It is a good bet that anyone described as “creepy” these days has earned the unenviable epithet through suspicions he is a paedo: for lazy reviewers of novels and films it has become the go-to cliché for hinting that the scenario includes a sinister and scary perv.
Far more sinister and scary, though, is a rather different kind of creepiness: Mission Creep. In a sexual context, it is everywhere. Feminist analysis that began quite reasonably some decades ago with a long-overdue assault on entrenched “patriarchal” power structures, may have been hostile to adult-child sexual contacts but care was generally taken to emphasise that if children wanted to express themselves sexually it was fine and dandy to do it among themselves. Not anymore! Even kids are under attack now for “inappropriate” sexual behaviour, which has come to mean pretty much anything sexual at all. With anyone. Including yourself.
Nor do “normal” adults escape the ever-widening remit of the nay-sayers. The fight against grotesque abuses of male power expressed through such cultural practices as female genital mutilation, rape as a weapon of war and so forth, is a legitimate, vital and continuing one: gang rape in India is a particularly horrific phenomenon right now, as registered in Heretic TOC’s “No wonder women turn against ‘teasing’”. But the cause will not be helped by Mission Creep that extends to wiping out – or trying to – every conceivable manifestation of male sexual interest.
The viragos now conducting a vicious, vindictive campaign to oust a leading member of the minority party in Britain’s governing coalition are a case in point. Lord Rennard, formerly chief executive of the Liberal Democratic party, was accused of making passes at female party workers, touching them as he did so. One “victim” said he brushed parts of her that she “didn’t want to be brushed” (Would that be as opposed to the parts she did want to be brushed?). An internal party inquiry concluded there was credible evidence “the women’s personal space had been violated”, but not enough evidence to establish that there was a case of sexual harassment to be answered. Brendan O’Neill, in Spiked, rightly asked “who benefits from this redefinition of normal human activity as harassment. It certainly isn’t women, who come to be treated as fragile creatures ill-suited to the rough workplace – an argument I’m sure feminists might once have challenged.”
The attacks on entertainer Jimmy Savile, no longer alive to defend himself against mere allegations, are another case in point. In “Savile: The Power to Abuse” on the BBC’s Panorama programme this week we were treated to such gems as a man testifying to his horror after taking his young niece to meet Savile at a public event and seeing him kiss her. This was supposed to show that Savile, as a huge celebrity with great influence in high places, was able to offend in plain sight and get away with it. The uncle, asked whether he had tried to intervene or complain on his niece’s behalf, unwittingly and hilariously revealed the true source of Savile’s evil power. He had not felt able to intervene, he said, because there was a whole crowd of girls lining up to be kissed! The superstar’s power, in other words, was fan power. If, like James Bond, he had a licence to do what others could not, it was a licence to thrill, not kill.
Also this week we see a third kind of Mission Creep. Or rather we would see it, but this creepy beast is a monster of the shadows: I feel like shouting “Look behind you!” to the all-unseeing British public. This is the creeping mission of the security establishment. The securitocracy, as noted here recently, is now adding paedophilia to its empire of anxiety. “Paedophiles to be treated like terrorists” was Heretic TOC’s headline. It referred to a forthcoming measure against online “paedophile manuals”, a proposal sold as analogous to sanctions against terrorists who download guides to bomb-making.
This measure, it must now be solemnly reported, was duly if obscurely announced in the government’s new legislative programme, in the Queen’s Speech. Well, not quite in the Queen’s Speech. Perhaps it was thought too embarrassing for Her Majesty to utter the word “paedophile”. Instead, she said briefly “a Serious Crime Bill will be brought forward to…disrupt serious organised crime”. An official briefing note issued with the published text added, just as briefly, that the Bill would “create a new offence of possessing ‘paedophilic manuals’.” Perhaps the government found it too embarrassing to spell out how they intend to define “paedophilic manuals” in a way that will not include this blog – or maybe a disguised intention to outlaw Heretic TOC is another aspect of Mission Creep!
Finally, I would just add that I will be guilty of Mission Creep myself unless I am very careful. Heretic TOC’s mission does not include defending the indefensible, and some of Jimmy Savile’s behaviour may have gone too far. As for Chris Rennard, His Lordship was perhaps a bit free with his wandering hands and should be made to sit on the Naughty Step for 10 minutes, or perhaps offer his “victims” a decent meal out with him at a posh restaurant by way of penance. If they don’t want to kiss and make friends again (or just make friends again), well, tough: their apparent determination to crucify the guy is out of all proportion and should not be indulged.
My invocation in this context of a voguish punishment for errant toddlers (the Naughty Step) is not accidental: how to liberate childhood sexuality while maintaining reasonable sanctions against precocious liberty-taking by little Lord Rennards is a topic that needs discussion and which I hope to take up soon.
PS: I’ve just noticed that pageviews on Heretic TOC have now topped 100,000. Standing at 100,723 over 575 days, that comes to 175 per day since launch in November 2012. Is that good or bad? Hard to say: the top blogs in popular mainstream subjects doubtless have a vast readership, but they number only a few thousand whereas the total number of blogs in the world is now heading for the hundreds of millions, with an average of under 10 pageviews per day. What interests me more is the increasing number of comments received as time goes on and the generally extremely high quality of these contributions, especially latterly. So there is clearly an appetite for intelligent discussion. Well done all you heretics for providing it!
I’m a serial harasser, for me it is doubtful the law must protect etiquette. Should I be imprisoned when I keep a fork with a right hand, and a table-knife with a left one? Or when I don’t bless one who sneezed?
And why to prohibit sexual harassment only at workplace? People struggle against “date rape” and “marital rape” (and contrary to the presumption of innocence the male has to prove that sex was not rape!), why there are no such crimes as date harassment and marital harassment? Why asking the girl out and offering the woman one’s hand and heart are not prohibited as sexual harassment?
And the most annoying thing is that women “don’t want to be brushed” themselves but at the same time think children always want to be brushed by them — and not by men! The mother violates the baby’s presonal space when she washes and swaddles him/her, doesn’t she? Modern feminism is just double standards aiming not at gender equality, and for sure not at age equality.
[…] – and merely giving way to a temptation to take sexual favours that have not been offered. Lord Rennard may have been guilty of the latter, but it would be grotesquely unjust to impute to him any secret wish to commit real […]
I just want to correct myself in my last post,when I said there was no homophobia in ancient greece,as discussed before that’s a contested area
however if you go say one hundred years or so back,the man boy relationships were seen as homosexuality,with the older man recruiting the younger boy into
the sordid way of life,here is a humorous example with my herbert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDrTJO8CroI
Heck, even less than one hundred years…run a search for ‘boys beware 1961’. “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick — a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious — a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual…”
Re your postscript about your page views, I suspect that many of them are from
the inky trade, our wonderful policemen, and other busybodies.
>I suspect that many of them are from the inky trade
Well, they’re wasting a lot of time then, because they studiously avoid writing anything. I wish they would!
these comments seem to imply that men never get touched,I used to go to the dance floor every weekend with mates,not just for relief from a weeks hard work, but have a laugh and see how many girls i can flirt with on the dance floor,yeah i had a few ugly girls grab me down there,I suppose that’s the closest we get to experience getting groped.god forbid you are a young pretty boy and end up in jail,all of a sudden so many men are bi curious,I get that
there are 18 year old’s in the gym who could pass for a 15yo,and they wonder why i’m so helpful lol.as i mentioned in my last post its the attitudes to sex that is the problem,all the best english novel’s not one mention of sex,never mind the gay youth don’t even bother,that’s why it’s ok to see a film with a dad brutally raping his daughter,but consensual encounters like LOLITA big controversy.Im more in favor of the ancient greek style love,for all the brutality
they saw sex as more pleasure then the erotophobia you see later,there was
nothing effeminate about homosexuality as such,there was no homophobia.
im not saying its for every one but harry hay had a relationship with an older sailor and mentioned that’s just what i needed.
I’m a radical pedophile and sex-positive even when it comes to sexual contact between adults and children, but even I see the problem with harassment. If it was just something that happened once every blue moon it wouldn’t be so bad, and most women would be able to brush it off. But reality is that many women have to face it numerous of times every day. And when you have to constantly deal with harassment and unwanted advancements every single day IT DOES GET TO YOU.
The problem with your post is that it takes the perspective of a male who doesn’t have to deal with harassment every single day and therefore has a more “theoretical” approach to this problem. Being harassed or having your genitals touched DOES go to you on a deeper level than many men realize, but it is hard to understand it unless one has experienced it oneself.
I think that women, girls (and boys too, this might become more of an issue to boys too when/if boylove is more accepted) should always have their integrity respected, and a respectable and empathetic man should never touch another person’s privates without express or implied consent.
Please, keep up the good pro-pedo fight. But don’t let it revert to dismissing or ignoring real problems that women have to deal with every single day.
Thanks for this comment. Spot-on and much appreciated.
Tom O ‘Carroll is a known pedophile living in the UK. I think he knows what it means to be harassed probably better than anyone else. If anything I would guess the opposite: he knows too well what it’s like to be hated, scorned and treated badly so he sees other people’s problems as more trivial. When I hear about the problems gays go through often times I think “So what? It’s not that bad, not compared to what pedophiles go through.”
But this is how I look at it: Tom is not writing from the perspective of a man who doesn’t have to deal with harassment everyday, he is writing from the perspective of a pedophile living in society that has gone too far in the opposite direction.
>he knows too well what it’s like to be hated, scorned and treated badly
That’s true, GL, although now I’m getting old I don’t get sexually harassed like I used to. Time was, I had the ladies all over me so much (guys too) I had to beat ’em off with a rolled up copy of the Guardian 🙂 As for the kids, no comment! Thanks, anyway, for kindly making this point. I do get hassle but also a lot of sustaining support, such as yours. I’m not sure I think anyone’s problems are trivial but I do believe it would be helpful in many circumstances to encourage a culture of robust personal response to difficulties.
I tend to agree that a culture of robust personal response to difficulties would be a good idea. However, high-profile and sometimes damaging as the major I-Am-A-Hapless-Victim cases tend to be, they are also unrepresentative — for one thing, the accusers include a politics lecturer at Oxford, a former Bedfordshire councillor and a former special adviser to Nick Clegg, all of them presumably people with a lot of status and clout.
In the Heather Hlavka study I linked below, fourteen-year-old Janice says that she and her friends were touched up by thirty-something Matt, who once told Janice he wouldn’t give her something to eat if she didn’t let him touch her breasts. Unlike certain persons, Janice is quick to take a reasonable portion of the responsibility: although, like Bridget Harris in the Lord Rennard case, she always moved away when Matt touched her, none of the girls ever told him to stop. Eleven-year-old Terri was grabbed by a seventeen-year-old neighbour who told her that he would rape her if she didn’t fellate him, so she did. This was not an uncommon experience in Terri’s world: “They always say they gonna rape you if you don’t do what they want” — rape, like sex, apparently only meaning penis-in-in-vagina. Terri blamed herself because she “shouldn’t” have been where she was: her mother had told her to come home. She didn’t tell her mother, who had warned her to protect herself from the supposedly insatiable and aggressive male sex drive, what had happened. I’m sure the mother wanted to help her daughter with those warnings, and was likely speaking from bitter experience, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. More of an emphasis on ‘yes means yes’, on rapists’ responsibility for rape and on the little girl’s own sexual agency might have helped her at least to confide in her mother.
Two fourteen-year-old girls in the study were raped, one in a park by a seventeen-year-old male acquaintance as she walked home from school, one by a twenty-seven-year-old male family friend who held her down and covered her mouth. Both rapists, presumably to protect themselves, immediately spread rumours about the girls: they were “sluts” and “hos” who wanted the sex and “let” the rapists do it to them. Everybody believed the rumours. No fourteen-year-old can stand up to all that alone. The police are influenced by and sometimes participate in slut-shaming. Other girls are and do, too. Thirteen-year-old Rachel wanted to have sex with a boy named Nate, but Nate wasn’t interested, so instead eighteen-year-old Trevor raped Rachel. When Rachel told everyone Trevor had forced her into sex, her twelve-year-old friend Jillian thought she was lying, as far as I can tell because Rachel had condemned herself as a slut by wanting sex with anyone at all. Four girls in the study, fourteen-year-old Carla, fifteen-year-old Jacki, fifteen-year-old Lana and thirteen-year-old April, had, like Lord Rennard’s ‘victim’ Alison Smith, robustly resisted unwanted touching by boys or men. But when a friend of Jacki’s, less assertive or simply less fortunate, was sexually assaulted by the same boy Jacki had successfully seen off, the two did not band together to accuse him. On the contrary: though the boy apparently made a habit of sexual assault, Jacki was convinced that “She probably wanted it anyway”. April’s case is classic. Her friend Sara, also thirteen, had apparently consensual sex with twenty-two-year-old Sean, whose overly persistent, edging on forceful, advances April had successfully rebuffed earlier. There were rumours going round that both girls had had sex with Sean and thus were “sluts” and April was anxious to defend her reputation, which she did by shifting the blame onto her friend: she pointed out that she had said “no, stop”, whereas Sara was the one who’d had sex.
I believe that the situation of these children is far more typical than that of the women Lord Rennard bothered. And nobody is doing anything effective about it, in spite of the child protection rhetoric. For their peers these girls’ nos are invalid, because having or wanting sex or being at the wrong end of a malicious rumour makes you a slut, and nobody cares about a slut. For the rest of the world, including it would seem Heather Hlavka, their yeses are invalid, because they are too young, and perhaps also because they are young girls having sex with boys or young men. They can’t win. I don’t see how the pillorying of Lord Rennard helps them either.
>I believe that the situation of these children is far more typical than that of the women Lord Rennard bothered.
Yes, the women in the Rennard case could hardly be less typical but I’m not sure the girls in the (admittedly interesting and thoughtful) Heather Hlavka study are typical either. This was, after all, a study based on interviews entirely in a forensic context. In other words, all the boys had got themselves into trouble with the law, whereas that happens to only a tiny proportion of boys overall. If the situation is typical, perhaps what it typifies is the rather brutal street-grooming scene I focused on in an earlier blog, not your average school playground. Yes, girls get called sluts in the playground. But are there lots of threats of rape? Call me innocent (not that many do!) and out of touch with youth (which, sadly, I certainly am!) but my guess is it’s not that common.
True, those girls aren’t typical either — just more so, I think, than Lord Rennard’s accusers. When subjected to mild groping, does the average person react more like Hlavka’s subjects, or more like the women in the Rennard case? My bet’s on the former. And Hlavka’s point is that while her subjects were unusually unfortunate, the beliefs they hold, e.g. that sex is something done to them rather than something they participate in, are widespread. I think she may well be right there.
I have no idea how common rape threats are on the playground, either, but I know from experience that they get thrown at women a good deal. Usually, it doesn’t actually mean “I’m going to rape you” it means “You have made me angry and I want to scare you” — but you never really know when it does mean “I’m going to rape you”. With kids especially, a good deal depends on context and what you construe as a threat. A few years back it was common to hear teenagers saying that they got raped up the ass in the chemistry exam, meaning it was difficult. Only the other day I passed two teenage girls on the street, obviously friends, giggling away, one saying to the other “S my d, Julia, s my d.” If one teenage boy says to another “suck my dick” that’s quite likely to be joking around, and a bonding exercise or a relatively harmless exercise in dominance. In certain contexts that can hold true between a male and a female friend, especially now that cross-gender friendships are more common, but in other contexts it may be deliberately threatening. And in any case, being called a slut may well have a worse impact on a young girl than a casual rape threat — see e.g. the suicide of Audrie Pott, which was given lengthy and intelligent coverage in Rolling Stone magazine (I won’t link because there’s a photo).
>being called a slut may well have a worse impact on a young girl than a casual rape threat
I hadn’t thought of that, but it figures now that you mention it.
Unless of course we should somehow come to learn that being a slut is a good thing natural to human beings just like it is natural to our nearest primate neighbor the Bonobo.
Miles to go before we sleep, Miles to go.
I am wondering if we maybe hundreds of thousands of years from now continue in endless wars will actually evolve away from the peaceful egalitarian creatures we are to being the fierce selfish creatures so prevalent now.
I had a dream last night that I was in the Normandy invasion of Europe, I was a soldier, I came upon an unarmed German soldier, I shot him dead … he was a boy with a uniform on different than mine.
Our job as pedosexual persons is a big one; to prevent our evolving away from this peaceful egalitarian creature we are. It is sort of like we must keep on a steady climate course like Neil deGrasse Tyson did when he was walking along with his dog in that television show: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey The World Set Free.
Set the world free.
Linca
In my experience (as a high school student) rape is uncommon but slut shaming is very, very common. On those occasions when rape does occur, it’s usually someone caving into pressure from a significant-other in which case (unfortunately) they receive no sympathy. Of course, my experience may also be atypical – any individual report is merely an anecdote.
Good point. Tom does know more about harassment than most, definitely including me.
Disjointed, conclusionless reflections on harassment from the receiving end:
— Usually, no one incident is so bad in itself: it’s the cumulative effect that’s wearing. The first time you are hissed at to suckitbitch, you shrug it off. The twentieth time, it starts to get to you.
— We know that there is sometimes hostility behind apparently innocuous comments. This is not airy-fairy theorising, but solid experience. Ignore “hey sweetheart” and sometimes the next thing you hear is “fuck you, you ugly bitch” because he’s mad at his ex-wife. A 1980s French gay publication called, if I remember correctly, Homophilies ran an issue on paedophilia. One woman recalled being felt up on the Paris metro from the age of about twelve. This happens to all schoolgirls, she said, and a friend of hers would fend off the hands with a pin. At about fourteen the first young girl stopped moving away when the feeling-up happened and started standing still and enjoying it instead. Once this resulted in orgasm, her first. Overwhelmed, she ran after the man when he got off the train and caught his sleeve. He shook her off, calling her a little whore.
— Women also know from experience that harassment is sometimes directed at the vulnerable and is also sometimes intended to bring about vulnerability. I’ve been harassed when wearing all kinds of clothes, but I’ve been harassed far more often when looking uncertain, worried, sad, lost, than when walking briskly with my chin up and my shoulders back. Also, “kneel bitch” is fairly common and I once got “get on your knees and suck it please” — this was brought out rhythmically and all in one piece, as though it were a line from a song or a rap, but internet searches have failed to yield anything. Perhaps he was a frustrated poet. Anyway, you get the feeling, after a while, that the you-on-your-knees part is just as important as the fellatio part or more so.
— Sometimes it is indeed not harassment but making a pass. A guy smiles at and says “hey beautiful” to one hundred women. Ninety-nine ignore him. With the hundredth, he strikes the jackpot. Not the most common mating strategy, but perfectly legitimate. Sometimes, however, it’s obviously not making a pass. Someone barking at you to let you know you are ‘a dog’ (really ugly) is not trying to get into your underwear, nor is someone yelling at you to show off to his friends. They only do it to annoy, because they know it teases. Someone following you home with a group of his friends telling you in a menacing voice that he wants to fuck you so hard he fucks your insides out may or may not be trying to get into your underwear, but you cannot be blamed for feeling frightened either way.
— Imagine that the age of consent is abolished and intergenerational sex is an acceptable minority pursuit, but everything else about our society remains unchanged. Are men saying “suck it, you little bitch” to passing thirteen-year-old boys, or barking at the ones they find unattractive? Probably not. Why? Immediate response may be, well, that’s a terrible mating strategy. But see above. Next obvious possibility, though not the only one: they’re not doing it because there is no social structure that supports and encourages it, whereas for straight guys, even for gay guys to an extent, there is.
— If harassment is just fine, why are so many straight men frightened by advances from gay men? Just homophobia? Maybe, and obviously I wouldn’t know, but…
— Really I’m a bit off topic here, because I’m talking about verbal street harassment, whereas Tom’s original post was about office groping. I have no experience of that, luckily, and nor do many people whose stories I know. But it was not always thus: not so long ago, you often had to keep your mouth shut about harassment or you’d find it hard to advance in, or even keep, your job. Admittedly we may well have gone too far in the opposite direction, but returning to the original state of affairs obviously won’t do either.
— I feel fairly safe in saying that most women — well, girls: it starts early — learn to protect ourselves and each other quietly. Quiet is key here. Most women don’t want to accuse someone innocent. Neither do we want publicly to accuse someone guilty but well-liked, thus becoming That Bitch Who etc. etc. Also, where applicable, it is dangerous to shout back when you are alone, outnumbered and outmuscled. The rage at paedophiles has a lot to do with their being a safe target to get back at. Just as Mr Fuck You, You Ugly Bitch takes out on me his anger at his ex-wife, so many women take out on paedophiles their anger at Mr Fuck You, You Ugly Bitch.
— I don’t much care for the creep category, either, because the pillorying is downright nasty and cruel and because the creep label is so all-consuming: it can take over someone’s public identity. Isaac Asimov was a notorious groperfish. That doesn’t invalidate his entire oeuvre. I’m also unhappy when I hear women put into the creep category perfectly nice but rather awkward men whose advances are a bit clumsy. That can have a tinge of ‘if I find him attractive it’s OK for him to talk to me, otherwise he’d better not’.
— Some women consider themselves harassed when a man does something like come up to them in a park, say “I don’t mean to bother you but you’re really beautiful” and leave immediately. This is unreasonable. I mean the “I’ve been harassed!” is unreasonable, not the compliment. However, women who get angry over things like that are in a minority, as are men who harass. Harriet J., a feminist blogger, put up a post called ‘Street Luv’ (search for it) which was full of comments from women eager to share their experiences of being complimented and/or made a pass at by men in a pleasant, respectful way. The few times that has happened to me, I’ve been almost pathetically happy and grateful to hear something nice when I was braced for something nasty. Hey, you spoke to me as though I were a real actual person and everything! Thank you so much!
— If you the reader are surprised by the incidents I am describing because you have never seen or heard sexual harassment, of course you haven’t. Men typically don’t do it around other men, especially not other men whom the woman in question may belong to. Also, to be fair, I may get an extra dose of harassment because I do things women aren’t strictly speaking supposed to do, such as take public transportation by myself after dark.
Very important information, A. The horrible stuff is invisible to many of us, but we have to face the reality of its existence.
For me it really hasn’t been so bad. A lot of it is paper tiger, as I found out the time I lost my temper and turned round and spat on the ground in front of the guy’s feet and he looked totally taken aback. Many of the harassers fall into one or more of the following categories: older adolescents; mildly drunk; with friends/colleagues and looking to impress them. The experiences which have left me genuinely feeling menaced have been in a minority. But you never do know, really, which one might be the rapist. You always have a little ticker-tape strip of information about your situation and your safety running along the back of your mind.
I certainly don’t want to turn this into Men vs Women. The only person I knowingly know who has been slipped Rohypnol or something similar is a gay male friend of mine and it happened at a gay pride parade. Fortunately, he figured out why he was feeling so strange and managed to stagger to safety and call someone to come and get him. Taking advantage of the vulnerable is hardly a uniquely male trait either: this paper by David Lisak http://www.jimhopper.com/pdfs/Lisak_Child_Abuse_Interviews.pdf, while it doesn’t use a representative sample, suggests that the incidence of genuine sexual abuse of young children by their mothers may be far higher than anyone wants to think. Joanna Bourke also found a high incidence of such abuse when researching her book Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present.
I’ve cautioned elsewhere against throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to feminist arguments. This study http://gas.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/28/0891243214526468.full.pdf+html contains a fair amount of bathwater but also a lot of baby. Thirteen-year-old Kelly was followed, touched and told she was beautiful by twenty-year-old Eric: nothing so bad on the face of it, but a warning note slips in when she says he told her “that he could have me when he wanted to”. What about what she wanted? Fourteen-year-old Carla rebuffed a boy’s advances on the school bus with a shove and he subsequently told her several times that he would come to her house and rape her. She bends over backwards to rationalise this away and put herself in his shoes: he must feel rejected, she knows he’s only joking…but still, “that can be a little weird to hear”. A seemingly harmless, even complimentary, interaction can turn nasty or dangerous in a moment, and you never know which one it’ll be until it happens. That’s a big part of why it’s all so wearing.
OMG isn’t the science already in? We boys like being advanced upon by men: Rind Meta-Analysis times three confirmed as good studies by the American Association For The Advancement of Science (AAAS). I am also thinking about the advance Harvey Milk made on the boy in tight jeans in the movie “MILK”. That boy later became the young man who took the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt around the world: Cleve Jones. The quilt now weighs 54 tons, the largest piece of community folk art ever.
Quit trying to scare us with incidents that are not typical.
And, P those boys in the gym know what is going on. Helped quite a few over the years myself. Darn why do they think they have to develop Giorgio Armani type bodies and become ugly?
Wish we could explain our pedosexual selves like Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the cosmos and what we must do to save our earth: http://www.hulu.com/watch/643055 We have got to become that good: Storytellers. Storytellers without shame.
Linca
I’m not trying to scare anybody. I am playing devil’s advocate a bit, but I think that’s necessary. I think the arguments in favour of the legalisation of intergenerational sex are strong enough that looking the bad stuff square in the face cannot knock them down. It can only add nuance and realism to pro-paedo arguments, and that can only be a good thing. The science does indeed confirm that boy-man relationships tend to work out well, but there’s a difference between advances and harassment, and the former being well received doesn’t imply that the latter doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem. The Rind report also came up with more equivocal results on girl-man relationships. My guess is that this isn’t because the good is less good but because the bad is more frequent: that is, when girl-man relationships work out well they work out no less well than boy-man relationships, but the statistical punch of those good outcomes is weakened by the prevalence of the less-good outcomes. The question is how to deal with the bad and the ugly while leaving room for the good to flourish in an atmosphere of humanity and personal liberty.
I admit to being in two minds about Lord Rennard. There’s no doubt that what he is accused of doing – if indeed he did it – was boorish and stupid. And he hasn’t really endeared himself since with his mealy-mouthed non-apologies. But then we are told that he cannot issue a real apology, because to do so would be an admission of guilt which could lay him open to litigation. So we are in a rather absurd situation where everyone knows he’s guilty but he can’t admit it for fear of being pursued by vengeful furies and their lawyers. In an ideal world some kind of arrangement would be reached where Lord Rennard’s accusers would waive the right to prosecute him, he would apologise fulsomely and grovelingly, and somebody high up in the Lib Dems would explain very slowly and at length to Lord Rennard that you don’t grope women here in the twenty-first century. That would be a grown-up resolution to the problem.
The bigger question (and the one that tends to exercise the ‘viragos’) is whether it isn’t altogether a good thing that we don’t grope women who don’t want to be groped. This is perhaps a difficult question for those of us who aren’t women – and who aren’t regularly subjected to groping – to answer. Only twice in my life can I recall being subjected to unwanted touching, and on both occasions I was so surprised and so flattered that it didn’t really occur to me to slap the offending hand away. But women assure me – and I’m disposed to believe them – that they are often made to feel violated and intimidated by unwanted sexual attention from men. There was a very good column in Guardian recently by Estelle Tang on exactly this subject (linked below). It made me feel incredibly angry for her. Stories of ‘everyday sexism’ make me incredulous at the behaviour of my fellow men and the kinds of acts towards women some of them think are acceptable. (Where do these guys grow up? Do they have mothers?) It is trivialising to women’s experience to suggest that they should just ‘grow a pair’ and get over it. They shouldn’t have to! Of course women should not be subject to unwanted sexual touching from men. That doesn’t mean idiots like Lord Rennard should be ‘crucified’ or even expelled from the Lib Dems (some punishment that is!), but we must wearily explain to them yet again (and again, and again) that this is not how civilised men behave.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/an-open-letter-to-all-my-male-friends
I have no link to substantiate my idea but was it not a technique deployed by some in the Second World War to broadcast information on how it is futile to attempt to escape areas controlled by the German authorities. Inside those radio broadcasts were details that would actually help a person reach the national boarder of a neutral country and then the person wanting to escape German control could them move off to countries like England.
If a text was published that offered as its stated goal that a person use the text as a guide to stay out of prison and not offend some would see the text as a similar tool described to above, only this time to aid access to a child for the minor-attracted person under the banner of good conduct.
I seem to outline a no-win process. Actually it is the double-bind of Gregory Bateson that sits behind my thinking here. If a reader looks up double bind in Wikepedia they are told the double bind is a dilemma communication, a kind of trap with no exit, where the person experiences the situation as a game that must be played but a game that can’t be won. Writing anything that claims to ‘help’ the minor-attracted person, ultimately in the current climate, will be likely to be read as a ‘clever document that must not be trusted.’
I can easily imagine that happening. But ironically, a slight variation on that technique could be used very successful. If one wanted to publish a pedophile manual, all they would have to do is switch the language to third person, sprinkle the words “frightening” and “vile” throughout and title it “Parents Beware”. It would probably become a best seller.
We need to take the passports away from the Puritans, put them back on the Mayflower, send the Mayflower on a trip to pick up all the other Puritans sans passports around the world, and send them all out to sea never to return to port again. What terrible pain and suffering they have brought.
We have made a major error that must be corrected. Above all we pedosexual people should never ever join in it. We need to know we are a peaceful, egalitarian, cooperative species. We had to be to survive hundreds of thousands of years of animals that were much stronger than us. We are not a fierce raping/killer people that have to have the discipline of the Puritans to control us.
Dear Puritans,
Let us alone with your messed up thinking, your flawed thesis has as big an error in it as the error in the race thesis that allowed the people of Europe to do what they did to the Jews in the 1930’s-40’s.
Linca
Shouldn’t there be a requirement to the law that the “pedophile manuals” teach good advice at least? What if I were to write a manual that gave such bad advice that it actually led to the arrest of people who followed it? Unless the assumption is that the manual causes people to break the law, as if child fiddling is such a complex task that without a manual it would be hard to do.
Bomb making is at least technical, most people wouldn’t be able to make a bomb without some kind of teaching, and there are clear rules one has to follow to make a bomb.. But the only really good guide for pedophiles to follow in order to stay out of prison is to not engage in illegal activity. Would writing that be against the law?
LOL! Brilliant!
I’ve been thinking a little more about it and I think it would be a wonderful idea if someone wrote a book called “The Pedophile’s Guide to Staying out of Prison.” The entire book would be dedicated to explaining in detail why pedophile’s should NOT engage in illegal activities without suggesting any other alternative. It could be divided up into chapters with each chapter explaining a different type of crime (such as downloading child porn, meeting underage people in chatrooms, etc…) and documenting real-life examples of people who have had their lives and reputations ruined over engaging in such activities. Then try to sell it on Amazon and see if they take it down..
Not only would it possibly create some great irony if, in their ususual hysterical haste, they were to ban the book that teaches pedophiles not to commit crimes, but I honestly think it’s a book that needs to be written for pedophiles. I read too often in the media about people who are still being arrested for stupid shit like downloading child porn on peer2peer networks and I just wish I could have explained to them before their lives were ruined why that was such a dumb idea. I think such a book could save some lives and reputations.