I always knew my lengthy interview in July for an upcoming TV documentary might go unused, even though the company making it, Testimony Films, made a considerable investment in my appearance. They gave me two nights’ hotel accommodation and other expenses, and committed a five-strong production crew to an entire day’s filming and studio hire in London, over 100 miles from their Bristol base, solely for my input.
A couple of weeks ago, as briefly reported here in response to a request for a progress report, I said I had received an email from Testimony saying “As this is such a difficult and controversial subject it is taking a very long time to make – and to go through the [name of TV channel] system. There have been several discussions with the [name of TV channel] lawyer over the content. The final shape of the programme still hasn’t been decided. There is no transmission date as yet.”
I was under a commitment not to name the TV channel until the last week before transmission. That time is now up. I now know that the programme, titled The Paedophile Next Door, is to be aired next Tuesday, 25 November, at 9pm on Britain’s Channel 4. I have been informed it will not contain any footage of the interview I gave, which lasted around two and a half hours.
This is disappointing, but I would not be particularly upset if I thought it was going to be a good programme anyway. I always hoped that if my contribution proved a bit too controversial for Channel 4 they might nevertheless be willing to give a platform to someone like Judith Levine, or Bruce Rind, or a British academic such as Glenn Wilson, who put up a spirited if all-too-brief showing on the same channel’s news output recently: PIE spy, with my tabloid eye…
All the signs are, though, that the programme will not be good. From a heretical standpoint it looks like being far worse than I had expected, indeed such an utter disaster I am feeling totally gutted even before seeing it. Am I prejudging too much? We’ll soon see.
I suspect Testimony are embarrassed. It seems they wanted to keep me in the dark as long as possible in case I went public too early and tried to derail things. Unbeknown to me, Channel 4 issued a bulletin about the upcoming programme on the 7th of this month, including its release date. But on the 10th, three days later, in response to my enquiries, Testimony were telling me there was still no release date and did not give me C4’s programme information.
The Testimony people have been very friendly and they definitely did not set out with the cynical intention of setting me up as a pantomime villain. Director Steve Humphries has a strong reputation as a documentary maker with an interest in a diversity of voices. He gives every impression of being a man of broad sympathies; his interview style is empathetic.
It is possible Channel 4 insisted on taking the production in another direction from the one first envisaged by Humphries. It may be significant that a second director’s name is now on the credits: Rudolph Herzog, son of the world renowned Werner Herzog. Herzog fils appears to be based in Germany, with no obvious connection to Testimony. His location, however, would make him well placed to explore Germany’s Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, highlighted in Jon Henley’s feature article on paedophilia for the Guardian last year.
Channel 4’s programme information begins thus:
With almost every passing week a new child sex abuse scandal breaks. In this sobering and thought-provoking film, historian and acclaimed social documentary maker Steve Humphries sets out to discover why all the elaborate policies and legislation put in place to protect children from sexual abuse have failed.
He discovers some radical new solutions proposed by an increasing number of child protection experts which challenge our deep-rooted attitudes and emotional reactions to paedophiles. They tell Humphries that many paedophiles live in our midst and go completely undetected. “They’re not monsters with horns and tails, but ordinary blokes,” says senior lecturer Dr Sarah Goode – and this makes them so dangerous and difficult to identify. Controversially, Dr Goode believes that the most promising way to reduce the number of child abuse cases is to encourage paedophiles who have not yet targeted children to “come out” and receive treatment.
This theory is supported by an extraordinary interview in which Humphries meets a man face-to-face who confesses, on camera, to his strong sexual attraction for children as young as five. He claims that he has not interfered with a child, nor could ever imagining doing so. He is so desperate for help that he is prepared to ‘out’ himself in the hope that men like him will be more readily offered support to manage their unwanted desires.
Paedophiles are the most vilified of all criminals – invoking universal hatred and disgust. Humphries hears from experts who explain that, as a result, the fear, self-loathing and stress paedophiles will associate with their desires makes them actually more likely to offend. Humphries explores pioneering schemes and initiatives designed to help paedophiles before they might hurt children. These ground-breaking schemes aim to educate families and encourage men to seek help – some of them provide residential support and treatment confidentially. Supporters of these initiatives believe they will keep children safe and are far more effective – rather than engaging with them only after they become offenders…
You get the picture. It looks as if this will be “virtuous” shit from start to finish. If I feel gutted, it is because the ideology of repression has won decisively in a direct contest with that of self-determination. I am gutted because I spilled my guts out for that interview and I know it was a good one, after a lot of preparation and an emotionally draining encounter with Humphries. It was all the tougher, oddly, thanks to his gently searching style. His kindness was killing. My answers could only come from the heart, at times painfully so when the questions reached deeply into the personal realm, – a place no aggressive inquisitor could touch; the defences would be up.
I’m not putting it too strongly when I say I feel betrayed, especially by the apparently central role given to Sarah Goode and her piss-poor thinking, which I believe I adequately demolished in my review of her book Paedophiles in Society and its predecessor – a review Humphries certainly knew about because I alerted him to it in an email back in May.
But to claim I have been betrayed by Testimony, or by Steve Humphries in particular, would be grossly unfair. I am confident Steve fought as hard as he could for my inclusion. That does not mean he shares my views, though, and I probably underestimated the extent to which he was keeping his cards close to his chest on that.
As for whether I really had performed strongly, was this just an illusion? Here’s the relevant part of what Steve emailed the next day:
I just wanted to say thanks so much for coming down for the filmed interview, which was as excellent and as powerful as I’d hoped it would be. I thought you told your personal story and stated your case as strongly as anyone could. I know the team…really enjoyed meeting you too and found it a moving and hugely interesting day…
A few days ago, “Bloom” wrote in the comments here “It would be interesting to get your take on the controversy over contact vs non-contact. Not so much on the question itself, which is somewhat abstract, but on how you see it affecting the overall struggle for greater tolerance and acceptance.”
First of all, I agree with another commentator, “Stephen6000”, that “pro-choice” is a better expression than “pro-contact”, although, it will be seen that I have opted above for “self-determination”, which avoids confusion with abortion. Also, I don’t think self-determination is too abstract, but what Bloom perhaps meant to say was too academic, as in the expression “it’s all a bit academic” i.e. it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, so why bother talking about it?
If that was the intended meaning it undeniably amounts to a strong argument, not least in view of this Channel 4 programme: I tried to talk about sexual self-determination but who was listening? No one ever does these days. So what’s the point of banging on about it?
Presumably Bloom is pleased to see controversy over self-determination taken out of the equation by Channel 4. That leaves The Paedophile Next Door, and any similar presentation of MAPs, free to focus on “tolerance and acceptance”, right?
Well, sure, and that would be a good thing if it were taking us in the right direction. Politics is often characterised as the art of the possible. The way to reach an ultimate goal is to focus on small, incremental achievements. You don’t frighten the horses by seeming to be insanely radical.
I understand that. But what if those small steps are heading in the wrong direction, leading away from one’s ultimate objective? The “tolerance and acceptance” aimed at in VP efforts is not tolerance and acceptance of sexual self-determination, after all, but it’s exact opposite i.e. an outcome that cements intolerance and non-acceptance of sexual self-determination permanently in place and depends upon brainwashing and coercing MAPs into submission.
This represents a repudiation of all I believe in and I cannot support it.
I will watch the programme, though, through gritted teeth. As long as I am publicly engaged in blogging and such like, I feel I have a duty to keep myself informed. It will not be easy. One of those taking part, unless I am greatly mistaken, is Ian McFadyen, who is fast becoming a full-time professional victim. I don’t relish the thought of having to watch this self-righteous bully’s “dignified exchange”, as the programme info puts it, with a paedophilic self-sacrificial lamb.
McFadyen, to be sure, was genuinely the victim of a sadistic rapist on the staff of Caldicott Preparatory School if his story is true, and I have no particular reason to doubt it. As a result, it seems, he is now determined to victimise anyone who crosses him, including his old school pal Nick Clegg – yes, that Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat MP who has been deputy prime minister of the UK since 2010. McFadyen was recently quoted as saying, “I’m definitely really angry with Nick Clegg… he’s been a real disappointment. I’m actually ashamed to have gone to school with him.”
Gosh, you might wonder, what’s poor old Cleggie been up to now? Nothing illegal, it turns out, though it might be thought so from McFadyen’s wrath. It’s just that Clegg had failed to back McFadyen’s demand for a massive inquiry into historic sexual abuse. See what I mean about the “bully” thing?
McFadyen has plenty of reason to feel traumatised and angry, of course, and it behoves us heretics to advocate for a more open society (including more accountability in schools) so that dreadful experiences like his are not repeated. But it is characteristic of so-called sympathetic programmes, including this latest Channel 4 one, that their purported sympathy for non-active paedophiles tends to be yoked together with truly extreme and appalling cases of abuse. Far from increasing sympathy for the average paedophile, the likely outcome of this pairing is to crank up the fear of paedophilia to a heightened extreme, so that even the most virtuous VP will come under ever more intense suspicion and scrutiny – and insistence that they do not go anywhere near kids.
For a bit of realistic balance, we could do worse than turn to some recent revelations by TV personality and former Tory MP Gyles Brandreth. He told the Daily Mail a couple of months ago he had been “abused” by a choir master at his prep school.
“I suppose I liked him,” said Brandreth. “At least, I was flattered by his attention. I think I felt it was my due. I was 11, 12 and 13 when this was happening, and quite full of myself. Mr Harkness took lots of photographs of me. We both admired the results.”
Also:
“Has this experience of being a victim of child abuse had a lasting effect on me? I certainly don’t feel traumatised by it, nor even resentful. I did not complain then, and I am not complaining now.”
It is no accident, I feel, that neither Brandreth, nor anyone with a comparable experience, is being featured on the Channel 4 programme so far as I can tell. They wouldn’t want to spoil their “misery memoir” narrative with any happiness, would they?
[…] first thought coming to many here may be that Channel 4 did a comparable doc not so long ago called The Paedophile Next Door, from Testimony Films. With the honourable exception of a fine contribution from our own Ed […]
[…] a very grand total – of 5,767 comments published so far as I write. One piece in this third year, Inadmissible Testimony, drew an astonishing 484 comments. This year also saw the most page views in a single day since the […]
[…] is the director, David Kennerly, who has miraculously managed to turn the pig’s ear of my discarded interview last year for Testimony Films into the silk purse of a 11-part, all-singing, all-dancing (well, not […]
[…] quickly, as we know. So I was very sceptical when, in the wake of the Channel 4/Testimony Films debacle last yearI was approached by another TV documentary maker with a comparable project. As part of the […]
I mentioned somewhere that I considered virtue to be an intrinsic good, like health and happiness. I’ve also struggled to express the mechanism by which I’ve come to my ethical position on sexual conduct with children.
I wonder if maybe I’ve taken the stance I have because I feel good about it. On this page: 7 reasons not to feel bad about yourself when you have acted immorally, reason number 7 is as follows..
It’s possible that I’m just responding to internalized stigma and feel guilty about my paedophilic impulses, but I believe it runs deeper than that. In particular, find I am happier and more confident in my relationships with children when I know that I’m not secretly believing that only I know what’s best for them. I can honestly and openly express my intents and purposes, and that is a kind of reward in itself.
I realise that, on this principle, I could be feeling good about honestly and openly keeping slaves or persecuting Jews, if that were what everyone else considered the right thing to do, but in this case I’m finding joy in declining possible pleasures those others don’t necessarily share, and I think that makes it different. I don’t think finding joy in restraint, in managing desire, has much in common with the mass psychology that makes selfish ends seem moral. It has more in common with the Buddhist path of liberation (which I suppose is another kind of ‘enlightenment’ philosophy). 😀
Anyway, with this understanding, I feel as if I can really love the kids in my life, without restraint. In the past, I felt an ambiguity around how I should respond to their sexuality and to my own sexual feelings, and that made my love seem hopelessly compromised and partial. I think if I had actually been sexual with the kids I was friendly with then, I would have felt and would be feeling even more ambivalent.
A story: my very first ever little girl friend and I had been constant companions for over two years when she went overseas. I didn’t see her for three years, then we met up again when she was ten. We hugged one another for a long moment and I remember an enormous sense of pride and relief that there were no awkward details in our past that could cloud the joy of our being together again. Maybe I would have felt just as happy if we had enjoyed some kind of sex play together when she was little, but how could I know that she hadn’t come to see that differently, in hindsight? I would have been anxious about that, at least, and it would have ruined the moment.
One of the most powerful guides to my conduct with children today is my horror at the thought of a beloved child coming to hate me. I try to cast all of my friendships into the future, and to guess how they might appear from that perspective. It is a source of enduring satisfaction for me that so many of my child friends have become adult friends, and that I have no fear of meeting any of the others.
In response to James (Dec 22, 2014 @ 15:15:18): I’ve gone from sensing a logical error to a type error. The main thing is that I take a somewhat similar approach in parts of my life but I don’t call it morality.
Yes I think this gets to the guts of it. I think the significant innovation made by Hume, Bentham and others, was the attempt to put ethics on a logical footing and eliminate sentiment, superstition, religion, parochial relativism and so on.
This is a hugely important step and I am very much influenced by this kind of thinking, however I do not think it is the final word on ethics. I think ethical thought does have an emotional aspect and I think that needs to be accounted for.
I think the ‘virtue theory’ I’ve been talking about is an attempt to provide such an account, but I am the first to see the problems with is. All I’m saying about it really is that it’s made things easier for me to understand in my own life.
When you say logical error you betray the partisan allegiance to logic which is the very limitation I’ve stubbed my toe on in my engagement with consequentialism, and when you say a type error you are saying that logic is the proper domain of ethics and that ‘virtue theory’ must necessarily not be an ethical theory.
I admit that ‘theory’ is a problematic word to use for something that claims to go beyond logic, but I don’t think that ‘virtue’ is theoretically inert. In the same way that we can theorize happiness and sadness, I think we can theorize virtue. For example, you say you respect your girlfriend’s religious beliefs because you don’t want to upset her, and that’s a very nice way to act. It could also be argued that that’s how you should act, and that makes it a moral statement.
Such compromises are the fabric of human community, and a utilitarian analysis might also admit that the soundness of that fabric is a greater good than the absolute logical rigor of it’s ethical perspectives. What people think is the right thing may sometimes be the right thing for that and no other reason.
But people do have reasons for shielding children from sexual life, and some of them are valid. Often this shielding is problematic and harmful, but sometimes it just gives children, and their parents, one less thing to worry about. I believe it’s important to question sexual attitudes, because many of ours in the west are extremely unhealthy, but I also think we should approach this whole question with humility and sensitivity.
>I think the significant innovation made by Hume, Bentham and others, was the attempt to put ethics on a logical footing and eliminate sentiment, superstition, religion, parochial relativism and so on.
Hume? Hume overturned the Aristotelian notion that ethics is a rational business. He foregrounded emotion and sentiment and would have agreed with you that they are the inescapable underpinning of our ethical judgements!
Hume?
Yes, quite right. What was I thinking? I guess I meant J S Mill.
Hume always comes to mind in relation to this controversy, I guess because he addressed it specifically, but as you point out he championed sentiment over logic.
:#)
” innovation made by Hume [….] put ethics on a logical footing”
….Have we been reading different Humes? See Tom’s comment to the same effect.
“I think ethical thought does have an emotional aspect and I think that needs to be accounted for.”
I view emotion as the engine (motivator) rather than the rudder (decider). I’m of the opinion that you should make choices to fulfill your emotional needs (a philosophy I’ve been pitching to my GF by calling it “The Virtue of Happiness”) but you shouldn’t let emotion be the one making the choices. In my experience, that’d mean you’re gonna have a bad time….
“When you say logical error you betray the partisan allegiance to logic”
I told you I was a Vulcan. Out and proud. Heil Logos!
“when you say a type error you are saying that logic is the proper domain of ethics”
Well, really I’m saying something more like: methodologies which do not explicitly target the improvement of general welfare fall outside the arbitrarily-drawn borders of my concept of “morality”. However, the categories were made for man, not man for the categories, so we’re allowed to have completely different definitions for “morality” as long as we agree not to confuse/conflate them. Brits and Americans mean different things when they say “chips”. Likewise, you and I mean different things when we say “morality”. That’s perfectly fine.
“It could also be argued that that’s how you should act, and that makes it a moral statement.”
1) I don’t consider all imperatives (statements of the type “one should”) to necessary be about morality. As Aristotle might agree, when saying what should be the case, one must consider the purpose/goal (teleos) of the thing in question. I believe imperatives consist of “one should X ….. to achieve Y” (there’s that Consequentialism again). I only judge an imperative to be a moral statement if it ends with something along the lines of “to be a good person”.
2) I don’t think my behaviour here WRT my girlfriend’s beliefs is about being a good person. I believe they are about having a mutually fulfilling/enriching/enjoyable relationship. Ethics be damned. This is me selfishly aiming for a smooth relationship and taking pleasure in my GF’s happiness.
“I also think we should approach this whole question with humility and sensitivity.”
Sure but humility granted: be ready to argue the best-looking case.
“I’m finding joy in declining possible pleasures those others don’t necessarily share, and I think that makes it different.”
Could you explain how it’s different? What distinguishes pleasure-through-restraint from any other pleasure? (Go ahead and drop ten tonnes of Buddhism on me if you wish.)
“how could I know that she hadn’t come to see that differently, in hindsight? …. One of the most powerful guides to my conduct with children today is my horror at the thought of a beloved child coming to hate me.”
This is still basically saying “iatrogenic harm is bad, m’kay?” I think everyone here agrees with that. I also get the impression that most people here are, for one reason or another, child-celibate. Glad to see we’re all on the same page here 🙂
I also get the impression that most people here are, for one reason or another, child-celibate. Glad to see we’re all on the same page here 🙂
I think you may be wrong, only a hunch, but the fact that non-celibacy is in fact illegal (and often involving mighty long periods of limitation these days) might have something to do with this perception. Imagine a bunch of bank-robbers dressed as nuns arguing the pros and cons of bank-robbing with each other, and all claiming never to have robbed a bank. Comparing robbing banks to sex-play with children is unfair of course, I’d never condone the former.
However, that said, I think Bloom’s position is very valid. He has found an equilibrium in his life that allows him plenty of interaction with kids, at the same time as being pretty open about who he is to parents etc. I respect that a great deal. My own nature is far too removed from Buddhist tranquility to manage this, so I have a different course to navigate. In fact, my little prehistoric paedophilic adventure caused me (Is still causing me! The ripples!) a great deal of grief. But you know, I’d not wish it undone for the world. Such is the power of love.
I think Bloom’s position is very valid. He has found an equilibrium in his life that allows him plenty of interaction with kids, at the same time as being pretty open about who he is to parents etc. I respect that a great deal.
Thanks so much gantier99, that’s very nice to hear! 🙂
my little prehistoric paedophilic adventure caused me (Is still causing me! The ripples!) a great deal of grief.
I’m sorry you’ve been caught in the people grinder. There are some who treat children with utter contempt and deserve much (seldom all) of what they get. Otoh, there are plenty of lives sacrificed to assuage the collective guilt of a sheep like populace and it’s cynical emperors.
I’d not wish it undone for the world. Such is the power of love.
I envy you that, but it must be hard to ‘forget’ something so profound.
My own nature is far too removed from Buddhist tranquility to manage this, so I have a different course to navigate.
Don’t be pessimistic about finding tranquility. Nothing about Buddhism is closed to anyone. You just have to sit in a quiet place and give yourself a hug. No guilt or belief required. 🙂
Don’t be pessimistic about finding tranquility. Nothing about Buddhism is closed to anyone. You just have to sit in a quiet place and give yourself a hug. No guilt or belief required. 🙂
Thanks Bloom! I found some of that tranquility this year through an unexpected source: the person to whom I referred. I suddenly realised I had to sort things out with her. So after many years of no contact, I asked whether we could examine what had happened and she said yes. It’s been a bumpy ride and we’re not done yet but it’s been positive for me and I think for her too. Ask me in another year’s time…. In the meantime I have some work to do with my own (younger but also now adult) kids. They caught some fallout and have suffered more than I knew. This iatrogenic thing is a nightmare. The messes we paedos get into.
“I’m finding joy in declining possible pleasures those others don’t necessarily share, and I think that makes it different.”
I really meant two things. One is that the joy I find in restraint is different to the joy some find in refuting license, such as the license to keep slaves or persecute Jews.
Also, the possible pleasures I’m declining are not validated or encouraged by society, as slavery and antisemitism have been at various times, so declining theme does not seem like a sacrifice to most people but it does to me.
I’m just saying that what I understand as virtue is distinct from slavish allegiance to social mores.
Also, I’d like to note that when I refer to ‘joy in restraint’ I’m not talking about BDSM. 😛
That came out very garbled sorry. I have to stop posting til I have time to THIMK!
Tom: Presumably Bloom is pleased to see controversy over self-determination taken out of the equation by Channel 4. That leaves The Paedophile Next Door, and any similar presentation of MAPs, free to focus on “tolerance and acceptance”, right?
Well, sure, and that would be a good thing if it were taking us in the right direction. Politics is often characterised as the art of the possible. The way to reach an ultimate goal is to focus on small, incremental achievements. You don’t frighten the horses by seeming to be insanely radical.
I understand that. But what if those small steps are heading in the wrong direction, leading away from one’s ultimate objective? The “tolerance and acceptance” aimed at in VP efforts is not tolerance and acceptance of sexual self-determination, after all, but it’s exact opposite i.e. an outcome that cements intolerance and non-acceptance of sexual self-determination permanently in place and depends upon brainwashing and coercing MAPs into submission.
I never really addressed this Tom, but I can state my position quite succinctly as follows:
To expand on this, I’d love to work with children, but I’ve made a commitment to myself (and to certain friends who consider this ambition problematic) that I will not pursue this career unless I’m out to my employers. I’d be uncomfortable working with kids without an understanding like this, because I’d be vulnerable to the accusation that I’d hidden my ‘real’ agenda.
Plenty of people have told me that teaching children as an out paedophile is an impossible goal, but as you point out, politics is the art of the possible. Also, along with all the nay saying, I’ve met with encouragement from people who actually know what I’m up against and are in a better position than most to rate my chances. It may be a remote goal, but it’s one that I take at least as seriously as you take self-determination.
For some years, I’ve also been up front about my orientation with the caregivers of children I’m friendly with. It doesn’t always work out in my favour, but it has worked out often enough. Even when it hasn’t, I’ve been given a fair hearing and my honesty has been appreciated. I’m expected, and have been warned, not to be sexual with these children. I think that’s fair enough (to say the least) and I don’t chafe against it.
I’ve been frankly humbled by the generosity of mothers and fathers who’ve supported me and encouraged me to spend time with their children and humbled by the trust they’ve shown, despite knowing that I’m attracted to children and that I sometimes have sexual feelings for them. Somehow this makes the thought of my betraying this trust truly horrifying, and I can’t imagine myself ever doing it.
So now I get to the point I want to be very clear on. Never in these negotiations have I professed any belief in the dogma of harm. If I say anything, I’m clear that I don’t actually see any obvious intrinsic harm in sexual conduct between adults and children. Rather, I’m staunchly agnostic on this question.
I make commitments on how I will behave, but no promises on how I will think. I’m happy to do this because meaningful time spent with children is important to me out of all proportion to any interest I might in sexual conduct with them. I support children’s rights to sexual self determination, but I step back if their sexual interests include me.
I think this draws a clear line between my position and that of VP’s, who assert that sexual conduct with children is and will always be harmful and wrong. I never profess this and i doubt I ever will.
It also draws a clear line between my position and yours, Tom, because my ‘ultimate goal’ has nothing to do with sex and a lot to do with expressing affection for and nurturing children.
…sorry, this didn’t turn out as succinct as I intended, but I do believe I covered everything in the first paragraph.
I do not accept this characterisation of my “ultimate goal”. Otherwise, thanks for a good post. More later perhaps. I’m on the road in a minute.
Yes, I’m sorry Tom, I don’t mean to imply you have a one track mind!
You do seem inclined to put sexual self-determination very high in your priorities though, and seem unwilling to give an inch to any idea of paedophile liberation that admits social constraints on sexual conduct. For example, you say:
I agree that social constraints on child sexuality are coercive and harmful and I suspect my own sexual politics are as libertarian as yours, but I see these issues as distinct from the problem of re-establishing a beach head of trust and respect for paedophiles in society.
The bottom line is that I recognize the authority that parents and primary caregivers have over the treatment of children in their care. This right isn’t unlimited, but when the motives are genuine and are inspired by care and protection, I’m not willing to predicate my acceptance into their family circle on my right to ignore their authority.
I don’t see this as cementing in place outdated puritan and sex negative codes and ethics, I see it as broadening peoples minds to understand and accept sexual attitudes and feelings that most people find strange and threatening. I agree with you that VPs cheerleading for the oppressors is problematic, and I wish they could see this for themselves. However, I also think they are adopting a position with some similarity to mine, in that they are attempting to separate the issue of sexual conduct with children from the issue of toxic social attitudes to paedophilia.
>The bottom line is that I recognize the authority that parents and primary caregivers have over the treatment of children in their care.
So do I. Paedophiles should want to have the trust and confidence of good parents but I don’t see why that trust should be predicated on sexual abstinence. I think that is an unreasonable imposition when the child is clearly very “physical”. Paedophiles and parents alike have to be bound by the law, though, so this discussion is necessarily very conditional and abstract.
Paedophiles and parents alike have to be bound by the law, though, so this discussion is necessarily very conditional and abstract.
Yes, abstract in the sense that the kind of acts that generate these anxieties do not generally occur, but the anxieties themselves are not abstract. Far from it.
Also, I think the law, to some extent at least, reflects these anxieties, and in this sense is other than an arbitrary constraint.
I don’t see why that trust should be predicated on sexual abstinence. I think that is an unreasonable imposition when the child is clearly very “physical”
I think trust is predicated on respect for values. The parent might believe that musical theatre is the work of satan (as do I) and insist that their child not be exposed to it, or that the child not be given sweets or allowed to play video games. In those cases, trust is predicated on respecting those values.
So what I’m talking about here is respect for other people’s values, which is how I understand ‘virtue theory’, aka Aristotelian ethics. It is the ethic of being a good person in other people’s eyes. Also, I don’t imply here that we should respect society’s ‘values’. Society doesn’t have values. Society is a construct.
But social values reflect individual values, more or less, and in a representational democracy, the law reflects the values of constituents, more or less.
There are necessary limits to the obligation to respect social values. In Nazi Germany, for example, antisemitism could not be justified on the basis that it was popular. You may see obligatory sexual abstinence by paedophiles in this light, but I don’t. I see it as …well, more complex than that. Children are sexual beings with sexual rights and I rigorously defend those rights, but I don’t include my own sexual rights in that equation. Nor do I consider children being denied sexual access to my admittedly voluptuous contours to be an unreasonable imposition on their rights.
I think punishing children for masturbating, cutting children’s genitals, banning children from sex play or sexual relationships with peers, I think these things are immoral in the way that antisemitism is, but I’m sorry, I don’t see a ban on sexual relationships with adults as being in that category.
I do think children have some right to pick their friends, however.
So, let’s see: you respect other people’s values, except when you don’t. Ummm.
So, let’s see: you respect other people’s values, except when you don’t. Ummm.
Complicated isn’t it, that virtue is so confoundedly relative! No wonder we reach for the safety of logic, but even as we do, we need to keep our hearts in sight.
In other words, there is a good in deferring to other’s understandings of right and wrong, even if at times we need to rely our own.
Sorry if this seems contradictory. I wish it could be more straight forward.
“No wonder we reach for the safety of logic, but even as we do, we need to keep our hearts in sight.”
As a Vulcan, I take that personally.
Seriously though: these two aren’t in conflict. Our “hearts” (emotion is really in the brain) give us our values and desires. Our reason gives us the ability to pursue these effectively. They compliment, they don’t conflict.
Besides: the thing about hearts is that they’re all relative while logic is true or false. If your morality is all about your heart, there is no basis by which you can fault the antisemitism in someone else’s heart. By grounding my ethics in logic, I draw a line in the sand.
>If your morality is all about your heart, there is no basis by which you can fault the antisemitism in someone else’s heart. By grounding my ethics in logic, I draw a line in the sand.
Precisely! Talking about lines in the *sand*, the virtue ethics stuff seems insufficiently *grounded* to me: the excess of subjectivity leaves us condemned to talk *at* each other, each mouthing our invincible feelings with no objective means of resolving issues.
“*sand* …. *grounded*”
You and your puns. SMH 🙂
“the excess of subjectivity leaves us condemned to talk *at* each other, each mouthing our invincible feelings with no objective means of resolving issues.”
My thoughts precisely! It was mentioned in the Consequentialist FAQ that I linked you to months ago the non-Consequentialists tend to solve moral conflicts by arguing about which rights apply here or which are more important. Consequentialists, on the other hand, can turn the problem into an empirical one: does this policy make people better off? I think that sexual self-determination wins here. I believe that if we can’t make the problem empirical, we can’t solve it.
BTW: Have I finished converting you to Consequentialism?
>Have I finished converting you to Consequentialism?
Oh, dear, I’m in danger of getting sucked into a discussion I sadly don’t have time for.
Put it like this, in theory at least (not so sure how far cost/benefit analysis gets in practice on ethical matters: the conceptual framework has perhaps fared better in economic applications although these have ethical implications), I like the objectivity of consequentialist analysis in aggregative contexts i.e. the ethics of public policies concerning the wellbeing of whole populations.
However, the obvious textbook Ethics 101 objections regarding the aggregate good being potentially at odds with irreducible individual rights have so far led me to believe consequentialism alone is not enough: it needs to be underpinned. The universalist aspect of deontological imperatives can provide such an underpinning. BTW, the last time I mentioned deontology you were very dismissive, apparently because of its perceived connection with the Catholic Church — any such connection is totally coincidental to what I am talking about, which has no basis in religion.
Tom and James, I acknowledge all of these criticisms of ‘virtue theory’ and in fact I don’t really claim it as a theory at all. It isn’t a basis for ethical decision making, it is more an attitude of humility in relation to other people’s morals and values.
I cannot defend ‘virtue’ as an ethical systems comparable to consequentialism or deontology, but I recognize it as a ‘good’, comparable to health and happiness. That is what provides the structure of its dependent ‘theory’.
Moral reasoning is not binary, in the sense of a logical proposition. There are distinct benefits in our attempts to make it so, and apply logic to our moral reasoning, but we will never be able to rely on this reasoning alone, because ethics are always going to have emotional and intuitive elements.
“consequentialism alone is not enough: it needs to be underpinned.”
Hmmm… Maybe this SSC post can provide some underpinning (or at least food for thought)?
“last time I mentioned deontology you were very dismissive, apparently because of its perceived connection with the Catholic Church”
LOL. Not at all. I dismiss Deontology because it seems intuitively and logically silly to me; not because it can be linked to Catholicism or any other religion. If anything, the Catholic Church loses prestige in my eyes by being associated with Deontology. Besides: I have mad respect for Catholicism (my GF would kill me otherwise) even while believing it to be wrong.
Thanks for the link, which could hardly be more relevant. I’ll try to find time, as I might for this one, which your linked page itself links to:
You Kant dismiss universalizability
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/16/you-kant-dismiss-universalizability/
But perhaps the punning headline for this one is so SMH you couldn’t bear to read it! 🙂
I actually quite enjoyed that punnish article and it increased my respect for Kant (though I already found him to be pretty great as far as Deontologists go). BTW: I don’t actually mind puns (which is great since both SSC and H-TOC are full of them). A good pun is its own reword!
“might believe that musical theatre is the work of satan (as do I)”
Aha! I’ve finally found a theist in this godless place! Mission accomplished 🙂
“But social values reflect individual values, more or less”
For the most part, they’re the vector sum of the individual values, weighted according to how influential those individuals are.
“In Nazi Germany, for example, antisemitism could not be justified on the basis that it was popular. You may see obligatory sexual abstinence by paedophiles in this light, but I don’t.”
In that case, we need some hard-and-fast method of distinguishing respectable values from those which are not respectable (besides 20/20 hindsight, of course). May I be permitted to rain on the virtue-ethical parade by suggesting a Utilitarian method? I’d say it comes down to whether the enforcement of those values harms/constrains even those who don’t hold those values. This is why persecution of Jews in Germany was unethical: it imposed unwanted harms upon those Jews. However, in that case, sexual self-determination still wins out because it is the minors choosing to follow their own values.
(I’m am actually quite distressed by the fact that this discussion of respecting values has focused on the parents’ values rather than those of the children.)
>I’m am actually quite distressed by the fact that this discussion of respecting values has focused on the parents’ values rather than those of the children.
Me, too. Wish I had a bit more time to join in these discussions but perhaps I shouldn’t, anyway, as I have my own “pulpit” here.
This is in response to James Dec 20, 2014 @ 03:58:22
Bloom: “social values reflect individual values, more or less”
James: For the most part, they’re the vector sum of the individual values, weighted according to how influential those individuals are.
That is so succinct and precise, all I can do is quote it in admiration.
May I be permitted to rain on the virtue-ethical parade by suggesting a Utilitarian method?
You may, but I am already heavily influenced by utilitarianism. The problem I have with it is that it lacks scope for moral intuition and we, as humans, rely a great deal on intuition. We restrain ourselves from harming people we love intuitively, not because we calculate a cost benefit ratio. I think parents care for their children in the same intuitive (or perhaps ‘instinctive’) manner.
And why not push the fat man onto the railway track? Why not deny expensive drugs to the child with leukemia? Money spent on western medicine could save orders of magnitude more innocent lives if it were spent on fresh water supply in the third world. Why don’t we do that? Because we look after our own.
Is that the ‘right’ thing to do? Probably not by utilitarian measures, but it’s what we do anyway. That’s why I said it’s complicated. The controversy over homosexuality has torn the Anglican church in half. Does that make gay rights harmful? Not in my book, but it does show how relative ethics can be, and it does bring into focus the fact that disrupting social values can itself have consequences that we must, in turn, factor into our Utilitarian schema.
Many MAPs profess to being child celibate as a pragmatic response to the weight of the law. Personally, I don’t give a fuck about the law. So far as the law is concerned, I do what I want when I want. I’m child celibate because my friends believe that is how I should behave to be a good person in their eyes, and I’m not only celibate with their children, I’m celibate (and in fact quite demure) with all children, because my friends values and intuitions in this don’t only apply to their own children, they apply to all children.
I know my friends aren’t infallible or omniscient, but I love and admire them, and their respect means more to me than the particular moral issue we are concerned with: whether sexual conduct between adults and children is …what? Harmful? Ethical? A right?
I am a staunch defender of children’s sexual rights, and I actually do defend children’s right to engage in sexual behaviour with adults (I sometimes argue this position with my friends) but I see this particular right as comparatively minor. I don’t want to shackle my entire ethic to a single relatively unimportant but highly charged question; instead I defer to the combined moral wisdom of a group of people who’s judgement I respect and who feel more strongly about this one question than I do. I guess their opinion is my personal, self selected moral vector sum. Arguably, there is a cost and a benefit in this deference, and I have decided in relation to this particular controversy, the benefits of deference outweigh the costs of transgression, not just to me, but to everybody, including children. So perhaps this is a utilitarian position after all.
If I had Moslem or Jewish friends who were about to circumcise their child, I’d be vociferous in my criticism, I’d be angry, I might risk losing their friendship, but I wouldn’t reject it, and I would do my best to maintain respect for their beliefs in a wider context. I would not change my own ethics to suit theirs but I would probably defer to their beliefs, even though I feel very strongly that this is a gross violation of their child’s rights.
If I had an old and trusted friend of no particular beliefs other than in his own moral primacy and (I discover to my shock) his right to rape his daughter, I would not defer to or accommodate his beliefs. I might remain a friend and visit him in jail, but my first obligation would be to his child.
I think these scenarios are comparable, on a kind of continuum, with my deference to my friends feelings on adult/child sex. But if I defer to some of my friend’s moral values, why not defer to them all? I think it comes down to a balance of the strength of relationships, the commonality of ideals and the starkness of the moral choices at issue. It’s multifactorial in other words, a multivariate calculus that must account for not just benefit and harm but instinct, intuition, love, respect, loyalty, community and other messy, human dimensions.
So I’ve found the questions sexual ethics in particular to be highly resistant to consistent analysis because, for one thing, they have a tendency to cut across human relationships and moral intuitions. Perhaps this is why we have so many formalized codes, which are really just a kind of etiquette. It’s important to question these codes, but around the particular issue we are debating here, I think it’s also important to be sensitive to widespread concensus and intuition. There is no simple calculus of benefit and harm that applies.
“That is so succinct and precise, all I can do is quote it in admiration.”
Thank you, thank you. However, like most good ideas, I suspect someone else has already said it better somewhere else….
“Money spent on western medicine could save orders of magnitude more innocent lives if it were spent on fresh water supply in the third world. Why don’t we do that? Because we look after our own. Is that the ‘right’ thing to do? Probably not by utilitarian measures, but it’s what we do anyway.”
And don’t expect my Third-World arse to thank you for it! 😛
“There is no simple calculus of benefit and harm that applies.”
We may have to agree to disagree here. In pretty much every case, my response is “inexplicably continues to be a Utilitarian”. I do like your exposition of how you determine your ethic. However, I parse it the same way I parse Catholic moral doctrines: smart, sophisticated, well-reasoned, and wrong.
I parse it the same way I parse Catholic moral doctrines: smart, sophisticated, well-reasoned, and wrong.
I regret that ‘virtue theory’ has this association with religion. It is a simplistic assumption based on the influence of Aristotle on early Christianity. I myself am not at all religious, unless you count my Buddhist practice, which I really don’t think of as a belief or of having any metaphysical dimension. It is simply a practice founded in a philosophy.
I also regret the assumption that (I think) David Kennerly and others have made that my discussion of ‘virtue theory’ is in any way related to the Virtuous Pedophiles group. It isn’t. My thinking seems to be incompatible with theirs, since I was banned from their group. (I should respond to David directly, but I’m too busy reading Carin Marie Freimond’s thesis).
Finally, Tom, aaaarrrrggh! Can you do something about your wordpress settings? It would be good to have the minimum possible indents for each level of reply and a preview of new replies before submission (to get markup right). Also, every time I try and start a top level reply, it winds up tacked at the end of the last thread I replied to… I’m prepared to wait as I know this is a busy time of year 🙂
>Finally, Tom, aaaarrrrggh! Can you do something about your wordpress settings?
I have considered the various options but all seem to have a downside. The present option has the advantage of allowing a thread to run through an eight-deep post and reply sequence.
“I regret that ‘virtue theory’ has this association with religion.”
I think I’m sensing a trend here so let me be explicit for everyone: if I say “X is analogous to Catholicism”, I do not mean “X is bad because it is associated with Catholicism”! I use Catholicism as an example because I know it well, not because I dislike it. I quite like Catholicism and Judaism. Most of my friends are Catholic. My cultural environment is quite Catholic. If I were better at double-think, I’d probably be a Catholic. It would certainly be less stressful if my GF weren’t constantly worried about my eventual departure for the inferno. I have nothing but vaguely positive feelings for the Catholic Church. So please, everyone, if I say “X is like Catholicism”, assume I dislike it for reasons unrelated to Catholicism. Of the two things in that analogy, chances are it’ll be X I like the least.
“I myself am not at all religious”
But didn’t you say:
“might believe that musical theatre is the work of satan (as do I)“
Was that a joke? I’m afraid I took it 100% seriously because it isn’t an uncommon belief around here.
“I also regret the assumption that (I think) David Kennerly and others have made that my discussion of ‘virtue theory’ is in any way related to the Virtuous Pedophiles group. It isn’t.”
Well, I never made that assumption so you’re in the clear on this front 🙂
“Finally, Tom, aaaarrrrggh! Can you do something about your wordpress settings?”
Tom has said in the past that he hasn’t come across better alternatives. Besides that, I don’t think he could whip up a replacement because he doesn’t code. Of the people who do code: could any of you edit the WordPress skin to reduce the indents?
“‘wrong’ seems a bit harsh. Does it mean false or just bent?”
I don’t know how to describe the feeling of wrongness I get from this. My brain just automatically tags it as “incorrect” without fully explaining why. It might be that it’s logically inconsistent or leads to bad consequences or is unnecessarily complex or something else. IDK. If you’re really interested, I’ll try to tease out all my objections and debate them. Otherwise, I’ll be over here rationing my brainpower to figure out all these “interpersonal relationships” neurotypicals keep getting on about 😛
But didn’t you say:
“might believe that musical theatre is the work of satan (as do I)“
Ah, but notice that I neglected to capitalize ‘satan’.
If you’re really interested, I’ll try to tease out all my objections and debate them.
Yep. Interested.
You not being minor attracted yourself, you may not be so conscious of the kind of dilemmas this trait can throw in the spokes of everyday life. In particular, I’ve come to my ideas from the position of a very strong identification with Enlightenment principles, particularly consequentialism.
One of the problems I’ve had is that I don’t consider the law to have any moral dimension, only a political one, so I cannot explain the intuitive celibacy I actually do observe in my conduct with children as fear of the law. To be honest, I don’t fear the law, or any authority.
When I add to this the fact that I honestly don’t see how respectful and affectionate sexual conduct between individuals of any arbitrary age can ever be intrinsically harmful, I cannot explain my reluctance to engage in sexual conduct with children by an appeal to harmful consequences, either.
Against this absence of restraining moral arguments (and let’s be clear, it would have to be counted as my ultimate sexual fantasy to be intimate with a little girl) I’m alert to the fact that I behave in the way I do because I have received moral attitudes from people whose judgement I trust and admire. These people are as radical in their thinking as I am, in almost all matters except the one of adult/child sexuality. I guess it feels to me that it would be somewhat arrogant for me to assume a moral perspective completely counter of theirs in this sensitive arena. Also, I would lose their trust and admiration if I simply acted as I saw fit, in contradiction of their values.
I do argue a more libertarian position with them and I do tell them how I feel and who I fall in love with, but I also internalize to a significant extent their own instinctive boundaries around intimacy with children. You’ll notice that my thinking departs from the Enlightenment emphasis on empiricism and logic, allowing a place for intuition and emotion. I think this may be a result of my studying Buddhism. In Zen Buddhism especially, there is a sophisticated critique, not unlike the postmodernist one, of using language to characterize life’s more subtle problems. The implication is that some problems are resistant to linguistic representation, and although I recognize an element of anti-rational thought in this, I don’t connect it with the anti-rationalism of, say, a Hitler or a Judith Reisman.
I don’t know if my ideas are ‘correct’, and I generally don’t make statements about how others ‘should’ behave. My emancipatory goals are mostly around fair treatment for paedophiles themselves and I have little to say about youth rights, abandoning laws around age of consent and so on. I actually get a bit irritated when youth rights are invoked as an argument against my approach to what I consider a problem that doesn’t really involve children (unless they themselves are paedophiles or pre-paedophiles, which many obviously are).
Anyway, I’d be very interested to read a more detailed critique from you if you feel like putting it together! 🙂
Now that you’ve explained in greater detail, I’m starting to see this as being reasonable but (if you’ll allow) misclassified. I’ve gone from sensing a logical error to a type error. The main thing is that I take a somewhat similar approach in parts of my life but I don’t call it morality.
For example: I don’t swear or talk about (my rejection of) religion around my GF in deference to her own preferences – she finds both to be upsetting. This does not mean I consider either to be wrong but simply that I have no intention of violating the boundaries or preferences of those I care about. I choose to live in harmony with them of my own volition.
The way this differs from what I consider to be morality is that I don’t universalise it. I’m not going to stop swearing in general or tell other people not to. I just wont swear around the people I care about upsetting. To me, morality is that which everyone should be expected to adhere to for the good of all (see: You Kant Dismiss Universalizability). This is more localized and case-specific so I would consider it to be a sub-type of pragmatism.
Caveat: I would not cause harm to others in deference to my friends. This draws an obvious distinction between Nazi-era antisemitism and your celibacy. IE: Only the first hurts other people.
So, all in all, I think that once I realised that what you call “morality” and what I call “morality” were different in kind as well as content, this issue cleared up. Unless, of course, I’ve grossly misinterpreted you. The only point at which I think we still disagree is that I believe that, localized morality or no, advocating for sexual self-determination (inter-generational sex included) of all minors is a worthwhile endeavor. (Unless you support that too, in which case: conflict concluded.)
Ps: ‘wrong’ seems a bit harsh. Does it mean false or just bent?
..actually, you have said you think penetration of young children is wrong and that you’re uncomfortable with the idea of anal sex with older boys. I think you said something like: that kind of thing never interested me.
So you do support some constraints on adult/child sexual conduct, and I guess from there it simply becomes a question of what is acceptable at what age, which isn’t too far away from the status quo, without the punitive hyperbole. Is that right?
I suspect you feel much as I do, that children know what they’re interested in and can even be quite direct in making that known, and that this, essentially, is as far as adults should go. Mostly this means ‘sex play’ or ‘curiosity’.
I think child led sex is acceptable in most instances, although I do think there is still a point where adults need to draw the line. A 13 year old who insists he or she wants penetrative intercourse is not necessarily the best judge of what is best. Against common prejudice, I think a lot of, maybe even most paedophiles would demur at such an invitation, however much they might like to accept.
Is that prudish or just prudent? I don’t know, but I think even if the social environment were supportive, I would find a way to decline without implying rejection.
Disclaimer: because I’m most attracted to girls of an age where sexual knowledge and agency is very limited, I find it quite simple to make these judgements, but I readily accept that the problem is much more complex when the ‘child’ is a young teen. Of course I’ve also been friendly with teens and preteens and have, occasionally, been surprised, even shocked by what goes on behind those ‘untroubled brows’.
As I see it, sexual self-determination is as critical as any other facet of self-determination — bot for children and teens as well as adults.
There seems to me an inherent conflict in recognizing that young people are capable of knowing what they want and pursuing it, recognizing that as a valid and good thing, and then saying that they don’t really know what they want, they’re not the best judge of what’s right for them, or even if they are they should be prevented from having it. Self-determination is just that, determining for ones own self. And the fight for sexual self-determination isn’t one-sided, i.e. “a paedophile’s ability to choose to be sexual with children” is worthless without “a child’s ability to choose to be sexual with someone they love.” Not a matter of “imposing on” anyone, but about mutual choice in cases of mutual interest.
Yes, in the current society as things stand, there is a great deal of harm that can come from those sexual interactions — or rather from reactions to and punishments for those interactions. I hope to work toward a world where rather than choices being determined by other people and their potential to do harm to the people making those choices, that self-determination can be a more important factor.
(P.S. — please excuse any lack of coherence; I’m more hung over than I’ve been in some time. Last night was a much-needed bit of pleasantness in what has otherwise been a rough few weeks…)
“rather than choices being determined by other people and their potential to do harm to the people making those choices, that self-determination can be a more important factor.”
“yes the immediate consequences are obviously negative but I have a convoluted ass explanation based on my ideologically motivated worldview that explains how this will be better for them in the end”
— people making decisions for other people (via shlevy on tumblr)
“please excuse any lack of coherence”
Seemed coherent enough to me 🙂
“Last night was a much-needed bit of pleasantness in what has otherwise been a rough few weeks”
Knowing you, I expect there’ll be a blog post on it soon 🙂
As I see it, sexual self-determination is as critical as any other facet of self-determination — both for children and teens as well as adults.
I couldn’t agree more. This is balanced against fears that children are vulnerable to sexual exploitation by adults.
Which is why it is critical that we be armed with the ability to ensure that our choices are truly our own. That’s where youth liberation as a whole comes in.
There seems to me an inherent conflict in recognizing that young people are capable of knowing what they want and pursuing it, recognizing that as a valid and good thing, and then saying that they don’t really know what they want, they’re not the best judge of what’s right for them, or even if they are they should be prevented from having it.
There is a conflict here, I recognize that.
What makes things clearer for me is that I fell in love with a four year old. Even I can recognize that a four year old is a baby and everyone knows that when a baby reaches for a boiling jug, she knows what she wants and she is pursuing it.
So ok, my baby wasn’t going to do that at four, but she might have reached for some other metaphorical jug, such as the one boiling in my heart. She’s 13 now and her face still lights up when she sees me and I’m afraid to say I still treat her like a baby.
Because I love her.
[…] audio recording of my interview with Steve Humphries of Testimony Films. Following my recent blog Inadmissible Testimony, I left a comment saying, inter alia, […]
“When there’s an entire society determined to convince us that anyone under a particular local AoC is sub-human, incapable and inferior, and not to be regarded as a full human (not until they turn 16 or 18 or whatever magic number) it’s a small but critical reminder that I’m just interacting with another person”
^This. So much this. It’s not even just the AoC: it’s whatever the locally constructed adulthood barrier is. I’m not sure if this is also true of North America, but around here even young adults (25 and under) aren’t properly considered people. About half my friends (GF included) are 18+ but I can’t think of a single one who’s really an adult socially.
“Current friends have asked me to give them pointers on how to be as outgoing and flirtatious as I am”
I know that feel well. I’ve gradually become better and better and projecting sociability. My friends ask me “how do I get to be this confident” and I’m like “you have no idea how introverted I am on the inside”.
Dammit, WordPress! This is in reply to Sophia (Dec 09, 2014 @ 16:53:32) who was replying to Bloom….
Well, I can’t speak for all of North America, but I have certainly seen a fair amount of that kind of thing around me.
I read someone who lives in the state of Washington writing about a 19 year old woman as “nearly a child” just the other day… I once was told, at 28, that I was “a virtual 12-year-old playing grown-up” by a bitch of a landlady who was attempting to point out that I had very little life experience… there’s also the fact that in the US, it’s possible to get a driver’s license at 16, at 18 you’re considered a legal adult, but can’t drink alcohol until you’re 21. Many medical insurance plans will cover dependent “children” under their parents until age 26, with some conditions. So halfway through your 20’s you might be considered a child for some purposes.
The other bit which feeds into all of that is I suppose something of a feedback loop; we treat people like infants until they reach some magic age, then belittle them for not being any “better” at adulthood afterwards. One person put it as “we expect young men and women just out of high school to be making decisions about their careers, about college, about relationships and finances and the rest of their future… and six months ago, they had to ask for permission to use the restroom! What’s wrong with this picture?” And of course, the same thing goes for the possibility of sexual attractiveness; that last six months somehow makes all the difference between “invisible” and “super hot,” I guess. Except that it doesn’t, as you mentioned in your encounter with that older guy flirting with you… until he learned your age. 🙂
(Amusing side note: one of the tons of buttons/badges that I pin to my purse says “Sodomy laws are a pain in the ass!”)
“we treat people like infants until they reach some magic age, then belittle them for not being any “better” at adulthood afterwards.”
I also find this to be ridiculous. If I might take a wildly different tone than my previous revolutionary one: There will be gradual progress or no progress at all! People don’t magically transform at a particular moment. It’s a constant process. Keeping people in a fixed state of no agency for X years will not lead to them being completely perfect at age X+1.
‘“Sodomy laws are a pain in the ass!”’
LOOOOOOL
*Thrilled clapping*
Such want. Must have.
snarkymcf.com — I know the guy who makes those. There’s plenty more snarky, sarcastic buttons there too 🙂 Not sure a about international shipping since he’s in the US, but yeah 🙂
And as for your “wildly different tone” I don’t see why that’s contrary to the previous statements you’ve made; the “gradual process” is in a completely different context. Allowing humans to grow and progress and learn can be nothing BUT gradual; an overhaul of the way governments and societies treat those humans (I also agree) cannot come in tiny, incremental steps!
Oh, and a note on one of your comments previously… can I steal “feminazgûl”? Because it’s perfect. 😛
I showed this button to the same gay man from before (good friend of mine) and he laughed so hard 🙂
Well, I was joking about the tone being contradictory. I do see the distinction.
You can totally steal the term 🙂 I’m open source, remember?
180 degrees out of phase, in respect (!) of a “letter of complaint” posted by some insignificant femstaz.
i though it was you Tom, at first- oh well, innocence goes a long way….
LOL. I imagine the penny dropped by the time you reached the middle of the first paragraph! You certainly wouldn’t need to have got this far: “The only thing to the programme’s credit is that you did not allow Tom O’Carroll a platform”. 🙂
“The most common type of male bisexuality, however, is surely not attraction to women and men but attraction to women and boys”
The history I’ve read so far – it really is extraordinary how common the belief (and practice) was that men are attracted to women and boys. I mean, I’m biased and looking for it to be true, but even I’m a little startled at times – that book of Rocke’s on Renaissance Florence was a SCANDAL – there were times even I wanted to cry out,” Enough guys, for god’s sake give it a rest for five minutes!”
Even the most conservative pagan puritans, like Cato the Elder, who rail against incontinence, don’t for a moment consider pederastic desire unnatural. The Judeo-Christians managed to pull off quite a swifty.
The Bailey book at Amazon, “The Man Who Would Be Queen” looks good – don’t think I’ve ever seen such a polarised Customer Rating: 5 stars: 61; 1 star: 41, and not much in between. A pretty good recommendation, actually.
Goodness, the replies are going backwards now.
Some prominent trans women basically attempted to ruin Bailey’s life over The Man Who Would Be Queen. Here is Alice Dreger’s history of what happened: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/
The book is available for free online and Bailey has invited people to take advantage of that: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/JMichael-Bailey/TMWWBQ.pdf And many of his academic papers are available for free here: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/JMichael-Bailey/research.html
I see nothing wrong with Bailey’s research and nothing very seriously wrong with TMWWBQ, as everybody calls it. It’s a bit breezy and glib in parts perhaps but arguably those are faults of popular science writing as a genre rather than of this particular book. I do think there are some things Bailey should have said with more qualification or just plain differently. For instance, somewhere he says that women actively avoid casual sex because it makes them feel cheap and used. He does not cite the research on which this statement is based, because he hasn’t got any. My feeling, which is based on anecdata but then so is Bailey’s, is that a slight majority of women would say something like, “Well, casual sex isn’t my thing because I need to get to know someone to feel if there’s any chemistry, just looks aren’t enough,” but there is a big difference between that and running a mile from casual sex because it makes you feel so awful. That response, I think, is largely cultural. Elsewhere Bailey says that he administers to his undergraduates a questionnaire measuring interest in taking care of babies and young kids. The sex difference, though in the expected direction (women have more interest), is not large. Bailey says he suspects his undergrads are not being honest on the questionnaire, because who would deny getting warm, positive feelings from babies? Well, perhaps, but is it not at least as likely that the sex difference really isn’t very large?
Those are small nitpicks, however. Overall I recommend the book.
I didn’t know it was out online. Great! I will assume from your recommendation that reading it wont make me feel like shit, the way it’s affected some other trans people I know. Although, it leads me to wonder why they found it so upsetting if you think it’s fine. Most of these are extremely level-headed people. I once saw one of them patiently and sweetly explain to a guy why state-sponsored eradication of trans people would not be economically feasible. I suppose I’ll have to read it first before I can make sense of the puzzle….
Now, I say I recommend it. I don’t say I agree with everything in it. Bailey is totally convinced of Blanchard’s two-type theory of transsexualism: about as convinced, as Alice Dreger puts it, as he is of the theory of evolution. So I cannot promise you that it won’t depress or upset you…but I feel pretty confident that if anyone can muster a strong counterargument where and when it may be needed, it’s you.
Hey, A. 🙂
Have you ever read Gloria Wekker’s article “Girl, It’s Boobies You’re Getting, No?”…it was included in the special female edition of the journal Paidika. I’ve tried looking for a PDF of all of its full contents online but couldn’t find much. Do you know if it’s available anywhere?
https://www.boywiki.org/en/Paidika:_The_Journal_of_Paedophilia
Oh hey. I replied to you further downthread but I guess it got lost in the shuffle. Sadly I have not seen it and I do not know where one could get it. I do however have some rare and precious articles on female paedophilia, notably Theo Sandfort’s interview with a young female GL and Marina Knopf’s study on sex between women and children, that I have not seen anywhere else. I won’t be able to get hold of them for a few months at least but I would be happy to make them available when I do.
Hey girl. I didn’t see your reply below, but I’ll look again. 🙂 Thank you for letting me know. There are so many interesting books and publications that are no longer in print.
Count me as another woman who would be very much interested in reading stuff related to sex between women and girls!
Hey, Sophia. 🙂
Another female here, awesome! I’m a BL myself but I’m interested in reading about any female pedosexuality.
Knowing one’s allies as much as one’s enemies, yeah?
Reading through it. It’s a relatively easy read. Slightly wince inducing, but not outright painful (though it might have been were I not trigger-warned).
It’s mostly Blanchard’s Typology and the general conflation of homosexual cisgender men with heterosexual transgender women that I find myself sceptical of, but I’m trying to give it the fairest reading I can. A lot of it is good and useful.
“I feel pretty confident that if anyone can muster a strong counterargument where and when it may be needed, it’s you.”
Thanks for the vote of confidence 🙂
“I feel pretty confident that if anyone can muster a strong counterargument where and when it may be needed, it’s you.”
I’d add a vote to the same effect, J. 🙂
Thanks for all the support! Hope I can deliver.
Do you have any opinions on this matter?
Whether or not women tend to run from casual sex because of cultural attitudes towards female promiscuity in actuality may indeed differ from the number who simply claim that they do. But it is indeed true that women claim that they do in large numbers, or feel “cheap” and “dirty” when they don’t in fairly significant amounts. This is because of the incessant degree of “slut-shaming” that continues to be directed at women, which is a very mean-spirited and double standard-ridden carry-over element from the days of Victorian moral dominance when it was females in general, rather than anyone who is legally “underage,” that was forced to personify the paradigm of Asexual Innocence. And IMO, despite the magnitude of the women’s sexual liberation movement, too many of them continue to buy into the absurd notion that a woman’s overall value and character is somehow tied in with her chastity.
So I think Bailey was indeed correct in making this cultural observation, even though I admit it would be interesting to find out how true it holds in actual practice.
I totally agree with your first paragraph. As for your second paragraph, Bailey’s observations don’t quite fit with mine, but that could just be because I’m younger than he is and we’ve seen some progress in this area since he was a teenager trying to get into girls’ underwear :P.
I had no idea that Bailey tried to fit into girl’s underwear when he was a teen! And to think he penned “The Man Who Would Be Queen”!
He’s as straight as it gets, so I’m assuming he did!
Did you perhaps miss my joke, A? 😛
OH! It went right past me! But I am laughing now!
LOL. I’ve yet to try on female underwear but I doubt anyone would call me straight if I did.
This even has meta-level humour since he (or, more accurately, Blanchard) considers autogynephiles to primarily be straight “men” who get a sexual kick out of seeing themselves as female, cross-dressing, etc. Thus, if he was trying on female underwear, he’d still be a straight “man” be his own definition! LOL.
(I know that this really isn’t the time to joke about Dr. Bailey since I should be hoping to endear myself to him, but I just couldn’t help it….)
Regarding the ‘Letter of Complaint” to Channel 4:
Too delicious! Isn’t it absolutely a scream that Alison Boydell was able to detect evidence of malevolent paedophilic intent and a manifestly evil agenda in the very Channel 4 documentary which saw Steve Humphries, having lost his nerve in anticipation of the reaction of just such mad zealots, leave all evidence of his interview with Tom O’Carroll on the cutting room floor?
One realizes that, for Alison Boydell and for others in her raging sisterhood, a total extirpation of all traces of paedophilia is not enough. Only the complete silencing of voices which fail to pledge absolute fealty to her and to them, or which speak in less than worshipful tones when approaching their altar of brittle and supernaturalist ideology, is an outcome which might, but briefly, quiet their savage shrieks.
The same blunt instruments of torment used to obliterate all traces of paedophilia from our midst can, and will, be used against any who might fearfully whisper any ideas not strictly conforming to those which exclusively prevail through terror.
Yes, you are all being “groomed”, as a nation, to find in Channel 4’s documentary, “The Paedophile Next Door”, evidence of the diabolical machinations of an agenda for ‘normalizing’ paedophilia, for finding within paedophiles any fraction of humanity to be tolerant of.
Only Alison’s voice, and of all her fellow and intolerant campaigners, may be allowed to speak. She has found it indefensible that she, and they, were not sufficiently consulted prior to the show going to air or that the telephone numbers of their various “helplines” were not dutifully and extravantly displayed as befitting their station.
And, while we’re at it, an online advert, in which the existence of sex was obliquely suggested, had the audacity to expose itself to her highly offense-prone sensibilities while watching the abominable documentary on Channel 4’s website.
But she was angriest of all for Steve Humphries’ failure to shriek at paedophiles, as well as their alleged facilitators, with the same intensity of rage as her own and for their temerity, in tentatively considering, the possibility that paedophiles might possess a capacity for rational action and thoughtful restraint.
This was, to Boydell’s mind, the most unforgiveable sin of all. Even more damning, it was “inappropriate”!
In future, when you need to know, with absolute certainty what is, or is not, APPROPRIATE, be sure to run it by Allison. And be sure to pay her the respect which is her due.
Let me ask you, is hers the voice of a campaigner confident in either the justice or the long-term survival of her campaign?
No, I thought not.
Monstrosities
In the sweet name of
Protecting the little ones…
Such atrocities!
The Inquisition
Reigns, its own creations the
True monstrosities.
Well said, David. I think we all get Ms. Boydell’s point: As unbalanced as the show was, it wasn’t hostile *enough* to MAPs for her tastes. So it seems just a smidgeon of sympathy slipped through the cracks there. No wonder she admonished Humphries for letting his filter guard down!
I believe it is only misguided hatred. We can both agree, I think, that MAA’s are not capable of the actions she ascribes to us. Therefore, as has always been the case, she should examine her own kind (i.e. so called “situationally offending” heteros) for the evil actions she ascribes to us.
“MAA’s are not capable of the actions she ascribes to us”
Are you sure that incapable is a true statement? I’m quite willing to accept that it’s a vanishing rarity, but I wouldn’t call it impossible. Some teleiophilic rapists are really terrible, and I’m not sure we can say with certainty that there aren’t monsters on both sides of the border.
This actually reminds me of a common failure-mode among some anti-racist types: they go from the premise that black people aren’t as violent as society commonly makes them out to be, and eventually conclude that all blacks are pacifistic monks. Which is just… no….
Also, to Jedson: Nice poem! Did you just write it? You seem to have quite a facility for writing far more MAP-relevant poems than I knew existed. (Although, as someone who can write poetry non-stop as long as it’s about politics or my GF, who am I to point out Special Interests? 🙂 )
Well, of course there are exceptions to this “rule” but for what it’s worth, I will stand by this statement.
I fully agree that the great majority (in deference to James’ clarification) of MAAs/MAPs are decent people with a fully developed conscience and capacity to empathize with others who would never force their attentions on a child or young teen. However, it’s clearly within the best interests of Boydell’s agenda to conflate MAAs with situational offenders. She needs to do such scientifically and intellectually disingenuous things to “dirty” the stats against us as much as possible… with the “dirty” equally signifying an act of *dirty pool* on her part.
Whoops, meant to say “Boydell.” Tom, can you please correct that in the original post? Thanks!
“extirpation” – true Buddhists would love this term – enlightenment follows the extirpation of all thoughts…
It is an underused term of which I was recently reminded through another poster’s use of it on BC. I admit to having to be reminded of the usefulness of some words, from time-to-time and will, undoubtedly, use them rather too frequently for awhile. Writing is strange, isn’t it? Surprisingly revealing of both its author and his frame of mind. And ruts which he may be stuck in. New words sometimes help in getting us out of old ruts. The trick is in not becoming too narrowed-down in vision as to miss the greater context. For me, anyway.
Unrelated, this must be a new record for number of comments on TOC, isn’t it Tom?
>Unrelated, this must be a new record for number of comments on TOC, isn’t it Tom?
Definitely!
Hi David,
extirpation is a useful word. Biologists use it to mean ‘local extinction’, ie, of a species. I guess Buddhists similarly refer to local extinction of thought, not the extinction of all thought everywhere. Not even a zen master could accomplish that. 😀
Anyway, I took your name in vain in a comment recently and I’ve been meaning to explain. I think I had the sense you were conflating my understanding of ‘virtue’ with the philosophy of VirPed. I admit we have some common goals, but I don’t identify with them because, unlike them, I don’t take any particular position on the ethics of sexual conduct with children and I reject the dogma of harm.
Anyway, now I have to go and eat, drink and be merry, so compliments of the season and happy new year!
Well, Bloom, I must have missed it entirely! Nevertheless, thanks for explaining. If I unfairly conflated your views with VirPed, I do apologize, myself. It’s always a challenge not to fall into the trap of making false equivalencies and blanket assertions. We’ve all been on the other side of that and know too well how that is experienced. I wish you the very best in the coming year and I look forward to your continued and greatly valued perspectives.
Whatever Boydell may think, there is no element of choice or motive of power and control in a paedophilic orientation. I think that many reasonable people recognise this. In that respect she comes across as positively dinosaurish, stuck thirty years back at least.
The survivors of sexual abuse seen by Rape Crisis are overwhelmingly women and girls for, I would guess, two reasons: one, sexual abuse of boys and men is discounted and downplayed; two, more women and girls than boys and men are sexually abused. Most of the abusers are, yes, men. The more I read on these subjects, the more I feel impelled to the conclusion that it is not intergenerational sex of whatever gender combination that is the problem at all, it is certain of the ideas and attitudes surrounding heterosexuality. A relationship between a teenaged girl and a young man in which both buy into those ideas and attitudes without thinking and the girl is too young still to stand up to them is likely enough headed for trouble and for the statistics. That conclusion is definitely not where I started out, but it’s what at present I find myself going towards.
What child pornography is is never made clear. I have never seen the stuff myself, because I keep strictly to the law, so I have no idea what’s out there. But when it was legal, apparently a lot of it was very soft-core, simply depicting kids running around naked on beaches and so forth. That’s a crime scene? If child pornography has become harder of late, could there not be an element of ‘may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb’? Does Boydell really think that typical child porn is like typical adult gonzo porn, with double penetration scenes and so forth? Somehow I doubt that it is.
Does anybody remember when Lindsay Ashford was an internet presence, openly discussing his attraction to girls 7-11? There was a heated Metafilter discussion about it. Someone expressed revulsion at the idea of anybody’s advocating ‘sex with children’. Then somebody else pointed out that Ashford said he didn’t think intercourse with such young kids was a good idea, so he was not in fact advocating ‘sex with children’ at all! When there is such a confusion over basic terminology, how can anyone talk to anybody else? Not that I think talking reasonably to Boydell et al. is really possible.
For me the classic example of the appropriateness police will always be the time when, about ten years ago I think, Jeremy Irons was told off for putting his arm round the shoulders of a little girl who was showing him round a school where he’d presented prizes or something. Annoyed, Irons upped and said in the papers that “children under 16 are immensely attractive. Any father will tell you…What are we doing to the generation, this new generation? We can’t smack them and we can’t hug them. What strange people we are going to bring up.” Esther Rantzen responded, “The words ‘immensely attractive’ are not the best thing to say about children under 16. ‘Appealing’ or ‘charming’ are more appropriate.”
This talk about co-opting the language of the gay and lesbian community is a bit rich given that Terry Bean, the sixty-six-year-old real estate broker who cofounded the Human Rights Campaign and schmoozed with Obama, has just been arrested for having sex with a fifteen-year-old boy. We should perhaps reserve judgement since Bean’s twenty-five-year-old ex-boyfriend, who made the accusation, is apparently not the world’s most trustworthy person and his relationship with Bean has been rancorous ever since he discovered that Bean had covert cameras in the house filming his sex with Bean and Bean’s sex with many other guys. However, the ex did help police find the boy and has since been arrested for having sex with him himself. What a strange set of circumstances.
This is all great! I particularly love the last paragraph. Absolutely hilarious. Filming the evidence yourself? Calling the police, only to be arrested for the same crime? Could one possibly be hoisted any higher by one’s own petard!? LOL! Top kek!
Thank you for another great post, A, as many important points were made within. The reason that the initial results of the Rind Report yielded data suggesting that girls respond negatively to sexual liaisons with adults to a fairly largely disproportionate extent than boys is because the initial data conflated reports that were consensual with those encompassing largely non-consensual incestuous abuse. When Rind et al. later eliminated the non-consensual reports from those that were consensual, the comparative results were “much more homogenous” between the two genders. This was duly reported on pp. 31-32 of the meta-analysis. Unfortunately, this section of the Rind Report has been mostly either overlooked or willfully ignored in favor of the initial results featured in the abstract, which has led to widespread claims that the meta-analysis determined that intergenerational sexual contact between men and girls *in general* are considerably more likely to result in negative feelings than those between men and boys. In actuality, all the Rind Report confirmed was that, as you noted, girls are victims of incestuous non-consensual sexual abuse much more often than boys (though no doubt, as you also say, sexual abuse of boys and men is downplayed in our culture).
This has resulted in many individuals even within the MAP community suggesting or strongly implying that boys should perhaps receive full rights of choice whereas girls should not, and has served to further marginalize studies and support of man/girl love in comparison to academics and MAP activists interested in the dynamics and legitimacy of man/boy love. Even though such a thoughtful social scientist from outside of the MAP community as David Riegel has fallen into this mode of narrow interest and thought. In his writings he *in no way* attacks man/girl love, but he speaks *exclusively* of support for the rights of boys and the legitimacy of man/boy love. Granted, there is the matter of considerably more studies on man/boy love than man/girl love currently being available (such as the work of Theo Sandfort), but nowhere on his various writings does he call for more studies and analysis of man/girl love.
http://www.shfri.net/dlr/dlr.cgi
Don’t get me wrong, I respect Riegel and his courageous work immensely, but I think the marginalization of studying the validity and nuances of man/girl love in the fulcrum of MAP studies is a serious problem. It has in a lop-sided understanding of the full range of intergenerational attraction across the gender spectrum, and has also resulted in political rifts between the BLer and GLer segments of the MAP community (though not nearly as much today as in the past, I must say).
In my case, I am simply not equipped to adequately advocate for those relationships that are not between men and boys. Those are the relationships I know (or once did, in a previous century). I suspect that may be why Dave does not address them either. And, while I know that there are many identical issues between the two different gender-pairings (or, for that matter, the two others which logically come to mind), I also must acknowledge some distinctly different ones, too. And, for that matter, both enjoy their comparative advantages and disadvantages in argumentation. This makes it very challenging to come to terms with and, for me, very difficult to integrate into ones advocacy. Some have thrown the doors open widely, and I see great appeal in that and will certainly not call them wrong for having done so. For myself, I feel I am on firmer ground when I argue what I know best and what I know to be true. Here, I hope that the ‘wider net’ group correctly perceive my position as what it really is and not as a repudiation.
Here is the way I see it, David. As a GLer, all I personally know is the spectrum of man/girl love. But I advocate for the rights of boys as much as girls, as well as for BLer’s as much as GLer’s, despite personally knowing one but not the other. Why? Because quite frankly, to advocate for the rights of one, and not the other (in either group case), is discrimination. Plain and simple. I try to look beyond my own personal perspective, because if your rights are not considered equally legitimate to my own, then my rights aren’t guaranteed. And if the rights of boys are not commensurate with those of girls, then the rights of girls could never be guaranteed. All progressive rights activists, especially MAPs with either gender preference, should know this fact of democracy better than anyone.
Are there some differences between man/boy love and man/girl love? And differences between boys and girls? Of course there are. But are these differences in any way suggestive that boys should have some rights that girls should not, or even vice versa? No. The male and female gender in general has differences, yet in this day and age we rightly do not advocate for one gender having rights that the other does not have due to any differences between the two. To do so is correctly recognized as discrimination. The same counts for same gender couples in general, just as it does with opposite gender couples.
Would you like to know another reason I consider the rights of boys to be every bit as legitimate as those of girls, and BLer’s every bit as legitimate as GLer’s? Because I’ve taken the time to get to know many BLer’s in addition to many loved boys, several of whom I’ve met in the online community. Have you done this with GLer’s and loved girls, David? If you did, then I reckon you would have a greater understanding of the dynamics of man/girl love, and the intelligence and competence of girls in general, and would likely feel less comfortable in this marginalization of man/girl love in comparison to man/boy love. Moreover, you would likewise feel less inclined to be comfortable with advocating for the rights of one underage gender but not the other; and would also likely be less inclined to put any type of thought into the differences of the two possibly suggesting to one gender having less legitimacy to rights than the other.
As I noted above, no one can cling to the initial results of the Rind Report as listed in the abstract as possible “proof” that girls are inherently less emotionally capable of handling relationships with men as boys, because pp 31-32 of the meta-analysis made clear this wasn’t the case when only consensual cases were counted. That cat is no longer comfortably in the bag, so as I see it, there is no legitimate reason for any MAP organization in this day in age – and that includes NAMBLA – to advocate for the rights of one gender, and one form of intergenerational love, but not the other. We are weaker when we are separate, and any group is weaker if it does not consider the freedom of choice of another group to be equally valid.
Note to Tom: I apologize with already breaking my commitment to brevity with this response. However, I think this is an important topic that needs to be addressed by the greater MAP community, and it’s one that as you can see I am quite strident in bringing to all of our attention.
You were making a point that I feel was well worth making and you did it well.
Completely right. Great post yourself.
I have a hypothesis: the younger the girl (within reason) *or* the more strongly identified the man is a as a GL, with the ethics and sense of responsibility that tend to go with that, the less likely harm is to occur. The relationships that show bad outcomes, that get flagged up by, say, the Guttmacher Institute, do not really fall into ‘our’ purview at all, strictly speaking: they involve girls of 15 falling pregnant by young men of 22. Having had a read of Scarleteen, I do think that many of those girls are being damaged by the ideas around heterosexuality, that they don’t feel really in charge of and confident about their sexuality and that this leads to problems. But there is a massive confound there: typically we’re also looking at low socioeconomic status.
Well put.
“Capable of withstanding the torrent of ideas, both good and bad, to which we are all subjected as part of this whole “life thing”.”
I might be, but not everyone is. Besides, sometimes I want to step back and take a breath. Maybe I don’t want to read something deeply offensive when I’m too tired to think critically about it. This is why I’d want to know what I’m about to read before getting into it. If I’m in a depressive phase (bipolar disorder) I’d rather not be reading through something only to suddenly be hit with, “and by the way, all Jews should die”. I’ll tackle that when I’m not already thinking about dying, thank you very much….
“my ideas shouldn’t be continuously challenged or that my feelings won’t get stepped upon.”
Again, this is what I mean about a time and a place. A safe space is just a place to let your hair down and have a smoke in comfort before rushing headlong back into the world.
“the remedy for them should only be to find sufficient strength as an individual to effectively block their limitless ingress into our consciousness.”
This really depends on the person. I’m naturally good at inspecting ideas from an emotional distance (usually, see above). However, I’m fully aware that some people are incapable of this. There are quite a few people who, due to mental illness, can’t block this out of their consciousness. I can’t rewrite their brain to give them inner strength that was built into my genes (my entire family is good at emotional distancing). I have to find a way to work around any problems they were hardwired with. This is The Conscience of a Biodeterminist.
“all of our thoughts and speech be subjected to elaborate but ultimately tyrannical collectivist filtration in which ideas are promoted or extinguished through the sheer numerical strength of majorities or consensus.”
Wait, what? Are we talking about the same thing when we say “trigger warning”? To define a term: a trigger warning is a statement about the contents of a piece of media, particularly to mention something which may shock or offend someone. This is to allow one to make a personal decision about whether they wish to read/watch/listen to something. It filters nothing. It promotes nothing. It extinguishes nothing. It is not collectivist, but individualistic. It cares not for majorities or consensus. In short, it is 100% orthogonal to the above.
“In this way, a safe space becomes that which the individual controls utterly and not one which imposes upon all others an obligation to exquisitely anticipate any condition, any other of whom might demand be imposed upon all others.”
But… this is what a “safe space” is! It’s something a private person/group creates where they control the discourse within it, and nothing without it. Public fora/property are not safe spaces. The closest people have come to expanding safe spaces into the public domain is political correctness, which is terrible. However, there’s nothing wrong with a private group setting up a safe space.
“demanding that all be placed in cages as protection against an imagined fragility.”
You forget that some people really are fragile, mental-illness-wise. It is best to fix this but one doesn’t go about it by simply increasing the background radiation of stress.
Dammit, WordPress! This is a response to David Kennerly on trigger warnings.
Damn wordpress in more ways than one. It is very inappropriate (excellent word, here specifically) to uses such as this blog, When replies begin to trickle (tinkle) in a thin stream.
Why not devise an “extreme” version of wordpress (wordpress-ext.whatever) that indents replies only one letter’s width, or, better still, no indentation at all, only a preface “reply”. Would this be so difficult for the designers of this form?
Glad I’m not the only one who posts replies in the wrong places, J.!
An excellent read, even so.
If we’re both talking about setting conditions upon speech made in private circumstances (which would include, say, private schools or universities but not government universities or schools) then I agree that limitations upon speech are permissible, but can or should be voted upon by simply going elsewhere less restrictive.
When trigger warnings become a legal obligation (with some kind of consequence) that must precede all speech, in which the speaker must anticipate the many possibilities for “triggering”, then it effectively limits free speech.
Much better would be to respect the strength and intelligence of individuals sufficiently to assure them that ideas or words have less power to harm them than they seem to believe possible.
This was once a bedrock principle, in fact. Its erosion is down to cultural re-engineers who seek to erase all distinctions between individuals (selectively, of course) by limiting speech through law.
This seems to be better understood by Americans, as a principle, than Europeans or Brits who allow for significantly greater limits on speech than are permissible under the U.S. 1st Amendment.
Regardless, it is in grave danger of being surrendered as a right in America.
If the U.S. Bill of Rights were put up to a popular vote here today I daresay it would be cut-off at the knees. And our Supreme Court has led the way.
“trigger warnings become a legal obligation (with some kind of consequence) that must precede all speech”
So that’s what you’ve been getting at! A light shines. I violently oppose the idea of legally mandating trigger warnings. The chilling effect would be massive and, since such a mandate forces speech, it would probably be unconstitutional in the US. Trigger warnings aren’t supposed to be something an author/publisher is bludgeoned into: they’re a courtesy to the audience. I’d argue that they are a good courtesy, too.
“Much better would be to respect the strength and intelligence of individuals”
Again: Typical Mind Fallacy, #NotAllIndividuals, etc…
“limiting speech through law.”
See opinion on TW as law above. Excepting the coerced application of TW, “limiting speech” still falls flat.
[…] sexual abusers themselves. The only thing to the programme’s credit is that you did not allow Tom O’Carroll a platform, despite interviewing him for it, although having involved him is indicative of the aims of this […]
Yes, when Jim Gamble mentioned the lie detector I was gobsmacked. And anyway, without context and other tests/interviews, such are very unreliable. Indeed, ‘Primary’ Psychopaths naturally have a slow heart rate and very rarely feel anxiety. They are most cool. All those machines do is show someone is anxious. And what “normal” person wouldn’t be when being interviewed by the Police?
Bullies like Gamble will, as you write, drive paedophiles away from general society and any help. Not that I think they need it!
A. endorsed by Tom: “Pederasty of the traditional/classic type seems to arise naturally (correct me if I’m wrong, Edmund) in very warlike societies where the sexes are rigidly segregated: ancient Greece, medieval Japan, modern Afghanistan.”
If true, this is a damning criticism, but I honestly can’t see it, so please forgive me if I contest it at some length and then ask you to elaborate.
To the best of my knowledge, pederasty has been an exceptionally effective means of enabling pubescent boys to become proficient in whatever the society practising it has thought most worthwhile. In the case of Greece, far more than warfare that means the general intellectual vibrancy which gave birth to the Greek miracle, laying the foundations for most useful thought since. This is not to deny that it was deliberately put to good use also enhancing the fighting skills of Greek boys (which I wouldn’t sniff at since without them the Greek miracle would not have avoided being snuffed out in its infancy by the Persians, and Alexander would never have been able to spread the benefits to humanity). But on what grounds are you suggesting the Greeks were more warlike than the Persians, the Romans or any of their other neighbours?
Yes, mediaeval Japan was warlike, but again how so more than most societies then? Most people were not samurai any more than most Europeans were knights. In contrast, I would hold up Japan in the Edo period (1603-1868) as an example of a quite exceptionally peaceful society in which pederasty flourished in every class (read Ihara Saikaku’s The Great Mirror of Male Love, 1686 for a good taste of this).
I certainly haven’t heard of modern bacha bazi being trained in warfare by their lovers in Afghanistan, but if even if they are, it’s surely a bit rich to blame the warlike character of their country on pederasty. Don’t you think being in the unique position of having to fight off invasion by the British and both superpowers might have something to do with it?
To justify blaming pederasty for the warlike nature of the societies that practised it, one would surely have to show these societies became more warlike as a result of it or less so when it declined. I can’t see anything at all to support that in Greek or Afghan history. In Japan, if anything the opposite happened: Japan became a great deal more militarily aggressive after the Meiji Restoration, which also ushered in the rapid decline of pederasty (though I’m not claiming that is more than coincidence).
As another counter to the link you are alleging between pederasty and being warlike, I would suggest Renaissance Florence is a good example of a society where pederasty was ubiquitous (having read the statistics in Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships, I hope you, Tom, will agree this is indisputable) and had no role in warfare, but which underwent an exceptional cultural flowering. How the latter was provoked by pederasty is something that badly needs studying, but I would say quite enough is known of the love lives of the Florentine artists and writers to support what is largely obvious from the coincidence.
In contrast, I don’t for a moment deny the link you make between pederasty and sexual segregation. To me, that is an argument for some sexual segregation as suiting the emotional welfare of pubescents.
Tom: “In any case, [Rind’s] theory does not address itself to all gender combinations of adult child erotic bonding. Are the other forms supposed to be less valid because they are not grounded in ev. psych.?”
Is homosexuality less valid than its opposite because it doesn’t result in babies? Arguably, but it’s valuable in any case. I would rather say what ev. psych. explains is not validity so much as prevalence, and if, like me, you take the side of the non-WEIRD majority of historical humanity in seeing no fundamental distinction between the heterosexual love of adults and the heterosexual love of pubescents, then pederasty has been far more prevalent than what is then left of the other combinations.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
>But on what grounds are you suggesting the Greeks were more warlike than the Persians, the Romans or any of their other neighbours?
It didn’t leap out at me that “A” was saying this but she can speak for herself (and no doubt will 🙂 ). I certainly made no such suggestion. No disagreement with your last paragraph either.
“it’s surely a bit rich to blame the warlike character of their country on pederasty.”
I think you’ve got the causal arrows backward. If anything, I’d expect the implication to be that constant warfare encourages pederasty rather than the reverse.
“Japan became a great deal more militarily aggressive after the Meiji Restoration, which also ushered in the rapid decline of pederasty”
I think the confounding variable which is largely responsible for both is Westernisation.
“How the latter was provoked by pederasty is something that badly needs studying”
Again, I think it might be interesting to see if the causation runs the other way.
“To me, that is an argument for some sexual segregation as suiting the emotional welfare of pubescents.”
This just begs the question. If sexual segregation is justified by pederasty, what justifies the pederasty? And would segregation be good in the absence of pederasty? Would segregation still be good if it were not necessary to pederasty? etc, etc, etc…
“I think you’ve got the causal arrows backward. If anything, I’d expect the implication to be that constant warfare encourages pederasty rather than the reverse.”
A. merely associated pederasty with warlike societies. She didn’t say which she thought caused which, and I’m not sure that it matters much. If warfare encourages pederasty, then to justify the association it still needs to be shown that these societies were more warlike than others. I would find any historical evidence supporting the association in either direction much more interesting and to the point than purely semantic argument, a field I willingly yield to your greater expertise.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
It’s not purely semantic.
If pederasty>warfare then we should expect that, should we find a way to introduce pederasty, we’ll become more violent. This would be bad and would indicate that we shouldn’t have pederasty.
If warfare>pederasty then we should expect that introducing pederasty through non-violent means wont make us more violent, in which case it would be fine to do it.
If warfare and pederasty are unrelated, there’s no problem.
However, in the event that there is a correlation, finding out which way the arrow points isn’t everything.
It’s the only thing.
“If pederasty>warfare”
The evidence would suggest this is the LEAST likely scenario. Pederasty occurs in chimp, bonobo and gorilla communities – the only speculated use being it’s a good way to relieve aggressive tension between adult males and the up-and-coming adolescents.
The irony in pederasty’s making good warriors is that it promotes harmonious relations between males in a tribe, in order that they can more effectively defeat their enemies. Take away the need for warfare and pederasty’s got nothing but bliss and peace to offer. Those twenty-something males in today’s society who go out every Saturday night to get drunk, fight and fuck – if they were instead falling in love with boys and showing them the social rudiments – I’d guarantee you less violence on the streets.
Pederasty is a natural part of primate sexuality that, in human society, can be picked up and used as a convenient social tool – like a rock can be used to split an enemies skull open or to divide up portions of gazelle for all to share. Don’t blame the rock! Pederasty is a rock – the rock of ages – build on it what you will: warrior ethic, democracy, a truck-load of aeon-inspiring art – pederasty is good for what ails us.
You got that right Jack. Less violence in the street and everywhere else. Will McBride says of course there are other causes of war that there couldn’t be war without the killer boys that are the result of their disturbed sexuality.
We are the human primate. We have one important obligation: Build a society (zoo) that fits who we are.
Linca
Also macaques, I think?
We are not headed back to ancient Athens, and thank God for that. I wouldn’t want to end up a slave in the silver mines, though how different that system really is to our global system is open to question. And I want modern medicine, and I want to live in a society which is peaceful, and which is fully gender-integrated on every level. I also don’t think life as a Buddhist nun would be for me.
In a gender-segregated society, or a gender-segregated spot within that society such as a monastery or a single-sex boarding school, there is going to be a lot of faute de mieux pederasty (and also lesbianism of course). The participants may well not think of it as faute de mieux: on the contrary, it may be deep love. However, in a fully gender-integrated society, there is going to be a higher incidence of lifelong exclusive heterosexual behaviour. There’s no getting around that. But so what? As I keep saying with a vague idea of reassuring everyone thereby, I do support providing certain single-sex organisations in which same-sex bonds, whether intergenerational or not, whether purely affectional or also sexual, can flourish. Such organisations are probably good for some children’s development more generally: for example, at least in the present state of things girls are more likely to feel they can be tough and competitive on a girls’ sports team, and boys are more likely to sing if they can do so with other boys and men. I wouldn’t want children or adults to be pushed into such homosocial islands, just for them to be made available for those who chose to participate.
I’m inclined to feel that the biggest current threat to the formation of bonds between unrelated adults and children generally, besides the long arm of the law of course, is simply children’s lack of freedom to wander round by themselves. The boys in Sandfort’s Boys on their Contacts with Men all presumably attended mixed-sex schools, given the time and place. Some of them were in presumably single-sex football or swimming clubs with presumably same-sex coaches, but interestingly, none of their relationships came about that way. Most commonly, the boys met ‘their’ paedophile through general social contacts or when they were out and about by themselves or with friends– and many fewer kids these days just happen to be out and about.
Thankyou A. for down to earth common sense. Children seem to be losing their freedom and their ability to explore by themselves. May not be true where you are James, but over here we have become so overprotective…..
Not too serious here. I’m actually a bit exceptional in that I don’t roam much, but that’s because I’m not all that social.
And in response to A.: It’s really “I wouldn’t want children or adults to be pushed into such homosocial islands” that helps to reassure me. If I were stuck in a group of and for males I’d flip.
And I’m very glad I went to coed schools myself, and I’m not trans. The research on whether single-sex education works better than coeducation is equivocal. The big confound is that many single-sex schools being studied are US charter schools, which can’t be compared to the local sink school. I think coed suits some people and single-sex suits others, for widely varying reasons. If I ruled the world we’d have coed be the default, standard option, but single-sex options would be available too.
To be fair, I think it also has something to do with the Xbox, which many kids prefer to going for a bike ride or wandering round town on the tram. Someone even told me that kids don’t play with toys any more because they’re all on their computers. I think that’s a bit of an overstatement: a nine-year-old I spent some time with last year was very into his Skylanders figurines, though admittedly those are linked into a computer game in some complicated way I never quite worked out.
That might be a bit reversed around here. Kids travel long distances frequently to get to a friend wealthy enough to afford video games.
I’m aware of how those figurines work and are linked to a computer game. However, I’ve never actually seen them since I know no one with the correct mixture of money and poor priorities to own this game.
BTW: Love the whole “If I ruled the world” thing. We have a similar issue of confounders where I live. The single-sex schools are older and more prestigious, hailing from a time when a secondary education was a privilege of wealth, while the co-eds are newer. The result is that there is higher demand for the single-sex schools and brighter students tend to gain entry, thus further inflating the reputation of the school. It’s a rather strange cycle….
If you want to supercharge a cultural practice – just shove all the young men and boys in a shed for a few generations and Bob’s your special uncle!
I’m just in the beginning stages of trying to educate myself on the history of pederasty, but already it strikes me that Rind’s theory is pretty good – hetero and homo hebephilia are a natural part of male sexuality. And it seems every society has to make a decision on an approach to take to each practice. Hetero hebephilia has mostly been a biological no-brainer: marriage.
But homo hebephilia, pederasty, has been open to radically different interpretations. It’s run the gamut from complete suppression to universal all-in. It’s dependence on cultural forms is reflected in the myths most societies develop to explain where pederasty came from, who invented it (give that man a cigar!), and who drew up the rules of engagement (if in doubt, blame it on the Cretans).
“Patterns of Sexual Behaviour” reported that 29 of 76 societies studied had condemned homosexuality, often with severe punishments from childhood up. The others were tolerant of homosexual practice of some variety. I’d love to get my hands on their database to see if any interesting patterns emerge comparing anti- and pro- pederastic societies. Because it does seem successful warrior tribes have often used the institution of pederasty to better themselves.
Then again, the Aztecs and Incas suppressed homosexuality, and did alright. Unfortunately, suppressing pederasty is no barrier to cultural success – although I think the man-boy art can lay claim to harbouring a spinach-like, muscle-popping burst of cultural energy.
The West could never quite make up its mind of course. Once the Christians took over they diligently set about making the Roman remains into a born again society with complete homosexual suppression. But, while they talked a good game, they never got close. And in fact the fractious fusion of pro- and anti- pederastic strands turned out quite culturally creative – spurring each other on in a way not dissimilar to Plato’s chariot allegory (although perhaps the Christian white steed frothed at the mouth a bit more than the noble Greek charger did).
It’s only once the Christians hand-passed the sizzling homophobic football to today’s secular caring-class – those smug, superstitious neo-tribalists – that the goal posts have loomed tantalisingly into view. Now, for the first time since man lived in little hunter-gatherer bands, our tribal leaders have the capacity to monitor and direct everyone’s personal space. We’re heading for one planet, one tribe, one collective identity – global warming has sounded its first voodoo drumbeat – Gaia is restless – and we lucked out and got lumped with a goddamned anti-pedo tribe! What were the odds! (About 2 to 1, I think.)
Great post, Jack.
>We’re heading for one planet, one tribe, one collective identity
Or as Fukuyama put it, the end of history. I don’t know which is more nightmarish, the one tribe scenario or yet more history courtesy of al Qaeda, Islamic State and any successor jihadists.
This is a Heretic blog, isn’t it? As such, I would hope your first allegiance would be to keep dissent alive even when the dissent that dares proclaim its name is distasteful to you. As Voltaire is widely supposed to have said (I don’t know the source) “”I may not agree with a man’s opinions but I will die for his right to express them.”
>This is a Heretic blog, isn’t it? As such, I would hope your first allegiance would be to keep dissent alive even when the dissent that dares proclaim its name is distasteful to you.
Well, yes, I agree entirely. But dissent is one thing and chopping off the heads of people who don’t agree with you is quite another.
Oh well, Voltaire. I always found this much quoted claim quite self-referential. And the “chopping of heads” might well be the outcome of such lax policies.
It’s fair enough for our tribe to view the Islamic extremists as evil. What’s interesting is our response to perceived evil. Evil within (aberrant sexuality) is pursued with fanatical thoroughness while evil without (Islamism) is met with fulminating rhetoric and little action. A thousand years ago, it was the exact opposite. But they were in a cultural up-swing then, and we sure aint now.
I’m certainly not saying that pederasty causes warfare! That would be most odd! I meant that three big things I see in common (but I don’t have your specialist knowledge here) between the Pashtun of today, the samurai of medieval Japan and the ancient Greek upper classes are 1.) gender segregation 2.) lots of fighting 3.) a tradition of pederasty which was/is not merely unofficially accepted, as it has been at many places and times all over the world, but to varying degrees institutionalised and ritualised. It makes total sense to me that the combination of 1.) and 2.) would naturally lead to 3.) — certainly not vice versa, though.
Renaissance Florence is definitely a good example of peaceful pederasty. Another that’s occurred to me is the ‘drombo’ tradition Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. I certainly could not accuse those of being a warlike environment! As you say, the gender segregation seems like a much more important precondition than the fighting, though I still tend to think the fighting helps due to the need for men to train boys in certain skills combined with the emphasis on the male body, male physical prowess and male courage and comradeship in a Tight Fix facing an enemy. And I do support providing homosocial opportunities for pubescents such as Boy and Girl Scout troops, etc.
The question of Afghanistan brings up something interesting. As you probably know, three types of male homosexuality have been observed: intergenerational (pederasty); transgender (one partner dresses as a woman and/or takes on some elements of a female social role); and egalitarian (the type we see on TV). In some areas of modern Afghanistan they seem to combine both, with some boys apprenticed to warlords and some dancing for men while dressed as women. I would love to see research into the kinds of environments that conduce to each type of homosexuality becoming standard for a society. It’s a pretty hot-potato topic, though, so I don’t hold out a lot of hope for it happening any time soon.
You all are only thinking recent history which is history after agriculture. Think paelo. Read Peace War And Human Nature. Rind is now reading it and having his theory deeply challenged.
Linca
>You all are only thinking recent history which is history after agriculture.
You all? Not me, for one.
I’m starting on it. Would love to know what Rind makes of it.
A,
I probably won’t know what Rind thinks of it until this summer when either I or my friend Dale will get to talk eyeball to eyeball with him.
I understand the ideas in the book will be a present a deep challenge to his deeply invested theory. Correct me if I am wrong but I think what he is deeply invested in is the theory that Pederasty enabled warriors. Tom can probably enlighten us on that point. I am just barely being able to determine what Rind is invested in from conversations here and what little Dale has said to me.
Linca
>Correct me if I am wrong but I think what [Rind] is deeply invested in is the theory that Pederasty enabled warriors. Tom can probably enlighten us on that point.
I don’t think we need get too hung up on warfare when discussing Rind’s theory. A significant chunk of his 90-page explanatory narrative is taken up with “pederasty-like” behaviours going way back before the emergence of homo sapiens and the other hominids, and even before the primates. This narrative enabled him to claim that pederasty is a truly ancient adaptive trait that had some sort of survival-enhancing function for a whole lot of animals, including creatures as different from us as sheep and birds.
But sheep, birds and many other species that show “pederasty-like” behaviours (a concept, by the way, that has been criticised as too vague, anthropomorphic and insufficiently tied to a particular adaptation in a particular environment that would enhance survival in a particular way for which one might seek particular evidence) do not go in for warfare. This immediately tells us that even if pederasty turned out to be good for training warriors, that was not what brought it into being.
Having said that, Rind’s “mentorship-bonding/enculturation-alliance hypothesis” does indeed propose that social groups (small bands, larger tribes and early states) that practised pederasty would have been given a significant advantage when fighting against groups that did not practise it.
There’s a bit of a problem here though. Why would any group *not* practise pederasty if humans had already inherited it as a trait from earlier species? It could have been an elective cultural practice depending on local environmental conditions. But Rind understandably has little to say about local environments and behaviours in the deep past: we just don’t know about them.
Thank you Tom. I am beginning to understand. Is there a link to Rind’s 90-page explanatory narrative. When Dale talks to me I am sure he thinks I understand far more that I do.
And, Damn I am far behind this weekend. Just accidentally came across your response to my question. Besides all the lost boy company also squeezing in a couple of movies: Ivan Noel’s most recent movie “Ellos Volvieron” and Christian Martin’s “Cal”, his follow-up to “Shank”. Plus “Occupy The NEED Act” and “Occupy Weed Street” and Ferguson Demonstrations. And, a 25-year-old monetary activist boxer on Guernsey that I have been ignoring. So much to do.
Running to stay up. But please if there is a link to Rind’s 90-page explanatory narrative I would love to have it.
Linca
Tom,
Never mind. I have “Censoring Sex Research: The Debate over Male Intergenerational Relations” 2 feet from my right elbow.
I found your post:
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/the-pre-weird-world-according-to-rind/
The pre-WEIRD world, according to Rind
Linca
Non-procreative sexual practice is always going to be malleable, subject to the whims of cultural beliefs – it’s sort of the whole point of it – using sexual energy to mediate social bonds rather than the essential task of reproduction. The ease with which pederasty can be suppressed is as interesting as how prevalent it can become under favourable conditions. There’s chimp societies where no homosexual activity has been observed. The practice of pederasty is as ephemeral and fleeting as the boys it idolises.
But when you look at the historical rarity of men being attracted to men (non-gender-stratified) – it does suggest a genetic underpinning is required for pederasty to be so persistent in its expression. So, as per usual, the gay community is trying to steal pederasty’s thunder. IF there’s a gene, it’s a PEDERASTY gene! (Personally I think the modern gay community got sprung from the middle-class mogodon gene.)
And it’s interesting to see the way the suppression of men’s natural attraction to pubescent girls has worked. I think there’s still a quiet recognition that a man may well find a 13yo girl sexually attractive – only that he’d be a monster to act on it. I think it would be a big help if the same at least could be recognised with men and boys. Maybe we could get some Platonic middle-ground scenario happening…
I have come to believe — largely based on reading J M Bailey’s research — that men’s attraction to other adult men tends to be largely innate, for one thing precisely *because* it is so unusual, so different to heterosexuality in the physical characteristics it seeks out, that something very strong has got to be impelling it. There’s a much bigger physical difference between a woman and a man than between a woman and a boy. And other cultures than ours have long been recognising (biological) men’s attraction to other adult men through their traditions of transgender homosexuality.
Quite what ‘adult’ means though is a bit of a question. I remember reading somewhere that female sex workers tend to be aged 15/16-late 30s, but male sex workers tend to be aged 13/14-25/26, and thinking, Yeah, that makes sense. The physical process of masculinisation continues in small gradual ways throughout the 20s, and the end result of this process may be something of a turn-off to many-to-most gay men. In that respect many gay men may be just a little bit pederastic.
A man’s attraction to men may become strongly ingrained, and be experienced as “innate”, but I don’t believe it would be genetically pre-determined. I would think the genetic underpinning which allows for non-procreative sex is far more vague, allowing culture and environment to shape it.
In the Florence described by Rocke, men were pursuing boys mainly age 14-16yo, but after Savonarola started recruiting a lot of these boys to his moral crusade, men simply started pursuing older boys and young men. Any port in a storm. Men in their prime only commit, in large numbers, to chasing boys when there are no women available. So when the boys were removed…well, all of a sudden the bearded chap next door didn’t look quite so bad.
The modern move to gay egalitarianism may contain a similar shift – a shift from adolescent boy to late adolescence/young manhood, then to a more fully realised egalitarianism. The new pressures coming from society may have caused it – the first modern-tending gay sub-cultures occurred in Spain (17th C) and England (18th C) at a time when particularly ferocious persecutions of sodomy were taking place. One effect of this was to “break off” homosexual practice from the bisexually responsive male condition and to make it into a self-conscious identity. And these homosexual men were no longer looking for a beautiful boy to mentor but for an attractive young man who could return their love with some much needed emotional support. The persecution itself seems to have been indicative of some great anxieties surrounding masculinity just as WEIRD started to develop.
I can’t help wondering, though, if gay egalitarianism has served its cultural purpose. All those married man-couples marooned in middle-class suburbia – what the hell are they doing out there? Aren’t they now starting to dream of adoption…could they soon be coming full circle?
If you remove men with overtly effeminate men from the equation, there’s not much man-on-man action at all before our time – surely that means the root cause is cultural rather than genetic.
You could well be right. I remember reading also that in 17th-century Japan, the practice of pederasty gradually extended to the pursuit of men in their 20s.
“I would love to see research into the kinds of environments that conduce to each type of homosexuality becoming standard for a society.”
I’ll second that! I think it would be an incredibly useful and enlightening line of research. Reading Crompton’s “Homosexuality and Civilisation” at the moment – an excellent survey – that’s the question that is most fascinating to ponder – particularly as ubiquitous pederasty in the West starts becoming far more “mixed” not long after the Renaissance.
“Patterns of Sexual Behaviour” seemed to be a wonderful starting place for such an approach – and it was one of the stated aims of the book. But that was published in 1951 – a time we’re constantly assured was a puritanical wasteland. Oh so sophisticated politics seems to have taken over since then. Yet “Patterns” seemed to me more worldly and broad-minded than any modern writing on sexuality I’ve read.
J Michael Bailey is one of the few recent researchers into homosexuality who’ve been willing to touch nonjudgmentally on the topic of pederasty. He’s also suggested, interestingly, that many very feminine ‘prehomosexual’ boys who must modify their behaviour in order to become acceptable men could perhaps be happier if we had a tradition of ‘transgender homosexuality’, allowing them to take on many elements of female dress and social role as adults.
I think we handicap research by being unwilling to acknowledge that adult sexual attraction to children is common and nonpathological. For instance, a few years back Bailey, since I brought him up, did a study which seemed to show that male bisexuality doesn’t really exist. Then he worked on another one which corrected the errors in the first one, and showed that it does. The most common type of male bisexuality, however, is surely not attraction to women and men but attraction to women and boys, or boys and girls, or women, boys and girls. Even attraction to men and boys could be seen as in some ways similar to bisexuality, given the physical difference.
Well i for one would come into the category of women,girls,boys,adolescent boys etc…maybe that is a more common form of bisexuality,an interesting assertion.
Bailey has …”also suggested, interestingly, that many very feminine ‘prehomosexual’ boys who must modify their behaviour in order to become acceptable men could perhaps be happier if we had a tradition of ‘transgender homosexuality’, allowing them to take on many elements of female dress and social role as adults.”
Well yes, and here in Thailand, where gender blurring is common (ladyboys, Tom-Dee etc. dynamics), there is no apparent barrier to pre-age-of-consent boys express femininity in society, no ridicule, only tolerance and respect for the way they instinctively are.
I hear it works like that in the Philippines as well.
Edmund,
I am going to have to think about the assertion that hetro relations between adults is the same as hetro relations between an adult and a pubescent. But what do I know.
All I know is my own same-sex relations with pubescents. God I loved them, bearing gifts for them, pointing the way in education, building bridges to their parents and loving them as adults when they were raising their own or suffering crappy jobs or prison. You know how many thousands we lock up in the US. If I could knock down the prison walls and free them I would in a heart beat. I do support prison groups but I sure don’t tell them they must get a mortgage, have 2 1/2 children, join a church, go in debt for a car, etc., etc., etc… the usual hetro things.
Linca
Several heretics have requested me to post the audio recording of my unused interview with Steve Humphries of Testimony Films.
I don’t see why not. I agreed not to make the recording public, which was a stipulation designed to safeguard Channel 4’s interest in the material. As the programme has now aired without using it, that obligation would appear to be at an end.
I have put the audio files onto Dropbox. It’s a bit messy because there are six of these unedited files, numbered T001 to T007. There is no T006 but perhaps there was a numbering error: I don’t think any material is missing, or nothing important. It may have been a trial file when a technical issue arose, so the only voices would be those of the director and his team.
As these files are totally unedited there is a bonus: listeners can hear every word that Humphries said to me.
On a technical point, turn the sound up quite loud at the start, otherwise you might think there is something wrong with the recording. It is very quiet for the first minute or so of background tech talk away from the mic before the interview starts.
Here then, are the file locations:
[TOC, LATER: I HAVE REMOVED THE LINKS. JAMES REPORTED TECHNICAL PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING THEM. I’LL SEE WHAT I CAN DO TO FIX THIS. SORRY!]
I got 404 errors for files 2-5 when I tried to find them on Dropbox. Do you know what might be the cause?
Shit! It’s perhaps because the files are too big. I’ll remove the links until I find out.
Dang,
I am showing over 100 unread emails from H-TOC in my Tom O’Carroll file. Too much going on this week with Thanksgiving Holidays, overwhelmed with returning “Lost Boys”, some of them new some of them from a long time ago. All Legal.
Speaking of “Lost Boys”, we in the US are going to get to see a live NBC Production of “Peter Pan” on December 4.
Didn’t get to see the show on Channel 4. Even though I have a VPN that shows me in London and pick up iTV and BBC just fine, could not get Channel 4 to load. Didn’t get a dialogue box that said I was denied, it just wouldn’t load.
Oh well. I will get caught up on the posts after this weekend when things come back to normal for a little while around here.
Linca
First my apologies for not reading all the posts on this thread; I just cannot find the time. This programme has caused a huge response.
My main impression was Eddie. He looked such a regular guy, and seemed really good and nice. I am confident this surprised the “moronic majority”.
And my following the tweets on Twitter confirmed this, as most I think were very positive about him. There were the usual tabloid trash ‘deflecting’. Some of the readers will be able to name one or two. What did disappoint me was people hardly older than kids themselves being disgusted and so on. The maturer tweeps were, well, maturer.
My main disappointment was the lack of distinction between child lover and child abuser. And this blurred the distinction enough to make the viewer think ‘virtuous paedophilia’ was the only option.
As a non-paedophile, but a supporter of loving sex between children (that are ready) and gentle adults, I just cannot understand why society has such a hangup. And to me, that is all it is. No rationality.
Anyway, the programme, and Doctor Goode, are a good start. Maybe this is the tide turning for serious and logical debate.
To close, afterwards on Newsnight was Jim Gamble. He said, in his experience, all paedophiles will abuse if given the chance/time. The interviewer rightly said he only worked with actual child molesters. Gamble didn’t answer, of course! Then he said he wouldn’t let Eddie babysit his grandchildren. Well I will tell the readership this: I would trust Eddie any day over that big scary man.
That grandchildren argument is a red herring,he also said that Eddie should be strapped to a lie detector,yeah that will encourage people to come forward
for their “treatment” I decide who i trust as a person,their orientation should not come into it.
Yes, when Jim Gamble mentioned the lie detector I was gobsmacked. And anyway, without context and other tests/interviews, such are very unreliable. Indeed, ‘Primary’ Psychopaths naturally have a slow heart rate and very rarely feel anxiety. They are most cool. All those machines do is show someone is anxious. And what “normal” person wouldn’t be when being interviewed by the Police?
Bullies like Gamble will, as you write, drive paedophiles away from general society and any help. Not that I think they need it!
Mr Gamble is oddly enthralled by dodgy methods such as lie detector tests and he frequently cites research by Dr Michael Bourke to add a veneer of “scientific” credibility to his assertions. His “thinking” exemplifies the most punitive and brutishly authoritarian wing of the Anglophone child protection inquisition. In his public persona at least, he consistently presents as someone who is unreservedly convinced that his beliefs are absolutely true, and becomes dyspeptically furious when someone dares to contradict him.
He and the rest of his buddies in this secular salvationist fundamentalist theocracy appear to adopt the same, media-friendly strategy: dyspeptically dismiss all the meticulous social and psychological research that furnishes evidence that sexual experience amongst minors is not harmful (whereas the official response to it invariably is), spew out a few lurid and unevidenced anecdotes about paedomonsters personally encountered in the course of a professional paedo-slaying career, and insist on citing ethically and methodologically questionable research such as that pumped out by Dr Bourke and his associates.
Bourke, for those a unfamiliar with his oeuvre, is proud of his dual status as a forensic psychologist and FBI cop, and even prouder of his mission to sweep up people officially labelled as paedophiles (a synonym for “sex offender” in his lexicon) and have them all incarcerated. He and his former boss, Dr Andres Hernandez, conducted frankly degrading and humiliatingly coercive research in the Butner Federal Prison with inmates serving sentences for child sex offences. The prisoners were invited to participate in a “treatment” programme that held out the promise of reducing their time served in custody if they “co-operated.” But “co-operation” was dependent upon each participant confessing to previous “contact offences” they had not previously “disclosed.” If they didn’t, they would be dropped from the programme and miss any prospect of earlier release. Desperate people in a US carceral hellhole were coerced into such forced confessions, and later (when they were eventually released) revealed what had happened to them behind prison walls and beyond public awareness.
There’s a good account here:
http://rsoresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/butner_study_debunking_kit.pdf
More recently, Bourke has published a study suggesting that lie detector tests persuade “offenders” that they should confess to incidents of child rape and molestation they had never previously declared. It never appear to occur to Dr Bourke and Mr Gamble that officially traumatised, terrified, powerless and incarcerated individuals may be persuaded to confess to anything in their desperation if the level of official intimidation is sufficiently crushing. This, we are expected to believe, amounts to the unvarnished truth.
Lie detectors are more properly described as sweat, heart-rate and blood pressure detectors. The Lacanian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe (who clearly considers them degrading, profoundly misleading and thoroughly wicked) wrote in his magnificent book 2004 (“On Being Normal and Other Disorders”):
“… there is scarcely a direct correlation between the test results and the degree of truth emitted by the test subject. More broadly one can say that, in psychopathology, there is no firm link between objective, assessable parameters for a specific psychological problem and the way it is subjectively experienced and expressed.” (p. 7)
Speaking of the fiction of “objective, assessable parameters”, despite my profound scepticism, I’d be interested in assessing the penile plethysmograph results of militant paedo-slayers when subjected to the same kinds of “stimulus” they inflict on their desperate and helpless captives.
Yes, those dismal aids of inquisition, lie detectors, have been discredited since at the least the nineteen sixties – see “The Naked Society” by Vance Packard.
Oh dear God, I use too many adjectives. That should read “on their desperate captives” of course.
The following link is relevant here (apologies if it has already been posted): childsexconspiracy.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/ceop-conspiracy/
“Shock tactics used on The Paedophile Next Door will not deter future crimes, according to Mirror Online readers”. This, from The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/shock-tactics-used-paedophile-next-4695094
Just what are these “shock tactics”? The only thing I can figure is that the shows’ emphasis upon “non-offending paedos” as a group that is ill-served by a punishment-only model of dealing with the “problem” (since they break no laws, after all) must itself be “the shock tactic”.
Imagine if they had actually run Tom’s interview!
This says as much about the dramatically pared-down limits of what are considered to be acceptable speech today (think raging feminists censoring everything on campus) as it does about the levels of savagery permissibly expressed towards paedophiles.
Anything else is, simply “shock”! And aren’t people easily shocked today?
It also points to a very creepy, and creeping, tendency in social discourse today: the “let’s pretend so-and-so said something so utterly beyond the pale, so manifestly indefensible, that we will feign outrage that they had the temerity to say it” phenomenon. It is purely an impulse to control absolutely all speech and to shut down any with which they find in the slightest bit threatening to the dominance of their own.
>an impulse to control absolutely all speech
A classic example has come to my attention in the way “feminist Kate Smurthwaite” responded to Spiked commentator Luke Gittos in a radio discussion of the Ched Evans case. Tune in to the podcast from minutes 7-9 of the 30-minute podcast to hear what I mean. Details below.
Also, Ian McFadyen tweeted about me calling him a bully. I make no complaint about the crude abuse that came my way afterwards from his followers. Actually, it resulted in me getting an unintentionally helpful piece of information.
One tweeter lashed out in the same breath at both me and Tom Watson MP, one of the politicians who has promoted historical child abuse investigations.
Remarkably this tweeter found something Watson and I seem to agree on. Deploring us both, the tweet reproduced a tweet by Watson:
“@tom watson He may be a survivor but Macfadyen appears a narcissistic bully.” See pic.twitter.com/YnjIyOsKua
Checking this out on Watson’s twitter page, I found that this tweet was real and resulted in an article in The Times. The article says he accidentally tweeted a private message. Watson denied he had been referring to Ian McFadyen!
See http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4261530.ece
Judging by a snippet elsewhere in the twitter feed, it seems McFadyen lost his temper with someone, presumably on air, and later apologised. It would be good to know more about that.
Here’s the broadcast re Ched Evans:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/northernireland/nolan/nolan_20141121-1136a.mp3
Should Ched Evans be given a second chance?
Fri, 21 Nov 14
The pressure has got too much for Sheffield united. They’ve told convicted rapist Ched Evans he can’t now use their training facilities. The football club had been heavily criticised for agreeing to allow Evans to train at the club after his release from prison. Support for Evans is in short supply. Some of Sheffield United’s patrons have resigned. And Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill says she wants her name removed from one of the Bramall Lane stands should he play for the club again. So where does that leave Evans who wants to resume his professional football career? Luke Gittos who is a solicitor and Legal Editor for Spiked Online and commentator and feminist Kate Smurthwaite.
Wow, that was scary! Although no different from anything on American talk radio. Just a different set of thick, regional accents (referring to the callers after Kate hung-up). I’m always amused by the Irish pronunciation of “raped” with the trilled R and that improbable dipfthong.
Luke Gittos held his own very well. And Kate Smurf-wait! Dreadful and hateful. And typical feminist-fascist (I’ve got to come up with the perfect bon mot, a new neologism that adequately but succinctly describes them in their vicious essence). I love that she hung up in a huff. She completely discredited herself.
This is instructive for us or, at least, those who have occasion to go on radio and television and speak in opposition to such maniacs. Gittos doesn’t let that dreadful creature hijack the agenda and maintains his poise and good sense throughout the interview. He stays on message. Much like you, Tom!
And why I must remain forever a ‘typist’, behind my keyboard, never tempted to fire-up my microphone or webcam for the odd webcast 🙂
>And typical feminist-fascist (I’ve got to come up with the perfect bon mot, a new neologism that adequately but succinctly describes them in their vicious essence).
The only trouble with feminazi is that it was Rush Limbaugh, I think, who originated it.
Yes, that IS, in fact, the problem! So those of us who either are or are not self-respecting enough to repeat Rush Limbaugh are left in a quandary. We just need to devote more time to it. I swear I found something close awhile back but I seem to have forgotten it!
“FemiStasi”? Stasi always has a good buzzing air of menace about it, every bit as good as Nazi (depending on how you pronounce Nazi). Yet benefits from being novel and not so Rush-Limbaugh-ish. Politically, it’s certainly in the right ballpark. What do you think, everyone? We could, for fun, spell it with a zed instead. Shall it be “FemiStazi”?
As if I don’t have other things to do:
Phlegminist Evokes mucus but not much else.
FemminLess or Feminine-less That kind of moves us back into Limbaugh territory.
Feminizemenist
Fuggetaboutmenist
You see my frustration. It’s better that I should move away from my computer now.
In the past I have jokingly referred to myself as a “feminazgûl”. Particularly due to it’s resonance with this scene where the Nazgûl says, “No man can kill me.” (Totally copies Macbeth). Of course, since the Nazgûl are creatures of darkness and destruction who serve an evil master, you could use it as an epithet. It’s also super nerdy because Tolkien.
You make some astute observations and powerful points, Peter, especially the massively suppressed distinction between gentle erotic love and violent sexual abuse. I apologise to Sylvia, who made this point very powerfully earlier, for responding here rather than directly to her excellent post – I’ve been neck deep in work over the last few days. But I’d like to hug both Sylvia and Peter for so eloquently expressing this critical distinction, upon which the punishment-only model of Anglophone child protection rests
I’m going to reserve final judgement on the programme as I haven’t yet had a chance to see it, but at this point I must admit that I’m inclined toward the positions articulated by Tom, Sylvia and others. I consider Dr Sarah Goode a cementer of establishment prejudice and scapegoating, not a bravely dissenting figure. “Therapeutic support” can so often be a most insidious and cruel form of punishment, involving mental imperialism and appalling scapegoating beneath an ersatz “compassion”. IMHO, any compassion founded on hate, projection and fear isn’t worth having, and Goode’s conception of people branded as “paedos” is as hateful and ignorant as the ugly, pitchfork-grabbing views of “that big scary man” Jim Gamble (a descriptor he’d probably feel rather proud of).
To ask a question once posed by the gay literary theorist Leo Bersani: what might an anti-fascist account of human sexual diversity look like? The fact that Bersani chose the term “anti-fascist” implicitly suggests that he sees the dominant, establishment view as inherently fascist (he was asking this question at a time when establishment moralists and politicians could barely contain their glee that thousands of gay males, young and old, were dying horrific deaths due to AIDS, an affliction they perceived as just punishment from a faggot-hating God).
My own view is that in our age of post-political biopolitics, the dreary consensus of middle ground/Third Way democracy actively requires the politics of fear-mongering to animate even the faintest flickers of popular endorsement. It’s fascist almost by accident, in its restless efforts to cast around for icons of absolute evil – fictions of ultimate badness it absolutely needs to legitimise a political “democracy” incapable of improving the majority’s material prospects. The rules of capitalism that it defers to simply won’t permit such a thing. So it must have dehumanised monsters to unify the electorate, because everything else on offer politically is about as exciting as choosing between different brands of toilet paper.
The imaginary paedo-monster features prominently, perhaps predominantly, in this imaginary fear-mongering. And this paedo-monster fiction occupies, although the Dr Goodes in our midst would seek to rationalise such comparisons away, EXACTLY the same symbolic and imaginary position as the Jews were forced to occupy under Nazi ideology.
We need, as never before, Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the master signifier (which holds that certain implicit, unstated key assumptions make other more ordinary words “mean” specific things) and the fantasy figure of the obscenely excessive enjoyer (who is portrayed in contemporary culture as ruthlessly enjoying at everyone else’s expense in contemporary political biopolitics).
I would hesitantly claim that this crazy mixture – the imaginary construct of decent folks versus unlimited enjoyers – is indispensable to a sane critique of a dominant narrative that systematically (and symptomatically) casts erotic joy as sexual torture.
“responding here rather than directly to her excellent post”
So instead you responded to my comment where I made terrible Tolkien puns 😛
“incapable of improving the majority’s material prospects. The rules of capitalism that it defers to simply won’t permit such a thing.
Hmm… Have we been reading different histories of the world? Mine draws a forward-facing arrow from the horse-and-carriage to the Tesla Model S. It’s almost as if the future were wealthier than the past….
Yes, James, I bungled the position of my reply – sorry for the confusion. I’m with Marx on capitalism: it inaugurated the most astounding development of the means of production in the history of humanity and it threw off absolutist monarchical tyrannies through the heroic efforts of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, introducing precious principles of individual liberty in the process (Marx was very enthusiastic about the bourgeoisie). But it’s facts like this that make me object to it:
“The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.”
“According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats
Preventable poverty destroys vastly more children than the fantasised paedophile of the establishment and its femistasi advisers (I like that word), but they’re far more preoccupied with the latter than with the former.
“Marx was very enthusiastic about the bourgeoisie”
I’m as aware of Marx’s praise of Capitalism relative to Feudalism as I am of his critique of Capital. It was, of course, the former which inspired the Soviet New Economic Policy.
“The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.”
Whether the poor have too little in relative terms is less important than if they have too little in absolute terms. In recent times the poorest people on earth have been getting wealthier and wealthier. If there is a way to make this process happen faster or more effectively, I’m all for it. However, calling Capitalism inefficient is light years away from calling it bad.
““According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.””
This is the Utilitarian Crusade. This is why we have GiveWell and Giving What We Can.
“femistasi advisers (I like that word)”
As expected, terrible Tolkien puns fail to take the crown.
Hi, David. I simply refer to such individuals as organized misandrists. In essence, I see them as nothing more and nothing less than that. They are certainly not worthy of the “feminist” appellation, “radical” or otherwise… I think *reactionary* is considerably more accurate than “radical.” It’s a shame that Limbaugh and his fellow right-wing brethren use them to besmirch true egalitarian feminists.
Out of curiosity, when you talk about campus censorship, do you mean trigger warnings? For anyone who doesn’t know what those are, they’re a new trend I don’t care for and I suspect most here wouldn’t care for them either. Here is an overview: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/the-trigger-happy-university/ , which I picked because it has quite a few links to other articles (by women) which are critical of the idea.
Trigger-warnings themselves certainly ring libertarian alarm bells but I had in mind the phenomenon of university feminists insisting that they be recognized as the sole arbiters of acceptable speech as it is uttered anywhere on campus whether by students, faculty or guest speakers. We have been treated, in recent years, to the very ugly spectacle of such activists (which includes men) heckling and shouting down any speaker who they deem to be politically incorrect (a term which they tend not to use anymore themselves but was one which they freely used for years without any apparent shame or sense of irony). This is a generation which no longer sees freedom of expression to be absolute or even desirable. To their minds, speech must be tightly regulated with those questioning their ideas and pronouncements subject to prior restraint and silencing.
YouTube has many examples of this ugliness in action.
Sorry, but I honestly don’t understand why anyone would object to the concept of trigger warnings. A TW is basically a summary of the contents of a book, but with specific attention to whether it might offend or distress the reader. Objecting to the existance of trigger warnings is effectively the same as objecting to summaries at the back of a book.
Plus, TWs have an added bonus that summaries lack: They pull the rug out from censors. Censors (particularly modern ones) generally claim that media should be banned because it could offend someone. TWs annihilate that objection by ensuring that the set of people who are reading a book and the set of people unwilling to read about certain things in the book are mutually exclusive.
Beyond that, TWs don’t really do anything. They don’t restrict discourse; they just label it. They don’t cause people to be less likely to interact with contrasting views since people filter information anyway. The only half-sensible arguments that I’ve heard made against TWs is that: 1) they can be cumbersome or hyperbolic, 2) they’re strongly associated with leftists and feminists, 3) they may contain spoilers, & 4) they coddle/enable people. However, these are merely aesthetic qualms that have no bearing on whether the concept itself is objectionable. Plus that last one is fucked up WRT Utilitarianism.
I honestly have no idea why you would dislike TWs. Can you explain?
More on this at SSC.
What do you mean by “people filter information anyway”? Because it seems to me that by allowing people to opt out of having difficult discussions, trigger warnings on texts in university literature classes do restrict debate and access to contradictory opinions. They make it easier for people to live in a bubble. I am all for having certain safe spaces, physical or virtual, where rules that restrict speech are strictly enforced, so that someone can head over there when things get too much and know that they can relax for a while because nobody is going to say something, say, transphobic or victim-blaming or what have you. But I feel unhappy about trigger warnings spreading into places such as university seminar rooms.
However, I admit that my objections are in large part aesthetic and that they may well not stand up.
They are hardly aesthetic, they are based upon reason and logic. I would just disagree about deliberately created ‘safe spaces’. In the real world, people can retreat only to their own private domains – in this case, a dorm room or an apartment. That universities would undertake to create other such spaces (beyond, say, a library) in the interest of protecting students from that real world of conflicting ideas and values is ultimately condescending and infantilizing. And to those who think that trigger warnings serve a legitimate purpose, I say “Grow up!” Grow the hell up and stop demanding that everyone else accommodate your weakness and your unwillingness to have your delicate sensibilities challenged.
‘Trigger Warnings’ can be dispensed with entirely on the basis that they make claims on the lives of others.
And notice how, at root, much of what the condescending and sanctimonious feminists demand is that “growing up” should be delayed forever further into the future?
None of this is a coincidence. The pieces of the puzzle all fit together.
“I would just disagree about deliberately created ‘safe spaces’.”
Great! I’m pleased to know that I now have your blessing to invite every child protection crusader on both sides of the Atlantic to flame the hell out of GC, BC, and H-TOC. God forbid that we try to create a place where people can avoid interruption from irrelevant or hostile groups.
[/Sarcasm]
“I say “Grow up!” Grow the hell up and stop demanding that everyone else accommodate your weakness”
Glad to know that if I ever become disabled or develop a mental illness, I can count on your overflowing compassion for those less fortunate than yourself.
[/Sarcasm]
“‘Trigger Warnings’ can be dispensed with entirely on the basis that they make claims on the lives of others.”
Because it’s so outrageous to provide something which is solely a description. So much effort. I mean, heaven forbid people know what they’re going to read before they read it. Or have any other descriptive information about the world around them. Why is this our problem? This is why I’m absolutely confident that you fight the good fight to have traffic signs removed from every intersection. I mean, how dare the government spend your hard earned money on something as disgusting as labels.
[/Sarcasm]
“And notice how, at root, much of what the condescending and sanctimonious feminists demand is that “growing up” should be delayed forever further into the future?”
>Implying that labeling information has some effect on when people “grow up”.
>Implying that people only avoid media when it has TWs.
>Implying that mentally ill people don’t exist.
>Implying that TWs are only used for avoidance, not categorisation.
>Implying that we have the right to inflict exposure therapy on others without warning.
>Implying >Implying >Implying >Implying
[/Sarcasm] [/Sarcasm] [/Sarcasm] [/Sarcasm]
(After a long break of deep breaths)
That was bad. That was extremely inappropriate and I’m sorry I said it like that. Note to self: don’t comment while fueled by the rage of a thousand suns.
If you’ll appreciate the ironic humour, I might even say your comment “triggered” me. 😛
All at once, I relived everyone who told me I needed to be a man (and stop being so feminine).
Everyone who told me that I wouldn’t be bullied if I could just stop being weird.
Everyone who said boys are supposed to rough-house (even if a particular boy has to get thrown out a window).
Everyone who told me that if I couldn’t understand literal language [TOC adds: J actually meant “could only understand literal language” as is made clear in a later correction post], it was my problem and I didn’t deserve any help.
Everyone who said autistics don’t really feel empathy.
Everyone who denied I’ve ever had any problem that couldn’t be solved by “growing up”.
Everyone who wouldn’t say, but was completely willing to imply, that I wasn’t a real human and didn’t deserve any sympathy.
And, more than anything, the multitudes who were convinced it wasn’t their problem and that if I couldn’t handle it, that’s just God’s plan.
It wasn’t that I was angry at you per se, but when I read: “Grow the hell up and stop demanding that everyone else accommodate your weakness”, all the rage I’d ever felt was channeled into one massive, supersonic FUCK YOU cannon.
This is because I respect you a lot. I’ve spoken to people who thought blacks should be sterilised, the Holocaust was great, transsexuals need to be rounded up and killed, all autistics should be aborted, etc, etc. However, I was always emotionally distant because I don’t give a crap about those people. But when you said: “Grow the hell up and stop demanding that everyone else accommodate your weakness”, it was different. More than anything I’d ever read before in my life, it made me feel like I wasn’t a real person.
So, I apologize for how I spoke to you but the sentiment is 110% real. I’m not taking it back.
[I’d also like to apologize to Tom for having to deal with this mess. I hope you accept both comments.]
I meant non-literal language! It would be really weird if autistics only understood metaphors. 😛
>I’d also like to apologize to Tom for having to deal with this mess
No problem for me, J.
I imagine David will be taken aback by the strength of your reaction but it is clearly honest, heartfelt, and not designed just to put the other guy down. My guess is that David will understand this and not object to me running your comment.
It sounds as though my remarks may have served as a kind of catharsis for you 🙂
Certainly they were not designed to make you feel like a lesser person. In fact, they are to acknowledge that you are a capable one. Capable of withstanding the torrent of ideas, both good and bad, to which we are all subjected as part of this whole “life thing”.
I would probably have agreed with some of the “safe space” argument, at one time, although would have to go back very far. I’ve discovered that there are much greater concepts to value, however, than a social consensus that my ideas shouldn’t be continuously challenged or that my feelings won’t get stepped upon. And life invariably demands that we must make those choices.
Neither of those things are pleasant and I do believe that rapt attention paid to them can result in self-damage. But the remedy for them should only be to find sufficient strength as an individual to effectively block their limitless ingress into our consciousness.
The remedy cannot be that all of our thoughts and speech be subjected to elaborate but ultimately tyrannical collectivist filtration in which ideas are promoted or extinguished through the sheer numerical strength of majorities or consensus.
It really comes down to valuing what is most important and necessary and recognizing that hard choices are demanded when our wants and our needs conflict with one another.
I will note that a property rights approach helps a great deal in clarifying the ‘safe space’ issue. Owning a private domain (which includes renting one) allows us a measure of solitude and an opportunity for recovery from the vicissitudes of public life and the sheer stupidity of others. In this way, a safe space becomes that which the individual controls utterly and not one which imposes upon all others an obligation to exquisitely anticipate any condition, any other of whom might demand be imposed upon all others.
The other achievable safe space, just as necessary, is that which occupies our own conscience and consciousness and in which our core principles are held inviolable and which serve to protect us from emotional injury.
Yes, life can be deeply unpleasant. People can be deeply unpleasant. But we are better, in the end, for developing better armament instead of demanding that all be placed in cages as protection against an imagined fragility.
I hope this helps to better explain my thinking than I was able to do before.
@JAMES
To be honest, it doesn’t seem to me that David was aiming the “Grow up! Grow the hell up!” thing at you personally. I also can see no good in trigger warnings as well as in the creation of a safe space free dissenting opinions or from “interruption from irrelevant and hostile groups”. Why should hostile points of view be seen as irrelevant? I am all for confrontation with the opposite side (but that’s perhaps because I have a belligerent nature 🙂 )
Personally I am for ZERO safe places, save for that safe spot somewhere within and, at times, I would say it’d be healthy for that intimate ground to be shaking as well.
The purpose of an open discussion of paedophilia in this blog and elsewhere, is – l hope – learning to stand one’s ground rather than hurrying to “safe places”. And hopefully that will be the outcome too. But it’s not going to happen if people continue to run to “safe places”.
I don’t think universities should be required to create safe spaces, just that if people want their blog or their social club that meets once a week to have safe space rules, that’s fine, because they’re running the show as private individuals.
The objections I mentioned in that post (constriction of debate etc.) are reasoned, but my instinctive reaction to trigger warnings is something like, “Oh, come on!” and that is aesthetic, or emotional, whatever.
If education is to work, if it’s to foster an enduring process of ongoing intellectual growth, shouldn’t it disrupt and disturb one’s established opinions and assumptions? Might it not be inevitable that one of the first responses to engaging with a text that subverts our preferred way of thinking is recoil from the source of perturbation, a step that can easily be converted into offence? Doesn’t great literature always do that? Why do we need to be warned that a text contains content that some people might feel offended or unsettled by? The point of education, I’m inclined to believe, is to unsettle the unenlightened assumptions and received wisdom that block us from growing intellectually. Offence can rarely be given but it certainly can be taken, and as such it’s an active decision, not a natural response.
I’m personally in favour of not treating students as potential victims, as fragile and easily disturbed neurotics, but as intelligent human beings who want to learn and expand their horizons. Full engagement with the texts and free discussion afterwards trump trigger warnings hands down, surely.
“If education is to work, if it’s to foster an enduring process of ongoing intellectual growth, shouldn’t it disrupt and disturb one’s established opinions and assumptions?”
Yes. It definitely should. It should also tell you that. That’s what a TW is: it tells you what’s about to happen. It doesn’t stop you from reading, watching, or listening – it’s a description. If someone reads a description and says: “well, I don’t fancy that”, then that’s their problem. It’s no different to disliking a summary.
“Might it not be inevitable that one of the first responses to engaging with a text that subverts our preferred way of thinking is recoil from the source of perturbation”
I’ve heard of cognitive dissonance, but I’ve never experienced it. When something contradicts my beliefs, I feel the urge to investigate it. This is how I use TWs. If I see a piece that says “TW: discussion of racial differences in intelligence”, I’m strongly drawn to read it. In the absence of TWs, I might be challenging my beliefs less frequently.
“I’m personally in favour of not treating students as potential victims, as fragile and easily disturbed neurotics, but as intelligent human beings who want to learn and expand their horizons.”
It just so happens that some people do have neurosis and it doesn’t make them any less intelligent. In fact, whether I have neurosis mostly depends on how you define it. The thing about TWs is that they take nothing away from those who don’t need/want them. The non-neurotic students aren’t harmed by it, so why should it be denied to the neurotic students?
Full engagement with the texts and free discussion afterwards trump trigger warnings hands down, surely.
This doesn’t make sense because these things aren’t exclusive of each other at all! TWs don’t make it harder to engage with texts. They don’t curtail discussion. If anything, they enhance the quality of discussion by ensuring that everyone goes in knowing what to expect and that the discussion isn’t bogged down by us poor “fragile and easily disturbed neurotics” screaming in the corner of the room.
“It just so happens that some people do have neurosis and it doesn’t make them any less intelligent.”
I completely agree with you on this point James – believe me, I’m definitely one of them. And I was deeply moved by your raw and passionately honest outpouring about all the indignities and humiliations you were deluged with by people who really should have known better (“neurotic”, incidentally, was eventually Freud’s word for normal people – as a deeply neurotic person himself, he knew that no one can proceed from infancy to adulthood without manifold neurotic twists and turns).
I just think that the rise of the era of “trigger warnings”, no matter how beneficial they may be to people prone to convulsions of unmanageable panic when the unexpected crosses their path, is inseparable from the pernicious and misanthropic ideology of pervasive victimhood (I concede, however, that if a trigger warning prepares someone to engage with a text who might otherwise have fled in terror from it, it has some merit). But I remain persuaded that victim culture is very definitely an inherent part of today’s deeply illiberal and profoundly reactionary dominant ideology, an ideology that constantly invites human beings to perceive themselves as surrounded by unquantifiable perils that only a strong, punitive State can protect them from. Strong, informal and spontaneous ties of friendship and love might do this, but the State can never fulfil his role.
But I would be troubled by a policy alerting scholars that they might wish to walk away from a particular discussion topic. A medical student who decided that gynaecology or oncology was deeply offensive would become a dangerous doctor, just as a student of anti-fascist politics who walked away from Hitler’s (dreadful) Mein Kampf would be deeply compromised as a political theorist. However offensive, disturbing texts need to be studied, critiqued, and worked on as truthfully and resourcefully as possible.
What I’m getting at is that “simple descriptions” don’t exist; descriptions are always governed by the core assumptions of the ideological frames in which they are fashioned. Labelling a discourse is never politically neutral. Truth only emerges when you take up sides; it can never be seen from some spurious fantasy of neutrality or objectivity.
And, incidentally, I also like the term “feminazgûl” to describe the chief architects of this terrible and limitlessly vindictive ideology (you have to be familiar with The Lord of the Rings to appreciate this, however).
“I was deeply moved by your raw and passionately honest outpouring about all the indignities and humiliations you were deluged with”
Thanks. Don’t mention it 🙂
(I mean that literally. I don’t like thinking about it. 😛 )
“inseparable from the pernicious and misanthropic ideology of pervasive victimhood”
The fact that TWs came out of the Social Justice Movement doesn’t mean they can’t stand on their own merits. The Nazis built the Volkswagen, but that does nothing to taint the ‘people’s car’.
“an ideology that constantly invites human beings to perceive themselves as surrounded by unquantifiable perils that only a strong, punitive State can protect them from.”
But this philosophy is the antithesis of the trigger warning. The TW says, “Take this information. Take these tools. Protect yourself or do as you please. You are your own master.”
To quote Commissioner Lal of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (yes, I’m that nerdy): “Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”
“A medical student who decided that gynaecology or oncology was deeply offensive would become a dangerous doctor”
Yes. Then they couldn’t be a doctor. However, it’s best they find this out before they become invested in it, rather than having it sprung on them. Knowledge is power and one must always know what one does not know.
“Truth only emerges when you take up sides; it can never be seen from some spurious fantasy of neutrality or objectivity.”
Spoken like a true lawyer. Or maybe a Hegelian? I will concede that labeling ideas can’t be perfectly neutral because labels don’t correspond to the world itself, but draw arbitrary borders on our internal conceptual map. However, there is a truth that exists independently of “sides”. It can never be perceived perfectly, without filtration, but it’s out there. Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.
“you have to be familiar with The Lord of the Rings to appreciate this, however”
One Name to rule them all, One Name to find them,
One Name to bring them all and in the darkness bind them;
In the Land of Tumblr where the Shadows lie.
I’m in full agreement.
If someone dislikes hearing something enough, they’re going to find a way to avoid it. Without explicit acknowledgements that, yes, this book contains XYZ, they’ll just avoid anything with the slightest chance of containing it. Like in the example on SSC of a trans-person avoiding all right-wing media so as not to be exposed to transphobia. TWs allow them to engage with right-wing media without worrying that this article will be terrible.
To give a personal example: when I’m about to get engaged in a religious argument, I say “blaspheme” to ensure that my more sensitive friends walk out of earshot. Otherwise I’d be pissing them off so frequently that I’d probably end up with fewer friends.
This was a major media event for paedophiles, there is no doubt. I too was feeling highly irritated by Humphries and others during the program. I don’t think we should be too quick to write it off though. For me, what stuck out like a sore thumb, was on one hand we have a cop who seems proud of his title “paedophile hunter”, where Ed is clearly the “prey”: what happened to Ed’s human rights? That’s severe psychological abuse, and it’s completely ignored! Ed did an amazing thing, but we have to remember that change happens gradually. This was the first time for a TV channel to humanize paedophiles, and with Ed coming across as a sincere and likeable character, not only was that achieved, but I believe it back-fired on Humphries for his monsterisation soundbites through-out. There’s a lot to respond to in that film; alot of good stuff. Can’t believe he said “I find it hard to believe they can control their feelings”, so are we to assume Humphries fails to control *HIS* feelings? It was still much braver than anything the BBC have put out, so let’s celebrate this as the first time to show a paedophile as a non-abuser, which in-turn created contradictions and seriously disturbed the status Quo. I feel his “therapy” was not voluntary, but a part of the deal. It’s society in general that needs therapy, as Ed has shown himself to be true survivor despite being scapegoated by the system. hope this makes waves.
Can’t believe he said “I find it hard to believe they can control their feelings”, so are we to assume Humphries fails to control *HIS* feelings?
I do worry for these teliophiles. They seem to have such very low standards, poor things. It is interesting to reflect that current attitudes towards paedophilia are to some extent the product of twentieth-century sexual liberation, inasmuch as we live in a culture where it seems that nobody can imagine not trying to have sex all the time. Or perhaps that is merely a reflection of our consumerist culture of immediate gratification, where the concept of a desire that is unfulfilled and unfulfillable is simply unimaginable.
I think what Humphries finds hard to imagine is that paedophiles might be able to exercise more self-control and sexual restraint than most other people can. And I sympathise with his incredulity. Having to accept that most of the reviled paedos might be better than you are must be a hard pill to swallow.
@ Dave
Let me disagree. True, change happens gradually. But proposing celibacy as the only possible form of social acceptance is hazardous to say the least: it gives credibility to the notion that all adult-child sexual encounters necessarily have harmful consequences for the child, and makes such a stance sound scientific and beyond the shadow of a doubt. Sure there will be change, but are we sure we want to swap hysteria with an equally misleading “evidence”? Beware, because the future may turn bleak. It’s already hard to neutralise propaganda, it will be twice as hard to cling to reality once “evidence” is presented in a respectful and “scientific” way, in a world of “virtuous” people.
“…to show a paedophile as a non-abuser”.
Are you sure? It seems to me that by insisting on the necessity of therapy and praising celibacy, they have done just the opposite, i.e. presented paedophiles as nothing but abusers in need of restraint.
People with brains and common sense will see he is a non-abuser. I assume we still have *some* people with common sense left in society, although that idea is being challenged I must admit. I hope people will notice the blatant disregard for the well-being of Ed; as if he has zero value in society. If that was a female confessing those things, there would be plenty of compassion for her; such is the misandry of present day society. I feel Ed was forced into saying certain things, especially: “helping other paedophiles not to offend”, because he is not an offender, but a victim of social outcasting. Surely, most in that situation would be wanting to help others live a peaceful life and cope with the effects of institutionalized psychological abuse.
“If that was a female confessing those things, there would be plenty of compassion for her”
I’m not sure there would be more compassion, per se. Less fear, yes. I expect people would take her less seriously, particularly if she were heterosexual and conventionally attractive. However, I would expect a similar visceral disgust response, not empathy.
You’ve got it.
Some of my limited — I don’t have Eddie’s guts — experiences of coming out has gone like this: at seventeen, I confided in a friend about my crush on a twelve-year-old. She thought it was funny. I was slightly hurt and offended, because my feelings were quite serious, but also relieved. When at eighteen I felt very drawn to a six-year-old I’d spent some time with, I didn’t tell a soul, because twelve is one thing and six another, and also I was getting older, so the gap between me and the people I found most attractive was widening. The episode precipitated me into a long period of self-disgust and general unhappiness about my sexuality. The next person I tried telling about my attraction to kids in general freaked out completely in a very dramatic and hurtful way. I lost the friendship over it and became convinced for a second time that I had better keep my mouth shut. But since then I have been lucky enough to have a couple of guarded acceptance responses from very close longtime friends.
I can’t claim to have had as profound an I’m-that-monster-you-see-on-TV feeling as many male paedophiles seem to do, though. The monster depicted was always male, and I wasn’t. But I may be a bit of an anomaly because, as I’ve said before I think, the female paedophiles seem to hang out at Paraphilias Forums, where the general view is very virtuous.
Thanks, A., for sharing your story.
Just some of the early bits. Things have looked up since. 🙂
Really? Great! How so? (If you don’t mind me asking.)
I have a couple of close non-paedo friends who accept it and I had a good gay/BL friend as well. Makes all the difference. And I feel happy to be what I am these days. I wised up and figured out there was nothing wrong with my orientation.
I too thank you for sharing your experiences.
Despite having talked about the subject to friends and family (and received praise for observations I’ve made), I have not come out personally to anyone. Doing so is risky to say the least, so I likely never will. My loved ones know how passionate and concerned I am about kids, so I wonder if anyone has put two and two together. Ehh, probably not. I (and most other CL’s) don’t fit the imaginary deranged psychopath image society has created of us.
Have you ever read Gloria Wekker’s article “Girl, It’s Boobies You’re Getting, No?”…it was included in the special female edition of the journal Paidika. Wouldn’t it be awesome if that was still in print? I tried looking for a PDF of all of its contents online but couldn’t find much. I’d also love to have both volumes of Brongersma’s Loving Boys in print.
https://www.boywiki.org/en/Paidika:_The_Journal_of_Paedophilia
You know something interesting? Today’s gay activists will adamantly claim they have nothing to do with our movement and never have, but they’re either lying or willfully ignorant. The very first sexual emancipation movements originated in Germany in the late 19th century and were started by boylovers. The world’s oldest homosexual periodical was Der Eigene, and it focused on pederastic themes.
I have not seen it yet, but our members who have are similarly disappointed. They report that too little was done to distinguish between pedophilia and child molestation, and that there was too little focus on the lack of help for non-offending pedophiles. I was hoping for something along the lines of Luke Malone’s piece on This American Life. Assuming the reports are true, I feel real bad for Eddie, who will have outed himself for nothing.
Carefully making sure that this distinction (between paedophilia and child molestation) is not presented as a valid scientific argument to the general public is precisely what’s on the agenda, no need for your members to be bewildered. Otherwise all claims on the unhealthy nature of paedophilia and the harm of all sexual contact between adult and child would crumble like chalk. That’s exactly what they are trying to avoid.
You were being so nice Nick- lets just say I am clairvoyant, and that I know for a fact that they were doing everything possible to conflate paedophilia and child “molestation”. Of course I did not read this trashy article.
Well, what a treacherous shit Humphries turned out to be. I was totally wrong to think Channel 4 was the source of the problem with this programme. Having just watched its first broadcast, I am clear that it was Humphries and his Testimony Films outfit all the way. Can’t even blame it on Rudolph Herzog who is named as co-director: he seems to have had very little input, even at the German end of the story.
There are so many ways in which The Paedophile Next Door was awful it’s hard to know where to begin. Veteran anti-child porn writer Tim Tate was wheeled out to say he had seen “the most appalling footage imaginable” of abuse. I think that sums up my view of the whole programme.
The only bright spot was Eddie, the paedophile who outed himself on camera. That was extremely brave and he spoke well. Unfortunately, his “acceptable face of the paedophile” role was totally overwhelmed by the bile-spilling monstering that dominated Humphries’ narrative and “contributions” from the likes of Sarah Goode plus “the usual suspects” such as the NSPCC.
So, Eddie wasn’t too virtuous for your tastes? (Not that I can judge since I haven’t seen it myself).
He was not self-righteous. He didn’t build himself up by condemning others. And he graciously admitted things might be easier for him because he is not exclusively paedophilic.
“He was not self-righteous. He didn’t build himself up by condemning others.”
So, kind of like Bloom?
(NOTE: I’m unaware if social etiquette indicates that comparing other people to commenters here is a faux pas. If so, delete this comment. Either way, I suppose I’ll learn something about interacting with neurotypicals 🙂 )
>I’m unaware if social etiquette indicates that comparing other people to commenters here is a faux pas.
I judge that there is no malicious intent in this comparison and I have no problem with you making it.
What do you think, Bloom?
flattered again. :-}
You may be hard-pressed to discover neurotypicals here, James. Unless you mean, by neurotypical, strictly autistic. If you were to extend its meaning to ‘perceptibly eccentric’, then I would say that there may be few in evidence.
I was thinking in contrast to autistics, but I concede your point about how “typical” the average commenter here is.
It particularly made me spew feathers when, hot on the closing credits, they make a plug for a programme about Stinson Hunter. It kind of cancels out any good intentions ‘The paedophile Next Door’ did have if they’re going to give that neanderthal air time.
I haven’t finished watching it and probably should before writing about it. And yet, I don’t really think it matters, does it? I’m thinking that the phenomenon of reporters ingratiating themselves to potential interview subjects with the full intention of ignoring anything they say which does not serve to advance a totally fleshed-out and immutable agenda is itself a subject worthy of television documentation.
I really do hope that you can release that audio recording of the interview Tom.
>I really do hope that you can release that audio recording of the interview Tom.
It’s late now. Tomorrow with luck.
First impressions: I was also surprised as I couldn’t find anywhere the “interest in diversity of voices” that director Steve Humphries supposedly had, not to mention the “empathy” and find it hard to believe that he might have “fought hard” to include Tom’s interview. There was absolutely not a word there that led me thinking that there might have been a desire to make a viewpoint like yours, Tom, known to the public. More generally, as I expected, the editorial line was such as to make sure that the audience remained in total ignorance of the existence of a reality other than “the sorry-paedophile” or “the ugly rapist”. For this reason, while l certainly feel some sympathy for “Eddie”, I don’t concede my applause. l acknowledge a degree of courage and certainly good faith in the man, but I don’t think this is the way to proceed forward. At some point the guy sounded to me as if he had been brainwashed, I couldn’t believe he thought of himself in those terms (the meeting, at the end, of the two men was – excuse me – pathetic).
I’ll say it and l’ll repeat it over and over again: the most pernicious message that is passed on by the propaganda remains the insistence on equalling paedophilia, the “love for children” with “child sex abuse”. Pay attention: it’s first and foremost a SEMANTIC process that leads to cultural conditioning. The paradox is that these terms which are naturally opposite in their meaning, have come to be interchangeable. This is the stepping stone that prevents a “diversity of voices” from being heard, even in the academic and scientific circles. The self-pitying “virtuous” approach certainly won’t help as it conveys the very dangerous message that paedophilia is necessarily, every time, a set of unhealthy urges and that it’s either rape or self-imposed celibacy. In this scenario there is no longer room for a natural sexuality, a natural affection, that is loving, responsible, and free from harm or predatory behaviour. To claim to be educating the public and to be serving paedophiles, by presenting a paedophile who begs to be “cured” and who’d rather “not have” this inclinations, is a great disservice and a fraud. The hasty claim that a “virtuous” approach might be something “radical”, something unheard of, and that in online forums there are groups of “radicals” preaching it, left me bewildered: sorry if I can’t see anything radical in self-loathing! I have nothing against celibacy as a personal choice but if anyone out there thinks that by presenting celibacy and therapy as a way of eventually making paedophilia more acceptable, trust me, you’ll soon have to wake up from you illusion. Eddie has not served the public, nor paedophiles, nor acceptance, nor understanding: he has simply been employed, despite himself, as a means of conveying the message behind therapy and virtue: that paedophilia is a disease to be cured and that there is no such thing as a non-harmful, non-coercive sexual contact with a child.
Anyone is free to applaude if they like – I certainly won’t.
BRAVO!!! I will applaud YOU rather than the self-proclaimed “virtuous”! There is much that is terribly dishonest about the creepy moral positioning which surrounds this issue and nothing of honor in any of it. The great moral crusade of our times is utterly bankrupt and the array of safe choices from which one must select hopelessly depraved. At the heart of it all is a very deep contempt for speech and independent conscience. If there is an issue even more disturbing than the bizarre obsession for kids and their sexuality it is this fundamental obliteration of the rights of the individual and a breathtaking movement to rigidly enforce a conformity of thought.
he has simply been employed, despite himself, as a means of conveying the message behind therapy and virtue: that paedophilia is a disease to be cured and that there is no such thing as a non-harmful, non-coercive sexual contact with a child.
…you sound almost surprised?!
Ahh ahh, yeah :-*
l’d say l am always optimistic. l would have accepted any “orthodox” stance, no matter how misleading, if only they had had the guts to air Tom’s interview uncensored. That’s the way an audience is encouraged to develop critical thinking: by allowing contrasting views to be heard and letting the public make up their own minds.
Thanks Sylvie for your powerful critique of this so-called documentary! I wasn’t able to watch it myself but that Eddie reminds me a little of my own recent experience, a long email conversation with a woman with whom I had a quite intense (and abruptly ended) relationship many, many years ago when she was 10 to 12. It was like walking on a knife-edge. You have to be prepared to give up nine tenths of the argument, to accept wholeheartedly that some things were wrong, that perhaps there was some coercion, perhaps desire was clouding my judgement. You have to be enormously sensitive and respectful of this person’s sense of having been betrayed, her hurt, her anger. But you have to stand your ground, you mustn’t cross that line in the sand, because if you pretend to yourself and to her that even the good things were bad, then the wolf pack will have won and it wouldn’t just be me that loses respect, it would lock her even more firmly into the role of victim….
Just wanted to share these few garbled thoughts from the self-determination battlefield – seeing as I feel so much support from everybody here.
Beautifully put. Thank you for sharing, as they say.
Thanks A.
Just so you know I used some of your own stories here to help melt the ice. And the ice melted nicely. We’re getting along just fine now, the exercise has been a success.
Wonderful! 🙂
Sorry to hear what a train wreck this pseudo-documentary turned out to be, Tom. Alas, it seems like it will be a while before the U.K. produces anything like “Daniel’s World.” The media and other powers-that-be in Union Jack’s land are still trying as hard as they can to keep condemnation and the oppressive “anti” agenda to be the order of the day when discussing this topic, as opposed to insight, understanding, or sympathy. I understand that watching this agenda-ridden excuse for journalism got you in the doldrums, but I’m sure you expected no less. The agenda is made quite clear when you observe what individuals they allowed to speak, and which voices they left out of the final cut.
As for this Tim Tate guy, I would love to have an objective and courageous journalist worth their stripe who operates outside his specific agenda, like perhaps Judith Levine or Debbie Nathan, to view this “horrifying” material he claims to have churned his stomach so badly to see if what he saw is truly something out of the “A Nightmare On Elm Street” film saga. The alleged proliferation of genuinely abusive CP seems to have the same ring to it as previous allegations of a thriving snuff film industry that was allegedly filling the coffers of some decadent international production crew at the expense of numerous innocent lives. The fact that the public is never allowed to see this material, and all we have to go on is the claims of a few oddly privileged individuals, makes me cry foul. I’m sure Mr. Tate would find anything he viewed that had youths as old as 16 kissing another person to be examples of horrific “abuse.” People like him see what they want to see, and not much more than that. The concept of nuance is alien to them.
Unfortunately, the highly emotional nature of this subject compels people to listen with a combination of lurid fascination and spectator-like horror, much as they did with the allegations of Satanic ritual abuse operating in American day care centers during the 1980s (the same time the snuff film industry was supposedly operating for the corrupt viewing pleasure of so many phantom individuals). The deep-seated fears these claims tap into causes numerous people to believe even the most outrageous stories.
The only real truth such programs convey is the disturbing need to shunt certain groups of people into the “Other” category by transforming them into bogeymen. This serves the purpose of the professional victims and manipulates the emotions of the general public into accepting all sorts of dictatorial legislation and surveillance into their privacy… you know, if that’s what it takes to locate and neutralize all of these horrible monsters operating in our midst, just outside public perception. This plays into the hands of anyone in the government or media who has an oppressive agenda. This is why oligarchical systems like the governments that try to pass for “democracies” need bogeymen so badly, whether they be “pedophiles,” “terrorists,” “communists,” etc. The voices of officialdom consider the nominal vestiges of democratic precepts that the system does have to be inconveniences that need an excuse to stamp them out. Bogeymen serve that purpose perfectly, because these largely manufactured monsters terrify the public into going along with any number of oppressive and censorious agendas.
“As for this Tim Tate guy, I would love to have an objective and courageous journalist worth their stripe who operates outside his specific agenda, like perhaps Judith Levine or Debbie Nathan, to view this “horrifying” material he claims to have churned his stomach so badly to see if what he saw is truly something out of the “A Nightmare On Elm Street” film saga.”
I managed to miss this excellent post by Dissident until today. I agree with every word – brilliantly observed and analysed. The illiberal pseudo-liberals of the oligarchy you describe so eloquently absolutely need a biopolitical monster to justify their deeds. As E.P. Thompson once put it, they are taking liberties – liberties which once belonged to us
Twitter has some comments defending Eddie as brave and as having done nothing wrong, alongside the ususal pitchfork stuff.
He is shown some “mercy” only the moment he acknowledges that there is harm in any sexual contact with children and that paedophilia must be cured. l wouldn’t jubilate. Especially if you consider that there are people who’d still want to hang him despite his confession of “virtuous” behaviour!
And some of those people must be entirely serious about it, given that a fair few paedophiles and suspected paedophiles have been murdered by vigilantes over the past couple of decades. Yeah, depressingly, you are completely right.
Their blah blah blah is always utterly serious. Yet most of them turn to chicken-shit when face to face. l wouldn’t worry.
Twitter is unbearably stupid at the moment. I’m particularly flabbergasted by this gem: “The Paedophile Next Door C4 doc is an unchallenged unbalanced Paedophile Information Exchange propaganda film.”
Wow. Just wow. I wonder how she’d respond to hearing Tom’s actual thoughts? Then again, you should expect as much from Shy Keenan. Anything short of “burn those witches!” is far too nuanced for her and must be enemy propaganda. (Which isn’t to say that, if accurate, the abuse she suffered wasn’t horrific.)
On a side note: a surprisingly large number of people believe that paedophiles are the ones advocating for paedophilia to be considered a mental illness, so they can be “exempt from responsibility.” Can you get it more backward?
Have you worked out what Steve Humphries hoped to gain from interviewing you?
Good question!
Humphries indicated right from the start that he might find it hard to persuade Channel 4 to use the interview with me; but it now looks possible he never really intended to use it. I think he was simply “collecting” me for his archive of oral history, which he says will one day be turned over to a university.
Note that in the programme he called himself an historian. The programme was profoundly unhistoric in its judgemental stance on the 1970s and 80s, committing the classic error of taking present-day understandings and values as somehow sensible and right and those of other times as foolish, ignorant and wrong. I think it’s called “presentism”.
Humphries does have a reputation as an oral historian though. See the reference to him here, for instance:
http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/oral_history_3.html
Perhaps it’s a pity I didn’t discover the following comment until this morning in a review of one of his books:
“W. L. Burn once warned against what he called ‘selective Victorianism’, by which he meant taking from the mass of varied evidence whatever bits suit one’s preconceptions. All the evidence thus used is valid, but the overall view becomes partial in two senses. Stephen Humphries seems to have fallen into such a trap in his use of oral history and other evidence in the present book.”
This was in a review of his book Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class
Childhood and Youth 1889—1939. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.
The review was in the journal Urban History, here:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3199552
“I think he was simply “collecting” me for his archive of oral history, which he says will one day be turned over to a university.”
Which is good news indeed. We can’t tell whether he actually means to turn it over to a university, but we know for a fact that the interview now exists, and as long as it “remains”, no doubt that somebody will make good use of it at some point in the future.
Presumably Steve Humphries’ intention in interviewing you at such great length was to try to get you to ‘hang yourself’ in such a way as to link up with the historical footage about PIE (‘He’s still at it, this loony’). When you said only sensible things, he lost interest.
Definitely! He imagined himself cleverly devising a trap which Tom failed to fall into. “Drat that diabolical pervert!” Let’s face it, any scrumptious slip-ups on Tom’s part would have been gleefully seized upon and repeated ad-nauseum in promos and trailers.
Oh well. l wonder if the “treacherous shit” may be reading the comments here. Not that l expect him to contact you, Tom. But if he does, let us know how he has clarified his position. We all could use a lesson in lip service at some time or another.
In case this doesn’t thread properly, this is in reply to your:
‘l wonder if the “treacherous shit” may be reading the comments here.’
I’ve no doubt that he’s following the discussion closely along with scribblers
looking for sensation, and the usual suspects.
Tom –
I am afraid I was pretty sure from the git-go that this would be the outcome. As I indicated before the program was aired, “I, for one, don’t think I can stomach one more patronizing piece of BS that purports to be sympathetic to MAPS.” Still feel that way. Watching that kind of thing can be debilitating. Basing social policy on deceit, lies, and censorship, which is what we have here, produces crappy results. It creates real harm. Luke warm, and fundamentally dishonest, displays of concern for societies real victims of the sex abuse panic are not incremental steps forward. They are just more of the same bull shit. Until the lies are uprooted there will be no real improvement. Children are sexual beings. No mutually desired sex is intrinsically damaging. Until these simple and demonstrable facts (not theories but facts supported by real data) are acknowledged, no progress will be made. The radical case was what needed to be said when you first said it, and it remains what is needed.
I would be interested in seeing (or hearing) your the interview they did with you. Would be happy to post it on uryourstory, if you liked. Hang in there.
Just a quick technical note before tomorrow. For those who might want to watch the programme, I have looked for options for you:
OPTION #1
Here is a link to Channel 4 streaming. You need to download Flash in order to be able to view it.
http://watchlive.channel4.com/
OPTION #2
No need to download Flash or anything to follow from here. I confirm it works for iPhone and iPad but stream is not available outside the UK.
http://www.tvguide.co.uk/tv-stream/?ch=channel+4
OPTION #3 – OUTSIDE THE UK
On Chrome, download Hola. It will make it look as if you are watching from the UK. However Watch Live is exclusively available to registered users. Click on register (you may use a UK address!) and there you go. It works!
Download Hola for Mac
https://hola.org/mac
Download Hola for Windows
https://hola.org/download
There are downloads available also for iPad/iPhone/Android/Linux
Thanks for this public service information. As a UK resident, I’m afraid I neglected other parts of the world in my announcement, although my lack of enthusiasm for the programme may have something to do with it!
Thank you! Very thoughtful!
Thank you! I could have saved some money as I just recently subscribed for a year to another service. This appears to be completely free. Oh, well…
There is an interview with a paedophile, discussing how society needs to deal with the problem, in my book, Outsiders: http://amzn.to/OutsidersUKAmazon
Could you please specify what exactly you consider to be the “problem”. Is it the paedophiles?
tomocarroll: The approach adopted by the United Nation Declaration of Children’s Rights, say, is all about protection and welfare[…]. The right to protection from sexual exploitation is very different to the right to sexual self-determination; whether these are seen as contradictory and mutually exclusive is a matter of definition and ideology.
The ethos of the UN is primarily an expression of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, a formalization of the ‘golden rule’ (ie, “do unto others”). As a rough guide for personal conduct, I think this has much to recommend it, but there’s a flaw in it’s translation into a quasi-legal principle: not everybody wishes to be treated in the same way. Policy makers are required to settle on a construction based on the needs of typical (average? normal?) person, so there’s a kind of imposition of majority values.
In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the UN ideal works pretty well at a low level. Everybody needs clean water, food, shelter and so on. It’s with the higher level needs that the concept breaks down, and this can be seen in the UN’s failure to deal with needs that shift across cultures, such as the need to cut children’s genitals. Despite widespread criticism and a vigorous campaign to eliminate it, the tradition of cutting girls’ genitals persists, even in first world countries. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization itself propagates a directly comparable genital mutilation of boys into societies where it has previously been unknown (and sees no ethical conflict in its initiative).
Protection of the body from physical assault rests at the second level of Maslow’s hierarchy, above physical needs and below emotional needs like love and intimacy, yet even at this low level, the vision of ‘universalism’ is coming undone.
The need for sexual self-determination might fit anywhere between the need for love and intimacy to the pinnacle of the pyramid: self actualization. These are important needs, but not fundamental, and also far less universal than those that relate to our common character as biological organisms. A warrior’s need for the excitement of battle is probably not shared by most people, and many cannot even contemplate a need for something that they themselves would experience simply as terror.
Likewise, a need for sexual excitement, a willingness to explore and experiment sexually, is not something that everybody shares. This may be due in large part to cultural attitudes, but I think it’s also related to personality. I would also say that formal acknowledgement of sexual needs is somewhat stunted due to historical reluctance to admit sexual issues to serious, formal consideration. There has been an incremental shift in this reluctance in recent years, but when high level diplomats meet, they are unlikely to prioritize discussion of their own sexual needs, and this translates inevitably into a devaluing of especially minority sexual rights in policy.
So to bring it back to your comment Tom, one of the defining characteristics of childhood is dependence: a preponderance of low level needs combined with an inability to meet them without assistance. Few children are more concerned with self actualization than they are with jelly and ice cream.
Therefore, there is a tendency to subordinate children’s emotional needs to their physical security, and an even greater tendency to downplay (belittle? ignore?) their sexual needs.
You and I both know that the roots of self actualization are in childhood, and that self expression is part of this. Children can thrive when their basic needs are met, but they can also be stunted and damaged when their emotional and personal needs are ignored.
I was a relatively uninhibited child with an active sexual curiosity. I was also sensual, empathetic and relatively naive. I loved sex play, especially with girls, more than just about anything else. Unfortunately, my interest in sex didn’t always go down well with adults and, largely due to a homophobic reaction to sex play with some boys, I suffered significant physical and emotional abuse by those adults. That experience still haunts me and it has blighted my life in many ways. So I don’t belittle or ignore children’s sexual needs or their right to sexual self determination. I recognize that self actualization is a life long project.
However, I believe the emphasis on protecting children from sexual exploitation, a response to their need for security, is due to it’s being more fundamental than their need for sexual freedom. It isn’t just about “definition and ideology” its a kind of triage.
In my case, my physical security was threatened because of a general failure by society to safeguard my sexual rights, so there is some link between the two, but I also think I had an unusually intense interest in sex. Even then, I was a minority, not a representative of the default universal category of ‘sexless child’.
I personally don’t consider the “right to protection from sexual exploitation” and the “right to sexual self-determination” as “contradictory and mutually exclusive”, in fact I see them as fundamentally the same thing, but I don’t think any amount of politicking is going to effect an inversion of Maslow’s pyramid. With an understanding of this analysis it may be possible to frame a more libertarian sexual philosophy in a way that doesn’t overtly threaten majority values, while these values may in time come to be seen as only superficially ‘universal’ and in fact oppressive. This has already happened to a limited extent with gay and lesbian rights, at least in the west.
The number one priority for most people is to keep their children safe from harm. Minority groups diverge in their higher level needs, not in these low level ones, so I think we need to be careful to acknowledge children’s need for security, not treat it as a barrier to progress.
Bloom.
This is such a substantial post in more than one sense that I would be open to re-publishing it as a guest blog, especially if you give us a bit more on Maslow’s pyramid and perhaps modify it with also with any afterthoughts or further editing. I am confident it would generate a lot of comments if given its own special showcase.
Thanks Tom, I’m flattered and I’d be happy to take you up on that offer. Unfortunately it won’t happen immediately as I am crazy busy at the moment, but you’re right I do have some afterthoughts and it would be great to have an excuse to refine what I’ve written.
My intention with the post was not to bolster arguments for or against liberalizing sexual conduct with minors. I really wanted to contextualize the controversy within the MAP community and also to shed some light on the powerful social and political pressure against such liberalizing.
My own personal position includes these differences in microcosm. I understand the desires of MAPs because I share them. That part of me would welcome greater liberty to include romance and physical intimacy in my relationships with children. It would meet a powerful, if not fundamental need of my own and it would allow my life to adopt a shape that reflected who I really am. On occasions I’ve ached for this freedom.
At the same time, I can see problems with this liberalizing agenda and I understand and somewhat agree with society’s general tendency to exclude children from adult sexual life. The key issues are the extent of a child’s need for this liberty when their sexual needs can be met through activity with peers, and also the extent to which sexual conduct with adults exposes children to unreasonable risk. Reason and intuition compel me to align with most of society in stating that children can get by without sex with adults and also that sex with adults is risky.
I’ve managed to reconcile these conflicts somewhat in my own life. I can meet many of my high level needs without bringing myself into conflict with society. However, with greater public understanding and tolerance, my life could be much more complete. I don’t need to express my feelings for children sexually, but I do need to be honest about them. It would greatly increase my happiness to be able to admit to child centred attachments and affections, without having to go through a charade where I pretend to be ‘normal’. Sympathetic parents pretend they don’t know I’m attracted to kids (even when they do) and while they make allowances for me, they still harbour anxieties about whether I’m really safe to be around their kids and what my true nature might be. I would value the liberty to just be open about all of this far more highly than any sexual liberty.
So there are contradictions and controversies in my own life. No wonder there are disagreements among people whose agendas differ widely.
>The key issues are the extent of a child’s need for this liberty when their sexual needs can be met through activity with peers
Unfortunately, this is becoming less true with every year that passes and more and more kids are branded as sex offenders, even when the kids are of exactly equal age and there is every indication of willing participation.
Unfortunately, this is becoming less true with every year that passes and more and more kids are branded as sex offenders, even when the kids are of exactly equal age and there is every indication of willing participation.
Exactly. And I would prioritize redressing of this injustice well over any bid to extend my own sexual rights.
Although, if your sexual rights were extended, this problem would have to be fixed as a necessary consequence. (ie: If sex with children is legal, children can’t be prosecuted over sex.)
Exactly. And I would prioritize redressing of this injustice well over any bid to extend my own sexual rights.
even when the kids are of exactly equal age and there is every indication of willing participation
which is why there is at least something to be said for the Scandinavian system of AoC = AoCR =15. It has it’s disadvantages, but it does mean that children <15 can get on with whatever with each other without the ridiculous prospect of legal intervention. There are ways of intervening in cases of force/bullying/coercion, but these do not involve police or the justice system. Or (heavens forbid) children getting onto sex offender registers.
It’s generally the case that a child’s sexual needs can be met through activities with peers, but not always. The researcher Pierre Tremblay has pointed out that some gay boys seek out sex with men because they are attracted only to men, not to boys their own age.
Since you’re turning this into a guest blog, I’ll save my commentary on the main post until then.
In the mean time, allow me to reply to the above.
“children can get by without sex with adults…”
What about those such as myself who find themselves in a similar position to the MAPs? ie: Being more attracted to adults than our pairs.
“…and also that sex with adults is risky.”
I think Ozy Frantz does a good job of tackling a similar problem in their most recent blog post where they talk about power dynamics in BDSM relationships. I particularly like these quotes: “It seems reasonable to me to argue that sort of relationship is harder than more conventional relationships. But I don’t think that that makes those relationships wrong.” & “[situations with power dynamics] are not all sexual, and them being sexual justifies nothing. What justifies them is that they contribute to the happiness, fulfillment, pleasure, and general flourishing of everyone involved.”
Both points are exactly what I was thinking.
At sixteen, you’d be old enough to consent in many jurisdictions, but I’m sure there are many younger people in your shoes. Charming evidence comes from the Born Gay Born This Way blog, where Javier from Andalucía says that by the age of eight, in 1987, he was filled with desire for “the real men of the street that I saw around me, such as teachers, bread vendors, or any guys over 40 with chest hair.” As he sat in the men’s locker room for hours, “If I felt any pain, it was because none of those men were into boys as young as me! That might sound crazy, but it’s true. It is a shame because I had enjoyed watching them so much.” Several commenters reply that they had the same feelings as children. One says that Javier must be sick in the head if he felt that way.
so I think we need to be careful to acknowledge children’s need for security, not treat it as a barrier to progress
Bloom, I’m with you 100% on this concluding sentence. And like you I was sexually active as a child, and at the same time withdrawn and suffering from a lack of emotional security. A scary situation when you’re a kid because you risk growing up with all sorts of hang-ups, learning to associate sex with a whole list of Very Bad Things. Children need a secure environment in which they can develop and explore their own sexuality and gender identity at their own pace and without fear or stress. A challenge for schools, for parents, and for all adults in their dealings with minors. Security is not a barrier to progress, on the contrary, security and progress must go hand in hand.
Bloom, you make a very crucial point about genital mutilation and the UN.
“The number one priority for most people is to keep their children safe from harm. Minority groups diverge in their higher level needs, not in these low level ones, so I think we need to be careful to acknowledge children’s need for security, not treat it as a barrier to progress.”
Exactly! This is precisely how I feel. I came up with a framework that I see as feasible, although societal structures would probably have to change before it it can be implemented. It could only happen in a society where the sex hysteria has died down…which it inevitably will one day.
In an enlightened society that healthily accepts and fosters child sexuality, child-adult sexual contact would only be legal under specific conditions. That’s how it would have to be and that would be the safest and best way to go about it. The age of consent without parental/guardian supervision would be 13. Anyone under that age would need parental/guardian consent before engaging in any sexual activity with an adult. The reason for this is obvious, because kids are less able to take care of themselves and are more susceptible to exploitation. It is thus very important that the child’s parents/guardians are directly involved to ensure that the experience goes as well as possible. The legal process for this would be similar to the guidelines for any other activity or pursuit that children legally partake in with adults, such as a sport or a research study. With sex, the adult friend would have to be someone who’s not in direct authority over the child and known to them for a reasonable amount of time (at least a year), would have to be checked for STD’s and would have to pass a risk assessment test proving responsibility. This would involve a consent waiver just like with anything else. In this more liberalized society, sexual encounters occurring outside of this context would be illegal, but wouldn’t carry the stigma it currently does and wouldn’t result in such harsh criminal proceedings (except with cases of clear coercion, assault, and prolonged abuse…the latter which would happen less often because kids would be allowed and encouraged to talk about sex) to avoid making the incident traumatic for the child. All illegal occurrences would be handled in a sensitive manner on a case by case basis, and the punishment for the adult would vary depending on the circumstances and the child’s feelings.
This could absolutely happen in a youth rights oriented society where children have control over their education (the education system would be rebuilt from the foundation to match democratic models) and adolescents would have the freedom to be their own legal entities.
Also, to Tom O’Carroll, I just want to say that this is a very enjoyable blog to read and you’re a brilliant person!
Good to hear from you entelechy! I like your thinking: some very sensible ideas here. And thanks, of course, for your generous words of appreciation.
Thank you, and you’re very welcome. I’ve shared my ideas in different online communities, and even with friends and family in real life. They’ve been pretty well received. This isn’t a pipe dream, don’t let anyone try to tell you it is!
I see more boys being granted freedom in that scenario!
men can be more over protective then the “moral mother”
regarding their daughters,with maybe the implicit sexual jealousy!
You may be right, but I’d say we’ve got to teach the girls not to stand for it!
I concur!
Replying to you down here since we’ve hit the reply limit up there:
I haven’t read that article, and I sure wish Paidika was still in print. I do have a few rare and precious copies of articles on female paedophilia which I picked up a few years ago when they were still online, and which you can’t find anywhere now. They are currently on a memory stick in a friend’s attic and I can’t get at them for a few months (long story) but I have them at least. The Marina Knopf study is one.
Loving Boys is available for full at Ipce, in two huge PDFs.
“The legal process for this would be similar to the guidelines for any other activity or pursuit that children legally partake in with adults, such as a sport or a research study. With sex, the adult friend would have to be someone who’s not in direct authority over the child and known to them for a reasonable amount of time (at least a year), would have to be checked for STD’s and would have to pass a risk assessment test proving responsibility.”
It’s very sensible to insist on acquaintance for at least a year. Let those passions cool down! We wouldn’t want lust or any silly romantic notions getting in the way of a responsible, considered decision. What really worries me though are those risk assessment tests. What if someone cheated in the exam? Wouldn’t it be safer to insist on children only having sex with properly qualified sex instructors with at least fifty hours certified experience of responsible sex behind them? I’m sure they could be relied on to maintain a professional detachment, so that way maybe we could dispense with the year’s waiting period? It would surely be a relief for many children who find a year a long time to wait.
“This would involve a consent waiver just like with anything else.”
Shouldn’t the child (and of course his parents) have doctorates in law (so we may be sure they understand the legal consequences), medicine (to assess the physical risks) and psychology? And obviously we would have to be sure nothing happened that went over the limits of what had been consented to. CCTV cameras with sound recording should do the trick, as long as the sex took place in approved standards of lighting and no music was allowed in the background. To be sure of all this, shouldn’t we insist on it taking place by appointment in a designated room with certified standards of safety and hygiene too? Which really ties in with my idea of them only doing it with a qualified practitioner. That’s surely what one would expect with the sports training you sensibly compare it to, isn’t it?
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
No, the child wouldn’t have to pass a test or know anything in particular beforehand. And the test would just be about how to prevent STD’s and pregnancy.
There would be no reason for the child to do that because the adult would be the experienced one held responsible for any mishaps. Children aren’t initially fully informed of the physiological risks of surfing…cuts, infections, head injuries, surfer’s ear, red eyes, skin cancer, and even death. Under the right circumstances they can participate with other children and/or a responsible adult. With the stigma removed, the only risks of child-adult sex in a communicative setting are physical pain, STI’s, and pregnancy (if the younger party is able to become pregnant or get someone pregnant – and this isn’t a concern in a same-sex matchup.) We’re looking at three risks that are very easily controlled, and especially would be in an open atmosphere where the participants wouldn’t have to sneak around. An adult can supervise and guide a child through sex safely and answer questions about it via demonstration during it without risking anyone’s life or harming the child one bit.
And I said “at least a year” because I can’t imagine most parents letting their children have any sort of sex with an adult they don’t know and trust. A year sounds like a good amount of time to know someone’s character and intentions, but maybe six months could be the limit instead.
Errm I’m not sure I like this Brave New World either… if sex is reduced to a series of bureaucratic hurdles then I vote for remaining celibate.
You’re concerned about preventing STIs, unwanted pregnancy and physical injury. So am I. But those are only risks with certain kinds of sex: mutual masturbation, for instance, is totally safe sex (except if ejaculate gets in somebody’s eye, but that’s a pretty outside chance). So I am more inclined to forbid certain sexual activities under a certain age — in Paedophilia: The Radical Case, Tom suggested no intercourse with under-twelves — but let people have the safer kinds of sex freely, whatever their age gap and length of acquaintance.
No penetration under 12…cool that was the age i had in mind,not from any real research though,just from knowing some local girls that liked to get around in my youth,and as a result a baby at 13 years old.
By the way Edmund, it’s nice to see a fellow BL on this blog, and even some other women, too. Where I usually post both are quite rare!
Other women? Are you also of the female persuasion?
Yes indeedy! Nice to meet you, A. 🙂
You too! 🙂
Christ..LOL!
It’s an invasion, mr p. Look out. 😛
Trans-female reporting in! There’s also Sophia (transgender) and Sylvie (cisgender). It’s very nice to meet you. The female population of this blog has certainly come to exceed anything I expected!
@entelechy I’m the Sophia that James mentioned 🙂 I had the same thought, “oh, hey! there are other women here!”
I’ve seen your name elsewhere, I think… perhaps on GC? I’ve stopped in to read there sometimes, and there certainly don’t seem to be many women posting…
Hey, girl. 🙂 Nice to meet you.
Yuppers, that was me you saw on GC. I’m a fairly regular poster there, despite being strictly a BL. I just like GC more than BC because it has a much friendlier atmosphere. An online friend of mine called BC the “Detroit of the CL movement.” Meaning that it’s an important place historically but not usually a nice place to be!
An evocative description indeed 🙂 GC seems to shift in waves as far as friendliness; sometimes I just stop reading for a while when it turns into arguments between a small group of posters…
“Wouldn’t it be safer to insist on children only having sex with properly qualified sex instructors”
While I’ve no objection to sex workers, how am I (or any other minor) supposed to fall in love with such a person? Prostitution has yet to replace adult romance for similar reasons.
(I’m fully aware you’re dripping with sarcasm but this actually seemed like a reasonable point worth responding to.)
I could not agree more, and I’m glad for the sake of your likely happiness that you feel that way.
I had hoped I was being tongue-in-cheek rather than dripping with sarcasm, but in any case I did have a serious point I think I should elaborate on.
The main thrust of modern argumentation in favour of allowing consensual sex between children and adults is what Tom has aptly called self-determination. I am fully in sympathy with this as I too believe passionately in individual freedom. Nevertheless, I prefer to concentrate on a different, old-fashioned argument, and entelechy’s proposals highlighted for me some unattractive features of the modern approach. I’m sure her heart is in the right place, but the general effect of discussing adult/child sex in terms of bureaucratic regulation and control is to dehumanise it and thus reduce it to something emotionally unimportant that can only be justified as harmless recreation. This at least is the vision she conjured up for me. It may be that the day will return when freedom is the main rallying-call of humanity rather than safety and equality, but I’m afraid I doubt it, and if it doesn’t return, people will never take the risk of agreeing to adult sex for their children unless they see it as fulfilling a strong need that cannot be better met another way.
Instead of arguing for mere toleration on the grounds of doing no harm, what I prefer to argue is that pederasty (I don’t know enough about girllove to speak for it) should be welcomed for the enormous beneficial effects it has had when properly conducted. However hopeless, my quest is to open hearts and minds to this idea, and it very much requires reminding people that pederasty is not simply about bodily acts, but is an extremely powerful means for bonding between men and boys of an age naturally drawn towards men whom they can hero-worship and emulate. Understanding of the potential educational and intellectual benefits to the boy of this could, I suggest, be much more persuasive than pleas for child sexual liberation.
This bonding could of course be effective between adults and pubescents of either sex, but I believe it is more likely to be intense and strongly effective when it is homosexual, because of the emulative principle. As regards men and boys, it has been amply demonstrated in societies where pederasty has been institutionalised. As far as I know, woman/girl relationships have never been institutionalised, but that is because in the traditional societies where pederasty has flourished, the role of girls has been domestic and so they have not needed any induction into adult life they could not get from their mothers. I would love to know whether anyone thinks it could in theory flourish the way pederasty once did, in a society where girls were also aiming at public life. A.’s views would be particularly fascinating here, though I know she is not sympathetic to the gender-differentiation that is so conducive to these forms of love.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
I’m not one hundred percent against such gender differentiation. I do think that same-sex mentoring, and perhaps especially that of boys by men, has a special importance and a unique role. I just think we shouldn’t ignore — but it seems you aren’t ignoring it — that cross-sex mentoring can be valuable too. For instance, in Terry Leahy’s 1991 book Negotiating Stigma: New Approaches to Intergenerational Sex (https://www.ipce.info/booksreborn/NegotiatingStigma.pdf) one woman describes “a very important intellectual relationship” she had with her uncle, then in his early 20s, when she was 10-12. The relationship eventually became sexual — kisses, touching, masturbation — and her uncle never pushed things farther than she wanted them to go, but one gets the impression that more important to her were the long conversations the two had about life and politics as they lay in bed together.
I do think that woman-girl relationships would flourish under the conditions that you’re describing. It might not be to the same extent as man-boy relationships, since women are considerably less inclined than men to be sexually attracted to pubertal kids. On the other hand, it’s well known that adolescent girls have a particular penchant for falling in love with their teachers, male or female. The loves of girls and women in same-sex boarding schools of a century ago are documented by Martha Vicinus in Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928. One magnetic girls’-school mentor figure was Marie Souvestre (1830-1905): her aim as a teacher was precisely to prepare girls for public life, and she had a profound effect on her young charges, who included Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Strachey, later friend and translator to Gide. Strachey’s novel Olivia is a lightly fictionalised account of her schooldays and the passion she felt, aged sixteen, for Mlle Souvestre.
The 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform, based on Christa Winsloe’s novel Das Kind Manuela and her play Gestern und Heute, depicts the love between a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and her Scripture teacher. It’s one of the best cinematic representations of female adolescence and perhaps the best cinematic representation of pedagogical eros. (On YouTube with English subs!) It was a smash hit among Weimar lesbians, and in the US Eleanor Roosevelt defended it from the censors, probably recognising from memories of her own schooldays its importance and realism.
Thank you very much for this extremely informative reply. I was evidently right in thinking you would be the best person to enlighten me.
A reason I have been wondering about woman/girl relationships is that I’ve been searching in the news for real stories similar to one I’ve made the subject of a novel. The one I was able to find that actually seemed closest in spirit was a lesbian one between a girl of 15 and a beautiful young teacher, though one has no choice but to imagine much of it between the sparse and hostile lines of The Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1215023/School-teacher-Helen-Goddard-jailed-15-months-lesbian-affair-teenage-pupil.html
What a shame that more women are not drawn towards pubescents of either sex. Evidently they are badly needed.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
Thank you!
Have you read this? https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/heidi.htm
I hadn’t, but I have now! Many thanks. To seek just a little further clarification though, I have never doubted the ability of the typical pubescent girl to satisfy deep emotional needs through intense friendship with a young woman. I’ve heard plenty of first and second-hand evidence. What is seriously in doubt for me, a doubt you have reinforced, is how commonly women might be able to reciprocate this under even the most favourable cultural conditions.
I believe the evidence that under the cultural conditions presented by societies such as ancient Greece most boys and men could find genuine if temporary emotional fulfillment with one another. Can you imagine this possible for women and girls in general? Or is it inconceivable that even under the most favourable cultural conditions most women could find an equivalent fulfillment? Would you dismiss what James has postulated about woman/girl love in Sparta as an impossible myth or accept it as something that could theoretically be emulated by other societies? Please forgive me if I am pushing too hard for clarification of the unknowable.
OkCupid’s statistics blog OkTrends indicates that while (heterosexual) men tend to have peak AoAs (typically late teens and early twenties), most (heterosexual) women have AoAs that track their own age. ie: As they age, the men that they are attracted to are progressively older (always around their own age). This lack of fixation may explain why there appear to be fewer female MAPs. Preferential minor attraction may be a result of the fixation point being at an earlier age than usual, but most women don’t seem to have fixation points so that wouldn’t happen to them.
Female sexuality tends, *on average*, to be rather more flexible and less ‘category-specific’ than male sexuality (James has pointed out one of the ways in which this is the case), so while women are much less likely than men to be attracted to children as children, my best guess is that many women are capable, given the right circumstances, of falling in love with a particular child: witness the category one women in Martha Knopf’s paper, which I referenced below. The companion piece to the Heidi interview I linked to is an interview with a lesbian in her thirties who’d never even noticed young girls until a thirteen-year-old kissed her, whereupon she fell in love and they had an intense eighteen-month relationship. The woman here http://www.just-well.dk/CrimeWithoutVictims/lotte.html was involved with a male and a female teacher when she was a little girl of ten and eleven. She says that she thinks the man was sexually attracted to little girls in particular, but she doesn’t think the woman was, and yet the woman fell in love with her.
Marina Knopf, damn it all, and Martha Vicinus.
Coming back with some more thoughts, as usual!
Also in the Leahy book, another woman recalls that when she was 12 she had a romantic relationship with a man in his mid-20s, and that he and his friends encouraged her to see herself as capable of going to university. This, she says, had a big positive impact on her life.
In the early 90s, the Guardian ran a piece called To Miss with Love: Four Lesbians Recall their own Schoolgirl Loves. One of the women recounted that having suffered through an unrequited passion for one of her female teachers, she began getting close to another female member of staff: her French teacher. When the teacher’s husband went back to France, the two started a sexual relationship. The pupil was 15, the teacher was 25, and everything was fine until one day the girl’s mother walked in on them. Her father told her that she had to change or get out of the house, because he didn’t want her turning her little brother gay. “I knew I couldn’t change”, she says “so I went and lived with my teacher.” That used to be a not uncommon experience for gay and lesbian people to have, but with the increased acceptance of homosexuality it is becoming more uncommon. Many gay men would say that, for instance, the boys in this article http://www.salon.com/2002/07/22/coming_of_age/ did the best they could with what they had, but that they sought out older men because that was the only way they could get to know other gay people at all. These days, I’ve heard it argued, young gay boys are much better off for being able to find a nice boy their own age at gay youth group, where older gay men are also around to mentor them in an entirely hands-off way.
But these objections are not fatal to an argument for the beneficial nature of some intergenerational relationships. As I mentioned somewhere else in this thread, some children, including many young gay boys, are attracted specifically to adults from a very early age. And there can be unique benefits to an age-gap relationship whatever the sexes or sexual orientations of the participants. The woman in the first Leahy example I mentioned, the one who had a relationship with her uncle, described the benefits in her case thus:
“It was so caring and considerate…which most adult sexual relations aren’t because…supposedly there’s more of an equal power base…I’ve never found that sort of catering for again but I treasure having been, not nurtured, but having been cared for that much and eased into it slowly and all those sorts of things. …The experiences…were really important in terms of the development of my sexuality, like in terms of educating me basically.”
Thank you for so much fascinating food for thought.
I did not mean to suggest there could not be a strong element of useful mentorship in heterosexual relationships between pubescents and adults, merely that it is not generally an intrinsic feature of them, and I am questioning whether it is necessarily tied to the pubescent’s stage of development, as I think it tends to be in homosexual ones. From what I have witnessed there is often also an element of mentorship in the more intense love affairs of women in their twenties with much older men. The other side of the coin from this is that heterosexual love affairs involving pubescents are often barely distinguishable in character from adult/adult ones except in the simple fact of the younger participant’s age. Perhaps the globally best-known woman/boy love affair in our era is that of Mary Letourneau, who has been married for the last nine years with children to Vili Fualaau, the boy she was first convicted of loving when he was 12. Probably the best-known man/girl case in recent years was that of 30-year-old teacher Jeremy Forrest and a 15-year-old who-must-not-be-named. They too proclaimed their intention to marry and their story spurned hundreds of other ones of women still happily married after a generation to teachers who had loved them in their mid-teens. I wonder how distinguishable these affairs are from adult/adult ones apart from the stupid fuss that the state now makes about age.
With man/boy relationships, on the other hand, I think there is generally an implied understanding that mentorship based on the boy’s pubescence is close to being its raison d’etre. The boy usually not being gay goes hand in hand with the man not usually being attracted to men to foster a love consciously based on their different stages of development. The fact that both know they are limited in time tends, I suggest, to heighten that consciousness and lend their time together a special intensity which makes up for its comparative brevity.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
I’m inclined to agree with what you say here. I must say that I suspect that many of the female teachers who have been involved with young adolescent boys are not *preferentially* attracted to kids (and that the same may be the case of some male teachers involved with young adolescent girls) and that this may have a lot to do with why these relationships tend to play out much like any other heterosexual romance. In her paper Sexual Contacts Between Women and Children: Reflections on an Unrealisable Research Project, Marina Knopf writes that her small group of subjects fell naturally into two categories. Category one women were mostly attracted to men but each had had one relationship with a boy of twelve or thirteen which came about largely as a result of circumstance: they were lonely, the boy liked them, they thought him mature for his age, etc. Category two women were attracted to children as children: one, for instance, was a twenty-three-year-old paediatric nurse who was exclusively attracted to prepubertal boys, liking their innocence and their hairless bodies. She had had sexual contact with boys as young as six, and her then-current young friend was a thirteen-year-old whom she’d met three years before at a nudist camp. I would guess that that relationship was likely to have, at least on her part, much of the intensity born of transience that you describe.
Hang on, no, the young nurse said she liked little boys’ unaffectedness, not innocence. A big difference: ‘unaffectedness’ is realistic, but ‘innocence’ is not!
PPS: Of course I know that most boys in relationships with men will grow up heterosexual, it’s just that in my experience, gay people are a bit more likely to be relaxed about intergenerational sex and to be willing to talk about it and possibly turn a blind eye to it.
A French BL once said to me that the two extremes of approaches to man-boy love were epitomised in two books: Roger Peyrefitte’s memoir Notre amour, in which the boy is in puberty and calls Peyrefitte ‘vous’ throughout and both model themselves on the ancient Greeks, and Tony Duvert’s novel Quand mourut Jonathan, in which the boy is well short of puberty and he and his lover practise a kind of radical egalitarianism, indeed the boy is in charge much of the time, including during sex.
I agree with so much of what you’ve said in these three very well-written posts.
An inter-generational pairing can be a heterosexual one, a homosexual one, or an apprentice-love type same-sex one. People of all ages can enjoy the company and companionship of other people of all ages, and sometimes sex isn’t about lust but is simply a more physical way of showing affection or gratitude toward someone you care for. There’s nothing wrong with it in any case as long as neither party feels coerced.
And I agree with this post! 🙂
“men whom they can hero-worship and emulate. Understanding of the potential educational and intellectual benefits to the boy”
Not sure if it’s just my personality or if lesbianism is somehow different, but I don’t see much to that, personally. I’d much rather an egalitarian relationship. Of course, if other people want this, more power to them.
“As far as I know, woman/girl relationships have never been institutionalised”
Ozy Frantz claims that woman/girl pederasty was somewhat institutionalised in classical Sparta, though I haven’t investigated it personally. However, since their Special Interests revolve around gender, sex, and Graeco-Roman culture, I’m inclined to believe they know what their talking about. Of course, even if this is accurate, I’d expect the evidence to be somewhat thin on the ground since the affairs of womenfolk were less important to those writing the records.
I figure there must be as many possible interpersonal dynamics in an intergenerational relationship as in any other kind. The hero-worship model is surely just one way of doing things, albeit quite a perennial and enduring one.
You also hear things about the circle of young pupils who surrounded Sappho, but they could be entirely made up. Edmund would know better than I do if they are correct.
I did think of raising the Spartan case as the solitary example known to me, but decided not to just because, as you say, so little is known about it. It seems to be generally supposed the reason why this happened in Sparta and not other Greek states is that Spartan women did not marry until their twenties, while other Greek girls married at around 15, the same age at which their brothers were having older lovers. So Spartan girls and young women lived in what would have been a romantic vacuum if they did not love one another, and this may have continued to some extent after marriage, since young, married Spartan men were obliged to live in barracks rather than with their wives. Anyway, it was partly considering these difference between Sparta and other Greek states that made me wonder whether a female equivalent of pederasty would flourish in any sexually-segregated society where adolescent girls remained unmarried and were allowed a life outside the home.
Edmund, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
On what basis have you chosen 13 in particular?
“It is thus very important that the child’s parents/guardians are directly involved to ensure that the experience goes as well as possible.”
I’ve gotten the impression that many, if not most, children who enter sexual relationships with unrelated adults have difficult home-lives. While these demographics may change in the future, if they do not, I have to wonder: how much help would these parents really be?
“known to them for a reasonable amount of time (at least a year), would have to be checked for STD’s and would have to pass a risk assessment test proving responsibility.”
While I don’t object too strenuously to these restrictions, I must point out that they seem to be far more serious than those imposed on other relationships. (ie: None.) Particularly the length of time they’d have to know each other. Pining after each other for a whole year? I’d go insane within a month!
“children have control over their education (the education system would be rebuilt from the foundation to match democratic models)”
*moan* Oh, yes! Tell me more!
(Seriously though, if Tom doesn’t mind the interruption, I’d like to know more about how you’d go about this.)
“adolescents would have the freedom to be their own legal entities.
Much as I’m flattered to be included among legal persons, I have to ask: why start at adolescence? If corporations get to be people, why not pre-teens?
PS: You might be interested in examining the proposals PIE put forward for AoC reform. I’m sure Tom can link you to it.
>the proposals PIE put forward for AoC reform. I’m sure Tom can link you to it.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44284820/PIE%20-%20Evidence%20to%20Home%20Office%20Criminal%20Law%20Revision%20Committee.docx
“On what basis have you chosen 13 in particular?”
Hello there! I based this particular age off of research found in David Moshman’s book Adolescent Rationality and Development: Cognition, Morality, and Identity (which is a very interesting read.) Moshman concluded with a lot of thoroughly analyzed data that “there is enormous cognitive variability among individuals beyond age 12, and it appears that age accounts for surprisingly little of the variance.” Adolescence in reality is the first phase of adulthood, although it typically isn’t recognized as such by our society at the present time.
“I’ve gotten the impression that many, if not most, children who enter sexual relationships with unrelated adults have difficult home-lives. While these demographics may change in the future, if they do not, I have to wonder: how much help would these parents really be?”
This is a very valid observation and something you now have me thinking about, too.
“While I don’t object too strenuously to these restrictions, I must point out that they seem to be far more serious than those imposed on other relationships. (ie: None.) Particularly the length of time they’d have to know each other. Pining after each other for a whole year? I’d go insane within a month!”
They’re safeguards that wouldn’t hurt to have in place due to the more vulnerable nature of children, particularly young prepubescent children. Maybe six months would be a better length of time to suit your fancy?
“*moan* Oh, yes! Tell me more!
(Seriously though, if Tom doesn’t mind the interruption, I’d like to know more about how you’d go about this.)”
I don’t know exactly, there would need to be some sort of education revolution.
“Much as I’m flattered to be included among legal persons, I have to ask: why start at adolescence? If corporations get to be people, why not pre-teens?”
Adolescence is technically 11 and over, so you have a point.
“PS: You might be interested in examining the proposals PIE put forward for AoC reform. I’m sure Tom can link you to it.”
Reading it now!
“David Moshman’s book Adolescent Rationality and Development: Cognition, Morality, and Identity”
Yet another book I need to read! The list grows unwieldy! However, Linca will kill me if I don’t get through War, Peace and Human Nature first.
“This is a very valid observation and something you now have me thinking about, too.”
Make sure to tell me what you think of 🙂
“Maybe six months would be a better length of time to suit your fancy?”
Better, I guess… *grumble* *grumble*
“I don’t know exactly, there would need to be some sort of education revolution.”
*sigh* My time observing the RadLeft from the outside has left me quite accustomed flowcharts pointing to a better future where the most important node has a label like “Proletarian Revolution” or “Radical Consciousness” or “The Destruction of Capitalism”, with no one stepping up to flesh out these points.
(You might be interested in the discussion we had before about revolutions. Just search the comments for “incremental” and “revolution”.)
Heya James!
I’m looking for that other discussion now. 🙂
Great 🙂
Since Tom is pressed for moderation and this is a bit off-topic from the blog post, would you mind continuing the discussion via email? I’m jasminerk@hushmail.com (Jasmine R. K.)
The only really useful book on democratisation of the education system that I have so far read is Les écoles sauvages, by Luc Bernard, published in 1976. Rather than theorising, Bernard went out and observed the ‘free schools’ of the 70s and wrote about what he saw.
The primary schools tended not to work out all that well. To everyone’s dismay, the bigger, stronger, tougher kids threw their weight about with the little ones. That wasn’t supposed to happen! The schools were mostly staffed by parents, partly for lack of anybody else to do it, and in spite of their best efforts the parents tended to favour their own kids and vice versa. That wasn’t supposed to happen either! And the parents quite quickly realised that they had to institute a couple of hours of compulsory lessons a day, otherwise nobody would learn a thing. Still, those schools may well have been better places, at least for some kids, than the state-run primary schools of the day, which in France were extremely rigid pedagogically.
The secondary schools were a mixed bag. Definitely the most successful academics-wise was a small boarding school for middle-grade (about 11-14 years) boys who’d had difficulty in the regular system. It was run almost single-handedly by one very dedicated man (a BL?) and his system was quite traditional, very similar to that of the state schools of the day, but with a few democratising touches such as having the boys write up reports on their own progress. Another catered mainly for older teenagers and had more of the trappings of a free school, such as democratic community meetings. One boy was mainly playing guitar and kicking his heels while he waited to figure out what he wanted to do. Many people go through that stage, and it’s as well to do it in a friendly, supportive atmosphere. A couple of other kids had floundered in mainstream schooling and now had very specific goals, such as passing the maths bac (end of high school, age 17-18) exam, and were being helped with that in a more concentrated, one-on-one way than would have been possible in a regular school. And then there was a school that consisted of three boys, a girl and a man on a boat travelling round much of the world. Despite gestures in the direction of book-learning, none of the kids seemed to be doing much academic work, but surely that could wait for a while. It’s not every day you get to take a boat trip to all those different ports. How’s that for a ‘learning experience’?
Alas, the book has never been translated.
Hey, A! 🙂
Interesting information…I know that some of the free schools in the 70s were a little too radical and didn’t achieve the best results. But you need to read about other democratic school models like Sudbury. It’s pretty radical and 90% of graduates end up going to college. That’s better than the national average of 66% (from the same income bracket). Children and adults make joint decisions about everything from hiring staff to spending the budget to creating behavioral rules. Age segregation is non-existent and children are free to interact with, and learn from, others of all ages. A number of adults are present as potential role models and helpers but the children are not forced into arbitrary relationships with them.
I don’t think the 90% acceptance rate can really be attributed to the structure of the school, per se. There is a selection effect: the kids who end up in a Sudbury school are disproportionately likely to be the children of critical-thinking, non-conformer types. Personality is largely hereditary so those kids should be more likely than average to be quite smart. College-eligible level of smart, that is.
Thank you for the wonderful post, Bloom.
One could make a case that the strict policing of even the most chaste child-adult social contacts is depriving many paedophiles of love and intimacy, and also potentially some children: those whose need for love and intimacy is not being met by their parents or guardians.
Thanks. It’s great to have such an appreciative response!
A: the strict policing of even the most chaste child-adult social contacts is depriving many paedophiles of love and intimacy, and also potentially some children: those whose need for love and intimacy is not being met by their parents or guardians.
Depriving paedophiles, yes, but children?
Paedophile panic is certainly robbing children of emotionally and personally enriching experiences with adults. See for example “Touchy Subject: Teachers Touching Children” edited by Alison Jones [http://www.amazon.com/Touchy-Subject-Teachers-Touching-Children/dp/1877276022]. A number of other books and many articles have addressed this topic, but most see the problem as one of misidentification: children are deprived of contact with decent, normal men in an effort to protect them from genuinely dangerous ‘paedophiles’.
However, I have also seen the argument made from a muggle perspective that children can actually benefit from the interest of paedophiles themselves. One article by a social worker in Montreal states quite openly that, underage sex notwithstanding, many street kids are better off fed and housed by a ‘sugar daddy’ than sleeping rough and eating out of bins. He also states that these relationships are not necessarily without affection or love, and that the adult’s involvement can be committed, extensive and can provide valuable emotional support as well as ensuring the children are properly clothed and go to school. I’m sorry I don’t have the reference for this on hand (I’d like to organize my sources but it’s not going to happen anytime soon).
A comparable argument I’ve seen made, independently of any ‘paedophile agenda’, involves child models in the Ukraine and elsewhere posing for photosets involving varying degrees of nudity and sometimes more overtly pornographic (but not abusive) performances. These children might be the only breadwinners in otherwise hard pressed families and may enjoy their work, but no consideration is given to this by Western morals campaigners.
These are substantially economic arguments though, so I’ll mention my personal experience to provide another view.
First, I think that if a child is well cared for and loved by one or two parents, she can still benefit greatly from relationships with other adults, and many muggles would agree with this as well. In my life I’ve had many occasions to dwell on this question: am I just a spare wheel in a child’s life, or does my engagement really matter? On one hand, I’ve had a mother say to me in the context of my friendship with her daughter, and knowing about my paedophilia, that she doesn’t want her daughter put on a pedestal and treated like a princess. On the other hand, an adult female friend once said that a little girl friend I spent a great deal of time with would grow up feeling comfortable around men and wouldn’t let them mistreat her. She said I had provided her with a model of how good men behave and what she should expect of them.
This second observation wasn’t just flattering, it made me aware of something that has become very important to me in my friendships with girls. I see so many young women treated like crap by young men who think they’re god’s gift that I pride myself in setting an example for little girls by which they can measure their future partners. I don’t put little girls on pedestals, as the mother feared, but I do cherish them and treat them with enormous respect. I don’t see how this can be harmful. I’d make so bold as to say it’s something not all parents can provide, especially if they’re mother and daughter, who tend to be competitive. Little girls long for a knight in shining armour and, much as this might make feminists wince, I think it reflects a human need that transcends gender politics. My little girl friends have all been bright, bold, intelligent and creative and I’ve always encouraged them to reach for the moon.
Bloom
You do sound like a very positive influence, especially given what your adult female friend said. It warms my heart to read what you write about your little girl friends.
I think that the obvious objection to the situations you bring up — kids on the street, kids who are the main family breadwinner — and to the situation I brought up upthread — gay kids completely isolated and unaccepted — is that while yes, the paedophile may be the least bad option there, ideally kids would not be in those situations in the first place, and we should be working to ameliorate that, rather than proposing paedophiles as the solution. I don’t think anyone here would disagree. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and can a paedophile really be blamed for being a caring least bad option? I would wager that most are trying to help more than they are trying to take advantage of other people’s suffering, though these things do get murky — would those little boys in the Maghreb or the Philippines really sleep with you if they didn’t need the money, and how much does it matter, and how valid can consent be in such a situation? No easy answers.
In many paedophile relationships, though, the gap being filled is surely smaller, less serious. It might still be something we’d want to fix, e.g. the child really is not getting enough love and attention at home, or it might be something ordinary that is part of all human relationships, e.g. the child is feeling misunderstood by their parents, or they share a particular interest with ‘their’ paedophile, or they like going somewhere where they get special treats and trips and can eat breakfast in bed and make as much noise as they want. Or it might just be a case of two people meeting and hitting it off. Sandfort’s Boys on their Contacts with Men shows us how easily and naturally and in how many different ways adults and children can strike up friendships when the children have relative freedom to go around by themselves. Some of the boys in the study rated their adult friend as the most important person in their life, but most rated their parents as more important. That doesn’t mean, however, that their adult friend was not important also.
As usual, I take the economist approach to the matter: If they’re choosing to have sex for money, that’s because it’s their preferred option. One helps by giving new, better options; not by removing (less) bad options. If after giving the new options, they still prefer what they had, they must just have different values. Live and let live. Liberty above all.
I’m inclined to agree with you that we should provide something better for people to choose, rather than taking away a less-bad option because it’s not unbad enough.
Oh yeah, and thanks for the book rec!
… Btw, I’ve made these comments as a girl lover, but I think the gender specific elements have analogues in relationships between men and boys that are just as valid.
As an aside, I think the comparability of female and male circumcision depends on the type of female circumcision we’re talking about. The mildest type, in which the clitoral hood is removed, is the equivalent of male circumcision (and the thought just made me yelp and clutch my groin, so understand that I’m taking this seriously). The most extreme type is the equivalent of chopping off the entire glans penis and then stitching up the wound so that it heals mostly closed, and doing so in such a way that first-time intercourse causes major pain and bleeding. That being said, I do agree that male circumcision is a serious issue and is not given the consideration it deserves. I have heard horror stories of US paediatricians being so ignorant of how an uncircumcised penis develops that they try to forcibly retract toddlers’ foreskins, which can of course cause tears and scarring, which can cause phimosis, which can necessitate circumcision! I also have a pet theory that some of the rather ugly and violent words used to describe intercourse — pound, bang, drill, smash — may have less to do with The Patriarchy than with the fact that most US males are circumcised and thus are more likely to have to jackhammer during intercourse in order to get enough sensation.
Then there is the question of the genital mutilations some first-world women inflict on themselves, notably having bits of their inner labia cut off. While we all have the right to do what we like to our own bodies, I feel sure there would be fewer labiaplasties if there were more open discussions and more honest depictions of sex and bodies. As it is, kids are left to figure things out from airbrushed porn. Someone once said that trying to learn how to have sex by watching (mainstream) porn is like trying to learn how to drive by watching Vin Diesel movies. And it is not only adults who have their genitals carved up over here: if you born with an external clitoris someone considers too large, they may chop bits out of the middle of it, then sew it back together and hope for the best, as explained in the bioethicist Alice Dreger’s post on the subject: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fetishes-i-dont-get/201006/can-you-hear-us-now . And *that* brings up the question of intersex children’s, and by extension all children’s, right to bodily autonomy, as discussed in this article by Dreger: http://www.isna.org/articles/ambivalent_medicine .
I recently read Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl. It’s a childhood memoir, as told to Virginia Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy. Aman begins by explaining her family background. Where she grew up, she says, multiple divorces and remarriages are very common, and women are often de facto heads of households. Then Aman tells her story. By eight, she was working. She went to school for a few years and liked it, but also tended to get into playground fights. At nine, she agreed to a circumcision of the most extreme type. She explains that the men and women she knows prefer circumcised and infibulated vulvas because they are ‘clean’, small, hard, closed and dry. She adds, however, that recently — and the book was published twenty years ago — a few parents have been requesting symbolic circumcisions for their daughters: the clitoral hood is merely pricked with a pin so that a symbolic drop of blood is drawn.
Shortly after Aman’s circumcision, the husband of the woman she worked for started to touch her sexually. She didn’t like this, but was too ashamed to tell anyone. At eleven or twelve, she fell in love at first sight with a boy of fifteen or sixteen and they had an intense romance which sexually went no further than kissing and hand-holding — but he was white, which brought the wrath of their respective communities down on their heads. At thirteen and a half Aman had her first period, and a few months later she agreed to marry a much older man. Everyone told him how lucky he was to have such a young and pretty bride, but she quickly regretted her decision and ran away. At fourteen she was living high on the hog in Mogadishu, partying nightly with new friends. Another much older man fell in love with her, had a sexual relationship with her and set her up in an apartment of her own. He intended to marry her, but she wasn’t attracted to him, because he was too old. Instead, she fell in love, again at first sight, with a man of twenty-eight, and they had a sexual relationship which, when her sugar daddy discovered it, got her kicked out of the apartment. She explains that in order to attract her, men had to be handsome and at least five years older, but not too old. Not long after that, she had a fling with another young man, ended when he had to leave the country, and not long after that she was forcibly raped by a youth several years older than her who’d always been nice to her and whom she considered a friend. The men she’d had sex with before had orgasmed from rubbing their penises against her vulva, because attempts at entry hurt too much, but this one pushed his penis into her vagina, tearing open her infibulation and causing her to feel excruciating pain, bleed copiously and pass out. When she came round, she was deeply ashamed, feeling she’d lost the most valuable thing about her: her ‘virginity’. However, at seventeen she was back on her feet, remarried and with an infant son. She matter-of-factly explains that she was still young and wanted to go out and have fun, so most of the time she left her baby in the care of her mother, his grandmother — which is certainly a common practice in many cultures, and some have theorised that it’s what post-menopausal women are ‘for’, evolutionarily speaking. Anyway, I do recommend the book, among other things for its look at intergenerational sex in a very different culture.
Having skimmed through the replies, I found some points to make. I don’t want to reply in the bowels of one-word-per-line indentation, so I’ll gather a few comments here.
1. Like Nick, I think the documentary will likely be more effective without Tom’s contribution, though I am also sympathetic to the disappointment of putting out a lot of effort repeatedly to have it ignored.
2. Over on GirlChat, Dante posted something about strategy and activism. I thought I had a pretty good reply to it (my top-level reply):
http://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/606006.htm
3. “What is sex?” Sex is behavior perceived to be sexual by both participants (the child’s perception including reviewing the activity later and reinterpreting based on greater knowledge). It is partly relative to culture.
4. It’s one thing to argue that the world is immutable. This has been unfairly tagged onto me. I am well aware that the world changes. One possibility people don’t discuss so much is the possibility that things will get much, much worse in a hurry. Repressive government, perhaps triggered by economic distress.
In general, I think revolutions are a bad thing, not a good thing. The French Revolution was a very bloody affair. Somehow Britain ended up with a democracy by way of incremental change, right? And in a more steady path than the chaos of Napoleon and successors. (They stabilized on the 5th Republic, was it?) As did we Americans (the revolutionary war being far from revolutionary). Long-term, profound change, by a series of incremental steps.
The Russian February revolution was a good thing, but the October revolution was a disaster.
American hawks used to argue that we ought to have it out with the USSR, with nukes if necessary because we’d have to fight them some day. Well, we didn’t. The Berlin wall came down and the USSR disappeared by incremental, moderate peaceful change.
Violent revolution is a huge gamble. Things can get worse at least as often as they can get better. And the better a society is, the greater the chance that something worse will show up (kind of like regression towards the mean). That’s why I can’t figure out what I think of the Chinese Communist revolution, because the society out of which it emerged was so awful to begin with.
5. The VP position “cements intolerance and non-acceptance of sexual self-determination permanently in place and depends upon brainwashing and coercing MAPs into submission.”
You cannot negotiate away thoughts and inclinations. As if part of the deal were brain surgery so that pedophiles wouldn’t hunger for sexual contact with children — or that it won’t arise anew in unborn generations of pedophiles the way sexual interest always does. There is no Pedophile Brotherhood, let alone one which can enforce discipline on it members. So what is “coercing MAPs into submission”? I believe the sexual activity we dream of is already illegal and severely punished, so you can’t be talking about behavior.
I view it kind of like a game of survivor, where pro-contact and anti-contact pedophiles can form an informal alliance to work for the goals they agree on. Once those are achieved, then the pro-contact and anti-contact positions can duke it out in a society where pedophiles are considered people instead of monsters. I’m happy to have pro-contact people as allies because I’m confident you’ll lose. You could be happy with us because of your confidence that we’ll lose instead. But that struggle won’t be biased by any sort of enforceable grand bargain. It’s not like you ceded a province of real estate which would then be controlled by us.
Needless to say, there’s a whole lot I disagree with here but I’ll leave it to others to do the analytical heavy lifting.
I will confine myself to just one point. Ethan says “Somehow Britain ended up with a democracy by way of incremental change, right?”
Well, yes and no. Change was incremental after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights the following year. The Glorious Revolution was glorious for being relatively bloodless, but that was in comparison to the immensely bloody civil war and revolution of a few decades earlier. That revolution was reversed in 1660, but the fact that it had happened established the necessary preconditions for more incremental progress later on: monarchs, and the ruling classes, tended to make concessions in later times for fear of unleashing another bloody revolution.
With the French Revolution a century later the powers that be in Britain had a powerful reminder of what happens to the tree that fails to bend in the face of a hurricane. It was largely fear of a French-style revolution that led to the great parliamentary Reform Act of 1832, a major milestone along the way to a universal adult franchise.
So, in the context of this particular discussion, I’d say Ethan is completely wrong.
A positive feature, though, is that Ethan has at least ventured into the world of evidence, rather than his usual stock in trade of reasoning detached from reality, leading to baseless speculation and assertion.
I’ll leave it to others to do the analytical heavy lifting.”
Don’t look at me! I’m mostly responding to his historical points 😛
“monarchs, and the ruling classes, tended to make concessions in later times for fear of unleashing another bloody revolution.”
Precisely. I think that if the Imperial reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1905 had been more progressive, the massive bloodshed of the October Revolution and the deprivation of War Communism could have been avoided. However, by February 1917, the die was cast. Caesar was over the Rubicon and there were Bolsheviks at the gates.
“It was largely fear of a French-style revolution that led to the great parliamentary Reform Act of 1832”
Another good point. To spur people into action, point at scary revolutions abroad.
“his usual stock in trade of reasoning detached from reality, leading to baseless speculation and assertion”
So basically what you’re saying is that Ethan is a continental philosopher?
You beat me to it, Tom.
I think I have to quibble ethane over the English revolution. It ultimately took a massively violent and blood-soaked revolution to overthrow the thoroughly evil tyranny of monarchical absolutism in seventeenth century Britain: Civil War is nearly always the attempt by a privileged elite to prevent radical change instigated by those they have been subjugating. Huge swathes of the English population were decimated in this war, most of them combative dissidents who willingly gave their lives to overthrow a despotic regime.
I must also beg to differ about the October Revolution. For a few precious years, Russia became easily the most democratic state in Europe after the early Bolshevik ascendancy. A devastating civil war, Lenin’s death and the rise of the monstrosity we now call Stalinism buried it. But that radical moment, charged with possibility and novelty, persists (just think of Egypt): when old, apparently unassailable regimes crumble, tyranny may ensue, but so may massive new emancipations and liberties. Lenin’s revolution was immediately subject to MASSIVE counter-revolutionary attack, bankrolled by the “free” West, which had fully supported Tsarist despotism and now supported a ruinous civil war that raged between 1918 and 1921 and destroyed many of the militant, libertarian proletarians who had toppled the tyrant who ruled over them. The path to Stalinist horror had been paved.
With that said, I firmly believe that incremental reformists and revolutionary radicals should collaborate on reform wherever possible. And I fully agree, as a seasoned old Marxist, that in times of economic crisis such as ours, things can rapidly become very much worse (Hitler’s genocidal regime comes readily to mind).
I would counter your view that violent revolution can produce nightmares at least as often as they produce improvements with this observation: in the UK, the Labour Party, which was borne of the struggle to introduce incremental, humane reform, became (when in Government) one of the most viciously persecutory, paedo-scapegoating political forces we have ever seen. It not only caved in to but eagerly embraced the thoroughly reactionary ideology of an unappeasable (and unelected) child protection Taliban, and we now have paedo-hatred and paedo-fear as the default positions of incremental, enlightened reform: all reform within the incrementalist world-view seems worryingly deferential to these pillars of hate-fuelled hysteria and dehumanisation.
Whether you’re an incrementalist or a revolutionary, the key I think is this: opposing the lies of the established ideology without compromising on truth. Truth, as Freud knew well, has to be repressed to ensure the smooth functioning of any oppressively dominant ideological regime (which he called “Ego”). But it will always return as a baffling symptom, such as the establishment obsession that children are being sexually endangered at a time when they have never been so “safe”, so subject to obsessive surveillance and panicky intrusion when their behaviour fails to conform to the ideal (and therefore the fiction) of sexless childhood. Violent prohibition always incites and multiplies the transgressive fantasies it supposedly seeks to eradicate (whatever you do when you read the following six words, don’t think of a pink elephant).
In short, it seems to me that an ‘increment’ of reform that agrees to remain under subjection to a regime that pre-emptively defines spontaneous expressions of child sexuality as inadmissible evidence is of questionable value.
You wrote: ” For a few precious years, Russia became easily the most democratic state in Europe after the early Bolshevik ascendancy.” Interested in your take on this. You are a better historian than I am. What is a good thing to read of only moderate length on this period of Russian history?
Don’t know about “moderate length” but Ten Days That Shook The World is excellent and freely available at the Marxist internet archive. I will not comment on whether the time immediately following the revolution but preceding the civil war was democratic, but the calm before the storm was so brief that it hardly matters anyway.
Hi jedson,
I can’t lay any claim to being an historian; I just have a nerdy interest in the Russian Revolution, which began as one of the world’s great bourgeois revolutions and rapidly became the world’s first proletarian revolution. Then it turned into a catastrophe after most of the workers who’d won it were wiped out in the Civil War.
My personal preferences for relatively short but powerful accounts of this seismic event are John Reed’s classic, The Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed was an American journalist and socialist who was there when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power) and Christopher Hill’s excellent “Lenin and the Russian Revolution” (it’s just been republished). A relatively short but more difficult read is Isaac Deutscher’s “The Unfinished Revolution.”
Oops. Wandering way off topic.
Thanks to both you and James. My general impression is much as you describe it. I’ll get the 10 Days book.
It’s true I wasn’t thinking of the earlier rounds of the English revolutions, but I still think there is much to be preferred by the English route. There was so much gratuitous slaughter back then that I find it hard to pick that out and say that that bloody revolution counts as an equivalent of the French. Just what was accomplished? The transfer of power from a single monarch to a hundred very wealthy aristocrats? The ability to oppress Catholics instead of Protestants? Hardly power to the people.
I do recall that back when I was actively interested in making a revolution, my reading was that what distinguished successful revolutions from unsuccessful ones was the astonishing ineptitude of the ruling powers — not anything about the revolutionaries themselves.
But our world is very different today. Any change you want in the West can be accomplished via the ballot box by getting a majority of the people to agree with you. (Or if not, it’s certainly the way to try first.) Very difficult, but easier and much safer than violent revolution. But what you will find majority agreement on will be incremental change, with a series of such changes leading to profound transformation.
‘Fraid your history is still on the Homer Simpson level for the 17th century, Ethan. The English Revolution (1649–1660) was not just about a few aristocrats. Sounds as though you are getting confused with Magna Carta!
According to Marxist historian Christopher Hill (not the last word on the subject, but an important one):
“The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords, and on the other side stood the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside . . . the yeomen and progressive gentry, and . . . wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about.”
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Revolution
The radicals made out the case for democracy: one man, one vote.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney_Debates
Having said that, I am making an historical point, not campaigning for violent revolution. There are non-violent revolutions BTW: scientific ones, for instance. The Industrial Revolution was rough and tough but not characterised by mass slaughter — although the manufacture of military uniforms and equipment was a major catalyst for capitalist take-off.
“Any change you want in the West can be accomplished via the ballot box by getting a majority of the people to agree with you.”
How much do you know about Electoral Theory, particularly WRT Tactical Voting? (This is a sub-field of Game Theory, which is an awesome field everyone should read about.) The main take-away from ET is that demographics, the choice of electoral system and the structure of government itself is extremely important in determining how successful certain policies or parties will be. eg: First Past The Post systems eventually degrade into two-party systems.
That’s details around the edges. OK, maybe a simple majority isn’t always enough. How about 2/3 or 3/4? Probably good to have some extra support anyway so that if some people fall away due to setbacks it doesn’t dip below 50%.
“Sex is behavior perceived to be sexual by both participants”
Oh my god this is going to lead to the most interminable rape cases.
“We had sex!” “No we didn’t!”
“the child’s perception including reviewing the activity later and reinterpreting based on greater knowledge”
I’m not sure what your philosophical theory of time is but if the future can reach back and touch the past I’m rage-quitting this universe. Did I say rape trials were going to be interminable? I meant fucking impossible!
“Somehow Britain ended up with a democracy by way of incremental change, right?”
Have you ever heard of the English Civil War? Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell? The Monmouth Rebellion? The Glorious Revolution?
“The Russian February revolution was a good thing, but the October revolution was a disaster.”
In what possible world could it not have occurred? The February Revolution made the October Revolution inevitable. Lenin was certainly right when he said Dual Power could not coexist indefinitely. The Russian Provisional Government was weak as hell and a civil war was bound to break out. If it wasn’t Reds vs Whites it would have been ethnic nationalists. Then what? Let Russia slowly dissolve until Hitler finally came along to decapitate the damn thing and wipe the Slavic race off the face of the earth?
“Violent revolution is a huge gamble”
I strongly agree. I don’t actually want anything of the sort. What I said below was mostly rhetorical flare. Truth be told, I’m more of an incrementalist Realpolitiker than a revolutionary. Some of my relatives have been honest-to-God pulled-a-coup-d’état Marxist revolutionaries and I’ve seen how well it turned out for them. However, even if one compromises one’s actions, one should never compromise one’s beliefs or lose sight of the end goal.
“pro-contact and anti-contact pedophiles can form an informal alliance to work for the goals they agree on. Once those are achieved, then the pro-contact and anti-contact positions can duke it out”
My, my. For someone who doesn’t believe in revolution, you seem quite eager to court your fellow travelers 😉
“the child’s perception including reviewing the activity later and reinterpreting based on greater knowledge”
I have James to thank for drawing my attention to this gem from ethane’s earlier (but rather brave) post, which I managed to overlook.
There is, I would wager, a good deal of merit in ethane’s argument, but probably not quite in the way that he intended. If he changed one word in his statement, however, I think I would probably be in full agreement. If he had used the term “contemporary dominant ideology” in place of “knowledge” in that sentence, I would be shaking hands with him (virtually at least) and toasting a new solidarity.
“Greater knowledge” implies that the meaning inscribed in a childhood event has been more fully understood. But then along came Sigmund Freud and planted a gigantic bomb under this linear model of causality. With his concept of “nachträglichkeit” – the notion that earlier developmental sexual events only acquire their eventual traumatic “meaning” through retroaction (projecting contemporary assumptions onto earlier incidents) – he demolished the apparently reasonable notion that subsequently acquired “greater knowledge” yielded fuller understanding. In Lacan’s hands, the concept becomes even more radical: the meaning of past events is never inscribed in the events themselves, which may not be experienced at the time of their occurrence as remotely traumatic. It comes from the dominant meanings of the present as they are projected onto the past.
Meaning and “understanding”, in Lacan’s praxis, are rarely liberatory phenomena. They are far more likely to imprison people into stultified “victim” identities, especially in our present epoch where youthful erotic pleasure is “inadmissible testimony”, in Tom’s words, and must instantly be compulsorily refashioned as sexual abuse.
We can all draw lessons about the prospects for liberation from previous historical examples. But the meanings we tend to live by come from the ideology of the present, not from the past. More radically still, the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit opens up the possibility that new meanings for past events, even the oppressive and hysterically policed meanings of our present times, can be reformed and revolutionised from a more enlightened and kinder possible future, too.
If we must turn to the future to reform the dehumanising and impoverished narratives of the present (at least to a future we can all share in shaping and helping on its way), perhaps we can all agree on one thing: bring it on.
Yup, I got that one wrong. Can’t define sex as what is perceived by both people. I wasn’t thinking of the whole problem, just one aspect of it: the effect on a child is not limited to what they experience at the time but includes how they characterize what happened later. Just as mutually enjoyed sex at the time becomes something ugly if a woman’s consent was dependent on a man’s misrepresentations.
But I’ll try again: if a jury of whatever culture was presented with a detailed record of the events, then their vote would determine whether it was sexual or not — in the sense of something to be regulated by society.
ethane,
Never negotiate with yourself. Wait till something is offered by the opposing side. Until then you have nothing. Until then you offer up where you come from, why what you want is good, then ask for the sale and be quiet.
Sales Managers of auto dealerships all over the US know this and preach this to their salesmen day in and day out.
Linca
Some negotiation… Pedophiles have zero (0) power — what, maybe 1% of men? We have nothing to negotiate with. Our progress is dependent on the goodwill and agreement of lots of muggles. I suppose we could become guerrillas but somehow swimming among the people like fish seems unlikely.
>Pedophiles have zero (0) power — what, maybe 1% of men
Maybe up to 5%; count in hebephiles and without checking the studies (which give a range of figures and there are confounds with older minors) I’d guess around 15%. Add in ephebophiles and it’s much more again, probably *most* adult men have a peak AOA in mid- to late-teens, which includes a lot of legal minors in many jurisdictions.
Note also that preferentially gay men are also around 5% but they have discovered power in unity. Their determinedly high public profile, militancy and pride gained them strength many gays never thought pre-Stonewall they could ever possibly generate. Kinsey (without being unscientific) helped by inflating gay numbers to 10%. That trick was achieved by focusing on behaviour rather than identity: there are far more men who have sex with men than there are “gay” men.
Having said all that, the power problem is currently the most daunting problem we face. It’s your strongest argument by far!
A quick side note: I saw a blog post somewhere which referenced a penile plethysmography study that apparently found that heterosexual men tend to be most attracted to women 20-25 (makes sense: peak fertility), while homosexual men tend to be most attracted to youths 16-20. The author of the post did not cite the study, and I have been trying to find it ever since with no success, so for all I know the blogger could have been making it up out of whole cloth. Bad blogger. If any future reader sees this post and knows the study, put me out of my misery: link me to the abstract.
I suppose we could become guerrillas…..
Many of us already are. A simple look of encouragement and recognition to a child you know well when you notice him/her stroking him/herself for example. Just so they know that they won’t get the shock horror reception from all adults.
“You cannot negotiate away thoughts and inclinations.”
Yes, to a considerable extent you can. History proves that sexuality is hugely influenced by culture. As an individual, you can choose to resist the influence on yourself of particular cultural trends (totally pointless if you agree with them) or not to. Even if your mindset renders you incapable of adapting your inclinations, you still have the option taken by millions of people of not making such a fuss about your sexuality and concentrating on other things in your life. Go be a trainspotter or something; at least you wouldn’t then do any harm.
“So what is “coercing MAPs into submission”? I believe the sexual activity we dream of is already illegal and severely punished, so you can’t be talking about behavior.”
I doubt it’s what Tom meant, but of course we could be talking about behaviour. Why do you think governments around the world are still introducing ever crueller laws to deter adult/minor sex if it is not to change behaviour that still goes on every day? Try reading the news. The trouble with your position that there is nothing left to argue about present-day state policy is that however cruel the law is there will still be some minors and adults who fall in love and give in to their natural impulses, knowing it is none of anyone else’s business. The state, and you personally as a supporter of its policy, are then morally culpable for the suffering it inflicts.
“I view it kind of like a game of survivor, where pro-contact and anti-contact pedophiles can form an informal alliance to work for the goals they agree on.”
What goals? I cannot think of a single hope or fantasy I share with you. Regarding your argument for alliance, the best analogy I can think of is this. Instead of maintaining solitary, obstinate and arguably hopeless resistance to German might in the summer of 1940, should the British government instead have formed a coalition with the British Union of Fascists with a view to seeking the peaceful integration of the British Empire into the Greater German Reich? Certainly the British could have negotiated some sort of citizenship for themselves in return for denouncing everything they believed in. Personally, I would rather be a heretic than don the swastika, even if my only weapon is the pen and the possibility of ultimate victory well beyond my lifetime.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
“I cannot think of a single hope or fantasy I share with you. ”
Really? Here are some candidates:
An end to mandated reporter laws from therapists (allowing pedophiles to discuss life problems not including trying to make pedophilia go away)
An end to the sex offender registry and residency restrictions.
Penalties for sex crimes to be calibrated based on harm and comparison to similar crimes and reduced accordingly.
Simple possession of child pornography not to be a criminal offense.
Minors never bullied into saying they were abused or cooperating with a prosecution they do not support.
Do not prosecute an adult sexual partner of a child 13+ years of age unless the child comes to agree they were wronged.
The first few I was going to reference anyway because I was aware you supported them and I thought the above was terribly unfair to VP.
However, that last few were shocking. Particularly: “Simple possession of child pornography not to be a criminal offense.” & “Do not prosecute an adult sexual partner of a child 13+ years of age unless the child comes to agree they were wronged.” Have you stated these publicly before? Would you stand by these if a journalist came knocking?
I have blogged about the CP issue directly (celibatepedos.blogspot.com). I think some of it might be terrible and highly immoral (and some if it not). But I stand with the ACLU and am opposed to criminal penalties (for simple possession) as a matter of civil liberties. Get the government off our computers. And while I do think what is considered illegal CP should be sharply curtailed, there may be moral problems with what’s left — it should just not be legal problems if all you do is look at it.
The thing about not prosecuting men if the minors don’t want them prosecuted is I suppose fairly radical, though I am not suggesting much legal change. It’s a way to get forgiveness, not permission. I imagine it working through a combination of people not pressuring minors, and of prosecutors not bringing charges. Those are social changes that would proceed at an uneven pace — though probably easier changes than actually changing laws. Nothing a minor could say would make you safe against future prosecution. But if human frailty wins out and the youth feels well-treated, society should give you a pass.
Both of those are my personal views, not Virtuous Pedophiles positions.
Interesting ideas. Just one thing:
Now that we officially have three female MAPs on the site, would you be alright with using “adults” instead of “men” when referring to MAPs? I assume it requires self-restraint for A. not to pop up each time such assumptions are made.
Yes, these are points I can agree on, Ethan.
The differences between us are less than might be supposed just because of your last statement, which posits your stance midway between that of most governments and entelechy’s, as he describes above. I could more or less agree with entelechy’s proposals (Aoc of 13, but a few years below that allowed with parental consent and other conditions) if I didn’t feel they took so much of the joy and spontaneity out of sex as to reduce it almost to a medical experiment. Nevertheless, your argument for shared hopes is flawed.
These hopes would be shared ones IF they were to be realised without conditions that negate or outweigh them in value. However, as envisioned by you, realising them is subject to us subscribing sincerely to the view that all adult/minor sex is wrong and then (unrealistically) convincing the public of our sincerity. I do not want the six hopes you list to be realised if that is the cost. The world you hope for is still too controlled and far too much built on the premise that adult/pubescent sexual bonding is harmful rather than the powerful source of potential good it is. It is miserable and wrong, and pretending otherwise would mean forfeiting all sense of integrity. Since nothing I do is likely to make any practical difference, that matters a lot. I prefer being a heretic in this world.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
“I could more or less agree with entelechy’s proposals (Aoc of 13, but a few years below that allowed with parental consent and other conditions) if I didn’t feel they took so much of the joy and spontaneity out of sex as to reduce it almost to a medical experiment. Nevertheless, your argument for shared hopes is flawed.”
I get what you’re saying, but notice that I said that instances occurring outside of that context wouldn’t be handled in a blanketed fashion. For example, if the kid insists they consented and wanted the sex to occur, took the initiative, encouraged the initiation, etc. then likely there would be a very minor sanction or none at all.
But I think my proposals are logical. This way, the adult can be monitored and judged by the parents as to how this thing is going. That way, the best results are achieved and abuse can be held to a minimum. Feedback is possible and the child is thus protected and can get out if desired.
This already happens in the real world. If you’ve ever read a book called Crimes Without Victims, you’ll see that there is a chapter that contains an interview with a mother of a boy, aged 10, who was in a consenting relationship with a man. She and her son expressed anger at society for the enforced secrecy. Several other examples of approving parents (mothers no less) are mentioned in Edward Brongersma’s Loving Boys and in Theo Sandfort’s Boys on Their Contacts With Men.
Your proposal about parental consent for young children having sex is one I agree very strongly with. I think there has been an unfortunate modern tendency for boylovers to talk of the liberation of children from their parents as much as the state. I find this severely misguided, as a prepubescent child has to have some protection and guidance, and the idea of making the state rather than the parents the judge of his individual good is unnatural, frightening and revolting. It is also politically idiotic, since its only possible practical effect is to make parents see boylovers as much more threatening and guarantee their support for the interventionist state as “protector”.
As you point out, parents have often been supportive of their sons’ affairs with adults, and I can’t see why our cultures could not adapt to allow them to be so again one day. This could only happen though through them being shown their fears are misguided. What boylovers should be doing (and I’m sorry if this sounds a little VPish) is proclaiming convincingly that they would never want sex with boys under 13 (and ideally over 13 too) without their parents’ knowledge and consent.
The ideal system for the emotional and intellectual well-being of boys was worked out in Athens more than two millenia ago and needs little improvement, merely some adaptation. Boys there had lovers implicitly approved by their parents. Their affairs were very much in the public eye and judged entirely by the effect they had on the boys, as observed by all. In effect, promoting a boy’s good was a collaborative effort between his parents and his lover, and the results were spectacular.
Edmund Marlowe, Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/
>promoting a boy’s good was a collaborative effort between his parents and his lover
I find this a very attractive idea.
“The ideal system for the emotional and intellectual well-being of boys was worked out in Athens”
I have some reservations about whether this is the ideal system. A. has two old comments here where she described what might be considered flaws in the arrangement.
Hey, thanks for linking to me! 🙂 I’d almost forgotten I wrote all that.
Pederasty of the traditional/classic type seems to arise naturally (correct me if I’m wrong, Edmund) in very warlike societies where the sexes are rigidly segregated: ancient Greece, medieval Japan, modern Afghanistan. There lies my problem with it. I don’t want to live in such a society, and I doubt that many here seriously would either. And when I read stuff from ancient Greece, it does seem to me that the situation sex-wise — you’ve got to preserve your virtue, but satisfy your lover! — must have been as difficult to navigate for some boys in ancient Athens as it was for many girls in 1950s Illinois.
However, I don’t have a problem with the basic ideas that mentoring of pubertal boys by adult men can be a very good thing and that promoting a boy’s (or a girl’s) welfare and healthy, happy development can/should be a project on which parents and adult lover collaborate. It’s not the only way of doing things in intergenerational relationships, but I’m sure it works very well for those it works for, if you follow me.
An example of how such a situation played out in the here and now (well, almost) can be found about halfway down the page here https://www.ipce.info/host/wilson_83/4_cases.htm in the case of ‘John’, twenty-eight. He is most attracted to pubertal boys and has been involved with his young friend, now twelve, for three years. The boy is the younger brother of his previous young friend, and this older brother, who is now twenty-one with heterosexual interests and with whom John still gets along well, seems to encourage the involvement. John also gets along well with the boy’s mother. He explains that in his relationships with boys he likes to develop their personality and character, instilling “honesty, loyalty, good manners”. In his current relationship, he teaches the boy and makes him do his homework, and this has had a very good effect on the boy’s schooling over the past year. The parents have entrusted him with the schoolwork side of the boy’s life, and he even goes to parent-teacher conferences with the boy’s mother. He says: “I think kids have to be moulded to a certain extent…I feel genuinely that I’ve got a job to do.”
>Pederasty of the traditional/classic type seems to arise naturally (correct me if I’m wrong, Edmund) in very warlike societies where the sexes are rigidly segregated: ancient Greece, medieval Japan, modern Afghanistan. There lies my problem with it. I don’t want to live in such a society
Me neither, which is why I am particularly interested in the world before agriculture and settled communities. There are strong prima facie grounds for thinking that warfare is a product of necessarily intense competition over resources (land, especially, in the first instance) when settled populations become too great. Pederastic bonding may have been forged earlier, in a hunter-gather context. It is not just warfare that needs bravery and skills that a man can teach a boy: hunting needs them too.
At Linca’s suggestion, I have started reading the big Fry book, although too busy right now to have got past the first chapter.
Not that I am (yet) sold on Rind’s explanation of the evolution of pederasty. There may be something in it but there is no hard evidence as of now. In any case, his theory does not address itself to all gender combinations of adult child erotic bonding. Are the other forms supposed to be less valid because they are not grounded in ev. psych.?
I haven’t made up my mind yet on the Rind theory, either. Jay Feierman suggests that pederasty is simply a byproduct of selection for heterosexuality, which makes sense to me, especially given that many men are attracted to women and boys both.
Then there’s also Rind’s theory of heterosexual hebephilia, which if I recall correcly only makes sense if we’re assuming a model of marriage in which a male has exclusive, indefinite sexual access to a female in exchange for resources. Things may or may not have worked that way when we were evolving: there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that humans evolved to be ‘serially monogamous’ — or ‘monogamish’ — for instance. In Marriage: A History, Stephanie Coontz writes that among traditional groups in resource-poor areas, parents enforce arranged marriages very strictly, because they really need more well-placed kin to trade resources with. In resource-rich areas, however, parents are much more willing to be indulgent when their kids skip out on an arranged marriage for True Love, because they don’t need the extra well-placed kin that much.
Also, who was bringing home most of the bacon likely depended on climate and geography. According to Frank Marlowe, in the tropics contemporary hunter-gatherer women provide 75% of the calories and men 25%, but men provide most of the protein and fat. Male contribution to diet rises considerably in colder areas — in the Arctic it is 100%, though the men could not hunt without the clothes the women make for them — and in areas where fish make up more than 20% of the diet. Also, in some contemporary hunter-gatherer societies women hunt small animals and men gather fruit and honey, and where net-foraging is common men and women frequently do it together.
Let’s suppose, however, that that model of marriage is correct. Girls are subfertile for quite a long time post-menarche, so if you marry a very young girl, you may be looking at a long wait before she gets pregnant. If you marry a young woman at peak fertility, she’s likelier to get pregnant at once, so you get more offspring per unit of resources. Of course, monopolising a woman’s entire reproductive lifespan is hitting the reproductive jackpot, especially if you’re polygynous, but the chances one or both partners would die before that happened were high, and the younger the girl, the likelier one or both was to die after the husband had invested resources in her but before she’d gotten pregnant. By surviving to peak fertility, she at least demonstrated that she had a strong constitution and thus was reasonably likely to bear a live, healthy child and survive to bear another. Still, I’m quite prepared to believe that heterosexual hebephilia is a minority reproductive strategy which has been just successful enough to allow it to go on being a minority reproductive strategy.
I think some paedos are very eager for ev. psych. explanations because they give them some much-needed self-respect and feelings of purpose, but of course whether or not we evolved to do something has no bearing on whether or not it’s a good thing to do (see theft, nepotism, murder of rivals…) or on the worth of anyone’s feelings, relationships or identity.
“I think some paedos are very eager for ev. psych. explanations because they give them some much-needed self-respect and feelings of purpose, but of course whether or not we evolved to do something has no bearing on whether or not it’s a good thing to do (see theft, nepotism, murder of rivals…) or on the worth of anyone’s feelings, relationships or identity.”
Pretty much the same thing I said the last time this came up. However, it’s worth pointing out that David Kennerly strongly disavows any such motive and I expect the same can be said for most of the others here.
I don’t disavow that motives are present, in general, I disavow that they are present in particular instances. And the motive to always claim to be able to discern ‘motive’ in those who seek explanations through science is itself one which should be called into question for its own obvious bias and tendentiousness. Impugning those who look, in good faith, for explanations about themselves or others, as being transparently self-interested and therefore to be dismissed out-of-hand is a particularly insidious and pernicious mechanism to continue their oppression. It is, in fact, ad hominem where you attack the person rather than capably refute their argument.
As I said the last time I apologized for this, that wasn’t my intention at all. Investigating things is good. It’s just that I’ve seen other people pin all their hopes, dreams, and justifications on evo psych, which is unhealthy. However, you clearly indicated that you were not one of those people, which is all that matters.
I think we’re on the same page now, Edmund. Prepubescent children are who I had in mind in particular when I came up with my ideas.
I agree with you. We MAP’s shouldn’t be trying to make parents our enemies, but instead need to encourage communication and open mindedness. Sadly with our current blanket laws and societal structures, sick non-pedophile jerks flourish and children are much more at risk than they would be if people were to look at this honestly and objectively.
I agree with you. To a great extent the conflict between – oh, let’s just call them MAPs this time, for the fun of it – MAPs is about individual assessments for the possibility and extent of cultural change over time with possibility, extent and required time scales each the subject of ferocious debate.
The self-proclaimed virtuous here have a conception of culture as being, essentially, largely immutable if not already close to ideal. They possess a great admiration for culture as it is presently constituted, while seeing it in need of continuous refinement and ardent purification. But it is, in their view, essentially rational and systemically so.
I suspect that religion is far more likely to play a part in their thinking than it does in many of those less enamored of ‘The Natural Order of Things’ as a conception of human society to which they are so clearly wedded.
I’m not convinced, however, that other types of collectivists have a regard for individual liberty sufficient to deliver substantial or sufficient relief from tyranny to those possessing unpopular beliefs, underappreciated sexual preferences or who are desirous of independence from the imposition upon themselves of consensus or majoritarian social structures, either.
Perhaps the greatest impediment to a brighter future for “MAPs” exists primarily as an underestimation by MAPs themselves of the potential for society to change dramatically over time and to identify opportunities for so doing. In this way, it is a failure of imagination, in which an accurate perception of society’s capacity to evolve, and for an individual’s talents of innovation to facilitate that evolution, is simply missing.
If I have a message here it is that we should question safe assumptions, all and at fundamental levels. We rob ourselves of opportunity – and possibility – when we fail to challenge everyday shibboleths and received wisdom.
No great revolution, in science or philosophy or in ideology and governance, ever emerged from a consensus view of change as impossible or of change as subordinate to the established order and in its exclusive service.
For this reason, the smug and comfortable, lacking in vision, imagination and ambition, offer us no inspiration worth embracing.
As often, you’ve expressed my views with great precision. Thank you.
And I take that as a great compliment!
True Quotes From Some Great Incrementalists of History.
Karl Marx: Workers of the world arise. Demand that the assembly lines to which you are fettered be cleaned up a bit.
Frederick Douglass: At some point we should probably get rid of slavery. But for now we should just ask that slaves be treated with a little more kindness.
Mahatma Gandhi: We are not asking that the English end their rule over India right away—just that they exploit us a little less ruthlessly.
Harry Hay: I think that gay men should have more access to confidential therapy so that they can learn to control their impulses, and live in harmony with the rest of society.
Gloria Steinem: We are not asking for complete equality for women immediately, but that’s probably the direction we should move in.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Of course we are not demanding that swimming pools and rest-rooms be integrated at this point. America is not yet ready for that. Maybe we could begin with a few restaurants.
Bravo!
LOL. Pure gold! I hope you don’t mind if I steal this idea? A satirical “Incrementalists of History” series would be the coolest thing ever 🙂
PS: This is relevant to our previous berdache discussion.
First, let me respond to the issue of planets that was raised in the blog you sent me to. This little poem should clarify a lot. http://tinyurl.com/k72tojy . Clearly all of those heavenly bodies are scary things. Think about one of them smashing into you while you were floating around in deepest darkest space. As for the little piece on important (but little known) historical quotes, I am glad you like it. It’s open source. Use it any way you like.
Thank you for the SSC read. I just now saw it.
I get tired of the arguments that wanting genital reassignment surgery is the same as wanting a healthy limb cut off. The choice is not having genitals vs having no genitals, it’s having one set of genitals vs having the other. And many trans men, I am told, don’t even have phalloplasty because the results don’t tend to be good: they just have mastectomies. Well, we let people have nose jobs, we let them have their labia minora cut off.
Likewise, a trans person is not saying, “I am Napoleon!” or for that matter, “I am a horse!” They are not claiming to be a different species or nationality than they are, to have different parents, to have a different life history, to be anybody other than themselves. Sure, they want to switch social gender, but gender is a fuzzy category anyway and so is sex. There is no continuum between being a human and being a horse: you are either one or the other. But there is a continuum between being archetypally male and being archetypally female. There is considerably more behavioural difference among the sexes than between them. Some societies have ‘third genders’. Some animals can change sex. There are more possible chromosome combinations than XX and XY, and as Dr Cary Gabriel Costello points out at the excellent blog Intersex Roadshow, we all start out in utero with ovotestes, a clitorophallus and a labioscrotum, and sometimes they don’t differentiate fully, so some people end up at some point along a spectrum in between the two extremes. And come on, I have met some trans people. They come across as sane to a degree that I’m willing to bet Charles VI of France did not when he was under the impression that he was made of glass.
I agree with all that you’ve said. However, my view is slightly different in that I honestly don’t mind people believing they’re Napoleon or a horse or wanting to remove limbs if it makes them happier. Live and let live; that’s the economist’s/Utilitarian’s marching song…
If it’s really and truly the only way to make them happy, then sure, but we should try everything else first.
I remember reading that the incidence of postoperative regret is quite a bit higher for people who’ve had healthy limbs amputated than for people who’ve had GRS. Admittedly the former make up a very small sample because you could never convince most surgeons to do it.
I agree that other, more effective methods are preferable. I was just saying that I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with those desires because no desire is inherently wrong (again: economics/Utilitarianism).
Solving the problem of the hairdryer by bringing it with you is a great idea when nothing else works.
Those are words. What were their actions? No bravo from me. Not one little bit of bravo. I know for one I have said one thing but immediately done the other.
I remember telling the workers in my factory I would find compromise with them and then refusing to bargain. The next year the union was voted out. I won completely.
Jedson303 tomocarroll look to actions not words.
Linca
That was meant to be satirical parody. Had nothing to do with their actual positions or actions.
“The next year the union was voted out. I won completely.”
Wow. Never fancied you for such a Capitalist.
James,
If you knew where that union came from you would understand my hard stand to kill it in my factory. After tough year I got the Taft Hartley Act (1947) changed to allow what it was said it would allow: Replacement of Striking Workers. I was on the other side of where I am now and need a lot of forgiveness.
We gotta get this team we are on doing tough things, Tough stands get tough things done.
This is all on subject James.
Linca
I think now might be a good time to mention (particularly for Ethan’s benefit) what Dr. King actually said:
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.””
– Letter from a Birmingham Jail
[Bold mine]
I’m not feeling over-sensitive or anything. This critique of incrementalism is trenchant and relevant, but I’d like it known that my own agnosticism (…fence sitting?) regarding sexual conduct with kids is not incremental in character.
The fact is, I don’t think sex has a moral dimension. The morality comes in when we start making agreements with other people and building relationships based on trust. At that point, what others feel about our sexual conduct becomes binding.
I’ve won significant support for this idea among muggle friends who have an interest in my sexual nature and my trustworthiness.
I occasionally contribute to the Forum for Understanding Minor Attraction, a private blog, created by Stephen600 and Adamjohn2 to: ‘… to discuss ways in which the situation for minor attracted people in this country might be improved,’ and to discuss ‘what strategies might be adopted to achieve this.’ Stephen6000 goes on to say that: ‘It is my view that significant progress in this area can only be achieved by changing people’s perceptions of MAPs.’ My participation in the blog has been to share my story with other members, and to be there for other MAPs in a support capacity should they need it.
Recently, Stephen and Adam were contacted by an Irish TV producer, Yvonne Redmond, who wanted to make a documentary about paedophilia. She says: ‘I came across your email address on Tom O’Carroll’s blog while researching for a documentary I am hoping to make on paedophilia in Ireland – looking at the treatment of paedophiles. As part of this we are hoping to get to interview someone who identifies as being sexually attracted to minors. We are more than willing to protect their identity by blurring their faces, distorting their voices, using a fake name, etc. We think it could be a really powerful piece and could look at questions like their treatment by society, the widespread vilification of people with this inclination, people who think it is wrong and seek treatment for it and people who think it is right and that their human rights are being denied by its criminalisation. If you could offer any advice on how to go about finding someone in Ireland or the UK willing to take part, or point me in the right direction, I’d really appreciate it.’
‘We are … keen for it to be very different from other pieces that already exist in the media that seek to villainise people. We want it to focus on what the people affected feel themselves – do they feel they are afflicted with an illness; an attraction and desire they never asked for and struggle to suppress. Do they feel there are treatment options that can help them and if so what are they, and most importantly we want to focus on their lives as people – and highlight to the public the human faces behind the headlines; that they are still someone’s child, perhaps spouse or partner, friend etc, that they still have to live normal lives, walk down the street, do their grocery shopping, like the rest of the population! So if someone wanted to speak to us that would be great. Also can I ask what kind of counseling services you offer and what the aim is?’
I and another blog member were willing to participate in this documentary, and duly sent our ‘stories’ to Ms Redmond via Stephen. Since then Stephen heard from TV3 that Yvonne Redmond is changing jobs, would have no further involvement, and that her boss Conor Tiernan would take over. In the past few days, Conor Tiernan contacted Stephen to say that his team is continuing to research the project, but that there are no immediate plans for production.
After hearing about the level of disappointment experienced by Tom in this HTOC Inadmissible Evidence topic, I wonder if we were wise to have become involved with TV3 at all (simple math: media=shyster). The trouble is you want to believe in motives such as those stated by Ms Redmond, as it potentially provides a rare opportunity to communicate to a wide audience, a minor-attracted person’s viewpoint. To this end, I was prepared to risk loss of anonymity and to bare my soul.
My feeling when approached by Yvonne Redmond was that we had little to lose by participating, particularly since none of us had to give our real names and she was assuring us that anonymised interviewing techniques would be used. It is true that editing might result in messages getting distorted to some extent, but I felt that there would be a limit to the extent to which this could be done. Of course they could just juxtapose our bits with statements by unsympathetic types accusing us of being cognitively distorted and so on, but this wouldn’t mean that we would be any worse off than if we had not participated, while there was always the chance that they would not do this—and even if they did, some viewers at least would be able to see that it was our people who were making the most sense and so we would be ahead with those viewers at least. Obviously it is a disappointment that the project appears to be stalling. I don’t know the real reason for this. I have E-mailed Conor Tiernan to say that I am glad they are still researching the issue and to offer any further assistance we can.
Meanwhile, as Baldrick would say, I have a cunning plan, but I’d better not give it away at this stage.
I would imagine that Tom also would agree that although his experience was draining and disappointing in its results, he does not regret going through with it. Is that the case, Tom?
No regrets?
I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. I suppose that means I can’t have any enormous regrets otherwise I’d be plagued with bitter thoughts such as “Why did I ever get into it?”
Perhaps it’s a matter of opportunity costs: I did *not* lose the opportunity to be doing anything hugely more productive at the time. On the contrary, I got an expenses-paid trip to London during which I was able to catch up with a few friends there.
And a lot of interesting discussion is now coming out of this blog on the matter, so I think my participation must have raised issues of interest here. I take satisfaction from that. Call me a believer in counting one’s blessings!
I would urge anyone who is to be interviewed for any such media piece to insist, as a condition of being interviewed, to have your own video camera, or at least audio recorder, continuously capturing the entirety of the interview. I would go further and state that you will use it as you see fit, for broadcast or otherwise, especially in the event that you are dissatisfied with the result of the piece.
If they want you bad enough they will agree to it.
I guess it’s also a question of playing the odds. If you never buy a ticket, you’ll never win the lottery, right?
My ‘incremental’ negotiations with muggle friends and parents has been a bit like this. I’ve been honest about my orientation, hoping for a good outcome, and have met rejection, suspicion, loss, embarrassment and worse, but I’ve gone on being honest (not putting up billboards, just opening up to people who matter) and over the years I’m seeing different results. I’m getting more than grudging acceptance and tolerance, I’m getting warmth, support, solidarity and even parents going out of their way to facilitate my friendships with their kids.
I don’t shrink from stating libertarian views on sex, but I also make it clear that I respect the values and boundaries of my wider community. I wouldn’t exactly say muggle support is contingent on my good behaviour, but none of them would tolerate my being sexually involved with their kids. However I think what’s more important is that they see I take the commitments I’ve made seriously. It’s not about what I feel, its about what I do.
I think that this same dynamic could emerge from our being more visible in a public forum. I don’t think it causes great harm for the public to know from Tom that paedophiles are sexual people who would probably enjoy sexual activity with children, because it’s true. I also don’t think it hurts for them to know that some of us accept the wider view that this sexual activity is problematic. We don’t all have to be speaking in one voice, we just need to broaden public understanding in a way that establishes our common humanity.
“If you never buy a ticket, you’ll never win the lottery, right?”
I get your meaning but I couldn’t think of a worse analogy. As a stats-nerd, one of my pet-peeves is people thinking that it is ever rational to play the lottery. My religious friends are confused by the fact that there exists no more strident anti-gambling campaigner than I 😛
“none of them would tolerate my being sexually involved with their kids.”
Out of all the ‘muggles’ you know, not a single one?
“We don’t all have to be speaking in one voice, we just need to broaden public understanding in a way that establishes our common humanity.”
Amen to that!
one of my pet-peeves is people thinking that it is ever rational to play the lottery.
I’ve spent some time with my feet under a card table and I’m also a mountaineer, so I’m a relatively sophisticated gambler. I only play long odds when there’s no alternative, but sometimes we just have to take a risks. What I’ve learned is that it’s always best to do it with open eyes and not with the illusion that everything is under control.
not a single one?
Those are the vibes I get.. 🙂
Maybe I wrote that wrong. I don’t mean that I’m actually against gambling in general. I have, in fact, gambled (which is illegal given my age). However, when I do, I crunch the numbers before hand. I play if net-gains come out positive. If I were playing the lottery or against a casino I could be damn sure they also ran the numbers and net-gains come out positive for them, which means a net loss for me. I’m of the opinion that I should go in with my eyes and calculator open 😛
Risk but risk smart, that’s the Bayesian’s marching song….
I agree!
Of possible compare-and-contrast interest: The Homosexuals, CBS, 1967.
http://vimeo.com/61123970
Thank you. I have now watched (part of this) again and after many years, having forgotten what an amazingly strong performance Jack Nichols (as “Warren Adkins”) delivered.
Can you imagine if WE had someone speaking on our behalf as confidently and articulately and BRAVELY as this? His answers are precisely what ours should be when discussing our own issues. They could, and SHOULD be, our talking points!
“‘If you were able to take a pill and to change yourself from a homosexual to a heterosexual, would you do it?’ and something like 95% of them said ‘No’.”
Incredibly, that same question still comes up frequently within man/boy love forums but with starkly different responses, especially from those who champion VirPed’s ideas and goals.
Now compare Adkin’s performance (and notice how, back then, anonymity, even for the most courageous, self-aware and articulate spokeperson, was required) with that of the “sick” homosexual who followed him.
Ask yourself, whose ‘social posture’ survived and was effective in affecting long-term social change?
Who are our current “sick” pedophiles who are breaking bread with the world in their pursuit of its sympathy and understanding?
And then there is Dr. Charles W. Socarides. Who does HE remind you of? Obviously, there are multiple candidates although one, in particular, seems to come closest in serving as the current chief emissary between the “scientific” world and the popular one in magnanimously framing pedophilia as a pathological, but not evil, condition.
That’s all I’ve watched, so far but, having been struck by the amazing resonance which this extraordinary historical artifact strikes with our situation today, I could not possibly let it go unremarked upon it nor fail to urge others to watch as a valuable lesson from history.
If you ‘spilled your guts out’, Tom, then that suggests to me you brilliantly delivered all the concepts that people just don’t want to hear. Fear and entrenched dogma is as rife as ever. ‘The Paedophile Next Door’. This alone signals to me what type of programme it is going to be. it seems packaged to wantonly tap in on people’s preconceptions to gain viewers. From the portion you quoted, the entire tone seems like it will be ‘paedophiles, what’s to be done about them?’ The only progress they seem to be making is recognising, in some sense, that the hostility of society is only going to make the objects of it behave worse.
Tom, I wonder what you think would have been accomplished had your interview been included. You have talked about sexual self-determination in many places at many times, always eloquently, always intelligently. You have won few, if any, converts. To the contrary, the invariable result is that attitudes harden and the pitchforks come out.
To persuade people, you need to start from a shared value and then explain how your position furthers that value. The reason that VP has had some success where other activist pedophiles have not is that we start with the shared value of preventing CSA and explain how more humane treatment of pedophiles reduces the risk of CSA. We also, as Dissident described, work very hard to distinguish between pedophilia and having sexual contact with minors.
You are right that we do not take on what you describe as the “intolerance and non-acceptance of sexual determination,” but you’re wrong to say that we “cement” that intolerance. That wall was built long before we came on the scene. We choose not to bang our heads against it, both because we do not think adults should have sex with children, and because doing so is unproductive and makes progress impossible.
I, for one, am very excited to see the program. It will not be perfect, but I am hopeful that it will lead to progress. I am hopeful that it will help to crystallize the distinction between pedophilia and CSA in the mind of the general public, that it will help to reduce the hatred felt towards pedophiles who do not offend, and that it will help pedophiles understand that they should not feel shame as a result of their sexual feelings.
Note that this does not mean that I think there should be no changes in the way that offenders are treated. I think a lot of improvement can be made in this area and I have said so many times. However, I choose to focus on what I consider to be the low-hanging fruit; issues where I think change is easier.
I hope that the program does not imply that all pedophiles need medical intervention in order to prevent them from having sexual contact with children. I do, however, hope that the program makes it easier for pedophiles in need to secure help. At VP, we come across many people who suffer greatly from secondary effects of pedophilia such as depression and self-hate, and these people should have access to help. We also come across pedophiles who do need help to avoid offending.
Finally, Bloom, I wonder why you characterize VP’s position as suggesting that there is intrinsic harm in sexual contact between adults and minors. We have said repeatedly that it is not harmful in all cases, but does result in harm in many cases. We have also said that much of the harm may be due to iatrogenic factors. In fact, these points were made in the guest blog we posted here time time ago.
>To persuade people, you need to start from a shared value and then explain how your position furthers that value.
Very true. I have always hoped that truth would be a shared value. Perhaps that’s where I’m going wrong.
“You have won few, if any, converts.”
*Raises hand*
“To persuade people, you need to start from a shared value and then explain how your position furthers that value.”
Does self-determination count?
“secondary effects of pedophilia such as depression and self-hate”
Many people in the disability rights community distinguish between “impairments” and “disabilities”. They define impairments as the problems directly caused by ones condition (eg: deaf people can’t hear pop music) while disabilities are problems caused by the way society interacts with such people (eg: deaf people being arrested for not following police orders they can’t hear). I think these “secondary effects” are firmly in the latter category of problems.
I love the way disability activism generalises to almost everything else 🙂
No James, I do not believe that the belief that children should have the freedom to choose to have sex with adults counts as a value shared by the general public. If you were a non-pedo who adopted this view after listening to Tom, I will consider this evidence that his arguments had traction with at least one member of the general public. Otherwise, I will not.
“I do not believe that the belief that children should have the freedom to choose to have sex with adults counts as a value shared by the general public.”
No, but it is an extension of a shared value. Men having the right to have sex with other men certainly wasn’t a shared value in the sixties, but it gained support as an extension of liberty.
“If you were a non-pedo who adopted this view after listening to Tom, I will consider this evidence that his arguments had traction with at least one member of the general public.”
I’m more than just a non-pedo, I’m an honest-to-goodness minor. Tom wasn’t the sole person involved in the process of swaying me, but possibly the most eloquent. However, member of the general public I am not. I’m an aberration.
PS: Ethan is already somewhat acquainted with me.
James, you are right that values can change or evolve over time. I see no chance of values changing to permit adult/child sex during my lifetime or Tom’s or probably yours. Further, my guess is that you will change your view on the issue if you have children of your own.
My main point is that Tom’s arguments have had no traction with the general public (despite their eloquence). Tom’s appearance on the documentary would likely have had the same effect that other arguments in support of adult/child sex have with the general public–a hardening of opposition. If I were in favor of legalizing adult/child sex, which I am not, I would be glad that Tom was excluded from the documentary to forestall the inevitable pushback. I would hope that the documentary succeeded in reducing hatred towards non-offending pedophiles, and that this softening of hearts led to an environment where Tom’s arguments could be considered.
Tom, I know you’re tired of hearing from me on this, so this will be last point on the issue. As always, thanks for allowing me the platform.
Nick
Further, my guess is that you will change your view on the issue if you have children of your own.
Pretty tired of hearing the argument that parents could not possibly conceive of their own children wanting to consent to “sex” with adults. There must be a more nuanced approach than that. That’s my spontaneous view as a father; I’m sure James will reply more eloquently.
Here’s another view which Nick might consider.
The idea that one must start from a shared value and then explain how one’s position furthers that value presumes that the ideological norms governing our era are immutable and that everyone shares them. All arguments must be conducted within the co-ordinates of the existing paradigm of knowledge.
But what people publicly “share” and privately deviate from may never be easily squared.
Perhaps the most important distinction between the liberal and the radical, the reformist and the revolutionary, is this: as soon as you accede to the co-ordinates of the current ideological regime, you have lost. You are relegated to the forlorn hope of petty, easily reversible moderations at best. The radical, dare I say revolutionary, position is, despite its seeming impossibility, vastly more optimistic and generous: existing ideologies contain gigantic voids that they can neither explain not subdue.
For early industrial capitalists and their media supporters, insurgent working class militants were seen as “the mob” rather than intelligent and humane people struggling against the grotesque, life-destroying exploitation of early capitalism. This was the (dangerous) void in their ideological meaning system.
Apart from those deeply engaged in the ideological struggles of the dispossessed and forsaken of their day, no one anticipated the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century or the Leninist October Revolution of 1917, nor the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of apartheid. Under the co-ordinates of the prevailing ideological norms, these historic events were inconceivable. And yet they happened. Tyrannies which seem utterly unassailable and entirely normal for decades can disintegrate almost overnight (as Alain Badiou puts it, “Sometimes, miracles do happen”).
I’m abstaining here on the issue of minor-major sexual liaisons. I just wanted to raise the point that, if dissidents were to believe that “what is” is “what is eternal and necessary”, the revolutions I mentioned would never have occurred. Dissent, perhaps, needs to be doggedly sceptical of received wisdom and conventional morality.
“Apart from those deeply engaged in the ideological struggles of the dispossessed and forsaken of their day, no one anticipated the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century or the Leninist October Revolution of 1917, nor the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of apartheid.”
I’m gonna say nah to that.
The king of France was clearly aware that he was losing control before the revolution happened. He’d spent lots of money on the 7-years war and acquired massive debt, the 3rd estate was pissed as hell at the 1st & 2nd, and there had been widespread famines leading up to the revolution. People may not have expected it to be so successful but it was bound to happen.
The October Revolution was preceded by both the February Revolution and the Revolution of 1905. The Tsar was a figure head. The Constituent Assembly was a joke. The All-Russian Soviet was eager for control. It would have taken a complete and utter idiot not to predict the October Revolution or something similar.
The state of decay and immanent collapse in Eastern Europe wasn’t exactly a secret to the people living there. Policies like Perestroika were implemented because the governments knew their system was disintegrating.
The South African Apartheid government was horrendously unpopular. Near the end they were losing the majority of the white vote and were staying in power by fiat, repression and gerrymandering. The international community hated them. They were afraid that the situation would devolve into a civil war like in Rhodesia. Capitulating when they did was the most sensible thing, since they could trust Mandela not to string them up.
You may not be able to pinpoint the tsunami, but you can usually feel the ground shifting.
Brilliantly argued, James. I think the point about pinpointing the tsunami is the crucial one: the powers-that-were knew they were in deep doo-doo but they didn’t know they were about to be wholly overthrown by a vast popular uprising. These revolutions became known as revolutions only after the chaos and uprisings quietened, when the fog over the battlefield cleared. But for the actors involved in pushing forward revolutionary change (Robespierre, Lenin, etc.), they were keeping faith with the truth that the existing system was rotten to the core. The point is that the authorities may have hated them but they failed to recognise their humanity, their intelligence and their ethical devotion to a cause: our humanity is defined by our refusal to bow to fate, not by our conformity to dominant social norms. To the authorities, the revolutionaries were criminals and brutish mob-leaders promoting senseless disorder. They were, in other words, the “void” in the established order’s ideological edifice, a force for radical change which couldn’t be integrated into the oppressive meanings that edifice was there to perpetuate.
I see your point. The precise moment of ignition may have been unpredictable, even if it was no secret that the gunpowder was there. The thing about these revolutionaries is that they could sense that there was gunpowder to be lit and the optimal time to strike the match. Lenin and his comrades worked hard for years to prepare the ground work for an uprising, but it wasn’t until International Women’s Day triggered the February Revolution that the stage could be set for revolution in October. I think the question to be asked is this: Is the current social order flammable? If not, how can we pour gasoline on it?
Bencapel,
In “Occupy” and “Monetary Reform” it is common to view people who advise; “That will not happen in our lifetimes.”, “Impossible.”, “We must go slow.”, “We have to build bridges.”, “This can only be done incrementally one step at a time.” as prima facie evidence that they are “Saboteurs” or “Agent Provocateurs.”. It is then put on these people and their supporters to prove otherwise.
We have the truth: Hundreds of thousands of years to prove it. Do not avoid or minimize the truth in any way. War Peace and Human Nature Edited by Douglas P Fry https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kb1tzxc2wuylw5t/AACGPO6wn9gl7___jn3L9jima?dl=0
Linca
Very well said bencapel. The againsters are always trying to tell us “It will never happen”, “It won’t happen in our life times.”, etc., etc., etc. It has been said, ‘The best way to win a war is to never have one, to convince the enemy to never attack.’ We need to attack full bore on all fronts. We are the truth.
Linca
“We need to attack full bore on all fronts.”
And there was I thinking you believed human beings to be inherently peaceful 😛
[/kidding]
Thanks for the link, Linca (no punning intended). I look forward to reading it.
You’re welcome for the link Tom O and James have said they will read it or read in it. It’s a lot of stuff. And, really challenges the theory that man is a fierce killer in his deep nature.
War Peace and Human Nature Edited by Douglas P. Fry Bruce Rind has the copy that I purchased from Amazon. You are in good company if you take it seriously.
Linca
I’ll try 🙂
All I can say is that any argument of the form “you’re wrong because you don’t have a deep, personal connection to this issue” is crap. Having distance between yourself and the thing you’re examining is generally a good thing, though not absolutely necessary. I find it odd that the same people who argue that paedophiles are too close to the issue to see it objectively would hold up parents as perfectly neutral and accurate observers. Parents are suckers for anything that can scare them. There’s good money to be made in the make-parents-shit-themselves industry.
I have known any number of parents who have taken a far more tolerant view of their children’s sexuality than Nick seems to believe possible, including a tolerance for their kids to have mutually-desired relationships with adults.
As for the tired canard (invariably invoked by bio-parents) that parenthood is, not only a life-altering event, but one transformed by a morality-transforming epiphany which results in an invariably prudish sensibility that cannot possibly be known or appreciated by the non-reproducing is one of the most offensive of smug assertions employed as facile “conversation stoppers” by those who truly have no better argument.
It credits those who have biologically reproduced with a greater innate wisdom than they possess and boylovers (for example) with an indifference for the welfare of kids greatly undeserved.
It’s time for those of us insusceptible to crude and transparent efforts to shame us into silence by morally bankrupt, undeservedly axiomatic condescensions to continue the conversation. And to take the “just wait until you’re a parent” meme to a sufficient depth of water and drown it. And to take some delight in doing so.
I’d say you’ve successfully answered Gantier’s call for an eloquent rebuttal 🙂
Hear, hear….
Gantier99, Dissenting and doting bio-parent. Vive la revolution!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmbDgfYOJng
Tom! Sorry, a song!
Thank you James! But not so eloquent. I realized, as soon as I had sent it, that I should have revised it slightly. Gotten rid of the double instance of “transform”, for example. But I have also learned not to burden Tom with my indecisiveness as a writer. At least, I try to minimize its impact upon him. You are, yourself, well on your way to forming incisive and persuasive arguments, I might add.
All publicity is good in our position!
Sorry, Nick, but there is proof that not all people develop an anti-choice bias, or throw away whatever principles they may have had in regards to youth lib, once they become parents. Robert Epstein is a good example of this, as he conducted the research that led to his article “The Myth of the Teen Brain” and co-developed the Epstein-Dumas Test of Adulthood as a result of his observations as a parent. Other pro-youth writers with a high degree of objectivity, such as Debbie Nathan, co-author of SATAN’S SILENCE, was a parent at the time. So this argument holds no value, and it is, I should say, condescending to all parents because it suggests that their critical thinking and principles will automatically be sacrificed once they become parents. The institution of parenthood is not inherently opposed to either MAP rights or youth liberation… only ignorance is the true embedded enemy, and parents as a group are as capable of overcoming ignorance as any other group of people.
As for your statement that Tom has won “few” converts… you overlook the fact that in this day and age, any Non-MAP who is “on the fence” about these issues, or has a variation of the pro-choice sentiment, are every bit as afraid to publicly voice this opinion as is any MAP of coming out publicly as a MAP. Have you overlooked the personal consequences of any Non-MAP in political office or academia who has expressed even a remotely nuanced view of these matters, particularly in the U.S. or the U.K.? Remember Rind and his team? Remember Prof. Harris Mirkin? C’mon now, Nick, implying that large numbers of Nons are free to come out with pro-choice or even moderately non-condemnatory views on either MAP or youth sexuality en masse with the hysteria still running high makes as much sense as the claim that large numbers of white citizens in the pre-Civil War South of the Confederate States who had genuine reservations against chattel slavery would have felt free to loudly and publicly express those views in large numbers. You have to take the political situation of the times into context before such claims have any type of validity, otherwise you are assuming (or hoping for) the extreme ignorance of the Non-MAP majority whose interests you claim to support.
“Remember Rind and his team? Remember Prof. Harris Mirkin?” Joycelyn Elders also springs to mind, and all she said was that it might be a good idea for sex ed curricula to include masturbation. Then there was the academic — I can’t call her name to mind at the moment — who did research into positive experiences of female pupil-male teacher relationships. The reason for her interest was that at fourteen she fell in love with her twenty-two-year old history teacher, on his first day at the school; at sixteen she started to go out with him; and at the time she was conducting the research they had been married for years. That backstory didn’t help her: she came under serious fire just the same.
Bandwagon fallacy…Thou shall not claim that because a premise is popular,therefore it must be true!
Nick Devin: we [VP] do not think adults should have sex with children
Hi Nick ..hold this thought.
Nick Devin: … I wonder why you characterize VP’s position as suggesting that there is intrinsic harm in sexual contact between adults and minors. We have said repeatedly that it is not harmful in all cases, but does result in harm in many cases. We have also said that much of the harm may be due to iatrogenic factors.
Well Nick, despite my genuine interest in and acknowledgement of virtue theory, I am also influenced by consequentialism.
On this basis, I must ask: if an act is harmless, why forbid it? If forbidding itself results in harm (such as iatrogenic factors) then we should question the forbidding even more. (There are parallels here with the immoral, fascist ‘war on drugs’.)
As I said earlier, I consider this question involving the rights of a completely separate population (children) to be subordinate and tangential in this context to the more pressing one of safeguarding the rights of paedophiles (including sex offenders).
I believe I’m equally impatient with VP’s decision to take an explicit line on adult/child sex as I am with Tom’s ..not least because I don’t even know what ‘sex with children’ is. Does shared nudity count? How about spooning? Or are we only talking about intercourse? If we are, I’m probably with you, but we don’t know do we, because ‘sex’ is a complex repertoire of behaviours. When affectionate intimacies draw the scale of penalties otherwise reserved for murderers and rapists , I think we need more and better questions and fewer categorical assertions.
Bloom
“I am also influenced by consequentialism.”
Huzzah!
“I consider this question involving the rights of a completely separate population (children) to be subordinate and tangential in this context to the more pressing one of safeguarding the rights of paedophiles (including sex offenders).”
As a member of this completely separate population, don’t be surprised if I disagree with you.
“I don’t even know what ‘sex with children’ is […] ‘sex’ is a complex repertoire of behaviours.”
Amen to that! I can’t stand broad statements about heterogeneous categories. In fact, Scott Alexander (of SSC) calls this the worst argument in the world.
James: As a member of this completely separate population, don’t be surprised if I disagree with you.
I’m glad you commented James, and to clarify.
Bloom: I consider this question involving the rights of [..] children to be subordinate and tangential in this context
I don’t subordinate the actual rights of children to the rights of anyone in any context other than perhaps the rights of a mother over her fetus. I’m talking about the question of children’s rights being subordinate to the question of our rights in the context of this discussion, which ought to be focused on our rights, not theirs.
When we’re talking about our rights as minor attracted people, as a stigmatized and pathologized minority, we should take care that we are not implicitly or explicitly discussing the rights of children, including whatever rights children have to sexual self determination and/or protection from sexual abuse.
That is a separate issue that has no place headlining the problem of our emancipation and fair treatment in society. I don’t deny it’s important, but I also don’t believe it should divide us into separate groups with nothing in common. What we have in common is what we have to focus on.
The pro-contact (pro-choice/pro-self-determination) position is built on the reciprocal rights of adults and children to have sex with each other. If children’s rights are not discussed, the argument falls apart. In that context, the two are inseparable.
Inseparable in the context of sexual rights, but as I say, other rights, such as the principle of habeus corpus, are more fundamental and their erosion has more serious consequences. These reciprocal sexual rights only serve to drive wedges into a group that would be better off developing a common voice.
I might also point out that the anti-contact position is concerned with children’s rights too.
>I might also point out that the anti-contact position is concerned with children’s rights too.
Not all children’s rights advocacy, though, is concerned with children’s *freedoms*. The approach adopted by the United Nation Declaration of Children’s Rights, say, is all about protection and welfare, including useful rights such as to education. This engages protection *from* (e.g., in the case of education, from ignorance) rather than rights *to* i.e. rights to make free choices e.g. which parent to live with in event of separation.
The right to protection from sexual exploitation is very different to the right to sexual self-determination; whether these are seen as contradictory and mutually exclusive is a matter of definition and ideology.
To reply to both of you:
Bloom: Right’s such as Habeas Corpus are important and everyone can agree on them. However, there’s no reason to believe that, even if both groups of MAPs were acting in concert, they wouldn’t be able to express different views. Coordinated action does not require disregard for differences of belief. As Leon Trotsky put it: “March separately, but strike together!”
Tom: Freedoms from are generally called “negative rights” while freedoms to are called “positive rights”. There is even a variant of Consequentialism called “Negative Utilitarianism” which cares only about avoid suffering rather than promoting happiness. In my opinion, these aims must be in balance. Anyway, I’ll save the weightier philosophy to reply to Bloom’s comment at the top.
I must say, Bloom, that the anti-choice camp has a very, very different definition of the word “rights” than the definition used by the pro-choicers, the latter of whom define it the way progressives have traditionally defined the word, which makes the element of *freedom of choice* and *freedom of acquiring desired information* implicit. The conception of “freedom from,” as opposed to “freedom to,” is part of the protectionist edict, not liberation. Thus, the anti-choicers are utilizing a misnomer when they refer to these protectionist measures as “rights.” They only use that latter term to impose a positive-sounding frame on their agenda. When it comes to the matter of actual rights for children and young adolescents, pro-choicers and anti-choicers are diametrically opposed. There may be places where the two camps can find common ground, such as a mutual desire for child safety. However, the two camps have an extremely opposed view as to what best serves these safety measures, especially within the context of a democratic legislative framework.
You hit on a very important point here, Bloom: The use of very loaded and emotionally suggestive language to frame the debate. When anyone, particularly anti-choicers, use statements like “sex with children,” or even simply using the word “sex,” this automatically suggests specifically penetrative intercourse or buggery to anyone who reads the discussion or debate. This encourages a specific type of emotional reaction in readers and participants. It would be much more accurate, and less value-laden, if terms or phrases like “sexual contact,” “sexual activity,” or “sex play” were used instead. This makes matters more clear, and introduces less bias into the mix.
Yes, and I think the problem is a very general one. For example, the term ‘child pornography’ evokes horrible images of child rape (whose creators deserve prosecution) but is then twisted and stretched like plasticine to cover child nudes, comics, drawings, unpublished journal entries and explicit but valuable human documents such as those made by Will McBride for “Show Me!”.
When I came out to friends a decade or so ago, I was spending a lot of time with their kids. There had always been full transparency in these relationships, which were friendly, affectionate and occasionally romantic in the way little girls commonly romance adults in their lives, including their teachers and parents.
Once the parents knew I had some sexual feelings for children, they could only frame this interest in terms of ‘abuse’. They couldn’t really understand that simple friendship could satisfy me, because they could only think of sexual interest in terms of adult sexual behaviour, which generally progresses to genital contact leading to orgasm.
Ok, in a different world I might have enjoyed some kind of sex play with these kids, but it would never have involved that adult script. The vast majority of paedophilic ‘abuse’ prosecuted in the courts involves the same kinds of sex play that children engage in among themselves: mutual touching and inspection. This is probably because most of the activities are child led. It seems to be situational offenders who most often bully children into acting as surrogate adults,
That anodyne intimacies are prosecuted as violent assaults is as much a reflection of a failure to discriminate between very different kinds of activity as it is a belief that the activities themselves are harmful. What’s more, just as the dogma of harm and the dogma of inability to consent are stoutly defended in order to maintain the status quo, so is the dogma of equivalence as applied to these very diverse modes of sexual expression.
Bloom.
In reply both to this comment and your earlier one (Nov 22, 2014 @ 08:47:58) … you’ve reminded me of a couple of things.
This mirrors my experience with my ex-girlfriend (I call her by the pseudonym MFP on my blog); when she had convinced me to talk to her about my attraction to young girls, the only way she could frame that was in the context of me forcibly grabbing a girl at random and raping her, that any interaction with girls would invariably lead to, as you say, “adult sexual behaviour, which generally progresses to genital contact leading to orgasm.” And of course, she also operated under the “insistence that [I] do not go anywhere near kids.” I couldn’t ever explain to her that living on the same block as an elementary school and a high school was not only safe, but a good place to be; she couldn’t grasp that I had the capacity to admire many beautiful people on a regular basis and then — privately, in my own bedroom, alone — fantasize about what I’d taken in as a masturbatory aid.
Again, echoing my own experience — I’m growing out of that mindset at the moment, and one of the most helpful things for me has been to repeat to myself: “Children are people. Children are people. Children are people.” When there’s an entire society determined to convince us that anyone under a particular local AoC is sub-human, incapable and inferior, and not to be regarded as a full human (not until they turn 16 or 18 or whatever magic number) it’s a small but critical reminder that I’m just interacting with another person, and I’m certainly capable of doing that I still deal with a bit of cognitive dissonance, describing myself as “shy” around other adult women, because I was, once upon a time. Current friends have asked me to give them pointers on how to be as outgoing and flirtatious as I am… and it all started with reminding myself that I’m just interacting with another human, and that’s something I can manage. Applying the same logic which has worked before in other situations seems reasonable!
Thanks Sophia, NOT Loren! I’m glad you expanded on those points. I think they’re significant and I’m glad I’m not alone in that. 🙂
No problem! You’re not nearly alone in that.
Also somewhat related, I was browsing through my local used bookstore a few days ago and found “Harmful To Minors” by Judith Levine for $6 — it’s incredible so far and I would highly recommend it to anyone here who hasn’t seen it yet. I can totally see why Tom would say “I always hoped that if my contribution proved a bit too controversial for Channel 4 they might nevertheless be willing to give a platform to someone like Judith Levine, or Bruce Rind, or a British academic such as Glenn Wilson…” — she certainly makes enough of a palatable case for many undecided but open-minded folks to see reality.
Nick Devin: we [VP] do not think adults should have sex with children
Hi Nick ..hold this thought.
Nick Devin: … I wonder why you characterize VP’s position as suggesting that there is intrinsic harm in sexual contact between adults and minors. We have said repeatedly that it is not harmful in all cases, but does result in harm in many cases. We have also said that much of the harm may be due to iatrogenic factors.
Well Nick, despite my genuine interest in and acknowledgement of virtue theory, I am also influenced by consequentialism.
On this basis, I must ask: if an act is harmless, why forbid it? If forbidding itself results in harm (such as iatrogenic factors) then we should question the forbidding even more. (There are parallels here with the immoral, fascist ‘war on drugs’.)
As I said earlier, I consider this question involving the rights of a completely separate population (children) to be subordinate and tangential in this context to the more pressing one of safeguarding the rights of paedophiles (including sex offenders).
I believe I’m equally impatient with VP’s decision to take an explicit line on adult/child sex as I am with Tom’s ..not least because I don’t even know what ‘sex with children’ is. Does shared nudity count? How about spooning? Or are we only talking about intercourse? If we are, I’m probably with you, but we don’t know do we, because ‘sex’ is a complex repertoire of behaviours not a ‘thing’. When affectionate intimacies draw the same scale of penalty as murder and rape then I think we need more and better questions and fewer categorical assertions.
Bloom
I’m not sure if one should feel more despair or disgust at hearing the story of this terribly disappointing let-down, but one thing I don’t feel is the need to accept without challenge the stories of professional victims like Ian McFadyen, as you generously do here, or, more precisely, to accept the spin they choose to put on what happened to them.
“McFadyen, to be sure, was genuinely the victim of a sadistic rapist on the staff of Caldicott Preparatory School if his story is true, and I have no particular reason to doubt it. McFadyen has plenty of reason to feel traumatised and angry, of course.”
The degree of authority over the boys collectively enjoyed by the pederastic schoolmasters at Caldicott (including, as they did, the headmaster) poses some troubling questions for those of us who believe sex between men and entirely willing boys of twelve or thirteen should not generally be forbidden. But that is no reason to accept the goings-on there being equated with rape.
“This self-righteous bully”’s depiction of what happened to him could be accurate, but here are a few particular reasons to doubt it:
1. George Hill, the man he claims sadistically “raped” him, was, in his own words, “very gentle around the boys. … He manipulated me into believing that he loved me” and “he was the first person apart from my parents I told that I loved.” Such being the case, why on earth would Hill have needed to use force?
2. I have read or heard numerous interviews by Mr. McFadyen, but in none of them does he claim having even hinted to either schoolmaster sexually involved with him that he found their attentions unwelcome, less still that he considered any resistance. And yet this went on for two years! “Rape” is a usefully emotive word, but surely one must doubt it can amount here to more than the legal fiction that a child cannot consent.
3. Among the risky things he did on leaving Caldicott at 14 was sleeping “with loads of men,” which he blames on his alleged trauma there. This sounds like one of those myths from the abuse industry’s textbooks that have gained the status of unchallengable truth just from being repeated often enough. Isn’t it more logical to suppose that people try to be happy, and therefore to try to repeat experiences that made them so rather than ones that made them unhappy? However he chooses to interpret it today, why should we not draw the obvious inference that he missed the sex at Caldicott too badly to cope without it?
4. After enjoying a lifestyle in his early twenties that many young men would envy, cavorting around his family’s chain of hotels, he says he then succumbed to decades of drug addiction and hopeless destitution. In strange contradiction to his mid-teen antics, he has also become enduringly frigid. Which is more likely to be self-validating and to win everyone’s sympathy: to claim and presumably to convince himself that all this was the fault of the schoolmasters he had sex with, or to blame weaknesses in his own character that were nothing to do with them, or blame his parents or any of a host of less palatable causes we cannot ascertain?
Mr. McFadyen did not crawl out of the woodwork until 2008. This was many years after the Caldicott scandal had captured the public imagination, largely due to the pioneering work of one Tom Perry who found Caldicott suitable to blame for his mid-life crisis and campaigned to persuade others to join him. Certainly Mr. Perry, and so far as I know all the Caldicott “victims” except Mr. McFadyen, have described what happened to them as consensual (however angry they’ve made themselves about it today).
How convenient for Mr. McFadyen that his allegations and eloquence presenting them so emotively have hurtled him into presumably rather lucrative fame and won him so much public sympathy that he now enjoys the privileges of a sacred cow. Meanwhile the once much-liked George Hill was made so unhappy by the utter ruin of his life that he killed himself. Who has really been the greater victim?
Edmund, author of Alexander’s Choice, a teacher/boy love story.
Tom my message to Edmund perhaps belongs in an email, sorry if using your blog is distracting – Edmund your book Alexander’s Choice is not available on Amazon in an e-book format, can that be changed? My life on a government benefit pushes me into e-books as my preferred purchase. (By the way I do like the way you reframe the victemology discourses you comment on.)
A Kindle version used to be available but I just checked and now it’s gone. Maybe that’s just an error and will be corrected soon?
Thanks for the update. Read all three reviews and gave a thumbs down to the review that was a poorly masked attack on Edmund. I very nealy labelled the review inappropriate but judged Amazon as unable to understand my view that emotionally driven arguments about suspicions an author might be a pedophile is really a breaking of rules about how one reviews a book/text.
With apologies to Tom from me too for taking up space to answer a question about my book, and with thanks to you for your interest, Alexander’s Choice is available as a Kindle book here http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/ (with 20 reviews) and here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alexanders-Choice-Edmund-Marlowe-ebook/dp/B00AR3MTIQ/ (with 23 reviews).
I suspect the reason you couldn’t find it is that Amazon has recently, annoyingly and without reference to me categorised it as “adult”. When one does a search for it, this pops up which it is absurdly easy not to notice: “Your search contains adult items which have been hidden. If you wish to see them, click here.” If you don’t notice it and click on it, you will think the Kindle version doesn’t exist.
Adding to the complicated absurdities, there are rival pages on both amazon.com (with 3 reviews) and amazon.co.uk (with 10 reviews) which falsely imply the paperback is only available second-hand and expensively. I couldn’t find your comment anywhere, so could you give me the url please?
It will be interesting to see what the finished product looks like, and it is perhaps unfair to judge the programme before it appears – I’m sure there will be plenty to say after it airs. I would say that I’m not as implacably opposed as you are, Tom, to the Virtuous Paedophile movement. I’m not entirely hostile to the idea of progress by baby-steps: I see some merit in the idea that paedophiles need to be recognised as human beings who have voices that should be heard before they can begin trying to demolish our culture’s entire sexual ethic.
What worries me about this programme from the information released by Channel 4 is not the ‘virtuous’ angle, but rather the attempt to medicalise paedophilia and transform it into a sickness that can or should be treated. This, I think, is the kind of discourse that both virtuous paedophiles and heretics need to stand up against: the idea that paedophiles are in need of ‘curing’ and that therapy of some kind is an appropriate response to minor-attraction. I am frankly disappointed that Sarah Goode seems to be associated with this. I am also sorry that this documentary would seem determined to treat paedophiles ultimately as risks to be managed rather than as human beings with a full range of human weaknesses and potential. The idea that children can be made safe by the persecution of MAPs is rightly criticised, but we should perhaps be challenging the very idea that the humanity of one group of people should be played off against the welfare of another.
Sarah Goode is quoted as dismissing the notion that paedophiles are in reality devils with horns and pointy tails; she scoffs at the quasi-religious image of the paedophile as the embodiment of human evil. Instead, she wants to establish the paedophile as a sick and dangerous but pitiable person (a ‘bloke’ as she makes clear), who must be cured of his illness for his own welfare and whose freedom must be curtailed for the welfare of society. You don’t need to be a committed Foucauldian to see the clinic and the prison operating together as instruments and enforcers of a dominant ‘regime of truth’. If what is being suggested is that some counseling should be available to MAPs who want it in order to make their lives easier, then that’s hard to argue with. But I can’t help but feel that there is a darker agenda here: to mark paedophilia with the stigma of sickness and the paedophile as a sub-person who is ultimately not in control of himself. There is often something very sinister and very dangerous about those who come attired as angels of mercy and enlightenment, especially when they claim to wield the instruments of science. We should regard them with the greatest of scepticism.
If the option we are being given is to ‘come out’ and accept the label of madness and deviance, then I for one would prefer to embrace my horns and pointy tail. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “so far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human.” Those who would want to brand us as sick no doubt think they are being humanitarian and modern and enlightened in effacing the image of the paedophile as the embodiment of evil, but in reality they are robbing us of the last vestiges of humanity we have in the popular imagination. At least being evil entails the recognition of moral freedom – something the inmates of the asylum, like human vegetables, are mercifully released from.
Kit Marlowe: This, I think, is the kind of discourse that both virtuous paedophiles and heretics need to stand up against: the idea that paedophiles are in need of ‘curing’ and that therapy of some kind is an appropriate response to minor-attraction.
This is what I like to hear. Our common interests outweighing the factionalized debate over sexual contact.
Kit Marlowe: At least being evil entails the recognition of moral freedom – something the inmates of the asylum, like human vegetables, are mercifully released from.
..and this also goes to the heart of the matter!
Hi Tom, a lot to discuss but I’ll try to stay on topic..
First, that “gently searching style” must have brought thoughts of the Bashir interview to mind. I do hope your faith in Steve Humphries is eventually productive and results in sympathetic publication of the interview. As for your being my ambassador of sorts, I’m unconcerned that our opinions diverge on some issues I wish you well in that project.
what Bloom perhaps meant to say was too academic, as in the expression “it’s all a bit academic” i.e. it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, so why bother talking about it? […] I tried to talk about sexual self-determination but who was listening? No one ever does these days. So what’s the point of banging on about it?
Yes sexual self-determination is a better term. In this context though, maybe the distinction between abstract and academic is somewhat academic! 🙂
I think the key words here are what’s the point of banging on about it? I don’t see this ‘banging on’ as pointless, but I do see it as specifically to do with one group, children, that is distinct from another, paedophiles, the population we’re primarily concerned with. I have a similar response when ‘youth right’s issues are raised. I think the questions around emancipation are broader than these discussions of sexual rights. I also think “it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon” is much less important basis for academic status than is de facto child celibacy. The vast majority of people questioning the prohibition of sexual conduct with children are not sexually active with children themselves (for whatever reason). That to me is why the question is academic. Especially compared with other questions that do affect many of us in a direct and personal way.
Consider men (usually) who have tricked, cajoled, bullied or forced children into sex. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying I’m no apologist for child abuse and that I don’t excuse these actions or argue that anybody has a right to treat children badly. However, I am conscious that child sex offenders receive draconian, often open ended sentences, are subjected to social exclusion, intrusive monitoring, vigilantism and violence in custody. Despite what they’ve done, I argue that their common rights and dignity are neglected and that they are being denied their humanity. This is a core issue that should concern all of us, yet has nothing to do with legalizing sex with children.
Presumably Bloom is pleased to see controversy over self-determination taken out of the equation by Channel 4. That leaves The Paedophile Next Door, and any similar presentation of MAPs, free to focus on “tolerance and acceptance”, right?
You’re not alone in misinterpreting my (far from unqualified) support for the likes of VP as agreement with their “intrinsic harm” position. In fact, I see this position as an irrelevant concession motivated by a desire for acceptance at any cost. For the record, categorically, I don’t recognize that harm is an intrinsic or necessary consequence of adult/child sexual conduct. I admit that harm is common, but I put that down to socially induced secondary harms such as stigma, bullying, shame, iatrogenic effects, etc and also to the generic harms associated with any kind of sexual conduct, such as unwanted pregnancy, infection and physical injury.
I like your term ‘self-determination’. I’ve chosen a path which prioritizes my actually spending time with kids. I’m very clear in my own mind that sex is not part of this and I don’t frame my friendships as romances or treat time spent with children as an erotic adventure. That doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize about kids, but I do maintain a clear distinction between my friendships with real kids and my private imaginings. This is my self-determined strategy for expressing my paedophilia in my own way and being rewarded by it.
Finally, and very importantly, I’m silent on the question of whether adult sexual conduct with children should be socially acceptable and/or legal. I have some opinions on this question and I’ve put a lot of thought into understanding it, but I remain agnostic and noncommittal. This doesn’t stop me from engaging with other important political questions affecting minor attracted people, and this is my key point,
A: “…insistence that they do not go anywhere near kids.” This is one of the worst things. I feel that many isolated and guilt-ridden child-celibate paedophiles would be considerably helped by a chance to get constructively involved with kids, say at the local after-school centre.
Yes. Its very important to me to feel comfortable in children’s company. At one time my sexual feelings felt intrusive and complicated my being ‘with’ children in the deeper sense of empathy and bonding. Now I downplay sex rather than make it a big issue, but maybe age has something to do with that as well.
At one time I was very uncomfortable around kids because I had low opinion of my suitability as a companion for them and was uncertain of my capacity for restraint. I have no doubts about either of these things now and I see my past discomfort as a result of internalized stigma.
So I agree, self-pathologizing is extremely destructive, however I don’t see how it’s necessarily linked with child celibacy of opinions on it.
>… that “gently searching style” must have brought thoughts of the Bashir interview to mind.
Not really. Bashir was definitely out to get Michael Jackson. Couldn’t be clearer in his later questions, although he spied on Michael and “groomed” him for months before getting around to them.
>…maybe the distinction between abstract and academic is somewhat academic! 🙂
Or pedantic 🙂
>…when ‘youth right’s issues are raised. I think the questions around emancipation are broader than these discussions of sexual rights.
So do I. See “An open letter to Frank Furedi”: http://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2014/04/12/an-open-letter-to-frank-furedi/
Not necessarily linked with child celibacy at all, no. (After all, I am child celibate myself, because I have no intention of breaking the law. Sometimes that’s just self-preservation, in the current state of things.) I was just thinking specifically of people like the guy in the programme, who says he is child celibate and feeling desperate. But certainly a guilt-ridden sexually active paedophile is not likely to manage sexual relationships with kids well, indeed (s)he may end up causing a lot of harm.
One thing I can say based on this latest debacle for you, Tom, along with the one created by Dr. Goode (what an ironic surname!) with her two books, is that they all suffer from a central problem that needs to cease if the public is ever to achieve a sincere understanding of MAPs and the dynamics of our attraction base: The cruel and biased conflation of adult attraction to youths in a general sense with adult sexual *abuse* of youths. This constant tethering of the two together serves no purpose other than to keep the public believing that there is an inextricable connection between one and the other in the first place. It’s a central part of the abuse narrative that serves to appease the professional victims (as you adroitly called them) and keep condemnation of both MAP sexuality *and* youth sexual expression at the forefront of public consciousness, rather than true understanding and empathy. Yet we’re always the ones accused of lacking empathy!
This conflation is designed to keep both MAPs and youths in their appointed “place” within the societal hierarchy while pretending to give us a “voice” and feigning sympathy for us. What it really means is, sympathy under PC majority terms: That we renounce our attraction base as inherently toxic, and we agree that we need to seek “help” rather than simply being law-abiding for reasons amounting to personal safety of ourselves and our hypothetical love interests.
It keeps a deeper understanding and discussion of the complex issues surrounding the dynamics of both the MAP attraction base and child/young teen sexuality in general off the discussion table, and stifles further understanding of these issues by keeping the sex abuse narrative front and center. While we can all agree that sexual abuse is a real and serious issue well worth discussing and seeking reasonable solutions for prevention, the pundits of PC and preservation of the status quo insist that it not be looked at as a separate issue unto itself, but one that can never be separated from any study of intergenerational attraction, let alone youth sexuality in general.
It also serves to keep the sex abuse profiteers in the position of heroes and professional “experts” despite all the destruction they’ve heaped upon societal consciousness, the law, and the genuine victims whose suffering they prolonged to retain their patronage as patients for the rest of their lives over the past three and a half decades. It transforms genuine victims into bullying braggarts who misuse sympathy to seek power and revenge, while manufacturing victims out of individual youths who refuse to adopt the party line view of their intergenerational sexual experiences. Let’s not forget the Satanic ritual abuse and “repressed memory syndrome” nonsense that rose out of the initial years of the sex abuse industry.
Until the appeal to emotion and sentiment is replaced with a dominant appeal to reason and understanding, these documentaries are not going to advance the general knowledge base about MAP issues in any beneficial way. Those who dare have a non-mainstream view will continue to be marginalized, while those who say what the public is believed to want to hear will get full use of the podium.
“While we can all agree that sexual abuse is a real and serious issue well worth discussing and seeking reasonable solutions for prevention, the pundits of PC and preservation of the status quo insist that it not be looked at as a separate issue unto itself, but one that can never be separated from any study of intergenerational attraction, let alone youth sexuality in general.”
This is absolutely key. I just got done reading Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, by the Mexican-American writer Rigoberto González. González recalls that by the age of seven or eight, in Mexico, he was enjoying sex with the kids next door: vaginal sex with the girl, who was his age, and receptive anal and oral sex with the boy, who was older. Around the same time, the boys and girls at his school would line up to show each other their genitals, but when the boys suggested that the girls suck their penises, the girls ran away in fright. At fourteen, in California, González began having and enjoying clandestine sex with a series of much-older men, most of them married with kids of their own. At nineteen, while at university, he became involved with a man more than twenty years older, a rich guy who sought out shy youths for sex. Having been starved of love since the death of his mother when he was twelve, González was overjoyed to have found this relationship, but it quite quickly became abusive: his older boyfriend would hit him, insult him, humiliate him publicly, etc. The boyfriend also revealed that he had been raped as a child by his father. When González asked him why he had never reported it, the boyfriend burned him with a cigarette and told him not to ask stupid questions.
My point is that these facts do not contradict each other. They coexist. González liked having sex with other children, including an older boy, when he was well short of puberty, *and* his boyfriend was raped as a child by his father, did not report it and was left with lifelong emotional damage. The boys and girls at his primary school liked to show each other their genitals, *and* when the boys suggested an activity that was perceived as male-dominant (remember, this was Mexico in the 70s) the girls took to their heels. As a teenager, González liked having sex with much older men, *and* he became involved in a classically abusive relationship with one in particular, a man with a history of such relationships. The error of almost everybody these days is to assume, essentially, that the first set of facts cannot be true. Some MAPs who are reacting against this go to the opposite extreme and assume, essentially, that the second set of facts cannot be true. But they are all true, and they must all be taken into consideration.
>With apologies to Tom from me too for taking up space to answer a question about my book
I am sure others here will be interested, so no problem.
LOL. You replied to the wrong comment.
Is there any way you might be able to fix this bug? I think it has something to do with the skin you’ve chosen. This never seems to happen on SSC or a few other WordPress blogs I frequent.
BTW: Have you considered hosting an open thread? I have faith in your ability to come up with a fantastically punish title 🙂
(Apologies for being too meta)
>Have you considered hosting an open thread
Er, no. I’ll read your link.
The link was just an example of such a thread.
Was that “no” as in “I haven’t thought of it” or “I’m not going to do it”?
I have now seen the link.
The present arrangement is clearly not perfect, what with super slim thread ends and replies going astray. But the Open Thread idea does not seem to address this problem.
So perhaps you are suggesting it might have an independently useful function?
Maybe others here would see some use for it that is not otherwise served by the ordinary threads. Are there people who would like to introduce topics that otherwise do not get a look in but which are relevant to the overall theme of H-TOC? Please let me know.
I had one wicked thought, I confess. I am quite tempted to banish the most egregiously off-topic posts to an Open Thread page e.g. The current thread started off specifically on the topic of the Channel 4 documentary. But Nick and Ethan wrenched it back onto the same ground as older posts concerning the VPs. Maybe H-TOC should start an Open Thread on a completely separate page in an obscure backroom of the site and have a running header for it called “Same Old Boring Crap”, reserved for posts from Ethan and Nick and anyone who is heroically dutiful enough to answer them.
As I say, though, that’s a wicked thought which perhaps itself should be banished. Arguably, they were not off topic at all but just severely patience testing.
The Open Thread was meant as a separate suggestion. It’s based on the fact that tonnes of our discussions drift away from the point of the post (like this one, or the one on historical revolutions, or Edmund’s book, or the book Linca recommended, or the thing about British cars, or the one about whether I should send the CV (BTW: Did you get it? Sent it yesterday. Sorry it was so short.).). I bet if you searched the comments for variations on the phrase “sorry, Tom” you’ll realise that a good half our discussions are off topic and we all feel slightly guilty about it. Plus, I’d love to have a good sparring ground to duel with deontologists 🙂
“his boyfriend was raped as a child by his father, did not report it and was left with lifelong emotional damage”
This is terribly confounded by the fact that his father was the abuser. This means he had a parent with an abusive personality and, since all personality traits are heritable, we should expect that he’d also be likely to be abusive. No emotional scaring required! Even he weren’t the victim and it was one of his siblings, it still wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if he turned out to be abusive. Of course, the fact that he was abused is terrible and may have indeed scarred him, but I wouldn’t think of that as my first explanation for his behaviour.
[/bio-determinism]
True, certainly, and often not given enough consideration, since children are supposed these days to be free from original sin, as it were, and it’s a bit heretical to suggest that a kid has very likely inherited antisocial personality traits. I’m definitely not suggesting that the rape ‘turned him into an abuser’, since it has been amply demonstrated that the abused-abuser hypothesis is not true. But at the very least it caused him serious and lasting emotional pain.
Hi Tom. Your feeling gutted reminds me of those public sector job interviews that go so well you’re convinced you’ve got the job. Then only to find it was a formality and the job was already filled internally. And probably by a less able person.
I have noticed two PC reactions we continually see on our TVs. One is white politicians, when discussing high immigration (of any colour), always say something like “As long as they pay their taxes then I welcome them.” So if say 100 million working immigrants come here that is Ok then? Nothing constructive, and honest, gets debated.
And with paedophilia, it is always about “victims” and “them”, as if paedophiles are not in one’s social circle.
Well they are! Which is obvious to this readership. From what I’ve researched, it is estimated around 3-5 per cent of {American} men are paedophiles and 20-30 per cent are hebephiles (mostly pseudo BTW, that is, secondary not primary interest). Whether these paedophiles are technically ones, or the mistakenly used term for people wanting/having sex with anyone pre-pubescent, I am unsure.
Therefore the minor-attracted are in everyone’s social circle. And out of these, some are genuine child lovers who might not have penetrative sex, just gentle behavour. And men who use kids like a Fleshlight! And invariably the latter is a man like most men: he is married/partnered and mostly has sex with a woman that lives with him. A regular guy!
In other words, the do-gooders are looking in the wrong place if they want to stop actual “child abuse”. And that, as far as I am concerned, true child lovers do not need any therapy. There is no malignancy. This fact is obviously what particularly upsets yourself about so-called ‘virtuous’ paedophiles.
My humble advice, Tom, is maybe try this…
As you are already “out”, I suggest make your own documentaries. If you have no film-making skill/experience, then just do a series of simple Youtube videos. And if you can find an expert brave enough to film using your Terms of Reference, maybe use crowdfunding from your readership to finance that person’s fee etc. Then get your message out there once and for all. On Channel Four News you came over very well indeed. No devil’s horns were visible.
And you could ask the likes of Gyles Brandreth to explain why they don’t feel abused.
This will not immediately change the Law in favour of child lovers, but it will surely lessen the persecution of such. At least it is a start and in the right direction too.
What do you all think? Am I very mistaken or could this be feasible?
>”On Channel Four News you came over very well indeed. No devil’s horns were visible.”
Thanks. If I were younger and more energetic, I would do exactly as you suggest. In fact, I think others should take up this idea, and indeed one or two have.
To be honest, I feel much more at ease with the written word than the spoken. I’m not a natural speaker. There must be young MAPs out there, including maybe H-TOC readers, with better oral media skills than mine.
If they do release the audio transcript to you, might you consider uploading it to YouTube or Vimeo or Dailymotion?
Also your interview on channel 4 News was cut short,still have not heard the rest of that.
I am very sorry to hear this. What a loss, and what a disappointment for you, especially after the effort and emotion you put in.
“…insistence that they do not go anywhere near kids.” This is one of the worst things. I feel that many isolated and guilt-ridden child-celibate paedophiles would be considerably helped by a chance to get constructively involved with kids, say at the local after-school centre. Yet once people have had the courage, or desperation, to talk about their feelings with someone else, the party line seems to be that everyone must try to ‘help’ them by making sure that they can never be around a child, even if there are plenty of other people around too. Few people would seriously suggest that a sexually frustrated heterosexual man should never be around young women under any circumstances: indeed, many would suggest that he go out and get to know some young women as people, so that he’s not stuck alone in a room idealising them in more and more unrealistic ways. But when it comes to paedophiles, even the virtuous types are seen as having the potential to be uniquely dangerous.
Speaking of cranking up the fear of paedophilia, the Guardian recently published the results of their 2014 British sex survey. 59% of respondents — 68% of women and 50% of men — said they believed children are more at risk from paedophiles now than ten years ago. 59% said the same for twenty years ago, and 55% said the same for fifty years ago. How can that possibly be? Kids play outside by themselves much less than they used to: surely everybody’s noticed that? Depressingly, 73% of respondents aged 65 and older said they believed children were more at risk from paedophiles now than ten years ago. It seems that they have seen how amped-up the media coverage is compared to what it was like when they were young, and drawn precisely the wrong conclusion: that sexual threats to children have increased, rather than that talk about them has increased. Apparently, 13% of female and 19% of male respondents also said they thought “gay sex should be made illegal”. I find that so hard to believe that I am wondering about the sampling methods, which aren’t explained. But perhaps I am sheltered.
I’m glad to hear that Brandreth came out and said that. This whole thing reminds me of a couple of comments in a Metafilter thread discussing Susan Clancy’s The Trauma Myth (https://www.ipce.info/sites/ipce.info/files/biblio_attachments/the_trauma_myth.pdf). Somebody had this to say:
“When I was young, I (a male) was sexually abused repeatedly by a male teacher at my school. I’d say ‘confusing’ was right as to my reaction. Also, it just seemed like a price worth paying to do the cool stuff on weekends he would take us out to do. It made me uncomfortable, but he was otherwise a really nice guy. Now that I’m much older, I’m not sure he was such a nice guy, but really I’m not sure.
“It doesn’t bother me all that much and I don’t think I’m traumatized. I hardly ever think about it and I have all sorts of healthy relationships and not a whole lot of dysfunction in my life. Now, other people experience similar, but different and more serious things and I’m not at all saying they shouldn’t be traumatized. I’m just saying I’m a data point for ‘confused … but totally over it a long time ago and no big deal’.
“Also, I don’t talk about it, ever (except here and now if I decide to post this), because I know if I did people would think its SUCH a bigger deal than it is in my life. Speaking only for myself and respecting the needs of others who have different experiences/emotional makeups, I really don’t want the OMG SEX ABUSE YOU ARE DAMAGED FOR LIFE machine infecting my life.”
Another man said: “My father, thirty years ago, told me that he didn’t think that adults having sex with children was as traumatizing as was generally believed. He was a child psychiatrist. Needless to say, he was not talking to the media about what he had concluded through several decades of anecdotal data.”
A possible small flicker of hope is offered by Carin Marie Friemond’s ‘Navigating the Stigma of Pedophilia: The Experiences of Nine Minor-Attracted Men in Canada’, a paper (viewable in full here: http://summit.sfu.ca/item/13798) about the experiences of three girl-lovers, four boy-lovers and one bisexual CL. All nine subjects are child celibate, but Friemond, though inspired by Sarah Goode’s book, acknowledges having read Rind, Sandfort, Okami, Kilpatrick et al. and concedes, in one quick but vital sentence, that child-adult sex can be nuanced and may not be inevitably negative.
This not-wholly-unsympathetic article https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/97-126_birkett_faces.htm is apparently linked to a 1997 Channel Four programme on paedophilia called The Devil Amongst Us. Did anybody see it at the time? What was it like? GIven the title, I’m not holding out much hope for ‘fair and balanced’.
Again, I’m very sorry to hear they cut your interview, and I too would love to hear the audio if that proves possible.
>1997 Channel Four programme on paedophilia called The Devil Amongst Us. Did anybody see it at the time?
Believe it or not, I was interviewed for that programme too. Just as with this latest programme, my contribution was dropped, and (I believe) for pretty much the same reasons.
Dea Birkett said immediately after the interview that I’d come across well. Later, though, she made an excuse for dropping my piece: she claimed the audio engineer had fouled up so there was no sound! I was not offered the opportunity for another go.
Oh, Lord.
Are you ‘Paul’ at the end of the article then, with the steak pie? Or is that somebody else?
I’ve just checked out the article.
No, I’m not Paul, but your speculation was perfectly reasonable. Think I know who Paul must have been but I’m not entirely sure.
Ah, OK.
Well, how’s this for a patronising sentence: “Books on children line his walls – Greek Love, The Child Abusers, Loving Boys, Perspectives On Paedophilia – volumes on child abuse, child rearing and paedophilia sitting right next to each other all jumbled up together as if somehow, in Paul’s mind, they’re about the same thing.”
Also we have: “I liked Paul; I wanted him to be saved.” What from? Hellfire?
“all jumbled up together as if somehow, in Paul’s mind, they’re about the same thing”
Maybe they’re all about (gasp!) children?
‘“I liked Paul; I wanted him to be saved.” What from? Hellfire?’
As someone who has been told this (“I want to save you”) several times, I’m pretty damn sure that it’s hellfire.
Really? Who told you that? Jehovah’s Witnesses?
“three girl-lovers, four boy-lovers and one bisexual CL”
3 + 4 + 1 = 8
I’m confused. What happened to the last guy?
It was 3+5+1. James, you and your sense of order! 🙂
I think it was a courageous paper to research and write, thanks A. for the link. Will read it more thoroughly.
A.:“…insistence that they do not go anywhere near kids.” This is one of the worst things. I feel that many isolated and guilt-ridden child-celibate paedophiles would be considerably helped by a chance to get constructively involved with kids, say at the local after-school centre.
I second this entirely, isolation from kids is not a good way for a child-celibate paedophile to move forward, but as you point, out putting this into open practice at say an after-school would be very difficult. Even in less hysteric countries than the UK.
“It was 3+5+1”
But A. said there were 4 BLs. Was that a typo?
It was a typo or simply that numbers dance for some people. Table 1 page 38. A. may want to comment.
Nothing wrong with my arithmetic, thank you! I’m merely a bit absent-minded and prone to careless mistakes. 😛
Yes, I went and forgot him. Poor guy must be feeling very forlorn. There are, as Gantier says, five BLs interviewed.
Once again, bravo on the title. I actually thought this was a continuation of our conversation on rape shield laws 😛
‘“They’re not monsters with horns and tails, but ordinary blokes,” […] this makes them so dangerous’
WTSF? Did they even read this? ‘These are normal people which is EVEN MORE SCARY!’ I can’t even…
“He claims that he has not interfered with a child, nor could ever imagining doing so […] men like him will be more readily offered support to manage their unwanted desires.”
Maybe a VP? I wonder if Ethan knows him.
What about if it isn’t unwanted?
“The way to reach an ultimate goal is to focus on small, incremental achievements. You don’t frighten the horses by seeming to be insanely radical.”
Have you ever heard of the concept of the Overton window.
“an outcome that cements intolerance and non-acceptance of sexual self-determination”
I’m not so sure. After all, wouldn’t the public not hating MAPs (for whatever reason) be a step in the right direction?
“this self-righteous bully’s “dignified exchange”, as the programme info puts it, with a paedophilic self-sacrificial lamb.”
Sucks to be the lamb, but I’d still like to see it play out.
“It is no accident, I feel, that neither Brandreth, nor anyone with a comparable experience, is being featured on the Channel 4 programme so far as I can tell. They wouldn’t want to spoil their “misery memoir” narrative with any happiness, would they?”
When ever I hear about things like this I want to participate. After all, I’ve been on TV before, what could be the difference? Then I remember I’m thousands of km away and trying to stay anonymous 😛
>After all, I’ve been on TV before
You have?? I’d love to know what that was about, although not if it’s going to compromise your anonymity.
I’ve been on TV several times so It would be difficult to say about what.
Mostly for quiz shows. Did interviews on behalf of my secondary school twice. Gave a speech at my graduation, which was televisied. Questioned a few politicians at the equivalent of a townhall meeting. It’s not that hard to get on local TV 😛
Quite a star already!
Maybe I should try to get onto your channel! 🙂
LOL. It’s all “gifted child” BS punctuated by occasional comedy. I’ve no idea how good our rating are…
Not BS in your case!
I suppose, but it’s kind of annoying. Especially when my teachers pushed me to study for those quiz shows. They clearly cared way more than I did.
It brings them prestige if you do well, I guess.
I know. Doesn’t mean I like it 😛
Since my time online is fragmented and my faculty for long-form writing largely non-existent (there’s a reason I don’t have a blog of my own), I was wondering whether, instead of writing a CV, you could just question/interview me about stuff before you consider whether to recommend me for Sexnet. It’s clearly apparent that I’ve been unable to predict which seemingly trivial details of my life you’re interested in so it might help both of us if you were the one posing the questions. Alternatively, I could go back to trying to finish the CV but I can’t guarantee it’ll be useful or contain anything new. I don’t keep secrets (besides my name and location) so if you don’t know something it’s just because it hasn’t occurred to me to mention it.
If you’re up for this suggestion, we could discuss things on the Sexnet post where we wont tie up conversations.
PS: If you’re still interested in the philosophy of language and how I think about the categories of “male” and “female”, I think you (and jedson303) should check out the latest post on SSC. It also features a cool discussion on national borders.
>Alternatively, I could go back to trying to finish the CV
How about just emailing me ( tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk ) what you have done so far? I’ll see if I can take it from there.
Alright. Give me a while with the email-address rigmarole. Pretty sure it just restates what you already know, though. Or maybe you intend to pass it on to Mr. Bailey?
>Or maybe you intend to pass it on to Mr. Bailey?
No, I’ll seek your agreement before contacting Mike. We may or may not need a bit of discussion/further info, depending on what you send me.
Alright. Would this further discussion proceed via email?
Yes.
Me too! But I look dreadful in orange!
I’m a bit confused. Was that meant to reference the orange jumpsuits often worn by prisoners in the US?
‘These are normal people which is EVEN MORE SCARY!’
Because they can hide in plain sight, I think is the idea. You never know if your new boyfriend, or the man next door, or the gymnastics coach, might be after your kids. Suspect everyone.
I know what they mean, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous-sounding.
I will be turning in.
Linca
Isn’t this eloquent testimony to the fact that we are never dealing (solely) with the pursuit of truth and enlightenment when the mainstream media are involved? I may be an old Marxist dinosaur, but it seems to me that there are good reasons why the radical philosopher Alain Badiou described the Western media as “corrupt and servile.” It doesn’t serve political parties so much as it serves certain political ideologies. Systematically, with one or two rare and honourable exceptions, it fails to question these dominant fictions
And punitive, disgust-ridden victimology is surely at the top of the established priority list
It seems to me that you threatened to probe the dominant ideology at its most symptomatically neuralgic point: its desperate need for the perpetuation of an established victims-and-bogeymen fantasy. This fantasy has become materialised in a vast edifice of State apparatuses and agencies over the last few decades, perhaps at an especially accelerated rate in the UK during “New Labour’s” reign (I would personally include child protection “charities” under that heading, as they work hand-in-glove with the most coercive agencies of the State and receive huge inflows of State/public money).
In other words, a lot of lucratively remunerated careers and a huge swathe of established anti-thought (“knowledge” borne of groupthink) would be at risk should this gravy-train for bullies and hysterics be successfully challenged. They seem to me to be rather like the provincial nobodies who herded millions of people into death camps during Herr Hitler’s regime: pathetic wannabe do-gooders who secretly delighted in their new status as petty officials with unlimited power over designated scapegoats, a power that allowed them to actualise their most sadistic fantasies without let or hindrance.
I found myself recalling a sequence from Slavoj Žižek’s extraordinarily powerful little book of 2008, “Violence: Six Sideways reflections”. He describes the predominant mode of contemporary politics as “post political bio-politics”, a mouthful of jargonese which actually means something very straightforward. “Post-political” is intended to convey the pseudo-progressive notion that the old ideological struggles of the past have been left behind, Instead, today’s “post-political” administrations focus on technical expertise and management, wholly blind to the massive political questions of what (or who) is being managed and what one can lay claim to expertise over in the first place. As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once put it, my need for a heart surgeon is rather different from my need for a friend. Or lover. Who can be an expert on friendship and love? From a Freudian point of view, no one, save for a few charlatans and deluded do-gooders (do-gooder always strive to manage their own unacknowledged conflicts by trying to manage other people). Bio-politics puts the regulation of security and the welfare of others at its heart – both deeply reactionary projects, misleadingly shrouded in a spurious “human rights” style piety (how can anyone possibly know what the true welfare of someone else would consist of?).
Let me quote Žižek directly:
“It is clear that these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life … almost only that. That is to say with the depoliticised, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear, it focuses on defence from victimisation or harassment.”
You threatened NOT to frighten the public. On the contrary, you “threatened” to make them less afraid, to make them more rational, a good deal calmer and considerably less paranoid. For that you HAD to be censored: the dominant fiction of the uncontrollable paedo, helplessly governed by unmanageable sexual demi-urges, is a necessity for the State of post-political bio-politics. They have, after all, been forced to give up on homo-bashing.
But to return briefly to Alain Badiou: truth is less easy to utterly repress. It always runs counter to established knowledge, and in fact (as Jacques Lacan once argued) it “punches a hole through knowledge.” The suppression of young sexuality by established knowledge, the fanatical recasting of young sexual expression as “abuse” (or “evidence of abuse”), has a formidable enemy: the natural, generally harmless and spontaneous tendency of the young to experiment with and explore sexual pleasure.
“It doesn’t serve political parties so much as it serves certain political ideologies. Systematically, with one or two rare and honourable exceptions, it fails to question these dominant fictions”
More than that, it serves Mammon. It chases money which means appealing to the lowest common denominator. If that means running away from inconvenient truths, well, inconvenient truths don’t pay rent.
“truth is less easy to utterly repress. It always runs counter to established knowledge, and in fact (as Jacques Lacan once argued) it “punches a hole through knowledge.””
What an excellent way of putting it 🙂
I for one would like to listen to a copy of the interview Tom.
As I read your account of the interview and your feelings now following the news of how this program is being shaped and marketed your feelings and concerns make sense to me. I regret you have been put in this position.
I live in a different country but for all that the same kind of climate shapes us in New Zealand as shapes you on the other side of the globe. One local academic labelled me a 1980s intellectual, and that is perhaps how things are. The openness and debate preference supported in the past has been replaced by an updated version of what it means to be ‘modern’. The debate is gone. The mere idea of a range of views captured by the idea of pro-contact or it’s opposite, or that same diversity can be couched inside ideas of self determination, is very much off the table.
I agree with you the best path is to allow an exploration of what are diverse lives. To sharpen what is being said I think your path is better than the virtuous pedophile template.
On my blog site (http://takearisknz.wordpress.com) I have put up a number of posts that offer views similar to yours, and like you the care of how that text is put together is not hard to detect. Currently, because debate is almost zero, I do find myself less than eager to put up more. For me the engine for writing actually comes from the response a text generates, in this sense I don’t subscribe to the view of seeing writing as something done for its own sake – a version of ‘art for arts sake’.
It is my belief the interview you gave will have a readership/audience but it may not be an item that is appreciated now, we have to wait for change for the dialogue you long for to be possible. I do have a strong sense of empathy for the position you find yourself in Tom.
Thanks for your thoughts, Peter.
>I for one would like to listen to a copy of the interview Tom.
Glad you are interested. I’d like to speak to Steve Humphries first. He is abroad for a week or so. Now that Channel 4 has no further interest in the video, it is possible Testimony Films might be prepared to release it to me.
Bump for interest.
Wow! That boggles the imagination! Good for you. Now, what to do with it? Hmm…
I agree with you on all counts. The channel, if not the producers or writers, “have an agenda” and they will not allow any dissenting voices to divert their narrative, even if those dissenters are both credible and happy, as with Brandreth or presumably yourself.
I think the “virtuous” types are actually the most tortured and twisted. Brandreth’s comments strike me as being totally real, and his light tone and the obvious smile as he speaks compares to the sweaty furrowed brows of the “virtuous” straining to hold on to their stifling and idiotic “virtue.”
Ah, well. The Channels and The Committees are not interested in self-determination or whatever we would call it; there’s no money in it. “That’s nice, dear, did you enjoy it?” just can’t compete with “Off with their heads!”
” But what if those small steps are heading in the wrong direction, leading away from one’s ultimate objective? The “tolerance and acceptance” aimed at in VP efforts is not tolerance and acceptance of sexual self-determination, after all, but it’s exact opposite i.e. an outcome that cements intolerance and non-acceptance of sexual self-determination permanently in place and depends upon brainwashing and coercing MAPs into submission.”
Precisely! And why I am, no doubt, irritating to others in my constant criticisms of the supposed “fresh start” which the VirPervs identify as their brilliant opportunity to gain society’s acceptance and understanding through their obsequious inoffensiveness. And then there is the pity-payoff which, for them, is all-important. Well, I find them plenty offensive.
It was a good shot Tom and I’m glad you went for it, even so. I agree, that your appearance being cut does not bode well for the message or tone of the piece. How could it? It really could only mean one thing.
I will watch it, hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
I don’t suppose you get to see or keep the footage of your interview?
No, I suppose not.
> I don’t suppose you get to see or keep the footage of your interview?
I have the complete audio recording but no video.
BTW from me too, I sympathise with you for effort made with no result. If you can make the audio available I’d be among those to listen with great interest
Hi David — let me know what you think. I, for one, don’t think I can stomach one more patronizing piece of bs that purports to be sympathetic to MAPS. jim
I am forever reminded of the “Exodus International” types who pray, so mightily, the gay away. Poor things! And all because they don’t know that sucking a boy’s dick is a damned good time for all and provides warmth and bonding like nothing else. Who would have thought such knowledge would now be so arcane and nearly extinct? Privacy is what we have been robbed of but privacy is exactly what relationships require to grow and to flourish, away from the prying eyes and sabotaging interference of jealously obsessive others.