100% vegetable diet [without animal substances] gives us all the nutrients we need at any stage or circumstance of life. This is recognized by all associations of nutritionists, such as the prestigious Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. If you want to be correctly informed, I suggest you read their position about vegan diets:
https://www.eatrightpro.org/~/media/eatrightpro%20files/practice/position%20and%20practice%20papers/position%20papers/vegetarian-diet.ashx
“It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.”
Taking vitamins does not make it an “unnatural” diet, it just turns out that the only vitamin that vegans must supplement necessarily, vitamin B12, is found in the soil, and since we wash the vegetables that vitamin disappears along with the soil, in fact the cows eat from the soil, and yet it is not enough, because they hormones the cows also with more B12. Besides, whether something is natural or unnatural is not an argument, nature is what we call where man has not intervened, that is neither good nor bad, nor healthy nor harmful. It’s just as natural and unnatural a McDonald’s burger or a burn ointment or an aspirin as a bottle of vitamin B12.
Secondly, the fact that so far humans have hunted or bred other animals does not justify continuing to do so. That merely points to a fact, but is not a valid argument.
Third, humans are not “predators”. I am a human being and I do not prey on anyone. And like me, millions of human beings live perfectly without having to kill anyone to eat or survive. So these facts refute this claim. Apart from the fact that human civilization is not based on predation, but on agriculture and industry.
Fourth, there is enough room in the world for everyone. The animals we use for food (or any other purpose) are not in this world of their own free will but have been raised expressly by man for our benefit. What we have to do is stop bringing non-human animals into this world.
Fifth, if you are against animal mistreatment and activities such as hunting or the use of furs then you should also be against any other use we make of other animals. Because they all involve harming them, causing them suffering or killing them. It is not coherent that some forms of exploitation seem bad to you and others not, when all of them are essentially the same.
In addition, all use of non-human animals is without their explicit consent, so it is immoral to do so. Would it be okay for others to use you without your consent, without your permission, for their own benefit? Surely not. So you will explain to me why you apply a different criterion to other animals just because they are not human.
Sixth, the fact that animal exploitation is legally regulated does not morally justify its existence. Unless you think the laws themselves establish what is right and what is wrong. No one really thinks that way. Because what legislation enacts is purely conventional (although it may have moral grounds) and does not imply that it is ethically acceptable.
The question is not whether the cages of non-humans are more or less large. The issue is that we do not have the right to cage any animal for our own benefit or that of others.
Seventhly, no, plants are not sentient. There is no proof or evidence that plants can have sentience. The fact that they are alive does not imply that they can feel and be conscious, since they lack a nervous system and do not possess any analogous organ that can perform that function.
By the way, if you send vegetables to people who don’t have enough to eat, they will be very grateful to you.
Eight. Serious studies only indicate that humans consumed meat in prehistoric times. Nothing more. They do not prove, or even claim, that meat consumption had a fundamental influence on the evolution of the human brain and its intelligence. Other studies on the evolutionary development of human intelligence indicate that it was the invention of cooking that influenced human evolution; but all kinds of vegetables were also cooked, some of which would not be edible without being cooked. Bearing in mind that there is no nutrient that our prehistoric ancestors could not obtain from vegetables, the hypothesis that meat consumption influenced the evolution of human intelligence has no consistency or even logic.
If you have arrived here I thank you for your attention because it is clear that you have paid attention to the content of my text. I hope that your opinion of animal exploitation will change, if you decide to question this prejudices.
>in addition, all use of non-human animals is without their explicit consent
Do non-human animals ever give their explicit consent to anything? How would a horse or a hedgehog make its consent “explicit”?
Can animals “consent” at all? If not, should they be allowed to have sex with each other? To the extent that we have dominion over the animal kingdom should we prevent them from doing so?
animal consent: here’s a situation where assent is a more useful concept.
“Do non-human animals ever give their explicit consent to anything?”
Here’s what Zeta, the perhaps worldwide only zoophile rights organisation, says about this:
“It is plain wrong that animals do not have the ability to communicate consent or dissent. In every other case we accept that humans can interpret animal expressions e.g. whether they are thirsty/hungry, whether they want to be walked, whether they are tired, whether (or not) they desire to be petted, whether they are anxious at the veterinarians, whether they like having the claws clipped or being injected, whether they fear the slaugthering house etc. Why is communication suddenly completely impossible when it is about sexuality? Why should a human be incapable of reading whether or not an animal is ready to mate at the moment or whether it enjoys or merely uneasily suffers sexual acts?”
https://www.zeta-verein.de/en/zoophilia/the-case-against-general-criminalization/
I agree with Zeta, actually. Among humans, too, we get far too hung up on “explicit” consent and “affirmative” consent. Plain “consent” and also even “assent” have legalistic connotations that do not apply to “willingness”. A parliamentary Bill in the UK, for instance, passes into law when its receives “the royal assent”: you can hardly get more formal and legalistic than that.
“willingness”
has a nice anglo saxon ring to it
I think I have made it very clear, that it’s morally universally incorrect to do something with someone who does not consent for the benefit of oneself, and not only for the interests of the other.
Now one can come and argue otherwise, that animals and children can consent. Not problem, PLEASE DO IT. Zoophilia, and the position that animals can consent, just like pedophilia and children’s consent, is never defended and therefore anti-zoophilia and anti-pedophile stances never find opposition, and that’s bad, because the only way to get to ethics is to debate and reason, if it’s not is mostly hegemonic speech and it doesn’t have much merit to defend.
But arguments cannot be utilitarian like Peter Singer do, because utilitarism is immoral. Doing something with someone if it gives you pleasure and if it doesn’t “suffer” and is “humanitarian” it’s wrong, it’s abominable, and I think no one in their right mind would defend to do with a human child, not even those they call a “pedophile”, or that’s what I want to think.
To be vegan is only to have the ethic of not exploiting animals, they can be perfectly anti-zoophiles and anti-pedophiles even without arguments against it, and that’s why that link is going to be very good for me to question their positions.
“utilitarism is immoral”
… or, maybe, amoral?
>“utilitarism is immoral”
I suspect what “VII” really means is simply “I do not like it”.
The basic idea of utilitarianism, going back to Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century rather than Peter Singer in our own times, is to so organise society as to minimise the amount of pain we all experience and maximise the pleasure. The “we all” can perfectly well be taken to include animals, which has been Singer’s particular contribution.
This strikes me as a noble moral objective, so it seems a bit harsh to call it “immoral”. The big problem, though, is that it only considers an aggregate position – the total pain felt by all of us set against total pleasure (although “pleasure” is sometimes taken to mean well being in a broader sense). This can lead to classic “trolley problem” scenarios in which individuals can be sacrificed for the good of others, provided that the total well being of most people is increased by more than the amount of suffering caused to the sacrificed individual.
At the extreme, it would be possible to say it is perfectly OK to slowly torture someone to death if it will save the lives of many people. Many governments around the world do indeed use torture as a matter of public policy and justify it on utilitarian grounds: harsh measures, they feel, may be necessary to defeat terrorism, say, by getting plotters to confess.
Singer has (rightly, I think) attacked “speciesism” because pain, especially prolonged or extreme pain, is a terrible thing for (other) animals just as it is for humans. But on a purely utilitarian basis it could be considered moral to use animals in medical experiments, including horribly painful and prolonged ones, if a sufficient amount of pain that humans would have suffered without new medicines developed through the experiments is avoided.
Thinking about it further, though, humans would have to be spared a vast amount of pain and anguish for this strange calculus to work.
For me, the most fundamental moral value is not pleasure or happiness, but freedom, the right of both persons and voluntarily-made communities to enact their own will, to fulfill their own desires, to pursue their own goals, to actualise their own plans – as long as they do not coerce others to do so. And such freedom include the person’s right to suffer voluntarily, to sacrifice happiness and pleasure for some perceived higher purpose, if the person’s will is so. Compulsory happiness, one that deny the free choice of individuals and communities, is the ultimate totalitarian horror.
That’s why I’m libertarian and personalist, not utilitarian, in my ethics.
interesting and nicely put
“For me, the most fundamental moral value is not pleasure or happiness, but freedom”
I agree. Unlike “gross vs nett happiness” it has a nice resolution in it’s extension from solipsism into community, in that one’s freedom is constrained by the extent to which it impinges on the freedom of another.
Ironic, given you don’t favor freedom for entire classes, who do not impinge on your freedom in the slightest.
I don’t follow. I didn’t refer to my freedom.
Sean, whose freedom do they necessarily impinge upon then?
This question is for long, in fact it goes beyond animal rights to include basic ethics. I will try to be more briefer.
Animals are in that sense equivalent to very young children, does not have the brain developed enough to consent to something that is done to them (emphasis here), what we know for sure is that humans (with exceptions) are brain developed from early teens, not from full legal adulthood, as Dr. Epstein already demonstrated.
Of course, it is legitimate to question that, and affirm with evidence that before puberty capable children can consent and deserve to make their own informed decisions, in fact Tom and others questions it very well, nothing to object there.
Now. Non-human animals, like very young children, still can’t consent. Consent is relevant when you, a moral agent, that can discern that it’s right and it’s not, do something to another being whether a moral agent or not. When you don’t have someone’s consent, then it’s only legitimate to do so for the benefit of the non-consenting, as long as their rights and interests are not violated. When you do something against the consent of another, for your own benefit like sex or other thing and therefore violate their interests as life or integrity, then it is immoral to do so.
Those who are not moral agents are not guilty of their acts with other non-moral beings. It is up to you to watch over the integrity of those you are in charge of. You are only morally obligated to prevent (if you think it is negative) what you are responsible for. In other words, you are responsible for the animals and children that you have welcomed into your home. We have no obligation to other beings, human or not, except not to violate their rights. You can help or save someone you are not their guardian out of empathy, but you are not morally obligated to do so.
So to answering your question: Yes, my stance is that is immoral to prevent non-moral animals who are not our responsability from having sex with each other, and anything else they do with each other, such as killing and eating each other.
Tom/VII
>Do non-human animals ever give their explicit consent to anything? How would a horse or a hedgehog make its consent “explicit”?
If someone is asthmatic isn’t it thanks to animal test that help those people?
The age of people having sex and age difference between people having sex, is a completely irrelevant and separate issue; than whether food comes from animals or plants. Let’s stay focused on what were fighting for. Diet and whether people should kill animals has nothing whatsoever to do with the age a person is ready to have sex.
>Let’s stay focused on what were fighting for.
Assuming you mean “what we are fighting for”, who are “we”? The debate about animals is interesting and important but the focus of this blog is precisely what you do not want to talk about: sex and age difference.
Please bear in mind that as the moderator here, I could have closed the animal debate down some time ago as off topic.
“We” in this case means humans who want to be able to engage in sexual play and contact with other humans with no age restrictions.
OK, I’m sorry if I misread you.
I do not recall ever seeing you get this ironic before, Tom!!!
Veganism suitable for everyone, regardless of age or conditions?
Biochemical, not to mention ethical, considerations suggests otherwise.
How does it compare to a strict ketogenic diet for kids with epilepsy, dementia sufferers, or the many millions Americans with metabolic syndrome?
I’m not vegan (only vegetarian) but I certainly want to. As a MAP I feel sad that my consumption contributes to the slaughter of young animals. I know that the meat and dairy industry are (by far) contributing to global warming more than any other industry and so, by not being vegan, I’m also responsible for the terrible consequences climate change will have on future generations.
To list three videos that perhaps motivate me more than anything else to become vegan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQCe4qEexjc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2GL3NAWQU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrlfkxvJNj0
Sean: Beware restrictions to children’s freedom in the name of protection. Women too are much more abused than men, but only reactionary regimes such as Saudi Arabia use protection of women as a pretext to deny their basic rights. And it is in patriarchal countries where youth rights are denied that their abuse is most severe, such as young girls married without their consent, or girls denied education and exploited in labour.
Under the name of protecting children from sex and abuse, their right to sexual information is restricted or sometimes denied, while in any other context, people are encouraged to be informed as much as possible in order to avoid abuse.
VII: In biology, the animal kingdom includes insects and ticks that transmit bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, malaria, the Lyme disease, etc; then many other insects ravage agriculture. They all have a minimal nervous system, so their “consciousness” is dubious and I do not respect their “right to live”. There are various degrees of animal intelligence, from zero to advanced, like apes.
Your arguments remind me of those who deny the right to abortion under the pretext that an embryo is alive and has a nervous system.
Hi, Christian.
If we must repudiate any consideration for a group because they are potentially dangerous and harmful (probability fallacy) we would have to kill all humans, and within it numerous races and ethnicities, because we ravage the resources of the planet and transmit an overwhelming amount of diseases, whose list would be endless, but ranging from those you have named, to venereal diseases to AIDS.
If the consciousness is “dubious” (i.e., if it does not exist, not if it is “minimal”) in any particular case, then your moral duty calls upon you to give as a minimum the benefit of the doubt until definite proof of it is presented.
Nor is it justifiable to repudiate the interests of others because they are “minimum” or “lowest” in your view, all sentient beings have interests (to life, to integrity not to be considered property, that is, not to be used by others) that deserve to be respected as much as yours.
If you say that you do not respect their right to life is more of a challenge than anything else, it is as if I now tell you that as pedophiles “can” have less emotional intelligence than others I will not respect their lives from now on. It doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Now. Intelligence, and its gradation is not an argument to give or take away rights, that argument reminds me of the social Darwinian and Nazi theories of racial supremacy, one of which was based on intelligence. I don’t call you a Nazi, don’t even think about it, but it’s true that specism is based on practically the same thing as racism. And the evidence is there.
What your speech reminds me of, and I say only reminds me of, to those left-wing reactionaries who are so abundant today don’t want to give up their specieist prejudices (and his barbecue on the weekend and his wool sweater) while criticizing the prejudices of racism and sexism.
And I make it clear, that I am not a biologist, nor do I need to be one to talk about biology, I talk here about morals and ethics (which are the same) and my positions on biology are based on the reasoning and studies that I have seen, which may be wrong, but at the moment I have not seen that they are.
>Now. Intelligence, and its gradation is not an argument to give or take away rights
Yet, your ‘rights’ arguments does not even consider AI.
“Beware restrictions to children’s freedom in the name of protection. …”
I think you can take it for granted that I’m fully aware of all of the problems you mention there Christian, although I agree it is useful to make them explicit.
What evidence do you have that young girls necessarily marry without consent in patriarchal nations? (If the poetry on your own blog is any indication, it was still possible for little girls to be loved by men even in nations not meeting the explicit approval of present-day misandrists.)
Is it not far worse abuse to strip an entire class (girls) of their rights to marry or even have sex, as was done by feminists even in the 19th century than for the occasional girl to possibly change her own mind about either?
“Is it not far worse abuse to strip an entire class (girls) of their rights to marry or even have sex, as was done by feminists even in the 19th century than for the occasional girl to possibly change her own mind about either?”
and is it not equally far worse for billions of little wee babies to be stripped of their right to distribute candy to passers by than it is for a vanishingly rare outlier baby to have a grizzly moment on discovering its tiny fist emptied of the candy that seconds before had been securely melting there?
How it could be “equally far worse”, when candy is not bodily self-determiniation and a mutual gain is not a loss?
Unlike you, I love girls and don’t assume their suffering, due to being denied bodily self-determination, is a trivial issue.
haha. are you a chatbot? 😀
I agree with all you said there in your response to Sean, Christian. I am a bit ambiguous about the “exploited in labor” issue, though, because too often that has been used (especially by liberals in America) to deny youths the right to choose work even that they enjoy, they are fully capable of doing, and under completely humane conditions. The fear of sweatshop conditions motivates this prohibition, and as a youth liberationist and civil libertarian, I oppose sweatshop conditions for everyone, support a heavy degree of labor rights for all rather than denying anyone the right to work altogether “so they do not get exploited.”
The truth is, under capitalism, virtually all workers are exploited. What we can control under the current status quo is how severe that exploitation is. Hence, we can still have youths choosing to take work as reporters, journalists, cooks, software designers, running monetized blogs/instructional videos, etc., under conditions that are kept humane. Otherwise, they remain economically dependent upon adults and under their iron heel. In all fairness, though, I think you likely meant specifically sweatshop conditions, and forced to work for considerably less pay than adults. I was simply clarifying that point.
Tom, What do you make of this; Can’t seem to find the full length, The full length starts off with the whole brigade in military dance. I find it very moving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAzd340sUrc&t=71s
The official site says:
>Young Men is a feature-length dance film without dialogue shot on location in Northern France featuring dancers from BalletBoyz dance company. Based on the hugely successful stage production that premiered at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2014, it is choreographed by Iván Pérez with a commissioned score by singer songwriter Keaton Henson.
It could well be excellent but it doesn’t really look my thing, to be honest.
http://www.youngmenmovie.com/
People who talk about men’s and girls’ rights and then talk about women’s and animals’ rights being worth a shit.
I don’t laugh at them, I just feel sorry for them.
About the Dailymail article about Phil Robertson advises men marry underage girls:
As a vegan I question if that these are the “brave” religious right people who are worth it? killing, eating and using animals is IMMORAL, the only justification is because they are another species, you are not killed, eaten, have you as a slave tortured to death (to give meat, milk, eggs, wool, leather, silk, incarcelated in a zoo etc..) only one and exclusively by being a human. This is called speciesism, something abominable like racism, and literally, because farms are concentration and extermination camps for millions of animals. So don’t think even that hunt ducks it’s worse but killing animals for meals is ok “because nature, proteins etc.”, it’s just as bad as anyone who hunting animals.
Also I think that Sean can say, and would have a valid point even if you not are a feminist, such reacctionary supremacist people no going for young girls because they love them and feel a strong attraction at that age, as it happens to me and some of us, but because they are sexists who think that women are only sexual objects, that only exist to please and be used by men, age doesn’t matter to them, in fact.
The other day I saw a guy saying that teenage girls are ok, ban lolicon is bad and even spoke against pedophilephobia and then say that “tofu makes you fag”. Before that he had said that women do not deserve rights, showing that he only sees them as inferior objects.
Another anti-feminist alt-right type incel who supported date with teenage girls also defended eating meat “because he liked it” that’s like saying that you rape teen girls “because you like it”, you see that they are immoral? all his vision of the world is immoral. They do to others what they don’t want to be done to them.
In Tom Grauer’s blog the other day an idiot commentator called those who oppose RAPE OF WOMEN (literaly, rape) “vegan butchers”, WTF!!!?
Although it’s not exclusive to being racist, alt-right and reactionary. Even people who I had in very high esteem as propedofront try to convince me and himself that plants feel and have conscience (they do no, only beings with nervous system have conscience and have interests and therefore deserve rights) but if even it were true that would not give us the right to kill animals, as we do not eat humans because animals feel and have conscience, so if plants have conscience then it would only be moral to eat fruit and seeds.
I would boring you with thousands of examples, which are thousands, but I think you’re already making an image.
Now I understand why Sean and Peace are trying to separate themselves from the misogynist pedophiles and make a “feminist pedophilia”. The same goes for veganism. There is absolutely a difference between those who love teenage girls and sexists or even worse hard misogynists that doesn’t have a taboo with age. I’m not a feminist but even… They are not like me. They don’t represent me. They don’t have my type of sexuality.
(Note: if you are feminist you need to be vegan, needless to say you can’t be against sexism and women exploitation and be speciesist and participate in animal exploitation)
Condemn those abominations called racism sexism and SPECIESISM just as you condemn ageism and pedophobia. Those who oppose ageism aka age discrimination need to oppose those immoral people to harm others because of their condition like race, especies, sex etc.
Tofu doesn’t make you a fag, it makes you someone with ethics.
“Also I think that Sean can say, and would have a valid point even if you not are a feminist, such reacctionary supremacist people no going for young girls because they love them and feel a strong attraction at that age, as it happens to me and some of us, but because they are sexists who think that women are only sexual objects, that only exist to please and be used by men, age doesn’t matter to them, in fact.”
spot on
I nearly chocked on my eggs and bacon from laughing so hard!
Your humorous comment illustrate the problem among some small number of (alleged) MAPs who, regardless of utility, flat out refuse to tolerate anyone not meeting some abrbitrary standard.
A reactionary’s response to the argued and empathic idea of having his human privileges taken away and see the equality of all oppressions:
“I will continue to eat animals. I love bacon. You comment is blah blah blah”
This is the level of these reactionary people. If you had been intelligent you would not have manifested against my text, like Tom O’Carroll and Sean and other commentators, even if they love eggs and beacon, because there is an obvious truth: Instead of adding people to your already small cause, where everyone counts, you prefer challenge and contempt. If you want to be everyone’s enemy and nobody is on your side, you’re on the right track.
It’s thanks to you, to people like you, that pedophilia (and teenage girls) is not going to be accepted, for now as long as it’s people like you who defend it, because it’s seen a miles away that people like you who talk so much about “men and young girls rights” just want to satiate your egoists on the basis of that fallacy of “I have the right to do what I like”, like you think that humans have the right to kill and eat animals, men have the right to get sexually gratified with young girls, etc. and no, that doesn’t work that way, and it’s not going to work in any civilized place.
Your reward for being such a big mouth is that from now on I’m going to dedicate myself to purging the MAP movement of immoral, reactionary and human supremacist people. You have no place in a movement that fights for equality, freedom and integrity, your place is with the extreme right, the Nazis of the alt-right, the misogynists, the discriminators and those people who are just the shadows of that dark world that we fight to disown once and for all. Those nice people who support murdering not only animals but pedophiles like you.
People who defend the rights of all and the interests of children even a the expense of his sexual impulses like Sean and many others like Leonard who is indeed a animal rights veggie, are the ones who represent MAP/pedophile activism, these are the people who are worth to be with them.
I won’t do it with misogynists and sexists, because I know that Sean, Tom O’Carroll and others are already doing a good job. Just as society has abominated racism and sexism, now it is the turn of specism, no matter how much you make fun about eating eggs with bacon.
If you still have some conscience one day you will realize that you were wrong and how much you regret. Until that day I have no interest in you.
>Just as society has abominated racism and sexism, now it is the turn of specism, no matter how much you make fun about eating eggs with bacon.
Many years ago I read Peter Singer’s seminal text on this theme, Animal Liberation. I found much to agree with but personally tend towards support for high standards of animal welfare rather than animal liberation or rights. I suppose this is “speciesist” but this moral blindspot, if that is what it amounts to, is shared by animals of all species, including a vast range of predatory ones: the lion presumably does not spend too much time pondering the rights of the lamb.
Non-human animals are not moral agents, and therefore cannot decide whether an action is right or wrong, and not guilty of their actions. Mentally developed humans are moral agents, and therefore we have a responsibility, which is to base our actions on ethics.
And what ethics says that harming others is immoral, using others without their consent is immoral, so it is illegal and socially repudiated to commit these acts with other human beings, the only thing we do and tolerate with animals is because their species, just as it was previously justifiable to do so with people of other races.
If it were justifiable to eat animals because other animals do, then we should practice cannibalism, infanticide and rape because other animals do.
Then one will say that “each one has his own ethics”. Ethics is not personal, if it were so it would be justifiable to kill and rape other humans, ethics is universal and part of reason. There is no argument that justifies killing, exploiting and harming others for pleasure or being of another species.
Animals are not specists because they lack prejudices, they act according to their needs (not moral or immoral). Speciesism is just a group prejudice like any other, but it is the most deeply rooted of all, since childhood we are taught that animals are here to serve us. Just as in other times they taught that women and blacks only existed to serve us and their desires and integrity did not matter.
Unfortunately, Peter Singer does not defend animal rights, in fact he is not even vegan, his book “Animal Liberation” is not about freeing animals but about exploiting them in a more “humane” way for him. Therefore Singer is utilitarian, only the pleasure and gain of an action matters, he does not question the use of animals nor the immorality of it, as it is universally immoral to use a human being against his will, but only criticizes his “treatment”, that is like to say that rape women and children is ethical and justifiable if we do it “women and children welfare”.
In fact that idea of “animal welfare” that has promoted by these supposed “animal rights advocates”, is the worst of all, and the most harmful to veganism, because it makes people believe that the problem is how we “treat” animals and not the root of the problem, that it is immoral to use them for our benefit.
If you think it’s immoral to do to others what you don’t want them to do to you, then choose veganism and don’t participate in animal exploitation anymore, or choose “animal welfare” and believe it’s right to kill, exploit and use someone if done with “welfare”. We don’t need animal products of any type to live and be healthy.
I think you are doing Singer less than justice but on the whole you are right that speciesism is a serious moral position.
“Non-human animals are not moral agents, and therefore cannot decide whether an action is right or wrong, and not guilty of their actions.”
I don’t think this is quite correct. The roots of our moral nature do seem to exist in other species, notably apes, but also dogs and other highly social mammals. Have you seen the look on a dog’s face when it’s caught eating the sausages?
Singer has some fairly strong points, but I’m not sure he understands that moral behaviour has an emotional component. I had an argument with him about this, over a beer a few years ago.
For myself, I hate to kill animals, even flies, and I go to great lengths not to cause them any suffering. Nevertheless, there is a point where I will kill them. Also, I’ve tried living in a house overrun with mice and it’s unhealthy and unpleasant. I use mouse traps if I need to, but only good ones and never poison. Mostly, I keep my house mouse proof.
I eat meat, but not very often. Sometimes I kill the meat I eat. This feels more ethical than buying it at the supermarket, because it keeps me alert to exactly what’s involved. I’d kill another human, but it would have to be in self defence or protecting someone else from an immediate threat. I might kill in a war but only if another force invaded my country. I wouldn’t want to kill a person and feel no regret, however they had acted themselves.
I have a lot of respect for vegans and I admire their principles, but I couldn’t live that way myself. Also, I believe it’s possible to be an ethical nonvegan.
Similarly, I think it’s possible to enjoy an ethical sexual interaction with anybody who shows an interest, without being a complete arsehole about it. It just requires some thought and care.
Very interesting, Sean!
As for your Singer reference, I wouldn’t mind a private word with you about him.
email away!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6373965/I-daddys-pimp-shocking-admission-daughter-Cream-drummer-Ginger-Baker.html
‘Everyone fancies young people. You can’t legislate for that. It’s human nature, but power and fame is a ticket to do a few more things than most people can. I told those stories because I thought they were funny. I was not traumatised.’
I may have shared this track before, But it’s fitting in the context of the discussions, Especially when it comes to teenage girls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccd5hdnnK-o
Nina Women Sex and Pornography Conversations With the Feminist Left SD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcrGbfKvf68
Thanks for posting this, Sean. I’m about 20 minutes into it. It’s nice to see a few sex-positive people around.
Sean is too ‘pro-contact’ for Virtuous Pedophiles and too ‘anti-contact’ for the MAP Movement ? (what’s the name of this movement?). So that’s why he belongs to that limbo between the two, and the only place where he can express those opinions without get a ban and censored is Heretic TOC.
Keep in mind, Sean, on the other hand, that all this is a tradition that some try to keep respected and distorted as little as possible, has a foundation and a history that you have already known. Besides that, behind any of the big pedophiles groups there is too much suffering, many people in prison, many persecutions from the authority, in short, it is no longer very ethical that you, from Monday to Friday you go to your office in suit and tie and you’re the nice feminist guy in your neighborhood and then you present on weekends in blogs and forums as a total and radical pedophile activist (and do not worry, there is a way to be a pedophile activist without the need to carry a narrative of this kind, I will tell you another day).
What could happen if suddenly, you and other like you open an account in a pedophile site and start making feminist statements is that you would be contacted by some members and they were very kindly informed you (and it is true) of the reasons why you should not use that feminist narrative, they would also explain you how feminism opress us day after day.
If you continue to insist on your feminist narrative, well, I’m not going to be the one to assure you that something will happen to you at least unpleasant like a permaban, maybe not, but almost certainly yes. You will see where and what you get into. The thing is simple: if you think you will be able to defend your beliefs with gallantry and get out well because your type of feminism is the good one, go ahead, if you do not think so, then, do not get into trouble and do things right, and above all first … learn.
My question is: why not both? Is there really anything impossible about holding both radical views on pedophilia and sexuality, and also supporting feminism and gender liberation? It’s my belief that viewing pedophilia and sexuality through a feminist lenses can unearth new and important ways of looking at and thinking of things which take into account not just the “cold, hard facts” many pedophiles prefer, but the personal experiences of many individuals and groups of people and the sociology behind certain ways of thinking. I think this leads to a more nuanced discussion which says more than statistics can.
I’ll simply give my unsubstantiated, personal experience. As many people have seen, I hold pro-reform views but am also very into the concept of gender liberation, of which feminism is a part. I seek to dismantle oppressive gender norms, and I also seek to support the autonomy of youth in all aspects of their life. To me, these two goals are not incompatible, and in fact overlap quite often. I don’t see the concepts of gender liberation and feminism as inherently antagonistic to me and my views of pedophilia, but rather as another way of looking at things.
So I, and other feminists, have viewed many facets of pedophilia and youth sexuality through a feminist and overall gender liberatory lens. For example, there have been feminist critiques of the concept of “corporate pedophilia,” which posits a young girl’s sexuality as both absent and insidiously dangerous, leading to girls’ sexuality being policed in the name of “protection.” Girls’ bodies are seen as a site of danger in which their “sexual innocence” is seen as the worst thing they can lose, rather than as a site of autonomous sexuality. Or we could look at the way that traditional gender roles lead to men working with or enjoying children being seen as “creepy.” To me, these conversations can explore how ideas of sexuality, and especially the sexuality of youth, are formed and maintained in society.
Have there been actions by feminists which have hampered our progress? Yes, many times there have been feminists who have thrown in their lot with the religious right-wing in order to advance a cause, just like there have been those in the gay community, youth workers, social workers, the psychological field who have opposed us. But there are also those in those fields who have supported us and our ideas, and which have examined the ways in which society and even others within their group have missed our message or contributed to that which they’re trying to fight. To claim gender liberationists or any other group as a monolith is, I feel, misguided.
I couldn’t agree more. Thank you.
I like your website. I’ve searched in vain for anything recorded by the 11yo Bjork. Have you ever heard anything from her early career?
Thank you! Though your comment reminds me of the fact that I actually was at one point sharing youth music… Perhaps I should actually make new posts, as there’s a number of albums I need to rip from vinyl and several more just sitting around on my comp.
I must admit I’m not much hip to Bjork! Searching on YouTube, it seems that the entirety of her 1977 debut album is available if you search “Björk Guðmundsdóttir ?– Björk.” I also found her 1976 cover of “I Love To Love” uploaded on YouTube. I’m not a superfan, though, so I don’t know if there’s any other earlier material of hers to look for!
Huh. Awesome, thanks! I love Bjork.
Her song Birthday seems to be about a relationship between a man and a five year old girl and it made a big impression on me.
It’s often discussed online, with assertions that it has nothing to do with paedophilia. I’m as convinced by that claim as I am by assertions that Charles Dodgson wasn’t attracted to Alice.
====
She lives in this house over there, has her world outside it.
Grapples with the earth with her fingers and her mouth, she’s five years old.
Thread worms on a string, keeps spiders in her pocket, collects fly-wings in
A jar scrubs horse flies and pinches them on a line. she’s got one friend
He lives next door, they listen to the weather, he knows how many freckles
she’s got,
She scratches his beard. she’s painting huge books, glues them together,
They saw a big raven; it glided down the sky, she touched it.
Today’s a birthday, they’re smoking cigars, he got a chain of flowers,
Sows a bird in her knickers, they’re smoking cigars, lie in the bathtub, chain of flowers.
====
Girls are not forbidden to date boys (or girls) their age, but only adult men are forbidden to date girls. Except for 1% of religious fundamentalists who consider all young sexuality as abusive, the rest are so. Girls’ sexuality is not considered dangerous or bad, in fact girls are encouraged (in schools, chats, television) from the age of 12 to turn them into bitches who engage in promiscuous and meaningless sex, with the clear objective of destroying traditional society. The only thing that is considered an aberration is to do it with men over 18. The only people interested and who may have reasons to be against an adult man not dating a younger girl are older women (aka their market sexual value) and their political and sexual union, feminism.
The work or enjoyment of men with children is not creepy because of traditional roles, but because of feminism that has declared men to be dangerous in all its facets (potential rapist, potential harasser, potential child abuser, potential maltreater, the list is almost endless …)
Traditional gender roles are based on maintaining the traditional society, which has functioned for thousands of years and has assured us to men prosperity, morality and dignity, a wife and children, and to woman security, respect, morality and family the things that a woman desires, nothing to do with ‘oppressing women’ or seeing men creepy for spending time with children, a completely natural activity.
Gays never liberated themselves, nor have transsexuals now been liberated by themselves. They were all co-opted by feminism and turned into fronts to destroy civilization. That’s why there were gays who supported youth liberation and attraction to minors because at that time they were not members of the feminist cult.
You know why pedophilia is not accepted? because it has no value for feminists, who are the ones who rule the civilized world as a totalitarian party, pedophilia will not destroy traditional civilization, it does not destroy families, it does not destroy creeds, ethnicities, races or countries. Pedophilia even does not destroy even childhood like child sex-change, abortion etc.
That is until you pedophiles make yourselves heard and go with your discourse can be used to declare even more that the nuclear family is bad, that children can bypass parents authority, etc. that at that moment pedophilia will be kidnapped by feminism, hatred will be forgotten and you will be one more of that LGTBIQWERTY party. Congratulations you will have about 10 years to love children before there is a world war and a reactionary revolution and things in Europe and the rest of the civilized world return as they should be: before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
This is seen as ‘fascism without merit’, well ok, I think is fine, but do not say that I did not warn all of you.
I HAVE NOT WRITTEN THAT! Someone has hack my email and is using my nicknames (Erich, Wehr etc.) to impersonate me and make me look like an unpleasant misogynist. Anyone can fake a user because it is enough to use a proxy and put the name and email you want. I’m sure someone has done it with the malicious intention of defaming me by making me look like an unpleasant misogynist and I’m sure that someone is a follower of Tom Grauer because I have several enemies of that cult who were offended by my comments against child slavery. Many of them hate or reject real pedophiles and minor-attracted.
>My question is: why not both?
Isn’t this a question of logic and cold, hard facts?
Men and children fall outside of the feminist domain, and have been stripped of rights and freedoms by feminism, a process which shows no sign of stopping.
What sexual freedom remains for pedophiles, most likely men, and the children, NOT women, they love under the arbitrary restrictions imposed by feminism?
As for ‘corporate pedophilia’ and ‘creepy’, the criticism rings hollow and hypocritical, given the feminist attempts to police the sexuality of girls by any (including corporate, legal and social[1]) means. Ziegler defended men dating or marrying younger women, while Phil Robertson advised marrying girls about 15 or 16 years old, so had feminists instead thrown in their lot with those brave men of the Religious Right, we’d have seen some actual progress.
[1] https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/men-pursuing-underage-girls/
I’ve just had a look at your link, Nada. This is the absolute pits of feminism. It stinks. And I have to agree that it represents all too well the sort of thinking that has become feminism’s dominant strand.
Agreed.
Brooke Shields is a kind of nonperson (or perhaps honorary man) in these circles. This is ironic, given that she speaks her own mind, something feminism champions but these wanna be feminstas condemn.
Who are Ziegler and Phil Robertson? A google search doesn’t give me anything aka nada.
Using DuckDuckGo, the relevant information is easily found. Example articles:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alabama-state-auditor-defends-roy-moore-against-sexual-allegations-invokes-mary-and-joseph
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2531462/You-got-marry-girls-15-16-Duck-Dynasty-star-Phil-Robertson-wades-new-controversy-advises-men-marry-underage-girls-newly-unearthed-video.html
It’s disgusting to complain that a guy defends dating underage girls and at the same time complain of his alleged homophobia. LGTBers are the real enemy. This is the proof.
Hating attraction to teen minors is ephebophobia, and to children is pedophobia!
“My question is: why not both?”
according to the documentary I posted above, the answer could lie in an unholy alliance between “pre-orgasmic feminists” and the Christian right.
I agree with pretty much everything you said here, Peace. I often do. But then I invariably see you make a post where you show deference to anyone who wears or claims the “victim” mantle over another who does not, and make outrageous allegations that men are somehow less in need of gender liberation than women, or that women are systemically discriminated against in WEIRD societies–especially when women in the West likely have better living conditions than anywhere else in the world both in the past and present; and men are subject to as at least as many blatant gender stereotypes as women are, and I can point to a long laundry list of clear systemic attacks on the male gender that do not apply to women (just three off the bat: 1. Men have to register for the draft at 18 in America, whereas women do not; 2. Women almost always receive custody of the kids during a divorce; 3. Men in “adopt a younger sibling” programs are not allowed to pick someone of the opposite gender, whereas women can choose either). And you do not see open misandrists (of either gender) getting their sites and channels banned or de-monetized as you do anyone who criticizes the extremist “feminists,” some of whom do proudly proclaim themselves misandrists.
I agree with you that the term “feminism” is not a monolith, nor are those seeking gender liberation. The problem on your part, I think, is that you conflate too many different camps who use those mantles and cannot seem to disentangle them from each other. As a result, just when I think we are essentially on the same side, you make another post where you make outrageous SJW-ish comments that lose me. What I’m trying to say is, not all camps who use the same mantle are compatible with each other, and though I want very much to be on your side, I cannot comfortably do that until you figure out which side you are on yourself.
“Besides that, behind any of the big pedophiles groups there is too much suffering, many people in prison, many persecutions from the authority,”
It’s true, I haven’t commited or been accused of any illegal acts with children. That’s partly because I agree with the spirit of most sex laws, such as those criminalizing rape and sexual assault in its traditional sense, partly because I think that sociey’s attitude to sex play with children introduces risks that might otherwise be absent, and partly because I don’t want to be a ‘convicted child sex offender’.
“in short, it is no longer very ethical that you, from Monday to Friday you go to your office in suit and tie and you’re the nice feminist guy in your neighborhood and then you present on weekends in blogs and forums as a total and radical pedophile activist…”
Actually, among the friends who know me and know I’m attracted to children, I express exactly the same views that I do here. Some of these people agree with me about some things I say and some don’t. In general, women seem to have more insight into paedophilia than men, and also have more liberal ideas around sex and childhood.
One of the benefits of baring my soul and having frank discussions about paedophilia, with other adults, is that I get to hear about their own experiences. What I’ve noticed is that women seem to have had more sexual experiences (positive and negative) as girls than men have as boys, and that women invest more emotion in sexual contacts, both at the time and in retrospect.
” (and do not worry, there is a way to be a pedophile activist without the need to carry a narrative of this kind, I will tell you another day).”
No, tell me now! 🙂
“Gab, an alternative social media network that, unlike other such alternative platforms, allowed pro-intergenerational sexuality message on its pages”
Sorry Explorer but…
GAB Bans Lolicon, Calling It “Demonic” “Garbage”
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2018/10/gab-bans-lolicon-calling-it-demonic-garbage/
Thanks for info, didn’t know about it. Yes, this is not good for Gab to engage in such blatant censorship.
Yet, to compare… another alternative social network – Minds – has banned even the intellectual, scholarly argumentation for the intergenerational sexuality, such as Marthijn’s one. So, Gab is still comparatively less censorious.
actually thats misleading. they ban it because its more or less illegal.
the implication is they’re quite happy to carry legal demonic garbage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62e9zF39ck0
I know this isn’t the kind of thing that a heretic would like to see but would it be right of me in saying that in order to avoid this kind of thing from happening, should children be allowed to be a separate authority from the mother/father figure or would that not work.
If you haven’t got time for a full-length feature film, there’s a plot summary here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_of_Mine_(1997_film)
Tom
have you seen the film at all?
>have you seen the film at all?
No. An hour and a half is a LOT of time.
I remember that documentary/Drama back in 1997, Germain Greer was a film critic at the time, And I remember her saying how she was glad that the film didn’t show too much “flesh” Cos paedophiles often rewind a thousand times.
That was one of the first times I identified paedophilia with myself. I was aware before but in some sort of denial shall we say.
These feminists all their life are mentally ill and unpleasant misandrist lesbians and above all envious of 13 year old girls (i.e. of a child, for them) and of the fact that men we prefer these very young girls to their dry pussies and their unpleasant grimaces of old hags.
But Greer is different from most feminists in that she has said things that are potentially more supportive to us. For example, she once said that the West has lost the concept of sexual play in childhood, which she seemed to think was a pity. Then again, there is that photo-book she brought out called ‘The Boy’. I think one wag said at the time that she had re-invented herself as an ageing pederast! But as the remark you have cited shows, she is hardly a consistent friend of the minor-attracted, about whom she probably doesn’t know a great deal and or even care that much.
stephen6000
speaking of women do u think patricia hewitt has really change her mind on maps or is she obligated in some way to go along with the status quo in some way?
She was probably not that sympathetic in the first place. See https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2014/02/
haha that’s funny, when Germaine Greer’s own book, “The Beautiful Boy” shows quite a lot of boy flesh!
Along with Camille Paglia, Beatrice Faust and Stevie Jackson, I’d put Greer in a category of sex positive feminists who have some sympathetic understanding of paedophilia.
Tom
judging by your character i think this film would break your heart i have to admit myself it made me turn away on a few occasions.
>i think this film would break your heart
The world we see in the news is more than heart-breaking enough for me, Daniel, without looking for more of the same from fiction.
Tom
in order to help children avoid emotional/coheres behaviours like in this film do you think that any recognised person under the AOC should be legally allowed to be their own authority away from the mother/father figure so they can escape this kind of covert underground operation?
You have addressed the question to me, Daniel, but many here will have a thoughtful view of the matter and I hope others will respond.
Briefly, I would like to see a more open society in which complaints of abuse are attended to quickly. The inevitable downside is that false and trivial complaints will be made. But, yes, kids should have it made clear to them at school that they have their own “authority”, or ability, to make complaints.
The problem is that there is a AoC, it is immoral and not ethical for a third party to determine the consent of a person, the consent is given by the person himself or then does not give it, except in cases of life or death that depend on a third party to save the integrity and life, in all other cases is immoral, a ethical person must fight for abolition of state enforced AoC and stop wasting time in prospective “victories” in AoC reductions and “small steps”. Exploitation and oppression cannot be regulated. That is what has happened to the Animal Rights Activists, they have been proclaiming for decades and decades that animals will be liberated by “small steps” and “regulations” but have achieved absolutely nothing.
That of the AoC is just to maintain the false impression of security and protection. Supporting any AoC only gives the wrong idea that there should be an arbitrary age imposed by scoundrels in power that can change as quickly as it has come. In the hypothetical case that after years and years of struggle it is possible to lower the AoC from 16 to 14 it will return to 16 (or 18) after protests based on fallacies and nonsense of the usual groups like parents, politicians, police, conservative and neofascist parties and feminists and others…
I tell you it in another way: the AoC is not more than the age at which a person does not want to have sex with people of under that age (“at age X which is the same that I like, it’s okay, before that age is abuse and perversion”), so he can have all the legal and therefore morally ok sex with the age he likes while others swallow 20 years of prison just to “protect the weak and innocent” from “perverts”. It’s just an old trick.
Erich
If a parent genuinely emotionally, subjects unwanted sexual contact ect with that person if the child could or should remain a separate authority of their parents or just like at the doctors be allowed a second or third opinion and this could even work regarding more trivial matters ie if mum tells her little boy to go to his room cos she thinks he’s being naughty then why shouldn’t he be allowed as a recognised human being so say no to mum i am a boy and i should be allowed to stay out of my room just like a grown up can.
The thing is, youths have to have the full spectrum of their civil rights granted to them, not just sexual rights. If they are denied full political participation in society, then all of their freedoms, just just those connected to the AoC, can indeed change at the will and whim of those adult agencies you mentioned. They need to be empowered so they can choose their own boundaries, resist attempts to place boundaries on them they are not comfortable with, and to be able to operate in society in accordance to their proven individual merits.
Some succinct responses to Sean here (even though Stephen and Nada both did a good job themselves).
First, I will say this. Your posts are heavily tainted with misandry, Sean. That discredits your objectivity for this topic right there. There is plenty of evidence that men are often falsely accused of sexual assault, which is itself a form of abuse. And are often subjected to sexual assault themselves, but it is not reported often. Women are often given a free pass when they commit similar crimes to men. Misandry doesn’t solve the problem of power imbalances, but simply add’s demand another or “alternative” form of imbalance.
Children are typically more vulnerable to sexual abuse than adults, because they are smaller,
Many men are non-aggressive and slight in stature. And kids can learn to defend themselves quite well. Further, the rights of kids should not be limited due to any arbitrary physical attributes, much as women should not be penalized for having a womb.
less knowledgable
Because we force ignorance upon them, and do not allow them to form or benefit from scientifically objective support & information networks.
and have lower status and less independence than adults.
Also an artificial situation that could be remedied in various ways. Youth liberation discusses ways of doing this, and pretending that the platform does not exist, or that we on the pro-choice camp never discuss it, is going against a lot of empirical evidence. It forces a sort of misrepresentation by omission.
In short, they are less powerful in these respects.
But more powerful in the sense that in the current climate, they can destroy the lives of adults–particularly if they are men–with a simple phone call.
They have some power, in that they are attractive and desirable to many adults, especially to their parents and also to paedophiles. They are adept at using that power but it’s only effective in highly specific contexts.
If an adult is in love with them, but lacks power over them that is in any way substantive, then that is quite a bit of power on the child’s side. And would be even more so if youths were politically empowered.
Children are excluded from the adult sexual milieux because they lack secondary sexual characteristics and so lack the motivation and understanding to engage in adult sexual practices.
This supposition has been challenged numerous times. It also makes the incorrect presumption that the sexual desires of MAPs are the same as those of teleiophiles, as opposed to on the level of the younger people they would hypothetically engage with.
They are also excluded for their own protection from sexual exploitation.
You make a good definition of “sexual abuse” elsewhere, but you ignore the fact that the definition has been expanded by the law and the media to mean any type of sexual contact with adults, no matter how the kids may have felt about it. And “exploitation” is an extremely nebulous definition. They are not excluded for “protection” but to prevent them from transgressing against a paradigm that keeps them in a subservient, ignorant position to adults. Our gerontocentric society does not want kids in any type of position with adults that may require or encourage adults to treat them as equals or full human beings. And this is the direct cause of the problem you seek to remedy, not a solution to it.
Paedophilia crosses the grain of all of these social conventions that relate to power and sexuality, so it is subject to disapproval and coercion to conform to social norms. It is understood as a sexual impulse that puts children at risk.
It is understood as a form of romantic interest that society finds offensive to their personal sensibilities, and threatens to weaken power structures that control kids by giving them agency over the expression over this side of themselves.
It may be that children can engage in sexual conduct with adults without being harmed, but that doesn’t make them less vulnerable in a wider context.
Vulnerable to achieving power in their own right, that is.
Children experience sexual abuse by adults and need to be protected from that, even if that protection places limits on their sexual freedoms. That is uncontroversial.
It should be quite controversial, because placing limits on people’s freedoms “for their own good” always results in precedent for draconian rules to be placed on everyone else, witch hunts, incessant surveillance, and the increase of governmental/police powers. It’s a raw deal for society as a whole, and always proves that democratic/libertarian solutions are always best if you want to have a free society.
What is controversial is the dehumanizing and demonizing of paedophilia AS IF it necessarily or typically involves the sexual abuse of children.
The latter is an inevitable consequence of the former. It’s like trying to create a fire that (hopefully) warms but doesn’t burn.
Many, probably most paedophiles have NEVER had ANY sexual contact with children, and yet they live under a crushing stigma. To me, the right to be open and honest about one’s sexual orientation, without stigma, is much more important and more tractable than challenging the social constraints on sexual conduct with children, which are intuitively grounded in an instinct to protect children from harm.
It’s an instinct that is based on controlling kids and keeping full citizenship from them, which places them at the mercy of adults and within most situations where they are subject to the most common source of harm. It’s not about “men”, as you seem to think, but about adults who want to maintain a status quo they are accustomed to and which they have the advantage. Granting freedom to all is advantageous to all, and would systematically remove kids from situations in which they are easily and secretly subjected to adult power.
“misandry”
it’s true. I am a gynephile. it feels intrinsic to my paedophilia, almost as if being attracted to children is (shock horror) a typically feminine trait. I’m physically strong and tough but I hated the rituals of male socialization and dominance when I was a kid and I hate them even more now.
not much to say about your ‘power’ analysis.
“the incorrect presumption that the sexual desires of MAPs are the same as those of teleiophiles, as opposed to on the level of the younger people they would hypothetically engage with.”
totally agree with this.
“misandry”
it’s true. I am a gynephile.
Which proves a common point I have often made: that if women were truly heavily oppressed in Western society, why is it that individuals of both genders can proudly proclaim themselves misandrists, gynophiles, etc., without losing jobs, having their sites or channels banned or de-monetized, or being publicly dragged through the mud on social media? In contrast to individuals of either gender who may claim to be proud misogynists, that is? This strongly hints as to which gender actually has the advantage in society regardless of the common narrative that acts as if the civil rights movement only began a few years ago.
it feels intrinsic to my paedophilia, almost as if being attracted to children is (shock horror) a typically feminine trait.
To me, it feels like a human trait that many humans of both genders have. I do not equate any of my positive human traits with either masculinity or femininity, because I hold no antipathy towards either gender.
I’m physically strong and tough but I hated the rituals of male socialization and dominance when I was a kid and I hate them even more now.
So did I. But I didn’t grow to hate my own gender as a result; I simply grew to dislike the imposition of any type of arbitrary socializiation. I also hated the roles I was forced to partake that forced me to play deference to anyone who was female, even if the latter honestly deserved none as individuals or collectively, in any given instance. For a long time that made me feel anger and even hatred towards females. Until I got over it, realized that hatred was wrong, and met the many women out there who were not like that and who have a strong sense of equality-based social justice, and thus resent both enforced male and female domination/inherent moral superiority games. Needless to say, this explains why misandrists often support laws that are inherently anti-male, including the AoC laws.
“It should be quite controversial, because placing limits on people’s freedoms “for their own good” always results in precedent for draconian rules to be placed on everyone else”
sounds good, and I’m all for personal liberty, but children have certain needs, and one of those is swaddling.
“It should be quite controversial, because placing limits on people’s freedoms “for their own good” always results in precedent for draconian rules to be placed on everyone else”
sounds good, and I’m all for personal liberty, but children have certain needs, and one of those is swaddling.
Individual needs are just as important as group needs. Children should the right to define their own needs, not have adults alone do so on an arbitrary basis due to their personal beliefs of what a child “should” be. No one should be a slave to a paradigm. If you make exception for any one group of people, you set a precedent to enforce similar laws and moralistic agendas on other groups. Which is exactly why such laws are rationalized for MAPs, and how the rationalization for denying due process to men on an arbitrary basis is now a serious topic of discussion. This is what you set in motion with any type of draconian law.
“You make a good definition of “sexual abuse” elsewhere, but you ignore the fact that the definition has been expanded by the law and the media to mean any type of sexual contact with adults, no matter how the kids may have felt about it.”
I don’t ignore this fact. Just because I use the term ‘sexual abuse’ doesn’t mean my intent is misuse in the manner that’s now routine. My understanding of ‘sexual abuse’ is exactly the same for children as it is for adults: sexual treatment of another person without regard for their welfare of rights. Consent comes into it of course, but consent is a negotiation, not a license. Negation of a person’s capacity to consent is problematic, since it also negates their personhood and natural rights.
Having intercourse with an unconscious adult is abusive and so is having intercourse with a preteen, but there must be room for negotiation in the cases that are not so clear cut. Where children are concerned, such negotiation has been silenced. Like you, I see this as the continuation of an authoritarian strategy of social control, using sexual learning and emergence as states of vulnerability to the imposition of compulsory morality. The impact of this regime is much broader than the domain of sex, as Reich pointed out more effectively than I could.
“And “exploitation” is an extremely nebulous definition.”
I don’t see why. One of the problems with sex is that it is a desire in which we seek a reward, but the reward we seek isn’t an inanimate substance like food or drugs, it’s another person. We ‘use’ the people we love to meet our needs but, ideally, we hope this arrangement is reciprocal. We give, if we can, at least as much as we take.
I don’t think the connotations of ‘exploitation’ allow for much reciprocity in this sense.
I mean .. welfare _or_ rights ..
and I should probably have said prepubescent rather than preteen …
>My understanding of ‘sexual abuse’ is exactly the same for children as it is for adults
In the case of adults the talk is usually of either “rape” or “harassment”; the term “abuse” almost invariably refers to children and is generally taken to mean ANY sexual encounter with an older person. So if you want the reader to understand that this is not what you mean you have to spell it out every time; either that or find another way of expressing the point you want to make.
The latter is preferable, I think: the word “abuse” has itself become pretty much just an empty term of abuse.
I know what you mean, but I have to say that application of the term ‘sexual abuse’ to adult sexual violence is still in wide currency where I live, and that the modifier ‘child’ is more or less required unless the context makes it implicit.
Admittedly I’m being a bit bloody minded, in the same way I sometimes am when I use the term ‘paedophilia’. Yes I know these terms are ‘abused’ in public discourse, but what, are we supposed to just hand over the entire English language to the barbarians and invent new words for everything?
I think the misused terms themselves are the exact locations where there should be some resistance to creeping nonsense.
‘adult sexual violence’ .. I mean ‘sexual violence towards adults’
I continue to use the term “paedophilia” myself, but only in contexts where it makes sense to do so, such as on Sexnet where the term tends to be used quite technically, and at HTOC where we also tend to use the word without heavily negative moral loading attached.
As for what I mean when I say “makes sense to do so”, the expression seems a good one when we think about it. It suggests not only that using it is a good idea but also that it is a good idea because it works: it makes sense: it allows the sense, or meaning, of the word to come across in the reader’s mind without a problem of interpretation or too much ambiguity.
Similarly, I suggest it is a good idea to have the audience in mind when we use a word: we need to think about what they will take it to mean, not just what we like to say. At HTOC one tends to think the person using the word really ought to know better than to use the word loosely. Either they ought to know better but don’t, or else (as with the VPs quite often) they use it in quite a trolling way, deliberately using it repetitively to provoke and annoy. Sometimes the former can be confused with the latter and bad faith can be assumed when that was not the case.
I guess I am being a bit of a troll sometimes, but only because I hope to provoke some imaginative responses. Even tho they show up here sometimes, I couldn’t care less what antis and haters think. The people who most annoy me (ie, whose beliefs I want to challenge) are other ‘paedophiles’ here who don’t share my views.
I get bored with hearing over and over how sexual abuse is a social construct or that protecting children is the same as imprisoning them or that feminism is next to nazism. Yes, there are senses in which all these are true, but there are also senses in which they are utterly false, ridiculous, vapid and facile claims. When I hear them recited by rote, as if they were axiomatic, I just think, well there goes more dogma, except aimed in the opposite direction.
>I get bored with hearing over and over
Might I politely suggest you would be less likely to hear the same things over and over if you don’t elicit them by making similar provocations over and over? Sometimes it’s almost as predictable as Call and Response in a church.
That said, both you and one or two of your more predictable opponents do come up with good points: there is wheat to be found, so to speak – grains of truth along with the chaff. In the end I think we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that all of us are coming from different places in the way we think: different experiences and perceptions inevitably prompt different opinions, often with no side being decisively right or wrong. We will change our views occasionally in response to debate and evidence but probably not often or drastically.
All of us have our characteristic blind spots, along with broad ideological leanings from which we are unlikely to shift. This is annoying but don’t we just have to live with it? Either that or move to greener looking grass in another field. But in the end it may turn out to be just the same old green, or even a bit unappealingly brown.
I’m walking a middle path that might seem contradictory at times, but I don’t think I can be accused of opposing the interests of MAPs. I may argue for some constraints on sexual behaviour and ‘rights’ but I also champion sexual liberty.
Tom understands that there are limits to sexual liberty (such as forbidding penetrative sex with prepubescents) while Dissident seems to evade the issue by casting everything in terms of ‘youth’, as if younger children don’t exist.
Overall, I’m detecting a strong rejection of the term ‘sexual abuse’ in favour of something more neutral like ‘sexual conduct’. I understand the clinical argument for this, but I don’t see what such ideological neutrality accomplishes in the context here. After all, heretics are not neutral.
Some sexual conduct is abusive, so why not call it out? Is the concept of sexual abuse absolutely incompatible with a greater tolerance for paedophilic behaviour? Personally, I don’t think so.
I think we need to traverse this terrain, not skirt around it. It’s a question of compromise.
>Some sexual conduct is abusive, so why not call it out?
Sure, call it out, but be clear what the activity is and why it is abusive rather than just vaguely tarring all adult-child contacts with the same brush.
“tarring all adult-child contacts with the same brush”
As if I’ve ever done that. I’ve given at least one definition that explicitly excludes a basis in age categories.
I know the term ‘sexual abuse’ is routinely applied in a shotgun manner, but not by me. Like you, I see some benefit in clarifying this term, and I don’t see how banning it from the heretical lexicon is going to clarify it. To me, the careless overuse of the term is interesting precisely because it reveals the soft underbelly of the inquisition.
Based on your willingness to exploit MAPs, why should anything you say be considered anything but trolling?
“You make a good definition of “sexual abuse” elsewhere, but you ignore the fact that the definition has been expanded by the law and the media to mean any type of sexual contact with adults, no matter how the kids may have felt about it.”
I don’t ignore this fact. Just because I use the term ‘sexual abuse’ doesn’t mean my intent is misuse in the manner that’s now routine. My understanding of ‘sexual abuse’ is exactly the same for children as it is for adults: sexual treatment of another person without regard for their welfare of rights.
Except the term “welfare” can be arbitrarily applied by lawmakers or moralists to ignore the feelings or empirical circumstances of the younger person involved, and “rights” are all too often defined as “freedom from” rather than “freedom to,” which would better translate into an imperative rather than a right. So, I would not agree that you are necessarily using the term “sexual abuse” in the same fashion for kids as you would for adults.
Consent comes into it of course, but consent is a negotiation, not a license. Negation of a person’s capacity to consent is problematic, since it also negates their personhood and natural rights.
I commend you for recognizing that here. But you contradict yourself on that score elsewhere.
Having intercourse with an unconscious adult is abusive and so is having intercourse with a preteen, but there must be room for negotiation in the cases that are not so clear cut. Where children are concerned, such negotiation has been silenced.
If you believe that, Sean, then like I told you elsewhere in this comments section today, you are not reading our posts clearly at all. Maybe sometimes we do not make this as clear as we should since we are used to talking directly to each other rather than the public at large here, but I believe we do make this clear often enough.
“And “exploitation” is an extremely nebulous definition.”
I don’t see why.
Because people can define “exploitation” in many different ways. Including based on narratives that always dogmatically presume a specific power imbalance based upon a very arbitrary set of factors. Or to leave the presumption that any type of vocation a youth may be working is equivalent to a sweatshop. Etc., et al.
One of the problems with sex is that it is a desire in which we seek a reward, but the reward we seek isn’t an inanimate substance like food or drugs, it’s another person. We ‘use’ the people we love to meet our needs but, ideally, we hope this arrangement is reciprocal. We give, if we can, at least as much as we take.
I don’t think the connotations of ‘exploitation’ allow for much reciprocity in this sense.
Which means it needs to be specifically defined, rather than nebulously and thrown around with impunity. And it also begs us to delve into the wider issue as to why we are far less concerned about exploitation if it occurs demonstrably outside the realm of sexuality and disproportionately concerned with it even if it only occurs ambiguously within the realm of the sexual based upon assumptions rather than evidence. Remember that emotional bias I mentioned to you before?
“Granting freedom to all is advantageous to all”
freedom from slavery or hunger is advantageous. Freedom from conscience or duty, less so.
freedom to be oneself and choose one’s own destiny is advantageous. freedom to blunder into bear pits and nests of vipers, less so.
I like (and lap up) loads of this but finally fail to be anything less than deeply troubled by
“If an adult is in love with them, but lacks power over them that is in any way substantive, then that is quite a bit of power on the child’s side. And would be even more so if youths were politically empowered.”
Can we talk now, Dissident, about the great disturbance that arises in our midst when one speaks, in the very same breath, of raw agency/agents and “political empowerment?” As if these were all of a piece, somehow, and not something to keep distinguished at all costs?
Is not “political empowerment’ but a euphemism for the guarantee that governmental discourse & policy directives will come to define the very parameters and peach of your most precious allotment of person-al being?
I won’t say any more for now, but such an assertion seems to me the living opposite of dissidence, and almost like the present crisis in commercial aviation itself, a hopeless confusion of pilot with robot, that can ultimately only confuse everybody..
Tom O’Carroll – “Your account about the girl going to school with her father’s semen dribbling down her leg is a case in point. It provokes a horrified reaction. That in turn appears to justify strong negativity, even though the incident may be wildly unrepresentative and the account may grossly distort our understanding even of the encounter that had this outcome, which in itself might not have been horrific at all.”
Do you think it’s okay to penetrate the vagina and ejaculate into a pre-teen girl?
>Do you think it’s okay to penetrate the vagina and ejaculate into a pre-teen girl?
I have long maintained that for practical reasons it makes some sense to distinguish penetrative from non-penetrative acts in terms of what should be permitted in law. Back in the 1970s I suggested the age of consent for penetrative sex should be 12. I have found no reason to change my view since then.
This I totally agree with. For under 12, there are many forms of low-level sexual contact that would risk no bodily injury to younger people, which is generally the same type they engage in with each other behind closed doors. In my experience, most Kind people would be completely okay with this common sense limit.
Based on what empirical evidence do you both support 12 as a lower limit?
Even touching, not to mention oral sex, probably involves some penetration. Younger girls are also known to use their fingers, or even objects, in creative and relevant ways.
>Based on what empirical evidence do you both support 12 as a lower limit?
Good question, Nada. Forty years ago, when I judged this age to be about right, relevant empirical evidence was not that easy to come by, so my estimation was no better than a rough guess, largely based on average anatomical compatibility. But I have been given no reason to change my mind since then.
Incidentally, though I did not think about this at the time, the age of 12 has been thought a suitable minimum age for marriage (and hence of consent) in the case of girls for thousands of years, going back at least to the Romans and later enshrined in English law. In those days physical maturity would have been a much more important concern than now, and there was relatively little emphasis on mental maturity and capacity for informed consent.
If you are interested in what PIE thought about the age of consent, and my reasons for departing somewhat from PIE’s “no AOC” stance, just read Chapter 6 of my book Paedophilia: the Radical Case, here:
https://www.ipce.info/host/radicase/radical_new_cleaned1.pdf
You really do need the full context, but the passage most relevant to your question is this one:
>Should there be an age of consent, then, geared specifically to a child receiving
(but not giving) penetration? On balance, I feel there is a need for this, although in
saying so I am departing from the PIE ‘party line’ that I have espoused for the last four
years. What might such an age be, if it were to be based purely on the physical
development of children in general to a stage when they were able to experience such
activity as pleasurable rather than painful? (Emotional factors, knowledge of the
world, etc., are dealt with elsewhere.)
>We have seen that in other cultures custom allows children to receive penetrative
sex by adults from as young as eight, and it seems improbable that such customs
would persist if they proved to be physically damaging, 11 though it is still possible
that they may be endured, rather than enjoyed, by some children. I do not want to be
dogmatically precise about any particular age: it may even be that the appropriate
minimum age for coitus is not the same as that for anal intercourse, but on the basis of
the medical opinion I have sounded informally, making allowance for slower
developing children, I feel that in both cases twelve would probably be about right.
It’s interesting that you saw this post, Nada, but Sean evidently did not? Coincidence? I hope so.
Anyway, to answer your question: I was once informed by someone who had studied these matters from a medical standpoint (a source I trusted) that typically by the age of 12, the female genitals are fully developed enough to handle the demands of intercourse. However, I concur with Tom that the information you provided is food for thought, as I have had women I was with tell me that when they were as young as 8 years of age, they experimented with self-made sex toys. What I might suggest is that perhaps under 12 every romantic relationship that may be desirous of intercourse can be treated on a case-by-case basis. In a youth-lberated society, for instance, young people in age disparate relationships would not have to fear visiting a qualified physician to determine if it was safe for them as individuals to engage in certain activities they may want to explore, much as adults can do today if they are uncertain about engaging in a certain form of exercise, travel, etc., based upon individual health concerns.
This age of 12 comes from the minimum age for marriage in the Catholic Church’s Canon Law: 12 years for girls, 14 for boys. It originates from ancient Roman Law and corresponds to an estimate of the age of puberty. However, take account of the following two facts:
– Today children are better fed than before, so they grow faster and start puberty earlier than in older times.
– In many cultures that were not influenced by Abrahamic religions and European culture, such as in Polynesia before the 17th century, girls often lost their virginity before puberty.
Thus from a “practical” or mechanistic point of view, this question is not settled. I do not know of any study about the growth of vagina during childhood and puberty.
Also, if you discriminate penetrative sex from non-penetrative one, you should distinguish vaginal penetration and anal one. The vagina is supple, adapted to penetration and childbirth, while the rectum is not. Physical damage is more likely in anal sex than in vaginal one.
>you should distinguish vaginal penetration and anal one. The vagina is supple, adapted to penetration and childbirth, while the rectum is not.
Interesting point. I made some comment about it in Paedophilia: The Radical Case. I’m not sure whether medical opinion has changed much since then but presumably (apart from earlier puberty) children and adolescents are much the same anatomically as they were 40 years ago.
Surely, Christian and all of you other wise people, the criterion as to whether a girl may comfortably make love at age 12 is the presence of the rugae vaginalis?
These concertina-like folds in the walls of the vagina that allow the vagina itself to stretch inwards easily, usually begin to develop when a girl is 11 to 12.
The next criterion is surely the gentleness of the girl’s partner? If it’s possible to hurt a grown woman with rough treatment, um, DUH…
M T-W.
my point here was that if this detail evokes disgust in onlookers, it may equally invoke self disgust in a person who has been sexually assaulted and whose own leg is involved. age or gender are not factors, but context is. the subjective experience is totally dependent on the context.
just as erotic excitement can offset disgust, and even make some mess positively arousing, the opposite inevitably pertains to victims of sexual abuse (of any age or gender). in the latter case, disgust (esp. self disgust) is closely linked to the phenomena of shame and social exclusion, and these can be just as psychologically destructive for sexual abuse victims as they can be for MAPs.
I see you’re doing good tom, nice job, looking forward to email exchanges if you have the chance.
Theelementalurbanics@gmail.com
>I see you’re doing good tom, nice job
Thanks, glad you like the blog.
>looking forward to email exchanges if you have the chance.
Too time-consuming, unfortunately. If you raise interesting points here in the comments space I might join in the conversation though. It’s a whole lot more effective when lots of people can follow the discussion.
Are you Omnipolitics?! If this is the case, then it is very, well, strange – as far as I know, Omni is dead; he had committed suicide.
So, there are three possibilities:
1) the information concerning Omni’s suicide was false, so he is still alive;
2) you’re the original Omni’s friend intending to revitalise the cause what he has started;
3) you’re a badly unethical troll who desires to attack emotionally the people of the (pro-)MAP community.
Which of these three options is true?
Number 1
Beware Tom and other fellow bloggers, this militant antifeminist guy Werh is almost certainly one of Tom Grauer’s Male Sexualist. In one of his last blog posts, Tom Grauer admitted that he really despises pedophiles (in fact he calls “clinical pedophiles” are neurologically messed up), and there are comments in his blogs saying that Tom O’Caroll and the MAP movement are hateful feminists and people without courage or guts, here fellow MAP blogger Steve Diamons talks about Tom Grauer’s wrongdoing:
https://ourlovefrontier.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/tom-grauer-so-maps-are-now-expendable/
I think they now want to poison our MAP blogs with their anti-egalitarian, anti-female propaganda. Please be very careful who you accept into your circles.
I have no problem with Tom Grauer or anyone else expressing their opinions.
>Please be very careful who you accept into your circles.
The liveliness of Heretic TOC as a comment forum owes a lot, it seems to me, to the fact that a range of views can be expressed here. The appearance of any particular comment should not be taken as an endorsement of the view expressed in it.
I do not personally have the time to rebut all comments I disagree with, nor would it be good for me to dominate in that way: I already have my platform i.e. the blog itself. I am totally relaxed about views opposed to my own appearing here, including those that seem obviously to lack merit. I am confident most heretics here, including you, will be able to see through them without any help from me.
That said, thanks for your concern.
Gab, an alternative social media network that, unlike other such alternative platforms, allowed pro-intergenerational sexuality message on its pages (at least, in the case of Marthijn Uittenbogaard), is blocked and de-platformed:
https://gab.ai/Marthijn_Uittenbogaard
The Internet censorship is getting worse day by day…
More on potential censorship, and for Ed Chambers specifically:
Ed, ProPedoFront apparently thinks that his Twitter page, as well as yours, was banned on the grounds of having “pro-contact” words in its description. And indeed, only your and his pages contained this exact expression, while the other pro-contact-MAP Twitter pages, that did not used this very description, were not.
Of course, all these is merely hypothetical… yet, Ed, when you will make another page on Twitter (I hope it is “when”, not “if”!), it may be wise to formulate your page description without using “pro-contact” phrase. Try to formulate in some other way, such as “supportive of the free sexual expression of children and adolescents”…
@stephen6000
==But it makes sense to question whether such a loaded term is appropriate (loaded, that is, against the ‘perpetrator’) when those who are responsible for maintaining the taboo are at least as responsible for the harm done as those who knowingly violate it. Unless of course the taboo has some independent justification. But it is hard to see what that might be.==
I agree stephen6000, it does make sense to ask that question. The concept of ‘sexual abuse’ is rife with contradictions. In particular, disapproval of childhood sexual experimentation and play is associated with the exact same authoritarian and patriarchal traditions that feminism seeks to unseat. Also, positive adult sexuality is associated with free sexual rehearsal in childhood, while sexual neuroses and other sexual difficulties are associated with punitive attitudes to it.
Against this background, the concept of ‘childhood sexual abuse’ has expanded to include almost every intrinsically natural, normal and healthy childhood sexual activity, including solo masturbation in some instances.
So we might say (surprise surprise) that protecting children from sexual ‘abuse’ is as much a socially conservative and reactionary strategy as it is a progressive one.
On the other hand, an authoritarian and patriarchal system still dominates western culture and, within that system, women and children are vulnerable to sexual victimization by males and male power. This is not rehearsal or play, it’s abuse, i.e., control, assault and rape. Exactly the same contrast can be seen between chimpanzee and bonobo social organization.
So I believe the origin and maintenance of the taboo against adult/child sexual activity is partly a patriarchal strategy to maintain control of sexuality and partly a strategy by women to protect themselves and their children from sexual exploitation. All discussions of it need to account for this dichotomy.
In my opinion, there are so many problems with western cultural attitudes to sex that it is not possible to directly critique the ‘child sexual abuse’ narrative without acknowledging the risk that weakening this taboo may expose children to greater risk. Unlike you apparently, I think genuine sexual abuse of children is a fairly common problem and also fairly miserable for the kids involved.
Encouraging feminism would only make sense if the world were dominated by sexism and patriarchy.
[REMAINDER OF POST DELETED & REPEATED: SEE BELOW. MODERATOR T.O’C.]
Sorry I make typos in the other comment, this is the good one.
Encouraging feminism would only make sense if the world were dominated by sexism and patriarchy.
But it is not. It is dominated by feminism. The woman reigns and the man the slave and submissive within society. What we in the West began to swallow a few decades ago and that we still have much to do to eradicate in all areas.
If the turns were the other way round, what you say would make sense. But since the turns are not the other way around, the deduction is that in the end you are fascists (those expressions against freedom of expression, that support for the concept of “hate speech” are proof of a fact, not an opinion) who fight for (consciously or not) male oppression in order not to lose the privileges that being born in a feminist world has given you as a woman’s ally and get social aceptation.
When a few decades pass and someone enters this blog, they will vomit as they read your comments that condone (consciously or not) the advance toward male oppression.
When families don’t fear that their sons will fearing that a 15, 16 or 17 year old girl will get a passport to jail to them, just as they don’t currently fear this with his daughters dating boys, it will be a good indicator that we’re really moving forward.
In the meantime, keep singing against patriarchy. Your future children will thank you. And women too, because I feel sorry for them. Although if men marry them, it will be because they won’t be aware that dating older women is a perversion and they will accept them as something natural.
>Sorry I make typos in the other comment, this is the good one.
Just a suggestion: give yourself time to calm down a bit before you post!
===Encouraging feminism would only make sense if the world were dominated by sexism and patriarchy. But it is not. It is dominated by feminism.===
Sorry Werh, I don’t agree. I agree there are excesses in feminist rhetoric and power in the west, but I think the rest of ‘the world’ remains in a more or less agricultural state.
Against this, I’m interested in caring for Mother Earth, aka ‘the world’, and I think ‘girl power’ remains our best hope for conserving our ecology. I also think feminism is intrinsically sex positive and would be supportive of paedophilia if it weren’t preoccupied with addressing the harm caused by sexual predation on children by some men.
These things may not be apparent in the present cultural manifestations of feminism but they are fundamental to its nature.
>be supportive of paedophilia if it weren’t preoccupied with addressing the harm caused by sexual predation on children by some men.
Feminism is about the rights of women. If you do not regard this as its fundamental nature, feel free to prove that NO girl have been stripped of ANY rights under ANY feminism.
As feminist laws conflates sex and rape, in particular regarding willing sex between girls and men, such men are all predators by their, and your, definition.
Rather than hold men, particulary pedophiles, responsible for the merely alleged crimes of the few, why not hold feminists strictly accountable for the suffering feminism have caused and causes to girl-lovers and girls? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
What I have written was not with impulse nor with hatred, it was to test you, it is not to vainglory me, but it is of such a high quality bait that neither Tom who is already a seasoned man, has realized it.
But I’m afraid this would be an endless fight, I’ve had a thousand arguments but with people who claimed that we need more “black power” while others “white power”, and of course, others claimed “men power” and nobody has changed their opinion.
I’m not surprised that some want to stay in the agricultural era, if I’m honest, no matter how bad it sounds, we have survived for thousands of years with women taking their place as wives and mothers, and now that a thousand rights have been given to them, you only have to take a look to realize that this western world is going to die, something like the fall of the Roman Empire. You may disagree, but for some to turn the West into any district of Amsterdam is not what paradise is said to be.
You can say whatever you want but… Feminists don’t care what happens to children or sexual abuse. You will care. Most of them don’t. Feminism incites child abuse by promoting sex change to pre-pubertal children, separating parents from their children with false reports of domestic violence, etc.
Supporting pedophilia will not change the depredation of children by some men. If a father wants to continue raping his preteen daughter before going to school, he will continue to do so and he will be punished anyway if they denounce him and prove their guilt (remember this last point is important, feminists tend to forget).
By the way, and I’m telling you just so you know, that phrase “preoccupied with addressing the harm caused by sexual predation on children by some men” is the same one they use, word by word, removing the “some” to prohibit and denounce men’s relationships with teenage girls under 18 (or 16 or whatever they want), so I know it well, and as you can see, it doesn’t impact me too much.
And forbidding a 15 or 16 year old girl to date with me is not going to protect her from the depredations of some men, it will only change me, for the bad boy of her age from her class, who will treat her like shit and make her pregnant and will go out for tobacco never to come back. Of course it is more horrible, abusive and predatory that at that age they can marry a man with the possibility of forming a family, we don’t need that in modern society, we need women in their best fertile years studying gender studies getting married even at 40, with that we will have a stable society for 5 generations. The fall of the Roman Empire…
And how many children in general (not just girls) are abused by some women who wield power over them, Sean? Is it really only men, or even predominantly men? Or, is the crime simply under-reported when it comes to women, less believed when it is reported, or less often recognized for what is when it does go on in public places because women are in general less heavily scrutinized around kids than men?
And more importantly, does your status as an admitted gynophile/misandrist force you to overlook the very thought this might be the case? I’m sorry, but if someone outright admits to being a misandrist, they are admitting to having an inherent bias that prevents them from tackling the issue objectively.
If ‘genuine sexual abuse’ of children is a common problem why didn’t Clancy see more of it? (She actually found hardly any – and she was certainly trying hard.)
===If ‘genuine sexual abuse’ of children is a common problem why didn’t Clancy see more of it?===
Meh… Well, for a start, it’s hardly an overt behaviour and, if we aren’t personally involved, we only know what we’ve seen or heard. If any of us have ever seen sexual abuse in child porn, we can’t say so, because we’d be admitting to a crime.
But my neighbour is currently in jail because he raped his preteen daughter every morning for a couple of years. She eventually overcame her shame and embarrassment and made a complaint against him. In court she described how his semen ran down her legs as she walked to school
She can’t have been persuaded to reinterpret her sexual experiences as abuse after the fact, because she complained while it was happening, and nobody else knew it was happening until she complained.
I’d watched her sometimes on that walk to school and I probably even thought about her in a sexual way, given that I’m attracted to girls. I feel bad about that now. I had no knowledge of her situation, but I regret that my love and admiration for girl children was so much in sympathy with her fathers crimes, rather than being focused on her own happiness and welfare.
I also hate the fact that she’ll struggle to have a good sexual life after that introduction, and I think that’s really the biggest penalty for kids who have these experiences, that their capacity to enjoy sex is severely diminished.
I’m not saying the scales have fallen from my eyes or that children can’t have positive sexual experiences with adults, but if you think sexual abuse of children is uncommon, I think you’re in la la land.
>if you think sexual abuse of children is uncommon, I think you’re in la la land.
Yet you give us an example of father-daughter incest. Academic anonymous survey research points to prevalence of 1 or 2 %. I’d say that’s quite rare.
This looks classically like a case of being overly influenced by individual accounts, especially when presented in an emotive way.
Valid points. I admit I was emotionally affected by that instance…
But statistics also show that children are at greater risk of sexual violence from step fathers than from fathers, so perhaps that 1 or 2 % is 2 or 4 % in blended families, and that percentage must be higher where ‘stepfathers’ are boyfriends and one night stands.
In my experience, physical and emotional violence against children is much more common that sexual violence, and sexual interactions between adults and children are often positive. But I also know that sexual abuse of children occurs and is not rare. What else can I say?
>I also know that sexual abuse of children occurs and is not rare.
It depends what you mean by “rare” and by “abuse”. Those who most routinely denounce child-adult sexual encounters are apt to define any such encounters as abusive, which bumps up the figures; and they define sexual encounters very broadly to include acts that are not directly sexual, plus words they consider “inappropriate”.
It is easy, but not necessarily very meaningful, to find widespread abuse in this way. That is why it helps to be as precise as possible rather than joining in too readily to endorse the usual assumptions.
Perhaps it is time to mention again some of the most reliable figures available to us, from recent large scale surveys of older adolescent schoolchildren. These were featured here earlier this year. See: https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/nothing-like-nordic-noir-to-cheer-us-up/
The article begins:
>Stunning research in two studies, from Finland and Germany, has already been reported this year, both of which give a big boost to the heretical claim that kind people are much kinder – more caring in their feelings towards children and liked by them – than the present, all-pervasive, vilification suggests.
However, the stats point to which I would draw particular attention in view of your sweeping claim that sexual abuse of children is not rare, Sean, is from a huge Finnish study with 11,364 participants. How many of these reported sexual contact with a significantly older person? Only 256. And that 256 included a big chunk who did not consider themselves to have been abused.
I wrote:
>The analyses focused on the subsample of 256 children and adolescents who reported having sexual experiences with adults or with someone at least ?ve years older at the time of the incident. This subsample amounts to 2.4% of the total sample, a figure some might feel is very low, and indeed reassuringly so on a conventional view, given that a survey of children themselves would appear to be the most reliable method.
=== So blinkered has research become that the policy point here (more safety education needed) will probably seem utterly uncontroversial to most people working in the field. That is because, for them, the victimological paradigm has become incontrovertible common sense. But this is zombie science. It lacks an alert appreciation of the data before the authors’ eyes, which clearly indicate that a very significant (in lay terms at least) proportion of the “victims” are only thus designated by convention, not by the evidence. This is not to argue against the goal of reducing real victimisation. It is just to suggest that a bigger and very important picture is being missed.===
Very nicely put!
My own assessment of the situation is based largely on media reports in my own locality or country, and occasionally on published self reports of ‘victims’ or victims of ‘sexual abuse’ or sexual abuse. I’ve also spoken to friends and acquaintances about their own childhood sexual experiences with adults.
I prefer to limit my view to the context of a culture I understand and my view is more qualitative than quantitative. In fact, it is not scientific and has no statistical basis.
>my view …. is not scientific and has no statistical basis.
But you still continue to hold the view and put it forward in public, apparently with some confidence that it is correct despite strong evidence to the contrary. Isn’t this simply irrational?
You say your opinion is grounded on a qualitative rather than quantitative basis. This sounds as though it might be another way of getting at the truth, and one which carries equal weight: the very words themselves look and sound very similar after all. Some scientists are adamant that this is not true, taking the view that qualitative research can be a useful prelude to the advancement of knowledge but we cannot achieve the latter without taking the measure of things through careful quantification.
That is a rather sophisticated question for the philosophy of science. At a much simpler level, though, we should not get carried away with the idea that qualitative judgements are intrinsically valid just because we use a fancy word like qualitative.
The validity depends on whether the qualitative judgement in question is itself of high quality or low quality. High quality “qualitative research”, such as Terry Leahy’s in-depth interviews with a range of people who were the younger partner is a consensual sexual relationship with an adult is very illuminating. In fairness, so are interviews with those who have been the victims of traumatic contacts when they are conducted in a careful, structured way; but it tends to be sensationalist anecdotes that are foregrounded in the media.
Your account about the girl going to school with her father’s semen dribbling down her leg is a case in point. It provokes a horrified reaction. That in turn appears to justify strong negativity, even though the incident may be wildly unrepresentative and the account may grossly distort our understanding even of the encounter that had this outcome, which in itself might not have been horrific at all.
Think about it. Millions of grown women are engaged quite frequently in sexual intercourse with their male partners, leading to ejaculation of sperm into the vagina, some of which will inevitably leak back. Millions of these women go to work, sometimes soon after having sex. Millions of women may have experienced the kind of leakage reported in the account you cited, Sean.
But are there millions of horror stories in the media about it? Does it imply these women have been raped by their partners? Should we be disgusted and outraged?
Well, disgusted, perhaps, but not outraged. As with teenage girls’ menstruation, semen seepage is a hygiene issue, not a rational basis for moral condemnation.
This is not to say the relationship you described was a good one. The father might well have been a callous bully. That may be why the case ended up in court. But the semen aspect, which appears to have fed into your qualitative judgement, does not appear to tell us about the quality of the relationship for better or worse. It is purely emotive. After all, would you blame the father if the girl had experienced a heavy period and found blood running down her leg on her way to school?
excellent response.
You’re right to say I’m winging it at times, but I think it’s wrong to say I’m being irrational. I’ve thought a lot about these questions. I’ve also read a lot of the same research you have.
You correctly identify the ‘disgust’ element in the detail of semen dripping down a girls leg. To me it’s a detail that makes her experience concrete. A woman in a consensual adult relationship might have the same experience, but would maybe ‘lean in to’ her disgust, and make it messy in a way that could be erotic.
That’s a view to quality, not quantity. That’s the problem with terms like ‘sexual abuse’ being used in so called quantitative research.
Oh dear, you’ve obviously got me down as one of those horrible pro-contacters who are ‘in denial about the reality of child sexual abuse’.
But I repeat my question. If ‘genuine sexual abuse’ of children is a common problem why didn’t Clancy see more of it? (She actually found hardly any – and she was certainly trying hard.)
I think it’s fair to say there’s an element of hysteria in society’s response to child sexual abuse, magnified through a lens of moral panic over ‘paedophilia’ in it’s many meanings.
So Clancy’s book is speaking to that, but I don’t think she’s saying that sexual abuse doesn’t exist or that it never causes trauma, just that the trauma is overstated. People have been publishing that claim for decades.
So are you saying that women (and a few men) are sexually abused and raped, but children aren’t? If so, are are you saying that children are having sexual contact with adults but it’s never abusive, or that adults rarely have sexual contact with children?
I find it hard to believe any of those claims, or that sexual victimization of children is so rare that it’s not a problem. None of these studies make that claim and my understanding of human behaviour makes it almost inevitable that children do suffer this kind of harm at times. Sure the degree is different from society to society, but I can’t believe it is insignificant in the way you suggest.
Ultimately, I think cleaving to the vision that children are never sexually exploited by adults just reveals an anxiety that perhaps they are, and that seems self defeating. I don’t see any reason for heretics to deny this kind of sexual harm occurs, and I think their persistence in doing so just erodes their credibility.
Surely the important thing is that paedophiles model their own behaviour in a way that doesn’t contribute to this problem, because the relevance for us is that we are held to account for child sexual abuse that has nothing to do with paedophilia, not that the abuse itself is a figment of feminist imagination.
No, I hold hardly any of the beliefs you attribute to me here. Maybe it’s my fault for not making my terminology clearer. When I said that Clancy found hardly any cases of ‘genuine sexual abuse’, I meant she found hardly any cases of coercion or manipulation in sexual contacts between adults and children. And she is quite explicit about this. It is true that SHE wouldn’t have said that ‘child sexual abuse’ was rare, because, despite the absence of force in the cases she studied, she still considers them as child sexual abuse, as there was subsequent trauma (which mainly appears to be sociogenic, though again she wouldn’t have used that term) and she doesn’t feel that the children were responsible for this.
Incidentally, I’m with the Rind report in thinking that the term ‘child sexual abuse’ should be avoided altogether as it is simply unclear what it refers to. If you use the neutral term ‘adult-child sex’, you are still free to make any moral judgements about it that you want
>I’m with the Rind report in thinking that the term ‘child sexual abuse’ should be avoided altogether
So is Michael Seto, author of perhaps the most the most scientifically sophisticated book on the subject of paedophilia and child-adult sexual encounters. Unfortunately Seto didn’t have the courage of his convictions. He consigns his unease with the term “child sexual abuse” to a mere footnote, but he does not consign his use of the term to the trash can.
Sorry, I didn’t answer your question. I don’t have time to read Clancy right now, but I really should!
Yes, I really recommend it. As well as being a vital contribution to the literature, it is a good read!
Were you against authoritarian control of sexuality, you’d not excuse its extreme form. A ‘patriarchy’ (Ancient Greece, Rome, traditional Islam) might have some restrictions on sexuality, but with regard to adult/child or adult/minor sex, they are nowhere near those found in the Western feminist dystopias.
As for your ‘protection’ hypothesis: Fathers also contribute to children, and there’s NO reason to assume the interests of women (including those hating men and children!) are those of children. Doing so allows for genuine exploitation (obviously including arbitrary restrictions of the sexual market!)
As this ‘protection’ conflates sex and rape (forced sex under the threat of death) for children, it’s also obvious it doesn’t protect children from rape, which drowns among the sex cases persecuted as rape. Without the ‘protection’, the risk of rape would be lower, as those loving children could do so without being falsely branded as ‘rapists’.
Regarding bonobos, are you as disgusted by their sexual behavior as you are of that of pedophiles living under the feminist restrictions you defend?
In my opinion, there are so many problems with western cultural attitudes to sex that it is not possible to directly critique the ‘child sexual abuse’ narrative without acknowledging the risk that weakening this taboo may expose children to greater risk. Unlike you apparently, I think genuine sexual abuse of children is a fairly common problem and also fairly miserable for the kids involved.
I do not agree that Stephen, and most of the rest of the pro-choice camp, believe that genuine sexual abuse of kids is not a fairly common problem. What we disagree with is that this taboo you mention has a positive aspect to it in terms of “combating” the problem. Most real sexual abuse occurs within the context of power, and women have as much power over kids as men do. However, abuse by women towards the kids whom they possess power over is often greatly underreported. This is often the case due to the anti-male attitude that is fashionably pervasive in our society right now, and which you frankly seem to espouse in this post of yours.
Secondly, we often discuss youth liberation as the means of empowering kids so they are no longer at the mercy of any adults in this fashion. That is something that you overlooked in your critique here, instead focusing on the possible partial benefits of maintaining the taboo. All the taboo does is strengthen two things: 1) Parental power over kids, where the great majority of all genuine forms of abuse against kids take place: within the insular, often-hidden walls of the nuclear family unit; 2) Increase state power over kids, which further disenfranchises them and effectively removes their voice from society almost entirely.
Weakening the taboo needs to go hand-in-hand with empowering kids politically, so that children and young teens have a voice in society, can participate in formulating the rules, and can have full access to information and support networks without adult agencies imposing bans or limits. We discuss this often here, and this evident to anyone who chooses to acknowledge its prominence among our discourse.
Needless to say, I agree with most of this and you put it very well, Dissy.
However, there is a danger that even the more radical sceptics here, including me, can be bludgeoned into accepting aspects of a falsely negative narrative simply because they are constantly asserted in the media. We all need to be vigilant in pointing to well researched evidence rather than being overly influenced by emotive and (very often) exaggerated anecdotes.
>I do not agree that Stephen, and most of the rest of the pro-choice camp, believe that genuine sexual abuse of kids is not a fairly common problem.
You could be correct in your view of what most of us believe; but most of us may be conceding too much.
Such evidence as exists that “genuine sexual abuse of kids” is “fairly common” vanishes in a puff of smoke when the details are scrutinised. It exists, but at under 5%. I would describe that as “fairly uncommon” or even “quite rare”. What would you call it?
As for how I arrived at that <5% figure, see two of my responses to Sean in the comments on this blog. Search for "Finnish study" and "incest" in two separate posts of 2 Nov.
So noted. For what it’s worth, I do not think genuine sexual abuse, even within the walls of direct adult power, is extremely pervasive or an “epidemic”. I simply think it is much more common within those walls than down the street with a neighbor or an online friend that the youth could usually quite easily avoid if they wanted to. Things would be different at a boarding school, etc., of course. However, I think instances of actual abuse would be considerably less at a boarding school following the Sudbury model for obvious reasons.
I think bullying of one sort of another is quite pervasive, however, even among parents who are nice people and have the best of intentions (e.g., saying “no” to their kids about something that would not be demonstrably harmful to them, but which the parents object to because it goes against their religious or moralistic beliefs, because it may enable their kids to achieve a degree of independence quicker than they want to or have to let go legally, etc.). And I think emotional abuse within the reclusive nuclear family household is quite pervasive, but at least 80% of the time it is defended as a form of “tough love” that is a legitimate form of “parenting” even if many parents will readily denounce subscribing to it. Yet, the bulk of genuine sexual abuse is externalized outside the nuclear family home, and ascribed to MAPs in general and “men” in particular.
>I do not agree that Stephen, and most of the rest of the pro-choice camp, believe that genuine sexual abuse of kids is not a fairly common problem.
The main point I wanted to make is that the common perception that nearly all cases of adult/child sex involve force or manipulation is false.
If you are attracted to children why don’t you call yourself CHILD attracted person?
Although you will realize that it is nonsense, because being a person attracted to children is being a pedophile. It is going against the natural course of language, which tends to abbreviate and not expand. Why should I deconstruct a word because the compact version is offensive?
An example, if I am a racist, I don’t say that I am a “person who differentiates by race” because the word racist is universally vilified, or I don’t use it, I use it with all its consequences or I use something else.
If the word pedophilia seems to you to have become something disgusting and abominable (it seems so to me), then look for another simple word to define something simple.
In fact, minor attracted person will inevitably vary to ‘map’ over time if in some hypothetical case it were accepted in the first place.
The word minor attracted person has become fashionable mostly thanks to those who defend by active and passive that hebephilia and ephebophilia are real, so they try to put in the same bag those who like pre-pubescent children (those who have a really different attraction) with whom they simply admit to being attracted young adults instead of shutting up and lying to each other and to themselves. (That they don’t have that attraction or that has a special chronophilia that everyone else doesn’t have).
I am a person who is attracted to women under the age of 18, that is to be a heterosexual man, it doesn’t make sense to call me “minor attracted person” as it doesn’t make sense to call me ephebophile, even though I am repudiated by the rest of heterosexual men. My sexual attraction doesn’t make me special to other men. Just as I am not a “legal adult attracted person” because I am attracted to women over 18.
Even if we defend the theory that we are all attracted to children to some degree, it would still make no sense to use minor attracted person or CHILD attracted person because then it would be just another experience of being heterosexual or homosexual, as well as being attracted to twenty- and fifteen-year-olds.
I believe this use of minor attracted person is also because the other words have not worked for them:
They don’t use (or just timidly) pedosexual because they are afraid of getting angry at the homosexual leviatan, they prefer not to think that their greatest enemies, those who live by martyrizing you along with the feminists are homosexuals.
Calling yourself pedosexual makes all the sense in the world when you are only attracted to children, because it is your complete sexuality, here sex is less relevant than the age stage, on the other hand when they are adults and young adults (teenagers), sex is more important than age, that’s why it is correct to use heterosexual and homosexual etc. When it’s both adults and children, it’s more of a pedophile, because within your sexuality there’s an inclination for children.
Childlover, girlover and boylover I suppose because it is obvious that they are more than anything euphemisms and labels of personalization, and is again call you pedophile deconstructing the word.
She claimed the SOTP had worked well in its early phase when it was in the hands of experienced clinical psychologists, but when it was rolled out over the whole prison estate it was not given enough funding and was delivered by poorly trained staff.
I totally believe her.
Tom. Perhaps you are spending too much time among the Goths and the Visigoths. Any treatment that demands ANY set of beliefs as a condition for staying out of prison is tolerable only in a totalitarian society. Which is what we live in. Now. It’s where we are at this very moment. I am not sure what, if anything, we can do about that. But somehow I think it is important not to forget where we are. What passes for “treatment” and what passes for “feminism” are two nails in the lid of our coffin. Having better trained people working in the concentration camps really won’t help a lot.
“Cognitive behavioral” therapy means totalitarian control of the the thoughts, desires and dreams of people along with their behavior. “Holistic” means throwing more drugs into the mix so that we can control their very synapses.
Real solutions to the problems of society are outside the range of acceptable discourse at the kind of conference you describe. I refer you to a book titled “Pedophilia: the Radical Case” for the straight gouge.
If only the Jews had been able to overcome their Jewishness, maybe the Holocaust would not have been necessary. Perhaps treatment would have helped.
>Any treatment that demands ANY set of beliefs as a condition for staying out of prison is tolerable only in a totalitarian society.
I agree. The fact that you think otherwise suggests you have not read the article for ATSA I linked to near the end of my piece. It is called “What to do with the entrenched client: a paedophilic entrenched client’s view”. The term “entrenched”, in this context, means deeply dug in, ready to defend their beliefs to the death, as it were, by fighting for them from the trenches.
You will see that I recommend taking a different approach, abandoning CBT in favour of discussing relevant literature, such as the marvellous memoir Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso, which could be the basis for a fabulously rich discussion of consent, power etc.
Here is the link again:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e6ar1390qief00w/ATSA%20Forum%20-%20O%27Carroll.pdf?dl=0
I thought we agreed about this issue, (and you confirmed that I was right.) That was why it surprised me that you agreed with Pamela Dow that the only problem with SOTP was that it was carried out by incompetent, poorly trained workers. It is amazing to me that you are able to maintain your reasonable and respectful style while you meet with those people. I admire your efforts. I just thought that maybe they were beginning to wear you down.
>it surprised me that you agreed with Pamela Dow that the only problem with SOTP…
My fault, I didn’t express myself as well as I might have done on this occasion. I totally believe her when she says the programme was run by poorly trained staff when it was rolled out nationally but I do not think that was the only problem.
While I am replying to you I might as well add that your work was briefly mentioned in the references to my ATSA article. The longer piece had substantial quotes from your book These Were My Realities.
Tom, in your article linked above you say: “Fragoso cannot be accused of propagandizing in favour of a child’s ability to consent to sex with an adult because she plainly express the opinion that the relationship was harmful to her in many ways, and that such men need treatment. This being the case, I found that the book presented a more powerful challenge to my view that children can consent to sex with an adult than anything else I have encountered in the media or the victimological literature….”.
Can you explain what this powerful challenge is? And do you know if the man’s suicide was related to his relationship with Fragoso?
>Can you explain what this powerful challenge is? And do you know if the man’s suicide was related to his relationship with Fragoso?
I could try to address these questions, but I recommend you read the book instead. It’s not that long.
What I will say, quite briefly, is that Fragoso is very interesting because she writes well and is not one-sided. Much of what she says throughout the book appears to favour the idea that children can and do consent. Towards the end another view is put forward but not in my view convincingly. As with so many other cases, it is as though she has been “got at” in adulthood, shifting her towards an orthodox view that she did not hold as a child.
OK, but why did you call it powerful if it is now convincing in your view? Maybe only in order to please ATSA? (By the way, when clicking into the article above and being presented for the ATSA’s logo, at first glance it looks like a Nazi site…)
>OK, but why did you call it powerful if it is no[t] convincing in your view? Maybe only in order to please ATSA?
It is definitely powerful. That is not the same as convincing.
As for pleasing ATSA, I’m sure using the word “powerful” helped. I had to get the damn thing published, after all, and there was plenty of resistance within the organisation. To the best if my knowledge this is the first and only time any paedophile has ever managed to get a relatively unapologetic word in edgeways in a publication “behind enemy lines” as it were. It’s not the most radical piece I have ever had published but it’s a long way from the grovelling shit that is usually the only kind of personal account they would countenance from “an offender”.
>at first glance it looks like a Nazi site…)
You are understandably suspicious, which has perhaps led to your imagination working overtime!
I should have said that in another version of the article I cited your work at some length! This longer version was much longer, at over 30,000 words, whereas the ATSA version is around 3,000.
Ladies & Gentlemen, will you ‘welcome’ to our grim and getting grimmer world-stage (wait for it).. The Intimacy Co-ordinator http://www.realclearlife.com/daily-brief/hbo-will-now-intimacy-coordinator-staffing-sex-scenes/
‘Intimacy coordinator’ – LOL! (I’d hoped to write a wittier response but couldn’t think of one.)
As always an enjoyable read on a serious subject. Also, as you wrote, Tom, plenty was said about the what but not the how.
Commenter Sean brought up a very important point, that of the misunderstanding between ‘consent and ‘assent’. And he put it well by describing it as the lite/light version. For a very good explanation, and useful advice also on romance scams, see this website: https://consentawareness.net/
Remember, consent doesn’t just mean assent.
Tom O’Carroll basically says that we have to join the “good” and “sensible” feminism so that with time (a long, long time) after showing that “we are all good people” they accept their pedophilia (and I guess what they call hebephilia and ephebophilia, that is nothing but natural attraction to young adults, but inventing non-existent chronophilias and use it in some forums and blogs to please the junk science of psychiatrists is too much needed).
In other words, the same tactic that hasn’t worked, but now will magically work, because… four? (out of billions) of feminists don’t hate sex with a minor under 18 very much, and some 10 only ask for a minor prison sentence and treatment.
Hopefully, the Feminist State will accept us, the happy few, the pedophiles, hebephiles and ephebophiles, as like homosexuals and transsexuals, because they need us to destroy the traditional western (and eastern) civilization, because there is nothing more destructive of a society than looking for girls of childbearing age, man, there is much difference between a 16 and 20 years old, believe me.
Feminism is a sensible and well-intentioned ideology, only that it has been co-opted by a noisy and prejudiced minority. Yes, and I am the king of England.
But it doesn’t matter, I am a loyal hebophophile, I will pay my jizya to feminism, which is an ideology of peace and equality, to be able to live as a prole.
Dear diary, it’s 1984… I say 2024, I’ve resigned myself to dating a 16 year old girl, they’re just children, it’s better that they discover freedom from lesbianism and play at chaining abortions, so today I tried to date a 20 year old girl but a policeman told me that at that age they are now by decree underage girls and now it’s also forbidden. We’ve always been ephebophiles. We have always been at war with heterosexual men. The ephebophile is who had won the victory over himself. We loved Big Sister.
> I tried to date a 20 year old girl but a policeman told me that at that age they are now by decree underage girls and now it’s also forbidden.
I hope you asked him what “decree” he meant. If the age of consent has been raised to 21 or more I must have missed it. Unless you were in a “position of trust” (e.g. guardian, teacher) in relation to the younger person I rather think you could have told him it was your business and hers, not his.
> “Also, there has been a huge problem for heretics. In order to “pass” the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) the offender has needed to convince the assessors running the courses that he (it’s usually a male) has changed his beliefs and no longer has an “offence supporting attitude” or a so-called “cognitive distortion” that makes him think consensual sex with minors is OK. A lot of us would struggle with this test, wouldn’t we?”
If they want a confession, I’ll confess that I am a gecko. Like, they can’t read my mind, right? So I’ll tell them whatever they wish to hear.
>So I’ll tell them whatever they wish to hear.
Some people are natural chameleons, or geckos, finding it easy to “play the system”. Others find it all but impossible. It’s a matter of temperament.
Sadly, as you are surely aware, Steve is as stiff necked as they come.
Exactly! But, as you too are surely aware, that doesn’t mean he is dangerous.
The people running these courses need to wise up to the fact that really dangerous people, psychopaths, are the ones who find it easiest to game the system: they are quite happy to lie and lie and then laugh at how stupid the “experts” are to believe the lies.
They would be better off believing those like Steve, who are honest enough to express disagreement with our present laws. It does not mean they will be hell-bent on breaking them when released.
Tom, you are preaching to the choir! All I meant is that Steve is incapable of playing the penitent. I do not know if I could do otherwise in his situation. Going along with these therapy idiots would be like eating shit.
>I do not know if I could do otherwise in his situation.
Of course, Peter, me too.
The programme sessions I envisaged, and which I proposed in my ATSA article would not involve the force feeding of shit. It’s desperately important to the folks stuck in these gulags to get away from that, giving them the chance of release. Any of these programmes would inevitably be distasteful — a bit shitty, if you will — but my proposed version would be nothing like as bad. Instead of having to eat CBT shit it would be a matter of the people running the courses doubtless still talking a fair bit of shit but nobody would be obliged to swallow it.
On the subject of the ‘entrenched client’ (and I’d like to read the long version), the nub of this issue is encapsulated in popular abusage of the word ‘paedophile’.
In this abusage, ‘paedophile’ is a pejorative, stigmatizing condemnation of a word, connoting (without much room for distinction or nuance) every kind of repulsive crime, up to and including child murder.
But as minor attracted people are routinely obliged to correct, paedophilia is not intrinsically violent and denotes not an act but a sexual orientation, exactly comparable to sexual orientation toward same or opposite sex adult peers. Also, as with any other sexual attraction, it’s mode of expression is varied and responsive to context.
The tenor of discussion at Heretic TOC reflects that of the eponymous ‘entrenched client’ fairly closely, and contrasts strongly with popular abusage. The formulation that “paedophilia is not child molesting” or “paedophilia is an attraction, not an action” can be found in most minor attracted forums and, increasingly often (and a heartening development), in professional literature addressing child sexual abuse.
Unfortunately, media continue to feign ignorance of the language and persist in erasing this distinction, mostly because ‘paedophilia’ is a scab which the public can’t stop picking, and that translates to sales.
A similar abuse of the assumed meaning of ‘paedophilia’ can be found in the criminal justice system, and the key to understanding this is the concept of ‘stigma’.
A stigma is a mark, also known as a label. As an example, the prosecution of child pornography offenses can be understood as a labeling exercise. This is why the COPINE scale attempts to include almost any image of a child in it’s scope, no matter how anodyne. The point is not to define images as harmful or offensive, the point is to characterize the viewer/collector as having a sexual interest in children.
Consequently, in both pornography and hands on offenses, it is not unusual to hear defendants plead guilty, yet insist they are not sexually attracted to children. They go to elaborate lengths to explain their motivation in terms of some more acceptable moral failing, such as drunkeness. In other words, being labeled a ‘paedophile’ is a far worse outcome than any of the (often draconian) penalties handed down for a child sex offense.
This labeling exercise is then elaborated into SOTPs as Tom has described, with the focus entirely removed from the sexual conduct itself and placed instead on the sexual dissidence represented by the offenders refusal to demonize his own nature. No wonder, for example, that a ‘diagnosis’ of paedophilia is seen as so disadvantaging, introducing as it does the possibility of an indeterminate sentence through ‘civil commitment’ and other ghettoizing practices.
This is not only unjust and counterproductive, it is an invidious situation for any therapist with genuine intent.
In my own assessment, the most fundamental step on the road to managing one’s own emotions and sexual impulses is to be consciously aware of them. People who struggle with harmful (or illegal) behaviours may be motivated to correct them, but find it difficult to show restraint in the face of temptation, especially when they’re under stress. Compulsive activities are typically a disguised or misguided attempt to meet genuine needs, and awareness of these needs is a precursor to finding safer strategies to address them.
Alienating a person from their own sexual nature is directly opposed to this development of awareness. This is not only the dynamic that has caused generations of sexual misery through an insidious culture of sexual shame and guilt, it is the dynamic that makes life difficult and sometimes impossible for minor attracted people.
These ideas are gradually penetrating the consciousness of professionals working with minor attracted people, including those solely concerned with child protection. Unfortunately, public ignorance and bigotry is sustained by agenda and profit driven public discourses. Organizations like ATSA need to hold media and other reactionary platforms to account and force them to correct their message but, unfortunately, this will not happen because sexologists are pilloried for the faintest suggestion they might be ‘soft on paedophilia’. For example, just have a look at political interference in the DSM5 editorial process.
So I think the most productive avenue is to use existing human rights frameworks and directly engage with human rights organizations, using emerging professional literature on paedophilia for support. There need to be, for example, legal consequences for media outlets that use ‘paedophilia’ as a synonym for sexual crimes against children, or deploy constructions like ‘murders, rapists and paedophiles’, alluding to a spectre of society’s most despised and dangerous members. Publication of this kind of language should not be tolerated and we need to prevent it by invoking the law as it stands.
Some bioethicists are publishing in this area already, so some groundwork is being done. It’s mostly a matter of overcoming entrenched (sic) views in human rights organizational hierarchies. These organizations are heavily (and rightly) engaged in protecting children from sexual exploitation,so they may be reluctant to rush to the defense of paedophiles, but they are more or less constitutionally bound to attend to a persistent and genuine cry for help from a disadvantaged minority.
And the point is, paedophilia is NOT cognate with child sexual abuse. That’s both the linguistic clarification and the argument against continued state sanctioned persecution of minor attracted people.
>the prosecution of child pornography offenses can be understood as a labeling exercise.
Yes. I am pretty sure the first time I saw this important point being made it was by a lawyer in Australia or New Zealand maybe a decade or more ago.
>There need to be, for example, legal consequences for media outlets that use ‘paedophilia’ as a synonym for sexual crimes against children, or deploy constructions like ‘murders, rapists and paedophiles’, alluding to a spectre of society’s most despised and dangerous members. Publication of this kind of language should not be tolerated and we need to prevent it by invoking the law as it stands.
I couldn’t agree more. In the UK it’s a matter of finding the right case to pursue with the right backing, including funding. You have usefully outlined both the potential and the problems.
I was trying to get to the absolute core of the problem facing paedophiles. I’m not sure I like the expression minor attracted people. How about cute curious?.
Anyway, I think my comments still lurk around the real issue, which I think should be expressible in one or two short sentences.
First off, I don’t think it’s a question of sexual liberty. Some paedophiles accept and more or less agree with social constraints on adult sexual conduct with children, while some insist that children should be free to explore their sexuality with whoever they wish. I have some sympathy with both points of view.
However, I think it’s irrelevant and obstructive to insist on foregrounding this controversy at the expense of a human rights case for protecting paedophiles themselves from intolerance and abuse*.
I think this case can be summarized as follows: minor attraction should not be a source of stigma. Public, psychiatric and legal discourses should not reinforce or articulate this stigma. To use paedophilia as a means to exclude and disadvantage people is a form of hate speech and needs to be recognized as such.
* Tom, I think Foucault’s analysis is directly applicable here. It’s a grand irony that power relations have been deployed so effectively in problematizing intergenerational sexual conduct without ever being applied to the predicament of paedophiles (other than by Foucault himself). Sure, children are small and naive and often vulnerable, but they are desired and that makes them powerful. In contrast, I don’t need to convince most here of what it feels like to be powerless in the face of social exclusion, compulsory morality and state control.
>I don’t need to convince most here of what it feels like to be powerless in the face of social exclusion, compulsory morality and state control.
Indeed. And the reason Foucault’s analysis has seldom been focused on “the predicament of paedophiles” is that power works against it. Those who have explicitly deployed Foucault in this way, such as Richard Yuill in his sociology PhD thesis at Glasgow University, have immediately come under vicious attack and their work has been marginalised. Richard was driven out of academic life in the UK in the wake of aggressive publicity against him, not just in the tabloids but in Times Higher Education as well.
At the same time, paedophiles are presented in the media not as powerless but as extremely powerful, a secret elite. When fantasist “Nick” gravely revealed to the police that top politicians — including the late prime minister Edward Heath –and other leading figures were raping and murdering children his wild stories were lapped up not just by the police but by the entire mainstream media, including “top” newspapers such as the Time and the Guardian, and prestigious broadcasters including the BBC.
>However, I think it’s irrelevant and obstructive to insist on foregrounding this controversy at the expense of a human rights case for protecting paedophiles themselves from intolerance and abuse
Under this little scheme of yours, which apparently admits the existence of some ill-defined ‘sexual exploitation’, ‘power’ etc, what will change with regards to the intolerance and abuse pedophiles face due to free speech (CP) or loving according their preference? Will even the state-funded attempts at genocide necessarily stop?
You mention social (as opposed to legal) constaints, yet does not specify their limits. Does anti-pedophile parents have the right to prevent their children from befriending, even loving (in a manner of their own chosing) pedophiles i? Do they have the right to subject their pedophile children, to ‘conversion’ or ‘sex offender’ theraphy’? Does SJWs promoting sex being rape, or organizations claiming to prevent ‘sexual exploitation’ have any right to prevent pedophile relationships, including sexual, chosen by children?
Out of curiosity, is there an analogous group gaining full human rights starting from only supporting an arbitrarily small subset?
Children are typically more vulnerable to sexual abuse than adults, because they are smaller, less knowledgable and have lower status and less independence than adults. In short, they are less powerful in these respects.
They have some power, in that they are attractive and desirable to many adults, especially to their parents and also to paedophiles. They are adept at using that power but it’s only effective in highly specific contexts.
Children are excluded from the adult sexual milieux because they lack secondary sexual characteristics and so lack the motivation and understanding to engage in adult sexual practices. They are also excluded for their own protection from sexual exploitation.
Paedophilia crosses the grain of all of these social conventions that relate to power and sexuality, so it is subject to disapproval and coercion to conform to social norms. It is understood as a sexual impulse that puts children at risk.
It may be that children can engage in sexual conduct with adults without being harmed, but that doesn’t make them less vulnerable in a wider context. Children experience sexual abuse by adults and need to be protected from that, even if that protection places limits on their sexual freedoms. That is uncontroversial.
What is controversial is the dehumanizing and demonizing of paedophilia AS IF it necessarily or typically involves the sexual abuse of children.
Many, probably most paedophiles have NEVER had ANY sexual contact with children, and yet they live under a crushing stigma. To me, the right to be open and honest about one’s sexual orientation, without stigma, is much more important and more tractable than challenging the social constraints on sexual conduct with children, which are intuitively grounded in an instinct to protect children from harm.
> Children experience sexual abuse by adults and need to be protected from that, even if that protection places limits on their sexual freedoms. That is uncontroversial.
Well, I guess it’s uncontroversial that SOME children experience sexual abuse by adults, in that some are coerced or manipulated into sex by them and uncontroversial also that they need protection from this. But it IS controversial that the term ‘sexual abuse’ is the right term in MOST cases. See, for example, Susan Clancy’s ‘The Trauma Myth’, in which the author points out how common it is for children to experience the sexual contact in a neutral or even positive way at the time, only to worry about it later, when they are made aware of the social taboo. True, Clancy herself would use the term ‘sexual abuse’ in these cases also. But it makes sense to question whether such a loaded term is appropriate (loaded, that is, against the ‘perpetrator’) when those who are responsible for maintaining the taboo are at least as responsible for the harm done as those who knowingly violate it. Unless of course the taboo has some independent justification. But it is hard to see what that might be.
For all its length, your reply avoids the questions I actually raised. I aspire to a much better signal to noise ratio. You define neither sexual abuse or exploitation, much less show they are well-defined. While you provide some examples of ‘power’, it should already be well-known to you that a hypothesis or conjecture is not shown to be true by some handfull of cases, claimed to be typical without a shred of empirical evidence, but by rigorious testing and logic, particulary at the extremes. That the ‘theory’ resulting from such dubious treatment can easily be exploited, in the genuine sense used in computer science or game theory, doesn’t seem to bother you.
The alleged existence of child porn produced by children, not to mention various examples from other cultures or history, indicate sexual motivation among children, as does the experience of MAPs with children. The lack of an anti-pedophile stigma across cultures and times is also unexpected if the sex=abuse axiom was true.
If murder was defined as wrong, you could hardly expect sympathy for being defined by the urge to murder and claiming to not yet done so. Yet, given the axioms you accept, this is at most what you desire for pedophiles – no free speech, nor any alternative to legally enforced celibacy. Are pedophiles even to be considered ‘good’ enough to be around children, akin to how homosexual men face no restrictions being around other men, despite the existence of sodomy?
It sounds as if you want a ‘truth’ expressed in some formalized language, as if the logic of human intimacy could be represented in a propositional calculus.
I can’t provide that, but I don’t think ‘sexual abuse’ is a difficult concept. It’s a kind of interpersonal violence with a sexual aspect. In my view, it has nothing to do with age, other than the observation that children as a group are more vulnerable to sexual violence than adults. Women experience more sexual violence than children because they have more salience as objects of erotic interest to men, who are typically the perpetrators of violence of any kind. Men suffer the least sexual violence, except in particular circumstances, such as prison.
If you want to question my desire to bring logic to human intimacy, posts orthogonal to both logic and intimacy is not the way to do it. If your goal was to reduce suffering, you’d favor well-defined concepts, and logical arguments instead of sloppy probobalistic arguments and ill-defined concepts. Do you even consider the very large probability that your probobalistic arguments are wrong (trivial), and the suffering that entails?
> “A similar abuse of the assumed meaning of ‘paedophilia’ can be found in the criminal justice system, and the key to understanding this is the concept of ‘stigma’.”
On this topic, have you read this?
https://ourlovefrontier.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/court-says-pedophilia-does-not-apply-because-perpetrator-is-a-woman/
> “In my own assessment, the most fundamental step on the road to managing one’s own emotions and sexual impulses is to be consciously aware of them. People who struggle with harmful (or illegal) behaviours may be motivated to correct them, but find it difficult to show restraint in the face of temptation, especially when they’re under stress. Compulsive activities are typically a disguised or misguided attempt to meet genuine needs, and awareness of these needs is a precursor to finding safer strategies to address them.”
I have discussed before in the comments section in another post how I managed to live so well with my feelings up to age 24, when I began to research this subject and caught a lot of misinformation that made me feel anxious for days. I even had trouble sleeping. I was blissfully unaware of the stigma before. When I noticed hints of it, I thought it didn’t apply to me, as I am non-offending. Only during that time when I began to feel horrible because of it that I started to see children “differently”. I guess it’s the stress thing you mentioned. Before, when I felt like it was nothing to worry about, I felt smaller urges and very sporadically, quickly and easily solveable with fantasy. After I become stressed with this issue and began to pay more attention to it, pedophilia became something so important and so present in my thoughts that fanstasies became more frequent. I managed to recover after a few weeks. I found Ipce and B4U-ACT and recovered my stability. It’s a matter of not hating yourself and seeing it as a small quirk, rather than something big and so utterly evil. You say that compulsive behavior is an attempt at achieving something, that motivates the behavior. What do you think of fantasizing, then? If I can achieve satisfaction with it, would it be a bad thing? Here I’m talking about unaided fantasy, not child pornography.
And thanks for the link. I’m really interested in this question of gender and paedophilia.
Enjoy thyself.
Hey Yure, I posted this earlier but it didn’t appear…
Your experience of developing awareness of paedophilia sounds similar to mine.
Also, on resolving sexual tension, go for it. Masturbation is a great way to get excited, have fun and relax. Fantasy materials are an important component of this and the prosecution of ethically produced child themed erotica (such as lolicon) as ‘child pornography’ is yet another example of society cutting off its nose to spite its face.
>I posted this earlier but it didn’t appear…
Don’t know what happened. Sorry.
no problemo!
I so much agree.
hi Tom, that was v interesting.
On consent, there’s been some discussion in bioethics of the very real problems that arise from the legal incapacity of children to give consent for medical procedures and especially for experimental treatments and drug trials. For example, nothing is known about the effect of most medicines on children specifically, and dosages for children are usually calculated as a percentage of body weight.
The concept being offered is ‘assent’, a kind of consent lite. I don’t have any references on hand, but I recommend you have a fossick yourself.
On sex offender treatment, where I live there has long been a zombie like march in the footsteps of the land of the incarcerated, albeit with a more robust human rights framework.
But, lately, there’s been some genuine discussion among sex offender treatment providers of the idea that the best way to protect children from sexual abuse by paedophiles is to understand and accept paedophilia and support and encourage paedophiles to express their feelings safely and legally.
This approach continues to condemn sexual conduct with children, but it does seek to destigmatize paedophilia. It’s only being discussed by ‘the experts’ and would meet stiff resistance from the usual factions, but I think its encouraging..
>The concept being offered is ‘assent’, a kind of consent lite. I don’t have any references on hand, but I recommend you have a fossick yourself.
Yes, I have explored this theme albeit not recently. It’s funny how the medical people can decide kids are capable of consent when they really want them to! And I agree with them. Kids can give valid consent even to life-threatening medical interventions, in my view; but it has to be fully informed consent after they have been properly told about the implications and had time to discuss and consider them. And they have the right (or should have) to refuse e.g. endless chemotherapy in the event of incurable cancer.
>But, lately, there’s been some genuine discussion among sex offender treatment providers of the idea that the best way to protect children from sexual abuse by paedophiles is to understand and accept paedophilia and support and encourage paedophiles to express their feelings safely and legally.
Great to hear this.
Kids can give valid consent even to life-threatening medical interventions, in my view; but it has to be fully informed consent after they have been properly told about the implications and had time to discuss and consider them.
That is the rub right there, Tom. Because kids will continue to be ignorant on a lot of things as long as adult agencies possess the legal power to deny them access to information considered “inappropriate” or “too heavy” for them. As long as youths continue to be held under their current non-emancipated status that can readily deny their individual and collective merits alike, they–and by extension, we of the Kind community–will continue being stuck at this impasse. Where we are forced to eternally (at least, that’s the idea) war with an essential part of ourselves, whether we are accepting of it or not, to stifle it for the sake of compromising with the fact that younger people are not legally allowed to have the agency where they could learn what they need to learn to make their own decisions, including for the mesophiles and flexible-minded among them to choose relationships with us (or even close platonic friendships).
Stifling ourselves in this fashion is demonstrably possible, but how many of us can truly be happy in that way? It’s great if we achieve a society within the context of the current status quo that is tolerant of us as people and do not demonize or marginalize us for our feelings, but will they truly accept us? That is, when their respect for us literally hinges on how well we avoid expressing an essential side of ourselves that other groups more or less take for granted and and are routinely championed for defending? And what about the large percentage of us who do not take kindly to the way kids would continue to be marginalized as people, and do not consider it part of the “greater good” for society to continue doing so? How tolerant would such a society be of our political views even if we were allowed to express them without too much fear of censorship or losing our jobs? Especially when it seems they are stringent in connecting our virtue and honor as people with our level of abstention from relationships with younger people–much like women continue to have their virtue and character connected to their level of chastity, despite this not being the legal requirement for them that it is for us.