Heretic TOC is on tour right now.
I am writing far from home, on a borrowed PC, in the midst of a seasonal round of boozy festivities with friends in London and elsewhere, in what has become something on an annual catch-up fest. It’s because I live at such a distance from the capital, you see, which is where many old pals happen to be. I’d like to see them more often, but…
On the most festive day of all, though, I expect to be back in my northern fastness, rapt in the Scrooge-like pleasure of counting my money. Not that I have much, but the quiet days towards the end of the year are the one time I can focus on sorting out my accounts for the tax people.
Anyway, this on-the-road thing gives me a bit of an excuse for the slight delay in providing a new link to the promised audio recording of my interview with Steve Humphries of Testimony Films. Following my recent blog Inadmissible Testimony, I left a comment saying, inter alia, this:
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 duly posted a link to the recording but withdrew it when I was told it was difficult to download. David Kennerly kindly offered to do some technical wizardry which has resulted in a new recording with excellent sound, and also greatly compressed so it is much easier to download. He has also edited it to make just one file rather than the original six. Amazingly, this single .wma file is only 30MB for a recording of two hours and nine minutes. If anyone has problems with it, other formats are now available too.
You will duly find the link below. If I hesitate to put the link in here, or here, it is because I am finding an emotional need to prevaricate and explain. The more I have thought about it in the days, and now weeks, since the Channel 4 broadcast, the more anxious and inhibited I have become.
It’s not that have any worries on legal or ethical grounds, nor do I regret anything I said in the interview, except for one word: I said “wolf” where I meant to say “fox”, but people will get my meaning, I think: the reference is to a famous Spartan legend that every schoolboy knows – or would have done in the days when schoolboys, if not schoolgirls, were routinely immersed in the Classics.
No, it’s not such much what I said nor even, for the most part, the way that I said it. I am not a natural speaker, but I think I came over pretty well for about two hours. The other nine minutes or so, however, are another matter. And as these wobbly moments are quite close to the beginning, listeners should perhaps be warned what to expect. I can only hope that people here, of all places, will be charitable in their response.
To set the scene, I should just reprise a few words from my earlier blog. I wrote:
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.
What proved particularly tough for me was an unexpected visit by Humphries to a difficult time in my past, when I was young. I am not sure why I was so unprepared. In retrospect, the topic in question was an obvious one to explore. My mistake was to assume I needed to focus my preparation solely on rational arguments and scientific evidence, and how to present things in a rhetorically persuasive fashion. This all seemed very remote from ancient details of my personal history. In retrospect it was a silly oversight on my part, but that is with the benefit of hindsight.
OK, time to stop beating about the bush. I was overly emotional. My paternal lineage is Irish but I was brought up in 1950s England into the culture of the British stiff upper lip. I hate the public displays of emotion that are so ubiquitous in the media these days, which appear to have started in the UK with the mass lachrymosity of the British public in response to the death of Princess Diana (a person most of the “mourners” had never met and knew little about) and which now extend to the winners (and losers) in televised cake-baking contests and such like: no event is too trivial to be the occasion for weeping these days.
As for more serious matters, we are not so much a liberal democracy now as an increasingly illiberal lachrymocracy: it is the weepers and wailers – sometimes with good cause but often not – who call the dirgical tune and imperiously demand we should all sing it.
But enough. The audio is here, on Dropbox.
STOP PRESS
Younger readers will not remember the blank space left at the end of newspapers headed STOP PRESS , reserved for a sentence or two of late news. There is no need on the internet to stop the presses but I do need to squeeze in at least a brief reference to news that has been accumulating during the month and cannot decently be ignored any longer.
This month has seen judges in Britain falling over themselves to pass draconian sentences in sex cases involving children. There was a double whammy at the start of the month, when it was reported that “paedophile doctor” Myles Bradbury, convicted of offences against his young cancer patients had been sentenced to 22 years in jail; we also heard that John Allen, who ran children’s homes, had been jailed for life for “sexually assaulting youngsters in a campaign of abuse spanning decades”. Just as striking in its ferocity, was a sentence of 25 years handed down about a week ago, on former DJ Ray Teret, jailed for rapes and indecent assaults “on girls as young as 12”.
These sentences were the “big three”. Life terms have long been in use against repeat offenders, which Allen was in a technical sense, having been convicted previously in 1996. But the new charges were all “historic”, going back to before 1996. It is not as though he was a recidivist. As for the other cases, terms of 20 years or more are vanishingly rare for any offence, and mark a sharp uptick in severity to positively American levels.
As I say, this is just STOP PRESS news. I have yet to consider these cases in any detail or assess whether the offences were particularly awful. There may have been seriously aggravating factors but one has to doubt whether they were so bad as to justify sentences longer than would be given for horrifically violent attacks leading to serious injury and even death.
Heretic TOC definitely aims to say more about this draconian trend before long, probably after the sentencing of Charles Napier, which is due to take place on the 23rd of this month. Happy Christmas, Charles! It is public knowledge that I knew Charles, as we served together on the executive committee of PIE in the 1970s. I also knew Chris Denning, the former DJ who was sentenced only yesterday to 13 years for historic offences: we met in prison in 2006.
While I have no direct knowledge of the cases against either Charles or Chris, and I am not in a position to see things from the point of view of the “victims”, I do think I have something valid to offer in terms of my personal assessment of the character of these guys.
So, more in due course!
I just finished listening to the audio. At first, seeing how long it is, I was going to listen to it in halves,but ended up listening right through.
What you say Tom, also mirrors my ideas to a tee, it seems.
If they had your interview as the whole BBC piece, the karma of this world would have taken a considerable leap forward.
>I was going to listen to it in halves
Yes, anything that length I’d probably take in quarters myself, these days. I no longer have the staying power to listen to long programmes never mind participate in them! I was flagging at the end, which is one reason I ducked out of Humphries’ final request. Anyway, glad to know you were carried along to the end. Thanks for you appreciative comments.
Just listened to the whole interview a second time. It was even better. And as for stamina, well I’m incredibly impressed. Were you treated to coffee breaks? Was there friendly banter with Humphries between takes? Would love to have been a fly on the wall during the editing process….
The entire crew were very nice. Was it all just an act?
The studio was set up in the Cable Street Inn, (http://www.cablestreetinn.co.uk/about.php ) owned by another documentary film maker, Julian Cole, who has no official connection with Testimony Films as far as I know. Julian saw at least part of the filming, or possibly all of it. He too was very talkative, relaxed and pleasant. He showed me around the place after the filming and we talked for quite a while about a number of things, including a film he is working on about left-wing firebrand politician George Galloway. Julian was very complimentary about my interview.
I find it hard to believe that he was just humouring me. Why would he? He had no professional investment in keeping me sweet at all.
[…] …TOC Post… […]
Thanks, Steve! I have added EQ Foundation to H-TOC’s Blog Roll.
Just went through your interview. Excellent, as expected. I hope it gets up on YouTube soon so more people can be exposed to it (and, of course, get too uncomfortable 5 minutes through and flame the comments).
Would provide a little more critical analysis but my brain is powered down. Was a long night. I sung in the bilingual mass (English & Spanish) at my GF’s church (since not many people are willing to sing in both). Luckily for me, I hear you like choir ‘boys’ 😀
>Excellent, as expected.
Thanks, J, that’s high praise indeed bearing in mind you are capable of a high-powered critique.
>my brain is powered down
Ah, yes, perhaps I escaped some criticism because you were on low power! 🙂
Luckily for me, I hear you like choir ‘boys’
Hey, I like girls too, but closer to 6 than 16 so I guess you’re safe. 🙂
Merry Xmas!
Hi Tom, I am only about a third through your interview, and am very impressed. I also see why it has not been aired. It is just too good. The emotion behind your words comes through as genuine and far from lachrymose as you feared. Your responses combine rational arguments and indisputable facts with an earnestness that few can easily dismiss. You are much too dangerous to people’s entrenched biases for any interview you may give to be aired in the usual media. That said, I am happy to hear that David Kennerly has volunteered to edit the interview for YouTube. I imagine it will be in reasonable sized segments with graphics (e.g. highlighted quotes, etc.). You speak eloquently for us, and word needs to get out one way or the other.
Thanks, Peter, for taking the trouble to send this encouraging message on a day of the year when few, even among non-Christians, will be much engaged with anything beyond their own home and immediate community. Greatly appreciated!
Tom, you have no need to apologise or feel even a twinge of embarrassment for your sincere and spontaneous emotional expressions in this incredibly thoughtful, courageous and moving interview (which I still haven’t finished listening to but will do before the “Holiday Season” is out).
It seems to me that the illiberal lachrymocracy you so brilliantly describe does the precise opposite: with shameless opportunism, it seeks out occasions to publicly promenade synthetic “emotions” as proof of (an irreducibly fake) sincerity. “Bah, humbug!” to the lot of them, I say.
I think Peter Herman puts his finger precisely on the right point:
“You are much too dangerous to people’s entrenched biases for any interview you may give to be aired in the usual media.”
Don’t be deterred by the politics of the mainstream media, which puts the avoidance of brand damage (and the pursuit of the imaginary biopolitical monsters they have helped to create) way ahead of the pursuit of truth and reason.
I wonder how many militantly paedo-hating cops, absurdly-named “justice campaigners” and psychopathic vigilantes secretly share similar feelings to you?
Thanks, Ben, that’s great! And Merry Christmas, or as merry as circumstances allow!
TY Tom … Mr Tom O’Carroll – Sage, Intellect, Freedom Fighter, And Maker Of Better Histories And Futures – http://therealosc.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/mr-tom-ocarroll-sage-intellect-freedom.html
Cheers, OSC! The appreciation makes a very nice and timely Xmas present for me and I hope lots of your readers will tune in to the audio. Keep up your excellent work!
Our pleasure and a good one to all !!!
Please let’s not overlook this: Charles Napier sentenced to 13 years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tory-mps-halfbrother-charles-napier-sentenced-to-13-years-over-prolific-child-sex-abuse-9942651.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30591158
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/23/charles-napier-tory-mp-half-brother-jailed-sex-abuse-boys
Indeed. As mentioned in the STOP PRESS at the end of the current blog, I intend to discuss this case shortly.
Tom, just listened to the whole interview, THANK YOU for making it available. I was so moved by your openness at the beginning. That first paedo-love never fades, right? You were spot on about the power thing, altering the past etc. (from about 1:50 I think). It’s a shame you weren’t able to expand on all this. I’m looking forward to you sharing your thoughts about the recent high profile cases. The way things are going I’ll need to cycle down to the library for a quick dose of Foucault.
Cheers, Gantier! Not sure which bit of Foucault you are thinking of but Discipline and Punish would seem to fit the bill for this month!
Yupp. Discipline and Punish is what I was thinking of. It was course literature at a uni course I did as a “mature” (relatively speaking!) student in the nineties, a time when I was in dire need of getting a grip. I seem to remember that it helped. A bit. Happy Christmas btw!
And to you, of course!
https://twitter.com/OSC______P/status/547410900559605762
OSC
I added a correction to my above comment, specifically “a slow threnody on kettle drums” but after it entered comment purgatory, it seems to have disappeared entirely.
Maybe James is referring to it?
OK, I’ll have a good look at what’s going on here.
No. I was referring to a comment of my own. Clearly something rather strange is going on here but I don’t know what.
WordPress is haunted >_>
Last post for a short while, I think: must head off to spend some time with the family.
The Caldicott school documentary Tom mentions can be watched in full here: http://chosen.org.uk/watch_film/ . It’s technically free, but the filmmakers ask politely for a minimum £1 donation.
Here is Heinz Kohut’s paper ‘The Two Analyses of Mr. Z’: http://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Kohut-H.-The-Two-Analyses-of-Mr.-Z-vol.60-1979.pdf and, for those of us less than familiar with psychoanalytical language, an explanation of what’s going on in it: http://www.bapfelbaumphd.com/Analyses_of_MrZ.htm . Mr. Z, you see, is Kohut, and we get to read about his childhood relationship with a man.
Holiday bonus, to follow on from the discussions about the many faces of pederasty: Norman Roth’s paper ‘ “Deal Gently with the Young Man”: Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain’: http://keats.kcl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/1106538/mod_resource/content/1/Roth%20Deal%20gently.pdf . Many of you erudite people will already have read it, probably, but just in case…
And since Christmas is all about choirboys, search YouTube for ‘Bach – Christmas Oratorio [1-3] Harnoncourt’ and ‘Bach – Christmas Oratorio [4-6] Harnoncourt’. (Not linking due to images of extremely clothed and decorous kids.) This is the Tölzer Knabenchor, quite likely the best outfit of its kind in the world, under the direction of celebrated conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and with celebrated tenor Peter Schreier as the Evangelist. Schreier, by the way, was a boy alto: he joined the Dresdner Kreuzchor at age nine, rising ten. YouTube also has some extracts from recordings of his as a boy alto. He made the first of these when he was fourteen and the last when he was sixteen: having been born in Germany in 1935, he can’t have had enough to eat growing up and I expect that delayed his puberty. Anyway, in the Christmas Oratorio, the boy soloists are: alto Stefan Rampf, whose age I couldn’t find, currently a professional bass; soprano Gregor Lütje, fourteen, currently an opera producer; soprano Allan Bergius, ten, currently a distinguished cellist and conductor. Want more Lütje? Search for ‘Tolzer Knabenchor: Dido & Aeneas (1 of 7)’. Lütje, then twelve, sings Dido. Want more Bergius? Search for ‘Mozart – Apollo et Hyacinthus – complete Opera – Pt 1/8’. Bergius, then eleven — as was Mozart when he wrote the thing! — sings Melia, in drag. Then try ‘Mahler “Das himmlische Leben” Allan Bergius / Leonard Bernstein’. Bergius, twelve, sings a solo which is normally sung by a woman, acquits himself splendidly and is rewarded with thunderous applause and with a hug from Bernstein. Bernstein (I can’t resist one last factoid) apparently had a liking for considerably younger men.
Merry & Happy, everybody.
What you say in the interview about your parents being very loving, but your never having seen them actually being sexual or affectionate with each other rings a bell with me since I’d describe my parents in the same way.
In secondary schools, during Personal and Social Education, kids are constantly told that sex should happen within the context of relationships, with people whom they love and trust.
Telling this to kids in Secondary School is too late: the hormones have started rampaging and what a school teacher says on sex is going to take a poor third to what their peers say and what they pick up from their cultural environment.
Isn’t it odd though that Society, whilst paying lip-service to this ‘sex in relationships’ message, ruthlessly prevents kids lfrom earning this from exactly those people whom they know, trust and love, those people who can be the best role-models of a good relationship, those people most present in the child’s early life?
Who better to demonstrate and make clear the value of sex/intimacy/sensuality in the context of a loving relationship than a child’s parents? Or, for that matter, family friends, neighbours, or that nice man down the road?
Instead society legislates to ensure that those adults whom kids know, respect and trust are unable to model for them the place of sex in a loving relationship; and thus Society ensures that kids learn about relationships from probably the worst sources – porn on the internet, fashion and pop industries, celebrity gossip and lad/ladette culture – all things which promote ‘sexuality’ as a consumer tool (you are attractive in proportion to how much you spend and how much you change your body and appearance) and which has little place for promoting the value of ‘sex in a relationship’.
So, yes, like you I consider myself lucky in having had excellent parents who gave me a great childhood – but I think I’d have benefited a great deal if they’d have been more visibly sexual beings, and had allowed me to start understanding myself as a sexual being, attrative in my own way, at an earlier age.
As it is I never really, deep-down, understood myself as being someone sexually attractive, though I was at the same time aware that I seemed, despite this, to attract women and girls.
I was always slightly puzzled when a woman came on to me (I write in the past tense because Time seems to have dealt with this issue in its own ruthless way…) thinking that she was joking, teasing, was just mistaken or maybe had forgotten to put her contact lenses in.
Of course this attitude has impoverished my sex life – and left me with plenty of regrets to brood over – some wonderful women whose interest I misjudged and misinterpreted (I’m not an exclusive child-lover).
All this leads me to think that if some woman (or man) had let me know, at an early age, that I could be the object of sexual desire and attraction I’d have had a better, richer, adult sex life (granted that a good sex life is not the be-all and end-all of existence – but all things being equal I’d have liked to have had more and better sex…)
Was it the Rene Guyon Society who had as their motto “Sex before eight before it’s too late”? I think there’s a lot of truth in that (granted all the caveats as to what we mean by ‘sex’).
>…your never having seen them actually being sexual or affectionate with each other rings a bell with me since I’d describe my parents in the same way.
I have mentioned this aspect of my upbringing to quite a few MAPs. You are the first to say it reflects your own experience. For me this makes a very interesting start to a post that just goes on getting even more interesting throughout! Any, yes, it was the Rene Guyon Society.
I think you’ll find the “René Guyon Society” was just one bloke and unrelated to the Frenchman of that name.
I’m the second then. My father split when I wasn’t much more than a blastocyst. Growing up, I almost never saw physical affection between partnered adults. The very few times that I did – a kiss between my aunt and uncle when I was five and one between my father and stepmother when I was ten, and that’s about it – it embarrassed me very much. But obviously, because I’m a woman, the aetiology of my paedophilia may be very different to that of any given man’s.
I really like this post, Lensman. I would argue that porn in general is not necessarily a bad sex-teaching tool, but that the mainstream porn of today most definitely is. They keep looking for something new and shocking to do, because people get a kick out of novelty and transgression. The latest frontier, I’m told, is anal prolapsing. Then, take a look at, I don’t know, some music videos from the 1970s or something. It’s a shock to the eye, because by and large the people in them look like actual human beings who just happen to be young, good-looking and in shape. These days photoshop is so ubiquitous and sophisticated that the appearance of the people in the music videos is impossible for anyone actually to attain. But the eye gets used to it, nonetheless. I have seen the number of things women and girls must do to their bodies in order to be baseline sexually acceptable according to the women’s mags just keep going up and up and up. There is probably a similar effect for men but to a lesser degree — lesser, that is, except if you’re a gay man.
Thank you for posting the interview, Tom. You made one excellent point after another. When you talked about your empathy for what young MAP’s go through emotionally, I too got misty-eyed.
And what you said near the end about compliance, spot on. It is an issue we need to address on a deeper basis. All research shows that a child’s perception of voluntariness in participation in sexual contact with an adult is the only relevant factor in the outcome – there is no inherent damage if the child doesn’t feel forced, and it takes a hostile social environment to create any damage. Problem is, children ARE under a great deal of constraint by adults. They are regularly forced into arbitrary authority-based relationships with them…teachers, priests, coaches. I wish it wasn’t this way. A child and adult can relate to one another and have a friendship of considerable depth, it’s just sad they are expected to interact in hierarchical terms.
People wonder why they like us so much, it’s because we’re practically the only adults that don’t have demands or expectations and let them be themselves.
Hey entelechy, I was hoping you’d turn up. I remember your mentioning the special women’s issue of Paidika. You may already know this, but in case you don’t: there’s a guy called Ian Pace who has been doing extensive and hostile research on PIE. He has done us all the inadvertent favour of putting on his website much precious, unobtainable material, most notably extracts from Magpie magazine and large chunks of the two books Perspectives on Paedophilia and The Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People. I hear the latter is normally kept in the restricted section of the British Library. One of the pieces in The Betrayal of Youth is called ‘Love and Let Love’ and I thought of you when I read it: it’s an interview with our blogmaster by female sex therapist Tuppy Owens in which Owens talks about a lot of very interesting stuff, including a female paedophile she met.
This comment’s intended for everybody else too, of course. Happy reading. Cheers Ian!
(Simply google for the relevant posts on Pace’s blog — I didn’t think it was prudent to link…)
Reverse the with and by in my last sentence, please and thank you. Tom interviews Tuppy Owens, not vice versa. My English is going all to hell because I don’t speak it much any more. Sorry all.
No problem so far as I am concerned. I’d forgotten it was an interview. It is just vaguely remembered on my part as a nice chat with a lovely lady!
I have uploaded full scans of Paidika issues 1-12. The scans are by Gerald Jones, who removed them from his website a while ago. The women’s issue is No. 8. Jones also has invaluable scans of PAN, Kalos, and the International Journal of Greek Love still up: http://exitinterview.biz/rarities/enter.htm
Paidika 1: http://a.pomf.se/lliqfi.pdf
Paidika 2: http://a.pomf.se/zhmibl.pdf
Paidika 3: http://a.pomf.se/ogkshh.pdf
Paidika 4: http://a.pomf.se/henqwt.pdf
Paidika 5: http://a.pomf.se/qluhby.pdf
Paidika 6: http://a.pomf.se/kdnbay.pdf
Paidika 7: http://a.pomf.se/fkssyb.pdf
Paidika 8: http://a.pomf.se/croakf.pdf
Paidika 9: http://a.pomf.se/gefyoj.pdf
Paidika 10: http://a.pomf.se/tttekn.pdf
Paidika 11: http://a.pomf.se/yilfap.pdf
Paidika 12: http://a.pomf.se/vxofkg.pdf
Excellent work, Kate! This is a really valuable service.
Actually, I really wish I could have played some part in Paidika. Unfortunately for me (but not for the journal, which did great things in its short existence) Paidika was being produced at a time when I simply had to get on with earning a living after finding my career in ruins following the PIE conspiracy case and my incarceration. There just wasn’t enough space in my head to pursue two objectives simultaneously.
Wonderful! Thank you so much.
AWESOME! Many thanks for posting these awesome pieces of history.
Hey A. I’ve seen snippets of the publications you’re talking about, as well as the study that Father Michael Ingram did and presented at a conference called “Love and Attraction.” Mr. O’Carroll also mentions this event in Pedophilia: The Radical Case. Very neat. 🙂
Tom,
Your emotions toward the boy you loved and Edmund’s boy chorister full on sex with his man got me to thinking back a long time ago to the boy I first loved. Have written never mailed poems to him. Riding his pony, long bare legs hugging. 12-year-old Bobby smelled of horse.
At my father’s funeral I asked about him learning his wife keeps him on their rural property, keeps him away from town. He should run away and come live with me. Two old men now. He still smells of horse, I am sure.
Damn the puritan bastards that keep us apart.
Hugs to you and your Bobby.
Linca
Oh, I was sixteen going on seventeen.
Linca
Thanks very much for this, Tom. I found it both insightful and fascinating. Actually, the fascination was largely due to its unedited state, since it provided an insight that those of us outside the broadcasting industry don’t normally get into how these things are put together. And unlike Lensman (and contrary to my own view expressed in an earlier comment), I warmed to Humphries. I thought he was doing his best to be helpful. Actually, I found it practically impossible to believe that, talking as he did, he couldn’t see SOME merit in your ideas. I’m inclined to think that the decision not to use any of the material must have come from higher up, but who knows?
The WordPress fairies ate one of my comments. Let me have another go:
Well, I’m not embarrassed (perhaps because I’m a woman!) to admit that I had tears in my eyes at a couple of points during this. Tom, you have an enormous amount of integrity and guts. Thank you for everything you’ve done and are still doing.
I like your point about paedophiles being potential allies to parents. In light of the recent controversy on this blog over whether loving parents can ever approve of their child’s friendship with a paedophile, this article https://www.ipce.info/library/newspaper-article/my-child-does-it-pedophile makes fascinating and heartening reading. It’s a set of 1988 Dutch interviews with two mothers and a father whose kids have been involved with adults and who are fine with it. One of the mothers actually says, “If there is openness, you have found yourself an extra parent for your child.”
[TOC: The first part of the following post by “A” has already appeared. Somehow the complete post found its way into the Spam folder. I have now rescued it and the hitherto missing second part appears below.]
More festive cheer: following the outcry about ‘child molestation’ when Lena Dunham admitted in her memoir to childhood sexual experimentation with her sister — who maintains that she does not feel Dunham molested her — someone started a Tumblr called Those Kinds of Girls, on which women anonymously post about the sex games they played as little girls. Quite a few of the contributors say that well into adult life they felt very guilty and ashamed about the sex play, but that they feel much better since finding the Tumblr and realising they weren’t the only one. Google it: I won’t link directly because it contains descriptions of children engaging in sexual acts with other children, and while these are not explicit and not at all pornographic and do not counsel such acts, laws vary from country to country and I don’t want anyone to get into any trouble.
Jeremy Irons is on record as saying, “I remember when my son was twelve and he was like a god. He just went through that sort of golden time for about eighteen months. I don’t have a daughter but they do the same.” And then there’s this: “She is the great romantic love of my life…I find my daughter movingly, passionately beautiful; when I see her running naked, or coiled sleeping, I feel something which is not (I hope!) lust, but alarmingly akin to it: a physical delight and recognition and excitement; and a desire to elicit from her an equal response. And I like her: for her energy and tenderness and sturdy independence; for her wit and intelligence and her passionate sense of her own selfhood.”
Who said that? A feminist Christian, the wife of a parish priest, writing about her five-year-old in a book called Why Children? of which I have a treasured, disintegrating copy. It was published in 1980 by The Women’s Press, and the women writing in it speak with an honesty which you’d have a hard time finding these days. One woman, for instance, is raising a young daughter after having decided against an abortion at the last minute. She’s a single mother, but she gets lots of childrearing help and extra love for her kid from flatmates, neighbours and nursery staff. She admits she’s not Supermum: supper is frequently beans on toast, and often, instead of explaining to her kid why the kid shouldn’t do something, she just says NO in a very firm voice. She adds, “I find myself liking and loving Amy most of the time and disliking or hating or resenting her some of the time.” And the woman who is in love with her daughter says that she found caring for a baby much harder and more unrewarding than she’d have thought, and that when she told her doctor she was suffering from postpartum depression, he earned her deep gratitude by saying “Rubbish” and telling her that small babies were indeed demanding, annoying and boring. These days he’d be breaking out the pharmaceuticals.
Abebooks has a few second-hand copies of Why Children? going dirt cheap. And there’s loads of other holiday reading for us. A gentleman called Ian Pace has done exhaustive and very hostile research on PIE and has made loads of previously-unobtainable stuff available to all on his website, including excerpts from issues of Magpie magazine and large chunks of the books Betrayal of Youth and Perspectives on Paedophilia. Simply google. Cheers, Ian! 😛 Entelechy, if you’re reading this, I remember you were interested in material on female paedophilia. You’d probably like ‘Love and Let Love’, an interview by our blogmaster with female sex therapist Tuppy Owens, which was included in Betrayal of Youth and uploaded to the website of the inadvertently helpful Mr Pace. Among other things, Owens talks about a female paedophile she met.
I’ve also just found Norman Roth’s paper ‘ “Deal Gently with the Young Man”: Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain’. Here it is: http://keats.kcl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/1106538/mod_resource/content/1/Roth%20Deal%20gently.pdf
The Caldicott school documentary Tom mentions can be watched in full here: http://chosen.org.uk/watch_film/ . It’s free, though the filmmakers ask politely for a minimum £1 donation.
PS to Tom: as for where the socialists are these days, I’m afraid the buddy of mine who is most implacably anti-paedophile is a serious, committed anarcho-communist.
Oh! Thank you for digging that out of spam, and apologies for the effective double post. This is what I meant by “The WordPress fairies ate one of my comments.” I figured you had set a word limit, so I clipped off the most important part and posted that. Then I tried posting other snippets as replies to Jack et al., which is what I should have done in the first place as it’s the best way to address specific points and get a discussion going. I left out the Lena Dunham Tumblr bit, as I thought those words might be triggering the spam filter. I should have just emailed you probably… Oh well. Happy Boxing Day.
Not sure how you know it went into Spam but, yes, it did. I decided to check the Spam folder when folks said stuff was going missing. I had to rescue a couple of pieces from Trash as well. It was my fault they went there, but these confusions sometimes arise when posters ask me to ignore a post which they are saying is not quite right, they’ll be sending a new version, etc. The new version may not always arrive…
I know because you said so, in the bolded bit…
Oh you mean how did I know before you said. Lord am I dense. Once I eliminated the word limit possibility I thought that was the likeliest thing.
>Oh you mean how did I know before you said.
No, you’re way ahead of me. Your first answer was right. I simply forgot what I had said! D’oh! 🙂
I’m half way through listening to the interview and it’s compelling and necessary listening for anyone who cares about this issue, be they pro or anti.
Your evident emotions when talking about your early, maybe ‘first’, love are entirely understandable.
And that you felt such emotions should give any norm or hater pause to question the grotesque misconception that a paedophile is anyone other than a person who LOVES children.
Moreover I think everyone’s first love takes on a mythical significance that can haunt one for the rest of one’s life. And I imagine this will be even more intense for paedophiles since our loves are so often fraught or thwarted, leaving a kind of ‘blank’ on which the imagination projects all sorts of ‘what-might-have-beens’ were the world otherwise than the hating, intolerant place it is.
As to Humphries – his encourgagement and his ‘very-goods’ must now sound to you as oleaginous and insincere. I’m left with a persistent impression that he’s trying to lead you into giving him some sensational, sex-sational sound-bites with which to whip up the viewer’s outrage.
His insistence that you make a clear simple statement about the ‘lack’ of an age of consent in PIE’s proposal really gives an impression of him being the big bad wolf salivating as he’s about to close in on one of the little piggies. All he’d have to do is edit out the important qualifications you give to PIE’s position and he can give the impression that PIE was advocating a sexual free-for-all.
I wonder if he was at all swayed by your reasoned and evidence-based ideas? I also can’t help but wonder what discussions he had in his car with his crew before and after the interview? I’d love to think that someone may have said “what he said kind of makes sense – but…”.
Have you considered uploading this interview to youtube?
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, and I can perfectly understand why you wouldn’t be keen, given how raw and sensitive a lot of it must feel to you. But it may mean that you get a wider audience, and it may bring comfort to lonely paedophiles out there and bring some truth and reason into what I optimistically will call ‘the debate’.
>Have you considered uploading this interview to youtube?
David Kennerly has kindly offered to do some editing work for just such a project.
I got the chance to listen to your entire interview by Humphries, Tom. You did better than you gave yourself credit for, though I was surprised at how emotional you got earlier in the discussion. Not that it was “bad,” just that I didn’t expect it, as I never heard you talk before so I wasn’t aware of your sensitive side. As it progressed, though, you got better hold of yourself and discussed many important issues with good composure, even being quite candid in some places. A few interesting things stood out to me.
I basically agree with your stance on the Cumberland school case, but with a few reservations. I certainly do agree that the kids there were in no position to say “no,” much as the chattel slaves were in a similar position in the American South during the pre-Civil War years. Hence, it’s correct to say that in hindsight, it was not ethical for any of the slave owners to seek sexual relationships with their slaves. But on the other hand, it would be unfair for anyone to use the case of the Cumberland school as an example to disparage all intergenerational relationships (not that you did, but we both know that some people would). To me, that would be tantamount to using those pre-Civil War cases to disparage all interracial relationships under any circumstances.
It was the disproportionate degree of legal authority in both cases that made the question of consent problematical even if both the kids at the school and the chattel slaves in question freely acquiesced to the advances of those with power over them. Nevertheless, I would still treat each instance on a case-by-case basis, since we do not know, for instance, if there were some cases where the student or chattel slaves in question may have actually initiated the contact.
I further agree that the solution in each case was the legal and civil empowerment of the minority group in question. This is why here in the West we no longer feel it’s inherently exploitative if a white man initiates a romantic liaison with a black woman, since the latter are now in a legal position where they can freely say “no” without possible punishment, as they are no longer conditioned to see white people in general as authority figures. I believe the same would be the case if youths were empowered within society’s educational institutions along the lines of the Sudbury model, so the environment wouldn’t be so autocratic.
I remember that oppressive atmosphere all too well when I was a student. Even though I was never personally subjected to sexual abuse, I and other students were often openly subjected to terrible degrees of emotional and even sometimes physical abuse by the teachers, who delighted in using humiliation as a tactic to keep kids in line. If they personally disliked you, the teachers had the right to make your life miserable beyond belief if they so chose.
I had one teacher – a music teacher – hit me in the stomach so hard one time that I fell to the ground, and it took a lot of willpower on my part to maintain my composure in front of the class. This action was not in self-defense on his part; it was because he caught me making faces at some of the other students during one of his turns at the piano while I was forced to stand beside him because he had caught me talking in class earlier. But because these instances weren’t specifically sexual abuse, the teachers most often got away with these acts. For the record, the assistant principal did tell me that he didn’t approve of that teacher’s actions and would talk to him about it, but the guy was never fired and never cleaned up his act; and I saw other teachers metaphorically flip the bird at the assistant principal when it came to him confronting matters of abuse of authority that was not sexual in nature.
Good God, Dissident, approximately what decade was it when that teacher punched you, if you’re comfortable telling us? Because I know enough teachers to feel fairly sure that wouldn’t fly anymore — one was disciplined for grabbing a boy’s collar as she removed a box of pencils from his hand, and this in a school full of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old toughs with criminal records for theft and drug possession — but you learn something new every day.
I think in the Caldicott school case we are also looking at some big confounds. These were kids who were sent away from home at age eight — yes, I’m sure boarding school works well for some, but… They were kept in sexual ignorance and shame: one said that at eleven he did not know what a sexual kiss was, another that Matron called him a dirty boy when she guessed he was having sex with a teacher. One felt that it was his fault when the teacher who’d been having sex with him was sacked over it, and he carried around guilt over that for years. And the teachers themselves were likely not in robust emotional health: it was the institutional culture, yes, but also the wider culture. I’d think that being told in myriad ways all the time that you are a perverted child molester, and having to keep any sex you have a complete secret, does not tend to do wonders for your ability to conduct relationships in a sensitive and ethical way.
When it comes to kids having sex with adults, we’ve tried the “keep quiet about it and go play rugby even if you feel upset” approach. Didn’t work, as the suffering of these men shows. We’re trying the “everyone must make a tremendous fuss over it even if you felt happy about it at the time” approach. Manifestly not working. What else is left for us to try but differentiating between the good and the bad and tailoring responses accordingly? Process of elimination.
I was very happy, by the way, to hear Tom make the point that compliance isn’t enough, that something more definite is needed. Thank you Tom, and thank you for continuing to identify as an equal opportunities feminist, in spite of everything.
Good God, Dissident, approximately what decade was it when that teacher punched you, if you’re comfortable telling us? Because I know enough teachers to feel fairly sure that wouldn’t fly anymore — one was disciplined for grabbing a boy’s collar as she removed a box of pencils from his hand, and this in a school full of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old toughs with criminal records for theft and drug possession — but you learn something new every day.
The decade in question was the 1980s. I was 13 years old at the time. He didn’t so much punch me with a clenched fist as he did backhand me really hard with his knuckles while his hand was in a cupped position, which nevertheless had quite the same effect. Between the 1970s and ’80s it was quite common, in my experience, for teachers to hit kids, forcefully grab and drag them, and to pull their hair. One of my elementary school teachers was famous for ordering misbehaving students to hold out their hand, then she would slap it. My kindergarten teacher would routinely give us a hard traditional spanking, and then look us straight in the face and ask, “Would you like three more?” No exaggeration there, as the teachers were quite physically abusive with kids back then!
On two occasions in elementary school I was literally strangled by a teacher. Not to the point of literally almost passing out, mind you, but certainly forcefully enough to both cause a lot of physical pain and scare the living hell out of me. The first time I was about 6 years old, and the teacher did that to me because I had skimmed through a book she was in the process of reading to the class over time, and I had inadvertently lost the page she had marked. The second time I was around 8 years of age, and it was done by a very mean-spirited art teacher whose face I remember quite clearly to this day, due to my talking out of turn while standing in line.
I think in the Caldicott school case we are also looking at some big confounds. These were kids who were sent away from home at age eight — yes, I’m sure boarding school works well for some, but… They were kept in sexual ignorance and shame: one said that at eleven he did not know what a sexual kiss was, another that Matron called him a dirty boy when she guessed he was having sex with a teacher. One felt that it was his fault when the teacher who’d been having sex with him was sacked over it, and he carried around guilt over that for years. And the teachers themselves were likely not in robust emotional health: it was the institutional culture, yes, but also the wider culture. I’d think that being told in myriad ways all the time that you are a perverted child molester, and having to keep any sex you have a complete secret, does not tend to do wonders for your ability to conduct relationships in a sensitive and ethical way.
This is the major rub that you identified here. And it comes with the territory when the penal code both criminalizes a certain sexual act regardless of the circumstances under which it occurs, and legally disempowers a certain group of people. It’s very hard to find a strong ethical balance when all involved are in a position where they feel compelled to either say “yes” or “no” to a certain act regardless of which they may truly want. It’s hard to manage such considerations in any type of system in which one group of people have full authority over another group. This is the same reason why sexual contact and romantic relationships that occur between legal adults in institutions like the corporate workplace, the university setting, and the military are often considered problematical, as a strict chain of command exists in each:
Did she really want to sleep with him, or did she simply comply to assure herself of getting that promotion down the line? Did he really want to sleep with her, or did he simply acquiesce to her advances because he really needed to pass the course she was teaching? Did she really want to sleep with him, or did she simply comply without complaint because he was, after all, one of her commanding officers? I think the same basic question are being asked in regards to the students who attended that boarding school.
How awful about your school experiences. I’m sorry.
I don’t quite know where I stand on the ethics of relationships between teachers and pupils. Clearly they can be positive, but the problems you mention keep niggling at me and keeping me from wholehearted support.
A music teacher hit me in the stomach: yes I had a similar fate at boarding school,One time a staff member poked me in the stomach, with a large stick
cos my shirt was not tucked in!
That same bloke,when a group of kids was out walking at night,booted one boy in the stomach,can’t remember why,but remember he had it in for that particular boy.He only stopped cos the lad collapsed in the road,and we were
leaving him behind: Are you coming, or are you just going to stay there all night(sic)!
Nice try Tom but you don’t come close to joining the ranks of the lachrytariat. There’s a big difference between a public DISPLAY of emotion and genuine emotion that happens to be public.
What’s in far more need of explanation than why you became a pedophile is where you got the strength to stick to such a tough, honest life-path. Pretty damn impressive.
I was pleased to hear you name the modern nuclear family as a big part of the problem. I reckon it’s probably the engine room of pedophobia. We weren’t meant to be the marooned, isolated little units we’ve become.
I’m reading a book called “Primeval Kinship” which attempts to trace the foundational structures of human society. One important part of the development of complex human society is incest avoidance. It’s a fundamental building block. We inherited the basic biological function from our ape ancestors and it works through developmental familiarity – all the time parents and siblings spend together subdues sexual attraction between them. It’s not reliant on blood – just on whoever’s in the nest. Interestingly, the author claims incest-avoidance is less effective if there is less physical contact between family members – this contact defined as “play, touching, bathing, sleeping, sexual games.”
This would mean that a neurotic “no touching” family is actually going to have weakened incest-avoidance, leading perhaps to a phobic hatred of adult-child sexual contact being a useful compensating force. So the pedophile becomes the living embodiment of their too-vivid nightmares.
It does seem to set up the possibility of a very nasty feedback loop. The more repressed and touch-phobic a family is, the weaker the incest-avoidance function, so the more phobic and fearful such a family would become. This is where the nuclear aspect of the family unit is so dangerous – no release valves that an extended family would offer. It could also help explain the increasingly demented institutional attacks on children who display any sexual behaviour.
Damn you must have needed a drink or three after that interview – it was such a marathon. Seriously good, though.
>a neurotic “no touching” family is actually going to have weakened incest-avoidance
This is important and you write about it well here, Jack. And thanks, of course, for your appreciative comments.
I’m reading a book called “Primeval Kinship”
Wow, thanks for the heads up! This looks like a must read. Like you and Tom, I suspect the damage wrought by industrialization and urbanization on the human family is at the root of our difficulties.
Fascinating comment as usual, Jack. I would add that not just extended family relationships, but also friendships, have been weakened by the dominance of the pair-bond. There’s much rhetoric lately about how your spouse should be your best friend and you should stop seeing your opposite-sex friends the moment you get into a relationship in case you should fall into an ’emotional affair’. From where I’m standing it looks as though men’s friendships with other men, in particular, are devalued, and are also constricted by homophobia. Just look at the greetings cards in the ‘Friendship’ section of the local drugstore: they’re all about women’s friendships with other women. Studies indicate that, on average, marriage bumps up men’s well-being more than it does women’s and divorced men are more keen than divorced women to get married again. Studies also indicate that when a couple marries, on average the man starts doing less housework and the woman more. Some feminists have put these two things together and argued that marriage benefits men more because they get taken care of, or waited on, by their wives. I’m sure that’s sometimes the case, but it seems to me that men are also more likely than women to have no source of emotional intimacy or support other than their partner.
In the US, it appears, people on average have fewer close friends than they did a few decades ago: http://tastyresearch.com/2007/04/13/americans-getting-lonelier/ . My guess is that this has a lot to do with being required to work all the hours God sends.
& to expand a bit, since I overdosed on caffeine and can’t sleep: I think we’re most of us a bit touch-starved in this culture. It must have been different when adults who weren’t related or having sex could sleep in the same bed, but these days that would be ‘inappropriate’. Not long ago I was in a museum when a class of six-year-olds came through, followed shortly afterwards by a class of eight-year-olds. The six-year-old boys were holding hands and sitting on each other’s laps. They reminded me of men from certain Middle Eastern cultures where homosexuality is officially taboo, even if sometimes covertly tolerated, and so men are freer to touch each other in friendly and affectionate ways. The eight-year-old boys did not touch each other at all. That had been stamped right out of them in the space of two years.
If we’re lucky, we get lots of cuddles from our parents when we’re children. As adolescents, girls can still share beds on sleepovers, and boys can at least still play-wrestle. As adults, most of us are left with sexual partners as our only source of affectionate touch — in fact, in this age of friends with benefits, they often have to be sexual partners who are also romantic partners. The older I get the more people I hear say, in effect, “This relationship is mediocre but I stay in it because I really need someone to snuggle with in front of the TV.” It’s just one more excessive demand put on the adult pair-bond: not only does it have to meet most or even all of your need for emotional closeness and all of your need for sex, it has to meet all of your need for hugs, too.
One can never ever overstate the importance of touch in healthy human interactions and relations.
Chemistry!
true and moving.
“From where I’m standing it looks as though men’s friendships with other men, in particular, are devalued, and are also constricted by homophobia.”
Yes, agree, although it’s fascinating how the homophobia has changed over the last few decades. Most straight blokes I know are reasonably tolerant of gays today – but only as a separate species – they’re happy for the funny gays to be over there doing their funny things with each other. And gays are certainly doing their utmost to be oh so harmless.
But the belief one has to be 100% straight or 100% gay does create an anxiety in the straight man when it comes to his relations with other males. This used to be expressed by hating sissy fags, but now finds its outlet in hating pedos.
Professional sport is the last bastion of straight male-male touching – and while only a minority of men get to actually practice the ancient art, all the rest sit glued to the telly watching, cheering and getting drunk enough to make it feel so good.
Couldn’t agree more about the “excessive demand put on the adult pair-bond”. But would you agree another trend today is for parents to become best friends with their kids? Not just on good, open-communication terms, but full-on friends that socialise together etc. It seems a bit mean-spirited to criticise it – but again I can’t help wondering about all this emotional content being stuffed into the confines of the nuclear family. The article you linked backs this up – over the last 20 years we’ve become half as likely to make close friends of our neighbours. The temperature of that nuclear family seems to be going up.
And this from your linked article: “Instead of a few strong ties, we have more weak ties.” That to me is the true spirit of our times. It starts the moment kids arrive at school – strong, or god forbid intense, friendships are not thought healthy and are gently discouraged. With much smiling patience and firmness kids are constantly guided toward existing with their classmates in a bland, non-judgemental, egalitarian porridge. I’m glad I snuck through the system before this became prevalent, cos I woulda choked on it.
About parents being best friends with their kids: I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest. I think there’s a lot more variation there, e.g. in the US I have seen a fair few parent-kid best friendships but there’s also that huge money-spinning “you must go away to college a long distance from your hometown” thing, which tends to break things off once the kids hit eighteen. In France, kids most often go to the university in their hometown and live at home, but I haven’t seen so many parent-kid best friendships. In any case, though, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing: unlike marriages, parent-child relationships are not expected to be totally exclusive, and they are expected to move to the back burner when the kids grow up and leave home, and even more so when the kids marry: although, in my view, sometimes it can be entirely reasonable for someone put their parents before their spouse, it’s not really considered acceptable any more.
But I have a bit of a bias here, since I was raised by a single mother and there was a period of several years after we’d moved to a new area but before she’d established really close friendships there when I was her main confidant. She responsibly kept a lot from me, but I heard a lot too: about her trade union struggles and her money worries and how the landlord was refusing to fix something and how my cousin had been caught with drugs, etc. etc. I don’t think it was a wholly positive thing for me, but it was far from being wholly negative, and I have no illusions that I’d have done any better in her shoes.
I can put myself forward as an example of someone who is BFFs with both their mother and their girlfriend 😛
Of course, they’re certainly not my only friends but I don’t have many. I find it a bit difficult to make friends but when the friendship bond forms it is very intense.
“although, in my view, sometimes it can be entirely reasonable for someone put their parents before their spouse, it’s not really considered acceptable any more.”
Not so over here. Here most people would agree that if your mother and your spouse are both in danger, saving your mother is the obvious choice. As one of my friends put it: “you can find a new wife but you can’t find a new mother.” I don’t think this attitude is always healthy and it doesn’t extend to fathers.
If you’ll permit the observation, in my experience that attitude to one’s mother a very Latin American thing and somewhat tied up, at least at its origins, with the madonna/whore dichotomy. But I don’t know how much of a special case your particular community is: what I’m saying may not apply there.
I’m also unaware of how far that generalises but it’s certainly true right here. An attitude of worshipful reverence surrounds mothers, who are sometimes referred to as “queen” or (the virgin) “Mary”. Fathers are also respected but it’s not quite the same….
Thank you so much for this! Yesterday I showed this comment to a female friend of mine. This evening I got cuddles. I am forever indebted to you 🙂
The above comment has been consigned to moderation purgatory alongside all the other comments which died without proper baptism; ignorant of Lord TOC.
I’m out of my depth here. What is wrong? What do you want me to do?
No idea. I thought that drawing your attention to a comment caused you to see it. I guess not. As it stands, this reply chain is hanging off of an apparently invisible comment from yesterday replying to A. on friendly touching which says:
“Thank you so much for this! Yesterday I showed this comment to a female friend of mine. This evening I got cuddles. I am forever indebted to you 🙂 ”
If you can’t see it as well, I’ve no idea how to proceed. Perhaps this is an illusion or a spiritual experience….
The comment right above this (to which this is attached) is also gone. In that comment I included the text of my original lost comment. I’m beginning to believe that WordPress just hates the contents of that comment for mysterious reasons. As such, I will not quote it again here. I’m tempted to just email it to you but at this point I feel like it’s too insignificant and has caused too much confusion. Sorry 🙁
Seriously Tom: Your blog is haunted.
>Seriously Tom: Your blog is haunted.
Must get my exorcism kit out, although it may not work as I am not a Catholic priest. Anyway, I hope to have a go this evening.
I meant to put my previous comment here instead of at the top.
so sorry.
One more thing: Tom mentions writings on mother-child eroticism in obscure feminist publications. How’s this: “She is the great romantic love of my life…I find my daughter movingly, passionately beautiful; when I see her running naked, or coiled sleeping, I feel something which is not (I hope!) lust, but alarmingly akin to it: a physical delight and recognition and excitement; and a desire to elicit from her an equal response. And I like her: for her energy and tenderness and sturdy independence; for her wit and intelligence and her passionate sense of her own selfhood.”
Thus spake a feminist Christian, the wife of a parish priest, writing about her five-year-old in a book called Why Children? of which I have a treasured, disintegrating copy. (Abebooks has a few second-hand copies going dirt cheap.) It was published in 1980 by The Women’s Press. The women writing in it include a single mother of two teenaged sons, a partnered mother of a developmentally delayed toddler daughter, several women who’ve decided not to have children, one half of a white lesbian couple who are raising black adopted daughters, and a lesbian who was raped, gave up the resultant baby girl for adoption, has had some contact with her daughter as she’s grown up, and is happy with the situation. They all speak with an honesty which you’d have a hard time finding these days. One woman, for instance, is raising a young daughter after having decided against an abortion at the last minute. She’s a single mother, but she gets lots of childrearing help and extra love for her kid from flatmates, neighbours and nursery staff. She admits she’s not Supermum: supper is frequently beans on toast, and often, instead of explaining to her kid why the kid shouldn’t do something, she just says NO in a very firm voice. She adds, “I find myself liking and loving Amy most of the time and disliking or hating or resenting her some of the time.” And the woman who is in love with her daughter says that she found caring for a baby much harder and more unrewarding than she’d have thought, and that when she told her doctor she was suffering from postpartum depression, he earned her deep gratitude by saying “Rubbish” and telling her that small babies were indeed demanding, annoying and boring. These days he’d be breaking out the pharmaceuticals.
Mind you, while mother-child relationships can be erotic, not all woman-child relationships have a maternal colour. In the women’s issue of Paidika which Kate linked to above is quoted a letter written by a woman in which she explains that she is having a sexual relationship with a ten-year-old boy and that her feelings towards him, while loving, are not at all maternal, but wholly sensual and physical.
Fantastic interview Tom. Thanks for making it available. More later.
Thanks for the historical document. The emotions were warranted.
Slightly related to a part of your interview, a study on the word “pedophile” was published a few days ago (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-014-0439-3). Unsurprisingly, people hate “pedophiles” more than “people sexual interested in prepubescent children”. This is the third study about the pedophile stigma I’ve seen. Not cheerful reading, but the fact that it’s being studied at all is encouraging.
Thanks, Kate, not least for the new article link.
a study on the word “pedophile”
Thanks for this. I note the abstract concludes:
Thanks very much for the link, Kate. Could you possibly link us to the other two studies?
I found the best of the two from one of your previous comments, A.: http://summit.sfu.ca/item/13798
The other is “Stigmatization of People with Pedophilia: Two Comparative Surveys,” which found that the best predictor of anti-pedophile bias was right-wing authoritarianism: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-014-0312-4 . I also found a literature review while I was looking for that: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19317611.2013.795921?journalCode=wijs20
By the way, for anyone without a university subscription, you can access most academic articles using the website http://sci-hub.org
Great! Thank you!
“the reference is to a famous Spartan legend that every schoolboy knows – or would have done in the days when schoolboys, if not schoolgirls, were routinely immersed in the Classics.”
My youth betrays me 🙁
(Or can I at least protest on the basis of being a schoolgirl?)
Anyway, I’ll look it up….
“I was brought up in 1950s England into the culture of the British stiff upper lip. I hate the public displays of emotion that are so ubiquitous in the media these days”
Can’t say Latin America & the Caribbean have ever had particularly stiff lips so that’s the natural state of affairs over here. I do at times find it disagreeable since my autism tends to leave me baffled by emotional displays. (Coincidentally, I managed to hurt my gf pretty badly yesterday because my teasing went down a path I was not aware was so raw. I didn’t notice there was anything wrong until too late because autism, so a massive cluster-fuck ensued. Set Hanukkah off to a terrible start. Wish I’d had trigger warnings 😉 )
((If Tom finds these personal anecdotes that keep popping up to be disagreeable, I’m quite willing to discontinue them.))
“The audio is here”
Huzzah! It arrives at last!
“Younger readers will not remember the blank space left at the end of newspapers headed STOP PRESS”
Dammit! Betrayed by my age twice in one blog post! Are you doing this on purpose, Tom? 😛
“more in due course!”
Please do. I’m on the edge of my seat. It’s been so slow around here lately….
Tom,
Thank you for opening up so well for all of us. Listening now.
Linca
There was a good article in The Independent recently about Chris Denning. Apparently it was an interview with him they reprinted from 2001. Well, the preface was not so good (being 2014 morals) whereas the interview itself was very interesting (being 2001 morals) and it taught me a lot about him. He refused to apologise for who he is, which I think is admirable. Anyway, here’s the article for those who want to read it: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/chris-denning-interview-what-should-i-do-live-my-whole-life-on-my-own-i-wasnt-prepared-to-do-that-9929395.html
Wow. Hats off to Denning.
Let my tears flow- a slow threnody on base drums – a nice change of scenery from slapping thighs…
rather: “a slow threnody on kettle drums”