Among the 130 comments received in response to Negotiating a little girl’s knickers down were a number of excellent ones on “consent”, including the “informed” and “affirmative” varieties. One commentator, Lensman, kindly agreed to my suggestion that his contribution should appear as a guest blog – by no means his first, as regular readers will know. I thought it was fine in its draft form but it now appears below in a more polished and extended version that must have cost its perfectionist author a lot more time to prepare. He has apologized to me (quite unnecessarily!) for its being “heavy going”. I say it is a serious subject that deserves, and indeed demands, the sort of careful analysis he has given; I trust others here will agree.
- What do the words “consent” and “informed”, mean?
According to Collins English Dictionary:
Informed: (adjective) 1. having much knowledge or education 2. based on information
Consent: (verb) to give assent or permission (to do something); (noun) acquiescence to or acceptance of something done or planned by another
From these we can venture that “informed consent” could be “the information-based or knowledge-based acquiescence to, or acceptance of, something done or planned by another”.
This creates a model of sexuality where one party is necessarily active and the other passive which, in my experience, is not realistic. Additionally it should not be assumed that the child must be the passive partner in an interaction (see section 8: “Informed consent” and “intent” – the child).
- In what circumstances is “informed consent” required over and above (what I will call) “simple consent” ?
Generally “simple consent”’ is sufficient provided that whatever being consented to
i/ doesn’t remove the capacity to give, maintain, or withdraw consent,
ii/ doesn’t require specialised knowledge to be able to make a consent decision.
“Informed consent” is commonly solicited in connection with medical procedures and from participants in research. Both require “informed consent” because of
i/ risks to the participants,
ii/ to protect the surgeon, researcher, etc., from having to bear the entire responsibility for any adverse effects on the subject of the surgery/research,
iii/ because the subject will also no longer have the capacity to give or withdraw consent during the actual treatment or research (the subject will either be anaesthetized or will be taking part in some sort of double-blind test where they must not know the exact nature of the tests they are submitting to).
- Is “informed consent” required for sexual relationships between adults?
No. Generally the consent that happens between adults is implied consent which “is not expressly granted by a person, but rather inferred from a person’s actions and the facts and circumstances of a particular situation.”
Consent is essentially expressed by the willingness or eagerness of the actors to engage in the activity in question and assumes prior adequate knowledge. Plus, in such interactions there is the assumption that the participants maintain their capacity to give or withdraw consent as the interaction develops and changes.
- How meaningful is the popular idea of sexual “consent”?
The legal (and popular) conception of “consent” implies prior agreement to the entirety of a sexual episode.
However, in practice, sexual consent works very differently. It is more of an on-going negotiation in which the contract is being constantly re-written.
What does not happen is that a couple, each time prior to initiating sexual activity, discuss in detail what they will do, and draw up a “sex-plan” that will be strictly adhered to and which outlines how they will proceed from hugging to kissing, kissing to groping, groping to undressing, undressing to foreplay…
The only situation in which something like this may happen is with prostitution.
The legal model of consent could be visualised as a house where there is only one single, unnegotiable, step for getting from downstairs to the bedroom upstairs.
In reality, sexual interactions will proceed from the “downstairs to the bedroom” by multiple small steps. Each step consists of one of the partners making a foray into a new activity, which the partner can either accept or reject.
At each stage both partners are implicitly thinking “Do I want what is happening to continue?”, “Do I want to do what s/he is proposing next?” Either actor can give or withdraw their consent to these actions.
This means that there are actually many moments in an intimate encounter where the progression of the interaction can be either halted, or diverted. The law sees “consent” as a unitary kilogram of “macro-consent” – whereas the actual practice of intimacy is more an accumulation of a thousand separate grams of “micro-consent”.
- Children and “simple consent”
A baby is perfectly capable of expressing pleasure or displeasure at something being done to him, and children are very good at knowing what they want and don’t want, like and don’t like. If you’ve ever tried to persuade a reluctant child to eat its broccoli, or suggested a trip to the pool on a hot day, you will see how capable children are of consenting.
But “consent” implies some intellectual evaluation of, and detachment from, the action being performed or proposed.
I suggest four things are required for this intellectual consideration to occur:
a) that the situation is comprehensible for the person,
b) an awareness that acts can have consequences beyond the act itself,
c) a realisation that pleasure (or lack of pain) is not a sufficient justification of itself for consenting to an act (e.g. would the child eat something it knows is poisonous because it tastes good?),
d) knowledge of their own capacity to consent, or withhold or withdraw consent, to acts, or indeed a whole relationship.
According to these criteria a baby can’t give meaningful consent to being suckled. However the fact that this doesn’t place mothers at moral fault for doing so shows that consent is not the be-all-and-end-all of how we should act towards others.
Provided that the criteria listed in section 2 above are met there is no reason to deny children the form of consent which applies to adult sexuality. Just as adults use “negotiated on-going micro-consent” (initiating activities, accepting/encouraging activities that please, rejecting activities and suggestions that don’t…) so can children. (any subsequent references to “simple consent” can be taken as shorthand for “negotiated on-going micro-consent”).
- What information do people need in order to qualify as “informed” with respect to sexual interactions?
Many decisions a child has to make will require additional information: jumping into a lake, learning to ride a bike, having their ears pierced, joining the brownies or going on a school trip. Children can, and are expected, to give, or withhold, “informed consent” to many things in everyday life.
Those inimical to child sexuality often evoke “informed consent” as a magical formula which renders all child-adult sensual interactions wrong. However the exact nature of the required information implied by the word “informed” remains (deliberately?) nebulous and protean.
In compiling the following list I’ve excluded factors which, given a good relationship, are covered by the protection of “simple consent” – most notably “knowledge of sexual acts”: a child does not need comprehensive knowledge of every possible sexual act any more than she needs to know about the “off-side” rule in order to kick a ball round the garden.
Intrinsic:
i. the risk of pregnancy
ii. the risk of STD
Extrinsic:
iii. knowledge of the nature and extent of social stigma associated with child/adult sexual/sensual relationships
iv. the possibility that s/he may change his/her mind about what happened at some time after the act is over
Note that all of the items on this list have one thing in common: they are about things that have an effect beyond the time-span of the sexual acts themselves; they are about possible results of the sexual activity.
Also, note that if the children in question are prepubescent the first two factors are much less significant than for adolescents. Non-penetrative sexual acts have in and of themselves no consequences outside of the time-span of the sexual activity itself.
- Can a child qualify as being sufficiently “informed” that their consent becomes acceptable?
At what ages children have the awareness of their own capacity to consent or not to sexual activity is hard to evaluate since it is not something that is touched upon either in education, child rearing, research or an average child’s experience.
WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) have a poor record when it comes to providing children with a sexual education. Children are repeatedly taught about “bad touch” and exhorted to “just say NO”. This is done in such a way as to avoid the child getting any notion that she herself can decide what she does with her body. No clear idea is given as to what a child must say “no” to and therefore such “education” doesn’t contribute to a child’s capacity to give or withhold consent.
The extrinsic “knowledge of the nature and extent of social stigma associated with child/adult sexual/sensual relationships” is something children may be aware of (“paedo” has become a play-ground insult) but is it likely that a prepubescent can have a proper knowledge of the stigma associated with adult-child sex?
- “Informed consent” and “intent” – the child
An important issue is also whether “informed consent” can be given progressively as a relationship develops. “Informed consent” is often thought of as requiring the child to have a comprehensive knowledge about sex etc. before she can engage in it at even the most basic level. As if a child needed to know about mitosis and meiosis before she can enjoy someone stroking her bottom.
I suspect that “progressively informed micro-consent” is the mechanism by which all activities proceed where the child develops new skills and knowledge in partnership with another person. Think how a child learning gymnastics will concentrate on acquiring the information and skills necessary for the next step. A good teacher will pass on his knowledge in small quantities and help the child assimilate it through practice and experience.
The intent of a child who willingly and proactively engages in a sexual relationship is clearly one of someone who is showing an eagerness to become “informed”, as are all children who are engaged in play and exploration. Such a child is at the same time giving “simple consent”, but is also seeking to become progressively “informed”.
Society normally encourages this progression and calls it “learning” and “education”. However when it comes to “sex and sensuality” society does all it can to maintain children in a condition of being uninformed.
Indeed society prevents children from seeking the knowledge and experience necessary for them to be sexually “informed” by:
- withholding information from the child i.e. lack of sex education and openness on the subject in society at large,
- prosecution and stigmatisation of adults who educate, or wish to educate, a child,
- stigmatisation and even prosecution of children who seek to be so educated.
9. Stigma
A lack of openness, of proper sex education and the stifling of children’s capacity to decide what they do with their bodies and emotions, makes it harder for children to be able to give “informed consent”. However, if we accept that a child in a relationship can become “progressively informed” then these are not insuperable obstacles.
But the stigma society loads onto such relationships is an insuperable obstacle.
The trauma often experienced by adults who have participated in non-coercive intimacy with adults occurs not at the time of the sexual activity but when the child/adult grows old enough to experience the stigma such activities provoke, and re-contextualise them as “abusive”. Can a child make an informed decision on how she will react in, say, ten years when this stigma really starts to bite?
This is an extrinsic source of harm imposed on such relationships by society. While this stigma exists there is a significant risk that harm will eventually result from even the best conducted, most loving child/adult intimate interactions. It is unlikely that a child engaged in a relationship with an adult could be made fully aware of this stigma – if she were, and had internalised it, she would be unlikely to wish to engage in the sexual activities.
This very serious risk of trauma is one that neither the child or the adult can reliably forestall.
- Conclusion
Children can give “simple consent” (“negotiated on-going micro-consent” ) to sex but society creates conditions which make it impossible for children to give fully “informed consent”.
First, society denies children the concepts and information by which they can think about and make sense of feelings and emotions they experience in their bodies and minds. Society then says children cannot give “informed consent” because they are “innocent” (read “ignorant”). Society use the ignorance it creates to justify the very creation of that ignorance.
Even if a child does adequately fulfill the normal criteria for being “informed” (i.e. those that are assumed in adult-adult sex) there is one criterion that will ensure that the child cannot ever be fully informed: the knowledge of the nature and extent of social stigma associated with child/adult sexual/sensual relationships. If the child is ignorant of this, she clearly is not “informed”; if she is aware of the stigma, faced with such a horrific prospect, she is unlikely to wish to engage in the sexual activities.
In a society where such relationships were not so heavily stigmatised, in which children were given the conceptual tools by which to be aware of their bodily integrity and autonomy, they would be able to give “informed consent”.
But all this is missing the point: society’s talk of “informed consent” is a smoke-screen, a sleight of hand, a boxer’s feint.
When Antis talk of “informed consent” they do not do so out of concern to define the criteria necessary for a child to consent. They do it out of an awareness that evoking “simple consent” doesn’t adequately do the job of shutting down child sexuality. “Informed consent” is their next line of defence.
Present an Anti with a hypothetical child who is sexually experienced, who is knowledgeable, who is independent-minded and autonomous, who lives in a society where adult-child intimacy is licit and who is eager to engage in intimacy with an adult.
Ask him ”Can that child consent to a relationship with an adult?”.
Furnishing us with a prime example of begging the question, his answer will be “No, of course she can’t! She’s a child!”
TWITTER TRAVAILS
Last time, in What to do about the Twitter twats? I wrote:
“I have drafted a letter to the police, calling for an investigation into the individuals who have posted incitements to violence and death threats.”
At the end, I asked for advice:
“Should I send that letter I drafted or would it just be a waste of time and effort? Is there anything else that can be done? Your views would be most welcome.”
Thanks for all the comments made. I think I probably will send the letter, but before I go ahead I’ll be consulting a solicitor next week for his professional input.
According to a new study, adult “victims” live less if they consider their childhood illegal sexual contacts “forced”—that is not the case for the rest of childhood illegal sexual contacts: https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2022-073613
It means, children are able to distinguish between forced and non-forced sexual contacts, i.e., they can consent.
U.N.-backed organization International commission of jurists claims children may be able to consent to sex, and this ability must be evaluated when dealt with by the law:
The text of the document: https://icj2.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/8-MARCH-Principles-FINAL-printer-version-1-MARCH-2023.pdf
The American government reaction: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/4/rubio-republicans-question-biden-administration-on-un-support-for-efforts-to-promote-underage-sex
This jurists’ report is indeed a very interesting development.
a new text on statutory rape:
Reblogged this on Ethics of Paradise.
I am a hebephile, and am quite proud to share this predilection with the great Errol Flynn.
[…] knickers down; and consent in the context of children was ably explored here in a guest blog, The staircase has not one step but many, by “Lensman” in the following […]
[…] “leonard sisyphus mann”), the others being The future is green, and liberating for children and The staircase has not one step but many. All three were and remain truly profound analyses, worthy of continued study and reflection. If […]
All defensive phoney Anglophone peds, as ever, BLOGGED down in semantics.
[…] it may be time to examine a radical plan recently put forward by a commentator here. Responding to Lensman’s blog on consent last month, Observer (“not minor-attracted, but hate the way you are treated”) […]
Reblogged this on Consenting Adults Humans and commented:
This is my most recent essay for Heretic TOC – an exploration of the nature of ‘consent’ in child-adult relationships. I have tried to start at first principles – with dictionary definitions of ‘consent’ and ‘informed’ and to see where this would lead me.
When researching and writing this essay I came across the phrase ‘informed consent’ quite frequently. However no-one who used this phrase to oppose child-adult intimacy, seemed to feel the need to specify the exact nature of the information implied by the phrase. My feeling was they were happier that this ‘information’ remain a shadow dark mass of protean threats, dangers and diseases rather than a debatbale and analysable list of specifics.
Those in favour of legitimising consensual (yes, I know that in using this adjective I’m begging the question this essay is investigating) child-adult intimacy should not tolerate people using the phrase ‘informed consent’ without them having to be specific about what this necessary information consists of.
The answers they give often reveal the confused nature of their thought on this issue and can provide us with a great opportunity for educating them.
Some very good conversations here: I have been away, So that took some getting through, And got through many cups of tea in the process, You can’t beat a bit of ceylon eh boys!
Present an Anti with a hypothetical child who is sexually experienced, who is knowledgeable, who is independent-minded and autonomous, who lives in a society where adult-child intimacy is licit and who is eager to engage in intimacy with an adult.
Ask him ”Can that child consent to a relationship with an adult?”.
Furnishing us with a prime example of begging the question, his answer will be “No, of course she can’t! She’s a child!”
In my novels A Natural Lizard Activity and TBOATYO (The Body of a Ten-Year-Old), I present to the Antis and everyone else many such children, fictional if not hypothetical. As the minor-attracted who post here are aware, the percentage of “agreeable” children is much higher than Antis are willing to admit – even in this repressive day and age.
Sorry, I haven’t had time to read this properly, but it looks interesting. One thing I noticed on a quick scan is that you have an enumeration of intrinsic risks associated with sexual activity..
I’ve always included a third item in this: the risk of physical injury. In the context this is even more relevant.
My own thoughts are that a folk understanding of consent is somewhere between agreement and willingness, and that this understanding has been colonized by the legal concept of ‘consent’ as a kind of contract, requiring some minimum status or authority of the participants. This colonization has not been accidental, but is yet another example of quasi-technical language being used to impose power structures on social relationships by displacing traditional understandings.
Any discussion of ‘informed’ consent declares it’s dependence on the legalistic usage a priori, but the emotional reaction triggered by the suggestion that children can ‘consent’ to ‘sex’ is not legalistic. It is the cognitive dissonance created by juxtaposing childhood innocence with a child’s purported willingness to be sexual.
Diverting the understanding to it’s legal bases makes it more difficult to counter, because the argument is framed in legalistic terms. Even the question of being ‘informed’ makes consent impossibly problematic. How does one possibly measure this? Must a baby be ‘informed’ about the possible risks of breast milk (eg, mercury poisoning) before she suckles? And how many adults walk into sexual relationships with their eyes open wide?
So this blog is again spot on in dissecting language as the mechanism of oppression, and it’s thru just such dissections that it can also be turned to the service of liberation.
thanks for you comment, Bloom.
>“I’ve always included a third item in this: the risk of physical injury. In the context this is even more relevant.”
I haven’t included this in my list because the capacity to give ‘informed consent’ presupposes the capacity* to give ‘simple consent’**.
The ‘simple consent’ mechanism should be sufficient, in the context of a consensual-type relationship, to eliminate the risk of physical harm (I’m not interested in non-consensual ‘relationships’ other than in how to prevent them).
After all if a grown man tries to insert his penis into an orifice not ready or willing to accept it – the child will make it quite clear that s/he is not giving their ‘simple consent’ to such an act. Physical pain and damage are the affair of ‘simple consent’ – ‘that hurts – stop it!’ – and doesn’t require information on the child’s part to make a decision about.
* By ‘capacity’ I’m referring both to the psychological capacity of the individuals concerned and and a ‘circumstantial’ capacity i.e. that deceit or manipulation or force is not part of the interaction.
** Short for the rather cumbersome, but more accurate “negotiated on-going micro-consent”
Mind you, it’s possible to cause injury in the moment between the insertion and the child’s going “Ow, stop!” Many women and men who have had receptive anal sex with men who got all their sex ed from porn, and so don’t realise that anal sex takes a lot of preparation and care, can testify to this. I feel a minimum age for receptive anal and vaginal sex is appropriate for this reason, rather like restricting young kids to tag rugby.
This so far reads like an altogether excellent article, and this website is much better for discussion compared to places like 8chan. I’ve been looking to speak with an “academic” audience for quite a while. I have to agree with the premise- “informed consent” is a legal distinction and it cannot hold up forever (even though it seems like it’s getting progressively worse at the moment.)
I’m not minor-attracted, but I hate the way you are treated.
Guest speaks about the social stigma and why it stands in the way of the ability to consent: The question is, how do you fix this? It’s not impossible, and I have the feeling that you may have lost hope after so many years. Maybe these papers can give everyone inspiration and be reformatted into some sort of action plan. I fully believe that if these strategies are followed, change can happen in a few decades. It’s long, but from what i’ve read so far this place appreciates long articles 😉 If you appreciate these papers, do you think it’d be possible to share them with others?
A beginner’s guide to destroying pedophobia: https://archive.is/7c6pR
Perspectives and Excerpts on pedosexuality from 8chan https://archive.is/8WTge
A message of encouragement: https://archive.is/chhtn
Myths about kind people: https://archive.is/TWeA1
Addressing Pedophobia in the LGBT community and victims: https://archive.is/5VFr4 // https://archive.is/5VFr4
I would encourage you to save and backup these items in case they are deleted. Consider starting a subverse on voat (a free-speech-friendly reddit alternative) so that more people can be exposed to your articles.
Thank you for reading, and I hope to see many more of your blogs in the future.
Have just read this after getting back, totally knackered, from a couple of days’ hiking in the mountains; so I am not really up to assessing these links this evening.
At first glance, though, I very much like the sound of what you are saying, Observer, and it looks as though your links could turn out to be important. So thanks for taking the trouble.
>I’m not minor-attracted, but I hate the way you are treated.
This is very fair minded and shows generosity of spirit. Thank you!
Thanks for your supportive comments and the links – you’ve given me a lot to read! I’ll work my way through gradually.
>“I’m not minor-attracted, but I hate the way you are treated.”
Nothing makes me more optimistic than knowing that there are sympathetic non-paedophiles like yourself out there.
This is not an issue where the ‘public’ have access to both sides of the argument. And therefore people like yourself deserve special admiration and respect for realising the extent to which society is wrong on this (and related) issue.
Sadly a lot of paedophiles themselves internalise society’s false and hate-filled narrative.
This results, at worst, in them adopting the ‘sick monster’ role – the only role made available to paedophiles by society; or adopting a philosophy where they try to control their love through denigrating their love – a ‘don’t think about sex’ approach which replaces ethics with ‘virtue’.
Anyway, I’ll get this comment posted and start having a proper look at the links you’ve posted.
I too greatly appreciate your support of this community and the right for our type of love and attraction base to be legitimized, and to get the facts about pedophilia and hebephilia straight while dispensing all of the cruel myths and half-truths.
I read a large portion of your links, and I am largely in agreement with the material therein. My one critique is that I am hoping that in the future, youth liberation would be more heavily incorporated into these articles, as I believe support for the rights of younger people on all levels – not simply in regards to sexual agency and bodily autonomy – need to be adopted by any society that accepts both us and them as human beings, not predatory monsters or inherently vulnerable living china dolls, respectively. Their complete agency as human beings is of great importance to the great majority of MAPs in the pro-choice camp, it should be noted (even though we may quibble on certain superficial points of youth lib).
One question, though… I could not find an explanation for the use of the term “kind” to describe us. It was clear to me what it means: a term for what we call minor-attracted people [MAPs] that does not have the negative cultural taint of that has become attached to the word “pedophile.” But from where was it derived? It doesn’t seem like an acronym.
Finally, one thing to consider amidst the advice to get our voices out via YouTube videos, Twitter, and blogs: one of the major problems that needs to be addressed in any such article about networking is the massive problem that MAPs (or kinds, if you prefer) have had to deal with regarding censorship. The presence of flag buttons, the hordes of “anti-pedo” squads that diligently search through the vast amount of material on social networking locales in cyberspace to locate and complain to the administrations about “pro-pedophile” material, and the commitments by the administrations themselves to take down material that is considered “inappropriate” or “against community standards” (which is code for “anything that offends us our any of our viewers sufficiently”) has been a severe obstacle towards getting the pro-choice message out in a fair manner, as well as keeping our supporters artificially “quiet” about the topic. Ways of opposing such censorship needs to be discussed, as it explains how the media has created the illusion that only one side of the issue actually exists.
True…As noted in the link posted further down, Many anti’s like free speech, But hate paedophilia more, Therefore willing to sacrifice free speech in order to curtail views which they find offensive.
Some great ideas Observer, and really appreciate your efforts, BUT, implementing the actions within a ‘formulated action plan’ crystalised out from your documents, assumes a coordinated approach taken by a coherent, disciplined and linked-up MAP community – a community that is prepared to raise its head above the parapet. In my experience, there is no such thing as a MAP community working, as communities tend to do, as one. I mean, we cannot even manage a single cause – cf. VP, plus different age-range sexuality interests. In any case, I cannot help but think that there is absolutely no appetite amongst MAPs to expose themselves to even more risk and hate, which the action plan implementation would most certainly create.
In my case, yes, I have lost hope after so many years, not entirely due to external pressures, but from the apathy within the ‘community’ that is so very difficult to be part of. For what it is worth, I have included your links in the WordPress ‘Forum for Understanding Minor Attraction’.
Thank you observer, always a delight to hear or see a non map on here.
“Re the situation today – I believe that the move from industrial to service- and consumer-based capitalist societies has involved a softening of the demarcation between the feminine and the masculine.
When ‘real men’ worked in heavy industry and mines men really did have to be strong, have a great capacity for endurance and be ruggedly stoic. Nowadays society demands flexibility, and a lot of more caring qualities – men can be nurses, infant teachers, and house-husbands.
The famous photo of a muscled man holding a baby, which was very popular in the UK during the period of transition from industrial capitalism to consumer and service capitalism, embodies this transition. Men were becoming ‘new men’ and adopting more feminine qualities.”
Utter rubbish: it is precisely the opposite which is true, the loss of deep male intimacy involving sensitivity to each other,destroyed altogether by the femiRot canker. Society is a lot harsher today than even fifty years ago.
If you want to know how males of the educated classes used to speak to each other, then read any English poetry or letters between men in olden times. The proleteriat never existed until the artisans and crofters were pushed out of their habitat and into the factories. So, your New Labour toss-talk is just pure nonsense. In the olden days boys were a lot gentler and softer than the thugs of all backgrounds we see going around today, even if the tougher ones were tougher still because they could fight bare-knuckle. And boys knew of their own beauty. The femiRot canker changed all this. The First and Second World Wars ( We should never have fought either of them ) didn’t help, because the best men ended up dying. Shame.
It is precisely since these diseased lesbians obtained the whip-hand that men have been incapable of sensitivity, above all, to boys.
In a comment to a previous post “Negociating …”, Bloom quoted the interesting document Consent vs. Assent of the Office of Grants and Contracts, California State University, Fullerton: http://www.ogc.fullerton.edu/IRB/consentassent.htm
This shows that the official notion of “informed consent” is a legal construct. Some people are legally capacitated to enter into contracts; the contract is valid if all parties are freely willing and non-coerced, and if they have beforehand received all necessary information. Some people are legally incapacited, in particular minors under a given age set by law, and the mentally disabled (pronounced so by psychiatrists); they cannot by law grant “informed consent”, and whether they are willing or informed does not matter. For some things that person’s legal tutor will give the consent for her; for others, like those mentioned in the above link, both the consent of the tutor and the agreement of the incapacitated person (called “assent”) must be obtained. But for sex, neither assent of the incapacitated person nor consent of the tutor is accepted, the activity is just banned. Thus in several countries, mentally disabled people are forbidden to have a sex life, see for instance the article High Court bans man with low IQ from having sex after council complains in Metro, 6th February, 2011: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/854744-high-court-bans-man-with-low-iq-from-having-sex
The trick of the propaganda is to present this legal capacity as a skill in the psychological or educational sense. They will say “children have not enough maturity” or “children do not understand the meaning of sex”, without any precise definition of the terms used nor data to support these assertions. For any real skill, like driving a lorry, practicing medecine or teaching maths in junior high school, the necessary abilities and knowledge, both theoretical and practical, are well defined, and can thus be measured and tested by an examination. And for legal contracts, the necessary information to be given to parties is defined by law. But nobody has defined the knowledge and skills neccessary to be allowed to have sex, nor has proposed a way to test it, thus we cannnot sort competent people from incompetent ones. It is known that for a given age, skills vary widely. Some people at age 17 have barely validated junior high school, while I once read bout a woman who at 17 had a M.Sc. and started her Ph.D.! Robert Epstein has measured the maturity of young people in the USA, and found out that 30% of those in the 13-17 age range have more maturity than 50% of adults. Epstein proposes to replace all age barriers (for drinking, smoking, sex, voting, etc.) by maturity and skill examinations.
Note also that for skills, all necessary information is freely available to the public, and people are encouraged to obtain all useful knowledge. But not for sex information towards minors: it is the only topic for which one speaks of “inappropriate knowledge”. There are no filters to prevent children from accessing creationist or negationist sites, or any type of obscurantism or racism; “parental filters” are only to shield them from viewing sex-related material, and in most countries the law punishes severely adults who provide minors with sexually explicit material. Thus one speaks of necessary skills and knowledge, but one prevents them from accessing it. In practice, most young people reach legal age sexually uneducated, and start their legal sexual life in the worst manner, as many adults have complained. I see two parallels to this shielding of childhood from sexual information: (1) In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade translating the Bible, and only the clergy could read it. (2) In Melanesian tribes, men keep locked in their “men’s house” the secret symbols (rhombs, flutes, etc.) of male domination, and women and children are forbidden under penalty of death from looking at them.
Another aspect of skills is that they are learned progressively through practice. Even when a given age is necessary to validate the skill, such as a driving licence, there are provisions to allow underage people some practice. So in France you can at 15 drive accompanied by an adult having authorization, in New Zealand you can at 15 get a licence with restricted rights. But there is no such thing for sex: before the legal age practical training is forbidden, after that age it is not required. One can compare that with drinking alcool. Among traditional Jews, children learn to drink alcohol moderately in a familial and religious framework, and there are very few alcoholics. But in the USA, below the legal drinking age, you are not allowed a single drop of alcohol, even under parental supervision; after reaching that age, you can drink as much as you want. So when the age was 18, one saw people aged between 18 and 21 drinking in excess, then provoking accidents and violence. So the age was raised to 21, and then one saw these excesses in people aged 21 to 24, now some suggest raising that age again. And in the USA, while average alcohol consumption is relatively low, problems like alcoholism and “binge drinking” are relatively high (compared to Mediterranean countries). Maturity does not come by waiting for an anniversary, but by practical training toward a responsible behaviour in a social context.
Very interesting thoughts and info here, Christian. See also Carrie Hill Kennedy in H-TOC blog from 2013:
“A less impaired vision of sexuality”:
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/a-less-impaired-vision-of-sexuality/
Thanks for the link, I had not read that post, indeed, it contains references to that same case of the man with IQ 48 banned from sex. Kennedy’s scales have been discussed, in relation to the capacity of youth to consent, in the article: D.H. Mader, “THE INDIVIDUAL CAN…”: OBJECTIFYING CONSENT, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2010, 103-112. DOI: 10.3149/thy.0402.103
Thanks for drawing attention to that. You might be interested in my other comment just now.
Also, you might find this interesting..
Can a Wife With Dementia Say Yes to Sex?
On that general note, there’s a very interesting 2009 documentary called Monica & David, about two people with Down’s syndrome getting married.
“skills is that they are learned progressively through practice”….Indeed, when I was 13 helping on a farm,mostly hanging out with males 40 and older. There was this one time when having lunch, The older farm helper heard a magpie out the back, blasted it out the sky; Around that time I was very interested in shooting, and kept asking questions; So he said ‘your gona have a go’ he set up some plastic on a gatepost, gave it a blast and hit it. since then I was shooting regular — MY Farther got me a single barrel on my 14th birthday, He didn’t want me to have a double (side by side) barrel cos he thought to heavy, despite me using the farmers side by side regular; Also he worried I’d forget after one shot, that there’s a second one up the spout.
He undermined my ability on both cases, It was evident that I handled the farmers gun the proper way. As for driving, at 14 I was driving the tractor and the bob cat around the yard — Yes practice makes perfect.
When in a bookshop, I Came across a book called LONDON’S UNDERWORLD – Three centuries of vice and crime, by Fergus Linnane…After jotting through there was a section ‘schools of vice’ where he goes onto detail on the sex lives of 11 – 12 year old’s…Can’t find anything to paste, so I’ll type it at a later date.
Your reminiscences remind me a bit of this speech by Harry Hay:
https://nambla.org/nyu1983.html
I couldn’t read that…Said attackers may be trying to steal private information from Nambla.org:-(
I think it’s OK, just that your browser is suspicious of NAMBLA’s website because it doesn’t have the right kind of certificate, but don’t trust me too much on that because I’m no expert.
This is because it is a link with “https” (encrypted), and sometimes a browser does not recognize the encryption certificate of a site. With Google Chrome, on the warning message click “advanced parameters” then “continue to …”; on Firefox, click “add security exception” then “obtain certificate”. But the simplest is to replace “https” by “http”, which works on this site; however your connection will no more be encrypted.
Ok…thanks for the info, goes to show, not all MAP’s are computer experts!
(reply to ethane72’s comment https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/the-staircase-has-not-one-step-but-many/?replytocom=8682#comment-8682)
>“I certainly can’t prove that a desire for partner sexual pleasure could not be uncovered (or incited) with appropriate social conditions, and never meant to imply I could. I think you are much further from being able to prove that it can be in any significant percentage of children. We’re going largely on intuitions here. My strong intuition is that if you succeeded in removing all shame and stigma around sex, many children would opt for prostitution — freely enough that the market would support a rather low price.
You can think about whether that would satisfy any desire you might personally have for adult-child sex, or if you are looking for something more magical and mutual.”
Ethics is not a percentages game. If it were, then minority rights would not exist. It may be that it’s only one child in a thousand who wants or needs to exercise the capacity to say ‘yes’, but the fact that that child exists means that the right to say ‘yes’ should exist.
My personal experience however is that a significant percentage of children do wish to engage in some, possibly elementary, form of sensual intimacy with adults. The ideas I explored in the essay come into play here, because what I’m not saying is that when a child, say, grabs your penis through your trousers she is ‘consenting to sex’. What she is consenting to is you (plural) taking a step, possibly a very small step, forwards into mutual intimacy. That consent is valid, though, yes, given the hostile context, it’s probably best if the adult stops things short of any activity that could be seen as breaking the law or be recontextualised as ‘abusive’ when the child grows up.
As to your strong intuition “that if you succeeded in removing all shame and stigma around sex, many children would opt for prostitution — freely enough that the market would support a rather low price.”
Has this happened in the world of adult sexuality?
Is your experience that children brought up with an open and confident attitude towards sexuality are more likely to become prostitutes?
Not entirely unrelated but there is some correlation between sexual ignorance and early teen pregnancy (see Judith Levine’s ‘Harmful to Minors’) – knowledge and power generally increase self-respect and self-control.
Child prostitution and sexual exploitation is currently more connected to this lack of power and knowledge allowed children regarding their sexuality. Knowledge and a strong awareness of their capacity and right to both give and withhold consent seem better weapons by which children can protect themselves.
Ignorance and powerlessness don’t work – though society currently prefers this option – leaving children an open door for real abusers, society is happy to sacrifice its children’s safety and well-being in order to preserve a social structure amicable to capitalism.
>“We welcome people who don’t share our values if their goal is to respectfully look things over and not post.
That’s not exactly being ‘welcoming’ is it? It’s like welcoming negros onto your bus provided they sit at the back and keep quiet.
As to your strong intuition “that if you succeeded in removing all shame and stigma around sex, many children would opt for prostitution — freely enough that the market would support a rather low price.”
Has this happened in the world of adult sexuality?
That’s the point. Most adults don’t just have sex any time they think it would feel good. Shame and stigma shows up as slut-shaming or telling a guy he’s a wimp if he didn’t go for the score. But the positive flip side is integrating sex with emotional relationships — or at least making sure you and your partner are on the same wavelength about that.
Very few if any prepubescents have that strong desire to have sex that older people have. Older folks in turn don’t generally agree to sex unless they really do have a strong desire for the sex itself. They don’t generally just do it as a favor to others, even if they like them. So I’m saying that if you manage to change societal values so much that kids would do that, you’d also have changed values so prostitution was perfectly acceptable, and kids would go for that opportunity. What may be elusive to the point of nonexistence is ever getting kids to want sex integrated with that sort of special tenderness that adults often do.
Is your experience that children brought up with an open and confident attitude towards sexuality are more likely to become prostitutes?
Not at all. But their openness and confidence can often result in their being less sexually active at a young age. Not giving in to peer pressure or guilt, and not opening themselves up for powerful feelings they weren’t expecting. Taking the edge off of desire with guilt-free masturbation.
Well, if as you say ‘very few prepubescents have that strong desire to have sex that older people have’, and if children being sexually open and confident means that they are ‘less sexually active at a young age’ then I daresay there will not be that many children looking for sex from adults in a world where children have sexual rights and are empowered. And even less wanting to prostitute themselves.
I’m happy with that. My evil plan is not to create a sexual free-for-all, a society in which all children become sex-crazed sex-fiends and I have a right to demand sex from all children. I love children for what they are – children. The Kidults you see on talent shows and dance-moms and such like are an abomination in the be-spectacled eye of Lensman.
My vision is just of a society where a little girl can ask her uncle to stroke her bum (yes, same little girl, same uncle, same bum), and he won’t get thrown in jail and ostracised for doing so, and she won’t get examined by a police doctor, forced to testify against someone she likes, and end up recontextualising the pleasure and love she experienced as life-destroying abuse. Consent laws will still stand: anyone pestering a child will be prosecuted in the same way as they would nowadays, and most children will probably go on happily playing with their dolls, dreaming of ponies and just being children…
Doesn’t seem so much to ask. I think your vision of preteen hookers on every street corner is based on a vision that has not only slipped all the way down the metaphorical ‘slippery slope’ but also gone on to fall down the mine-shaft at the bottom. I think you’re really over-dramatising things, ethane72, by choosing to conjure the worst imaginable dystopia out of scant evidence.
“What may be elusive to the point of nonexistence is ever getting kids to want sex integrated with that sort of special tenderness that adults often do.”
That’s not my experience. My experience is that those kids I’ve had the closest and most trusting relationship with (i.e. those where there’s been the most love and commitment) are generally the ones who have felt the most at ease and ready to express their feelings and desires with me. Again I have to admit that I’ve never followed the progression of our intimacy to a point of illegality, but it’s always been myself, and not the child, who has had to been groan-up and stop things progressing. My own desires and love arise out of exactly that – tenderness – and it surprises me that you should not have experienced how great a component of paedophilic love tenderness is.
It’s simple: intimacy with someone you love, trust and feel comfortable with is easier and feels better than with someone you feel uncomfortable with – it’s like that with adults and it seems that it’s like that with kids. You present a vision of love and intimacy as something really quite dark and freighted with all kinds of anxiogenic assumptions.
I think we can draw a line between being ‘pimped’ and selling your body out of your own free will, Though its not desirable, The fact that its ‘sexual’ separates it from other jobs people do on the poverty line. Would’ve loved to be ‘cash ready’ 20 years back. would go straight to Cambodia, To risky these days.
But if you watch a video on youtube about an NGO That started one of the first ‘child protection’ rackets there, You will see that it started when he was sitting in an outdoor stadium — Then some young boys approached him, and started to rub his genital area; Trying to initiate sex with him. Another part of the video, you will see a bloke with his adolescent friend, being harassed be the NGO with his seemingly moral high ground; They both tell him to ‘fuck off’
That is not to say that some are not trafficked, But that’s not an issue exclusively for minors…Though some that are reported to be trafficked, and then ‘saved’…Return to, and break back into the brothels which they were previously ‘saved’ from.
reply to ethane72’s post – https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/the-staircase-has-not-one-step-but-many/?replytocom=8669#comment-8669
>“Some girl might possibly be interested in some bum-touching as a matter of exploring boundaries and forbidden things. Some who have been (against their natural inclinations) introduced to these things by adults might seek such touch from others as part of what they’ve learned. A very few might just want it. But I’ve never seen any evidence that a child (who has not already been persuaded to do this with others) would feel at all hurt or rejected if such bum-touching was not forthcoming — until she’s well into puberty. I am generally sex-positive and would not have been panicked by sexual interest shown by my girls or other kids around me, so I don’t think I applied a filter to never see such inclinations.”
That “(against their natural inclinations)” somewhat begs the question, doesn’t it? The debate is really about the nature of children’s inclinations – you’re making a statement that presupposes what the debate is hoping to establish.
Your opinions seem to arise from an over-simplistic conception of how child sexuality develops and expresses itself.
Children are born with a capacity to talk. Babies will enjoy making sounds and vocalisations; talk to a baby and it will listen to you intently and try to reply; when a baby ‘talks’ that baby will learn from its parent’s joy that talking is a good thing. Essentially a normal parent will encourage a baby in its attempts to talk – will respond positively to its babbling, reward it and educate it.
Now imagine parents who, instead of responding to their baby’s babbling remain silent and unresponsive. Even worse – imagine parents who discourage or punish a child for trying to talk and who think that children shouldn’t talk till they reach the age of, say, 16.
That is a somewhat exaggerated metaphor of how our culture treats infant and child sexuality. But right from birth our culture starts inculcating a negative education – when I have bathed babies I have noticed that the baby enjoys having its genitals handled. But what did I do? Because of my conditioning I washed the baby’s genitals as quickly as possible. Despite being a paedo, fear prevented me doing what I’d have done if the pleasure were of not ‘sexual’ i.e. prolonging the contact.
Thus even a new-born experiences how this culture hates children’s sexual pleasure.
The process continues throughout a child’s upbringing. A child enjoys stimulating its own genitals – a ‘good’ parent will distract the child, or tell it to ‘stop’. A bad parent will punish the child or even mutilate it (are the various forms of circumcision a way of ensuring that the first intense genital experience a child has is of excruciating pain?) A child pulls its pants down to a family friend – everyone reacts with embarrassment and the child notices this. Maube the parents tell the child off. A toddler wants to run around naked but the parents cover her up whenever nanny and grandad come round &c &c
Then there’s the way we deprive children of the concepts by which they can understand their feelings and desires. I remember having erections at the age of 6, but all they meant to me was a nice feeling and a body part changing its consistency. Why? You’ll say ecause I was ‘innocent’? But no – because no one had educated me about these things – I was deprived of all concepts and any information I could have to understand my feelings. I couldn’t name them or think about them. Our culture does everything to deprive (or ‘protect’) children of the concepts through which they can start to think about and understand their desires and sexuality – then it turns around and says ‘look, children know nothing about sex – so they must be asexual’.
However my experience with children is that when they do realise that I’m not an adult who is embarrassed or condemnatory about sexual matters they quickly get quite sexual – I think there is a ‘paedo effect’.
The difference between a little girl sitting in my lap and her sitting in the lap of a ‘normal’ person is that subconsciously my body ‘welcomes’ her, a norm will generally tense up and be uneasy. The child picks up on this and enjoys being in my lap more than in the lap of a ‘norm’. The same if her knickers show – whereas a ‘norm’ might be embarrassed I probably give her an encouraging smile &c &c
When I was younger and more handsome I’d quite often have interactions with little girls where they got quite sexually assertive – this was, in retrospect, I suspect because they sensed I was open to it (which I was) – and it was me that had to curb the progress of the activity when it seemed to reach a level that could spell trouble.
The process of teaching shame, though it starts at birth, is not entirely internalised by the child till the age of about 7 (it’s no coincidence that Freud postulated the latency stage at around that age). This is the age where sexual interest can seem to disappear. I believe this is a consequence of children reaching a point of sufficient social maturity that they have properly internalised sexual shame.
So the asexual child you have observed is – like all manifestations of our drives and urges – a social construct. We rear children in such a way as the only concept they have about their sexual feelings and desires is of it being something intensely fraught and shameful. How many little girls can name their clitoris and know that its only function is pleasure? What parent when teaching a toddler her body parts includes her vagina and asks her, when the toddler plays with herself – ‘that’s nice, does it feel good?’ – why, in our culture, does is seem such a wrong thing to do – to say to a child ‘that’s your clit – it’s meant to feel real good when you touch it’?
If you bring a child up in a family where reading is wrong, shameful, hidden away and a sin it’s unlikely that that child will be reading Joyce at the age of 12.
Consider how children love sweets – when a sensual pleasure is accessible to them they love it. Do you think that the same wouldn’t be the case with regards to sensual erotic pleasures if it they were allowed to indulge themselves in the same was as they are allowed sweets?
It’s harder to keep little boys in ignorance of their own anatomy and how it works because they have outies and not innies. But little girls’ ignorance can be shocking. I remember being in algebra class aged thirteen and becoming aroused for no particular reason, as you do at that age, and having a lightbulb moment: “Oh! If I were a boy, I’d have an erection now.” At that point I had been masturbating to orgasm for three years already. And it would be over ten years before I found out I was righter than I knew: females have an internal structure that is the equivalent of the penile shaft, is about the same size and becomes erect in precisely the same way. It would be a similarly long time before I found out that the hymen/corona doesn’t need to be ‘broken’ but simply wears away on its own. Knowing that earlier would have spared me a lot of anxiety.
And fixes are often so easy to implement. A helpful intervention can be quite small and simple: for instance, when I saw the film Du er ikke alene (You Are Not Alone) at nineteen, its relaxed, warm attitude to sex calmed and reassured me enormously. It was a real turning point.
Hi Tom
You may have seen this article this morning. May I ask for your view with regards to the allegation that Ted Heath attended PIE meetings?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/edward-heath-fixed-jimmy-savile-6220604
Total bollocks! August is traditionally “silly season” for the British press. They’re getting sillier and sillier all the time though.
Everything they say the degenerates of GC is just pro-abuse garbage!!!
Why pedophiles defend and engage in sex with prepubescent children? the pubertal (young adolescents) already have full sexuality, and the body and the mind formed to practice the act correctly. I think pedos invent childhood to justify your personal tastes ?? !!
Children do not have the body nor the mind to do those things, you can not expect to have sex whit a 5 yrs!! hebephilia is best, at least with 10 years are in puberty and have a body!
And child pornography is disgusting as the adult pornography .. it is like watching violent movies, affect the mind and make impure the children, no one has the right to pornography me just to satisfy four perverts.
I am a proud hebephile, I know I will not abuse children and do not dedicate myself to reinvent the childhood for a little girl of 5 years do me a blowjob.
Thanks to disturbed pedophiles as those in GC, the hebephiles are persecuted, or see PJ antis posing as a child of six years?
‘Divide and conquer’ ehh?
Is this a taste of things to come? Everyone scrabbling for their place on the life-raft of legitimacy? The teleios looking down on the ephebes, the ephebes, in their turn, looking down on the hebes, the hebes on the paedos, the paedos on the Nepis? All of this without any real serious engagement with the issues?
> “Children do not have the body nor the mind to do those things, you can not expect to have sex whit a 5 yrs”
This sentence puzzled me at first.
And then my slow brain worked out that it actually makes sense if by the word ‘sex’ you actually mean ‘intercourse’.
As a paedophile who knows other paedos in real life, and many paedos in cyber-space, I’ve never met one who thinks a girl of 5 should engage in intercourse with a grown man.
Please don’t think me rude if I describe you as ‘fuck-minded’ – a lot of norms (and apparently some hebes) are. For them ‘sex’ means ‘fucking’. For paedophiles (strictly defined as loving prepubescents) sex doesn’t, or shouldn’t, mean ‘fucking’.
This is why the word ‘sex’ is the wrong word to use in discussions which the ‘fuck-minded’ might over-hear or participate in.
When they imagine what it must be like to be a paedo – all they can imagine is doing with a child what they want to do with an adult (or an adolescent) i.e. something that terminates in penetration; all they see with the word ‘sex’ is themselves straddling an orifice and pounding away. Teleiophilic sex is goal oriented – ‘sex without penetration’ is like the sound of one hand clapping for the fuck-minded.
For me ‘sex’ may be nothing more than stroking a loved one’s shoulders or massaging her feet – ‘sex’ is whatever the child wants and enjoys, sex is whatever is her next step into intimacy. Don’t tell me that a 5 year old’s shoulders are not properly formed to enjoy being stroked, or her feet to be massaged.
For what it’s worth, Lensman, I fully agree with you on this. As a hebephile, I have always been outspoken about not rejecting the pedophiles for our own perceived benefit, as the vanilla homosexual community has done to all MAPs since at least the early 1990s, and as BLer’s have sometimes done to GLer’s (and vice versa), as female GLer’s have sometimes done to male GLer’s, etc. I am fully against “divide and conquer” policies and arguments over which attraction base (non-normative or otherwise) is “morally superior” to others if actually acted upon in a mutually consensual manner, etc. All that does is result in a fractured community or set of communities who would be much stronger if they stood united rather than playing these polarized, partisan games with each other. None of us will truly be free unless all of us are free.
You already mentioned an important thing that too many teleios, and also it seems, too many hebes, who do not routinely talk with the entirety of the community, seem to think: the myth that most pedophiles have the same type of sexual desires as what you described as the the “fuck-minded” (i.e., highly intense and largely intercourse-focused) teleiophiles, and simply want to impose such acts upon prepubescents. That is usually far from the truth, as you pointed out. Most genuine pedos have sexual desires on the level of a child, which means: less intense, no interest in penetrative activity (either vaginal or anal) that would likely be physically too much for such a young body with an adult, and which children do not typically look for anyway. This is why I have said in the past that misleading terms like “sex” – which implies a goal towards intercourse and intense teleio-style sexual desires in general – should be replaced with terms like “sexual activity”, “sexual contact”, or “sex play”, etc., when referring to the physical aspects of intergenerational romantic liaisons between adults and prepubecents.
I obviously cannot speak for all hebephiles, but many of us – including myself – likewise have less intense sexual desires than the typical teleio, as the former tends to de-emphasize intercourse and is more focused on the types of physical activities pubescents and young adolescents often prefer to engage in (which we often refer to collectively as “outercourse”, e.g., kissing, heavy petting, massaging, sometimes oral, etc.).
I apologize for any hebephile who may behave like this, or any GLer who may have negative feelings towards BL, etc. This is also why I suggest that all MAPs should associate with other MAPs from different sub-communities (e.g., BLer’s with GLer’s; pedophiles with hebephiles; female GLer’s with male GLer’s), and grow to understand each others’ desires, and more importantly, to get to know each other as people. This is much more productive IMO than having each sub-community insist upon remaining isolated from each other, working on separate fronts to establish freedom and understanding for only certain non-normative minority groups (e.g., exclusively the rights of men and boys to love each other, and not also men and girls or women and girls, etc.), or to attempt to focus upon whatever differences we may have rather than the many important parallels between us.
Debates about paedophilia with the ‘lumped paedophobiat’ so often start with them making a statement such as ‘You want to ban the age of consent!? You think it can be ok for a grown man to fuck a 4 yr old!?’. Their error is reasonably easy to clear up – that is if your interlocutor is receptive enough to listen. But we need to be aware that that’s pretty much what non-paedos imagine we’re all about: arguing for the right to fuck prepubescents.
The age of consent doesn’t just cover penetration. I guess that it covers, well, pretty much anything a judge thinks a child shouldn’t be doing with an adult – probably including something as innocuous as having her bottom stroked.
This is something that the lumped paedophobiat is unaware of, being fuck-minded, but also something that we also forget at our perilc.
We’re making things harder for ourselves with inaccurate use of language (I know, Tom, that you like to ‘call a spade a spade’ – but I think we need to distinguish between different types of spade – http://gizmodo.com/5994728/the-8-types-of-shovels-everyone-should-know 😉 ): we should not allow people to misinterpret us as arguing for the right for a 40 year old man to fuck a 4 year old. Instead we should be clearly arguing for, for example, the right of a 4 year old to ask her 40 yr old, much-loved uncle to stroke her butt. Both these acts are illegal, one rightly so, the other not. One is pretty much indefensible, the other is something a reasonable ‘non’ may be ready to concede as not intrinsically harmful.
> “I apologize for any hebephile who may behave like this…”
No need to apologise, Dissident – I know how strongly you believe in solidarity, and how accepting you are of other age preferences.
10-year-olds are in puberty and have a body? Apart from the fact that most 10-year-olds are not in puberty yet, especially boys, do younger children not have a body, too? What bodily constraints exclude the possibility of giving a 5 years old a blowjob compared to a 12-year-old?
Concerning the “forming of the mind”, human brain is not fully developed until an age of 20-21 years, so why don’t you adopt a more precautionary approach and reject any form of sexual contact with people below this age?
I think by “have a body” he means “are developing secondary sexual characteristics”.
I think it really depends what you mean by ‘sex’. Not many people would try to claim that five-year-old girls giving blowjobs to men is a really swell idea. With regard to what you say about anatomy, the prepubescent vaginal wall is indeed comparatively inelastic, so penis-in-vagina intercourse with a prepubescent girl is a bit anatomically risky, quite part from other considerations. But five-year-olds ‘play doctor’ with one another all the time, and I see no harm in their doing so, consensually, with adults.
This, in a concise nutshell, is precisely how I feel about the matter, A. The idea of “sex play” between adults and prepubescents as opposed to full-blown intercourse needs to be made clear as a part of a pedo’s natural desires, and that pedophiliac desires are not the same as those of the typically intercourse-focused teleiophile. Many people outside of our community do not care, of course, and most are eager to deliberately obfuscate these very important differences in the language they use, but it’s very important that we ourselves maintain clarity about this matter with our use of language. And btw, I never heard the term “inelastic” before, which is rather cool, so thank you for expanding my vocab 🙂
Sure thing :).
Rüdiger Lautmann devotes a portion of his book Attraction to Children to examining the question of the adult’s own physical satisfaction in adult-child sexual contacts. Many interviewees said it wasn’t that important to them. One commented, “My wishes don’t go beyond what he’s willing to do: I actually like cuddling the best. So with me, sex doesn’t depend on whether or not I ejaculate. This is okay, but it must not be implicitly required.” Another: “Orgasm doesn’t always have to be part of the equation. I can just as well do it later on, when I’m by myself. When I kiss a girl, this is virtually already the climax. That’s usually enough for me. Often it’s already enough for me when I’m able to see how beautiful she looks between her legs.”
I think many teleiophiles would seriously doubt the sincerity of these statements, because they themselves can’t imagine being sexually satisfied without intercourse, receiving oral sex, etc. But did they feel that way when they were just starting out sexually, fooling around with similarly inexperienced classmates? As well as consideration and tenderness for the children concerned, expectations and experience must surely moderate the desires of sexually active paedophiles. In a way — and I’m not trying to say that paedophiles are emotionally immature or anything silly like that — many paedophiles probably remain for life in a mental state similar, in this respect, to that of the young teenager for whom a makeout session on the couch is the height of sexual excitement because more is not expected.
That’s it for us paedophiles: children’s sexual organs actually are beautiful.
The same cannot be said for those of adults, I think, no matter the orientation of the perceiver.
A little girl’s vulva is a sublime statement of form.
A little boy’s penis and scrotum,… almost that.
“That’s it for us paedophiles: children’s sexual organs actually are beautiful.
The same cannot be said for those of adults, I think, no matter the orientation of the perceiver.
A little girl’s vulva is a sublime statement of form.
A little boy’s penis and scrotum,… almost that.”
Hmm – what do you make of someone like myself who both loves the bodies of children and finds the bodies of grown women sexy?
I say the more kinds of people one can find attractive and love the better.
Ethanic, why not simply say “children have a beautiful face, a beautiful smile, a beautiful voice, beautiful hands and beautiful everything”, instead of focussing on the “forbidden parts”?
In case it’s of any use to TOC or anyone else, here’s the Pew Report on Online Harassment, released October 22, 2014:
http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/10/PI_OnlineHarassment_72815.pdf
Might provide some good quotes to illustrate an argument with, who knows.
A few brief notes…
1. While some parts of society are against children’s knowledge of sexuality, there are other parts that are all in favor of sex education and in favor of children’s masturbation and sexual exploration with peers who are nonetheless against adult-child sexual activity. Those who disagree with you are not monolithic.
2. You speak of future regret based on society’s negative reactions, but there is another major source of future regret based on re-understanding context. It is especially likely to apply to young teen girls. Consider the adult woman who has sex with a man who has suggested he’d like to eventually get married to her. Suppose she later finds the man is married to someone else that he has no intention of leaving. While she has no legal case against him, I would suggest that ethically her consent was not properly informed. Her distress is not based on societal stigma, and neither is the young teen girl’s.
3. Surely some “antis” will use “informed consent” as effectively a buzzword. Most proponents of any position are not especially incisive thinkers, but it doesn’t damn the position. If you want to get into that level of detail, you have to find an opponent willing and able to go there with you.
4. Your hypothetical child could exist, but lots of us think the baseline probability of such a child is very low. You can construct similar hypothetical children who should be supported and abetted in a decision to commit suicide or to have a healthy limb surgically removed. Society reasonably says that the baseline probability is so low that it is better to prohibit such things entirely — that the chances of one of the conditions being in error are too high to allow in practice. The baseline rate of occurrence of a prepubescent who is inherently eager to engage in sexual activity with an adult will be a point we are likely to disagree about.
>The baseline rate of occurrence of a prepubescent who is inherently eager to engage in sexual activity with an adult will be a point we are likely to disagree about.
If the rate is as low as you suggest, why is there such a resolute disinclination to allow the facts to be investigated (see my other post today)? The only plausible reason I can see is fear that the baseline might be quite high — alarmingly so to those who want to shut down debate.
Your point two, about the young teen girls: yes, there is a risk that they will fall head over heels in love, be given to believe that their love is reciprocated and realise later that it was not. The same may apply to any other gender pairing, but it may well be a particular risk in the case of early-adolescent girls involved with men. This view finds some support in this paper: http://unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/jvq/CV71.pdf. Most of the minors in question were girls 13-15; almost all of the adults were men 26 or older. Half of the minors were in love with or otherwise felt close bonds with ‘their’ adults. While 21% of the adults admitted having been deceptive or misleading about their motives to some degree, most were honest about wanting sex with the minors in question: “most misrepresentations involved insincere promises of love and romance”.
The question is how much damage this does on average. I can see the discovery of such a deception shattering a kid’s heart to such an extent that s/he is in serious pain for a long time and finds it difficult to trust in later relationships. I can also see it being just a minor bump on the road. Someone writes on MetaFilter: “When I was in high school [ages 14-18], I knew a few teenage girls who were involved with men in their late 20s and 30s. Yes, it was sketchy as hell, but there was no telling them that. These relationships eventually ran their course and didn’t cause any lasting damage. When we’ve talked about it some 15 years or so later, they realize how sketchy these guys were and chalk it up to a learning experience.”
Also, what if a kid is head over heels in love at 14, and a year later isn’t much interested? That’s common enough. “At 17 or so, I honestly grew out of him”, writes another poster in that MetaFilter thread, referring to the adult she was involved with some 20 years before. The Paidika magazine women’s issue, uploaded to this site by Kate (thanks a million, Kate!), contains both the story of a 13-year-old girl left heartbroken when rejected by her 28-year-old female teacher and lover and the story of a woman in her 30s left heartbroken when the 15-year-old girl she’d been in a relationship with for a year and a half moved on, as adolescents are wont to do. There is just no evidence that the younger parties in intergenerational relationships are bearing a disproportionate amount of heartbreak. Which brings us to the calls for more research below.
A final point: it could well be that legalisation of adult-minor sex would lessen the number of broken hearts. Adults would be less likely to feel they had to mislead kids into sexual relationships with them: it wouldn’t be a fraught, risky enterprise, and if one kid wasn’t interested, they could try their luck with another. Kids would be less likely to feel they were doing something deeply forbidden and so a lot of the glamour and thrill would disappear. The “I’m risking it all for love of you” line would not work.
An aspect of that paper I linked that I haven’t thought much about before: only half of the kids felt close to the adults; even if we assume that this half was all girls, of the half who didn’t feel close, given the composition of the sample as a whole a large proportion must still have been early-teen girls; there weren’t many rape cases in the sample; hence there must be a fairly large group of early-teen girls who are actively looking for casual sex with men or at least are happy to accept an offer of casual sex with a man. Which is interesting in itself.
I’ve referred before to Terry Leahy’s book Negotiating Stigma: New Approaches to Intergenerational Sex: https://www.ipce.info/booksreborn/NegotiatingStigma.pdf. The girls in the book fall quite neatly into two groups. A typical example of the first group is a girl who at 11 or 12 begins a relationship with a man that’s emotionally close, exclusive and semi-romantic, involves sex but not penis-in-vagina intercourse and lasts for a couple of years. One relationship of this type was ended by outside interference. In each of the other three, the girl grew out of the relationship and left it, in one case turning down a proposal of marriage at age 16, with who knows what heartache caused to the man proposing. A typical example of the second group is a girl who comes from a social background where relationships between teenage girls and somewhat older men are considered normal. She begins seeking out and having casual sex with men, including penis-in-vagina intercourse, at 14 or 15, by which time she’s ‘old for her age’: emotionally mature, socially competent, sure of what she wants and handling safer sex and contraception well. The sample size is tiny, as in about eight people, so we can’t generalise based on it, but surely it’s possible that some of the girls in the study I linked above were like the girls in Leahy’s second group.
There is no question that a few intergenerational relationships turn out OK. Foaming-at-the-mouth antis will deny this. What can I say? Foaming-at-the-mouth pro-contact folks will claim that sexual abuse doesn’t exist, and instead ALL cases were consensual relationships where the victims were brainwashed into thinking they had been harmed.
When it comes to setting societal policies, probabilities necessarily come into play.
When it comes to criminal penalties, I am all for looking at each case on its own merits, and if you can’t find a child who is willing to say with some conviction that they were harmed or seriously misled, then let it go. And don’t twist the kids into a pretzel convincing them of it. I am most concerned to deter rape by saying that minors who say they did not consent are automatically right. I also don’t think adults can know going into a relationship that it will turn out OK, so it is always wrong to start one, even if some end up turning out OK.
I’ve blogged extensively on a lot of these issues:
celibatepedos.blogspot.com.
I am most concerned to deter rape by saying that minors who say they did not consent are automatically right.
Which throws out the very important constitutional provision of due process, that accusations must be backed up by reasonable evidence provided by the counsel of the accuser. By throwing that out, you are well aware that most adults would be too afraid to engage in such mutually consensual activity with an underage girl, because all girls would so easily be in a position to blackmail him or destroy his life with ease if she so happened to be a person of the unscrupulous sort or not clinically sane. His fate would be in her hands the moment he exchanged a passionate kiss with her. You also know (but ignore) that giving such power to any group of people would bring out the worst tendencies in many of them, as young girls are human like any other group of people, and wouldn’t ethically handle such lop-sided power as a group any better than anyone else would. Some college campuses have recently done the same thing in regards to accusations of date rape by female students against male students: the woman is always to be believed without question or inquiry as to the circumstances. This is a stellar example of why uncontrolled emotion, sentiment, and the PC attitude are inimical to civil liberties and democracy. This also, again, illustrates the dark side of the Left, when liberals seek power over others rather than equality and empowerment for everyone. This is the post-1970s Left at its worst.
I also don’t think adults can know going into a relationship that it will turn out OK, so it is always wrong to start one, even if some end up turning out OK.
We don’t know if going into any type of relationship with anyone will turn out right. Making the assumption that it’s so disproportionately likely to turn out badly for a younger person – and the younger person only, no less – outside the context of current societal and legal factors is just that: an assumption. Basing policies on such broad assumptions leads straight down the road to the Nanny State or Draconian measures, with the former simply being a dressed up, “best of intentions” disguised version of the latter.
I agree with everything Dissident said.
There’s only one thing that worries me. I feel we have to be strictly empirical about these things, and in the research I’ve read of twelve-year-old girls enjoying coitus with men, but not of eleven-year-old girls doing the same, so twelve is, in my view, a good age of consent for coitus, until and unless further information is revealed.
However, the studies I have read indicate that on average, girls become consistent and correct with their contraceptive use to the same extent as adult women when they are aged fifteen to sixteen — except if they are on oral contraceptives, in which case, on average, they keep on forgetting to take them at an increased rate right through their teens. So what do we do about this gap?
Better sex ed is surely part of the answer, but I doubt it would fix all of the problem. It’s possible that some girls who at a young age start having coitus with adult men are a self-selecting group who handle contraception and safer sex very well from early on, as they were in the Leahy study. Also, this study http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3116099.html indicates that while girls with older boyfriends are less likely to use contraception and more likely to get pregnant than those with same-age boyfriends, the pregnancies are more likely to be wanted. On the other hand, there is some evidence, which I think I’ve discussed elsewhere, that girls with older boyfriends — who may not be hebephiles at all, just young men half-a-dozen years older — are more likely than girls with same-age boyfriends to be cajoled or persuaded into having first coitus quite young, which isn’t necessarily terrible in itself, but suggests that they may be cajoled or persuaded into skipping the condoms, too. And we have very little data on boys, who can wind up acquiring an STI or, if they are involved with women, co-creating an unwanted pregnancy.
There are contraceptive implants that you don’t have to think about, but while I’m no medic, I’m not sure giving them to twelve-year-olds is such a great idea. In some cases, sure, and I understand that people giving them are probably thinking in terms of damage limitation, as no doubt I would in their shoes, but I feel leery of making implants the default if a child comes seeking contraception. While hormonal contraceptives are well tolerated by most people, they can have nasty side effects for some, and the thing is that if you grow up like that, if you start taking the hormones at a time when your body and mind are changing a lot anyway, you won’t necessarily know how they’re affecting you. There are plenty of accounts by women who started taking hormonal contraceptives in adulthood and only when they came off them years later realised that the contraceptives had been dampening their interest in sex and even their general zest for life. How much more might this apply if you start on them at twelve? Then there’s the bone loss problem with Depo-Provera: while bone mineral density appears to bounce back when teenage girls come off it, they do have to come off it, so it’s no more than a short-term solution.
On top of all that, teenage girls are physically more vulnerable than adult women, because their cervixes are still developing.
So I would like to see some sort of legal provision that allows twelve-and-ups to consent to coitus but, with regard to relationships between children under sixteen and adults, puts all the responsibility for contraception and safer sex on the shoulders of the adult and holds the adult to account if, say, no condom is used and the kid acquires an STI. “She said not to bother with condoms”, however true, shouldn’t be viewed as an excuse, because under-sixteens should be regarded as incapable of dealing properly with contraception and safer sex *except in the presence of compelling evidence that they are*. Rebuttable presumption, I think they call it. This would be a gender-neutral provision, because they make ‘female’ or inside condoms these days. But I have no idea how or if such a provision would actually work.
A few brief notes…
Thank you, and a few in return…
1. While some parts of society are against children’s knowledge of sexuality, there are other parts that are all in favor of sex education and in favor of children’s masturbation and sexual exploration with peers who are nonetheless against adult-child sexual activity. Those who disagree with you are not monolithic.
Perhaps not, Ethan, but the war on child sexuality still goes on unhindered. The handful of your fellow contemporary liberals who are okay with children exploring sexuality with peers seem to be marginalized, as is anything resembling a liberal position on this general issue since the 1980s. Further, the limits you place on how far youths can explore their sexuality still force those with certain natural inclinations to be marginalized and subject to censure, with worse censure given to adults they may choose to be intimate with. As an analogy, it’s all well and good for a socially bigoted, essentially sex-negative society to be liberal enough to allow bisexuals to engage in sexual exploration with members of the opposite sex, but placing such limits on who they can explore with in an entirely arbitrary manner based on assumptions with no scientific validity leave the door open for full marginalization. Which is precisely what we are getting today.
2. You speak of future regret based on society’s negative reactions, but there is another major source of future regret based on re-understanding context. It is especially likely to apply to young teen girls.
Yes, because like children, the PC attitude overcompensates regarding females, who held the same place on the Victorianesque, “invariably vulnerable and in need of protective white knights” scale that children and younger teens currently do. This attitude is, IMO, highly condescending and a form of sexism, much as the same attitude applied to children is ageist. It betrays the PC, negative side of the Left, i.e., protectionist rather than empowerment liberalism. This comes to the fore every time you use an example or analogy that puts you in the position of playing the white knight for young girls, whom you insist are so inherently vulnerable that they cannot handle their own choices and freedom.
Consider the adult woman who has sex with a man who has suggested he’d like to eventually get married to her. Suppose she later finds the man is married to someone else that he has no intention of leaving. While she has no legal case against him, I would suggest that ethically her consent was not properly informed. Her distress is not based on societal stigma, and neither is the young teen girl’s.
I will ignore your apparent implication that this sort of thing largely happens only to girls based on your common gender-specific example, with the suggestion that men are naturally duplicitous and manipulative by comparison to the female of the species (these anti-male and female-purifying attitudes encompass a large portion of the “anti” attitude, IMO), and respond to the general type of social disappointment you describe. If you feel that someone is so typically incapable of handling such a situation, then I do not believe that removing their rights is a solution, but rather educating them to understand what can happen in a relationship if expectations are kept too high. No one is too stupid or naive to understand these things even at a young age, and I think it actually benefits people of both genders and ages to experience the downside of relationships. The knowledge and experience they glean from loss as well as success are crucially important to development. If we as a society fail to educate our young about the emotional and social pitfalls of relationships, then yes, society is complicit. And the semi-subtle demonization of males and condescending canonization of females implied by your analogy do serve as examples of social stigmatization that leads to many negative policies, including the basis of the age of consent laws and the war on youth sexuality in general.
3. Surely some “antis” will use “informed consent” as effectively a buzzword. Most proponents of any position are not especially incisive thinkers, but it doesn’t damn the position. If you want to get into that level of detail, you have to find an opponent willing and able to go there with you.
Objective scientific study and even simple common sense pretty much damns the position. There are a good number of incisive and very intelligent thinkers on the “anti” position due to its extreme cultural popularity, but they typically use the same rhetoric and moralizing assumptions as the non-incisive thinkers out there, even if oftentimes dressed in articulate verbiage sans the mindless calls for death and dismemberment for anyone who holds the unpopular position. That is the problem.
4. Your hypothetical child could exist, but lots of us think the baseline probability of such a child is very low.
Yes, that is a popular belief of the anti position. It doesn’t hold up for the reason Tom mentioned, and for many other reasons discussed with you here and elsewhere. It’s highly intellectually dishonest to consider how the majority of children in this society behave in front of the adults who have such complete power over them, and whom they know will slap them down the moment they express the slightest form of sexual expression, to be emblematic of how they are in a natural state, regardless of the type of society they live in.
You can construct similar hypothetical children who should be supported and abetted in a decision to commit suicide or to have a healthy limb surgically removed. Society reasonably says that the baseline probability is so low that it is better to prohibit such things entirely — that the chances of one of the conditions being in error are too high to allow in practice..
Society is in no way reasonable about this. They provide harsh punishments for children who express the least bit of sexual interest, and continually tell them that such thoughts and behavior are “dirty” and inherently “wrong” for anyone who isn’t a legal adult to consider. I once saw a friend of mine go into a nasty and lengthy tirade on his 14-year-old daughter simply because she made the mistake of drawing a picture of a young man and women straddling each other and kissing, and leaving the drawing where he could stumble upon it. I’ll never forget the beaten down look on her face during the lecture she received. These attitudes force children and young teens to be very secretive about their sexual interests. For society to consider that children and young teens who may have an interest in adults would be open and exuberant about this inclination if they “actually” had it is the height of intellectual dishonesty. This is a good example of how the “anti” position is almost entirely bereft of logic, common sense, and empirical observation no matter how intelligent or well-educated its proponents may be.
What you said above is the equivalent of forcing a lion to become meek while raised in captivity, and then insisting that the behavior of all large cats born and raised in captivity is the natural baseline behavior for the species.
The baseline rate of occurrence of a prepubescent who is inherently eager to engage in sexual activity with an adult will be a point we are likely to disagree about.
What ever gave you that idea, Ethan? 😉
Tom allows only limited column-inches to my views, as they are often insufficiently heretical. So please understand if I do not reply in full to criticisms of my views. For those who want to explore my positions in more depth, there’s my blog celibatepedos.blogspot.com.
the war on child sexuality still goes on unhindered. The handful of your fellow contemporary liberals who are okay with children exploring sexuality with peers seem to be marginalized, as is anything resembling a liberal position on this general issue since the 1980s.
You are waving your arms about the strength of various social forces. Very few of the scientists take that rabid view, for instance. If your purpose is to change things instead of feel righteous in your anger, then you look at who your different opponents are. Part of the Virtuous Pedophiles thinking is that you don’t win over everyone — religious conservatives will not respond to our message at all, but liberals with some commitment to civil liberties can and do respond. Pro-contact positions either don’t think about changing people’s minds at all, or else as I see it they are committed to not winning over any sizable numbers of people at all.
the PC attitude overcompensates regarding females, who held the same place on the Victorianesque, “invariably vulnerable and in need of protective white knights”
You’re changing the subject. I singled out young teen girls as a common case that resonates with most people’s experience and intuitions. Whether it is more or less common in them and the effects of in some idealistic future rearranging society in a different way is complicating and enlarging the issue.
If you feel that someone is so typically incapable of handling such a situation, then I do not believe that removing their rights is a solution, but rather educating them
Sure, let’s educate our kids about everything. Educate our 6-year-olds so they can enter binding legal contracts. Until the revolution fixes everything, there are going to be limitations. Also, such relationships are perilous at any age, but the difference is that they are vital to the happiness and well-being of adults or older teens, but of marginal benefit to young teens. It’s trade-offs and probabilities.
And the semi-subtle demonization of males and condescending canonization of females implied by your analogy
You earlier promised to ignore that part. If you’re not going to, let me say that you’re complicating the issue unnecessarily. I raise the man-with-young-teen-girl case as a clear example that resonates with most people’s intuitions, without any need to look at the exact boundaries of age and gender.
[the baseline probability of children’s interest in sex being low] doesn’t hold up for the reason Tom mentioned, and for many other reasons discussed with you here and elsewhere.
Tom said (“The only plausible reason I can see…”). Dismissing out of hand any other motivations is very far from a strong argument.
It’s highly intellectually dishonest …
Failure to accept one particular claim as to how present reality is actually a perverted form of some deeper reality which has seldom if ever been seen to occur is hardly intellectual dishonesty.
..to consider how the majority of children in this society behave in front of the adults who have such complete power over them, and whom they know will slap them down the moment they express the slightest form of sexual expression, to be emblematic of how they are in a natural state, regardless of the type of society they live in.
Teens are generally very bad at keeping their desires secret because they will be punished for them. Many want cool toys (and sometimes shoplift to get them), no curfews, they want to drink and use drugs, they want sex with peers. They very often just do those things despite punishment, and when they don’t they are very vocal about wanting them. They say much less about the desire to have sex with adults and do much less of it. Prepubescents say and do very, very little of it.
Society provide[s] harsh punishments for children who express the least bit of sexual interest
You are focusing on a few cases that match your expectations — your friends’ daughter is an anecdote. Large segments of US society are much more relaxed about this — half, maybe?
Even in those halcyon 1980s, teens and prepubescents did not inundate adults with their demands for sex. Exaggeration aside, it was never very common. As best I can tell, it was mostly kids who lacked sufficient love and attention at home putting up with sex to get that love and attention.
Tom allows only limited column-inches to my views, as they are often insufficiently heretical. So please understand if I do not reply in full to criticisms of my views.
In all fairness to Tom, Ethan, he has likewise told me and other participants here who do have fully heretical views to seek brevity in discussing matters. This is because he is the only person moderating the blog, and lengthy diatribes are a lot of work for one person to deal with, which is why he has asked (and sometimes had to insist) that those of us (like me) who have difficulty with brevity strive harder for it here. In that spirit, I will try hard to keep my responses succinct.
“the war on child sexuality still goes on unhindered. The handful of your fellow contemporary liberals who are okay with children exploring sexuality with peers seem to be marginalized, as is anything resembling a liberal position on this general issue since the 1980s.”
You are waving your arms about the strength of various social forces. Very few of the scientists take that rabid view, for instance.
You only have that position, Ethan, because you often discount the many scientists who have criticized the common views: Okami, Kilpatrick, Sandfort, Franklin, Green, Friemond, Rind, Tromovitch, and Riegel being but a few prominent names that come to mind. Ignoring this fact doesn’t solidify your position.
If your purpose is to change things instead of feel righteous in your anger, then you look at who your different opponents are. Part of the Virtuous Pedophiles thinking is that you don’t win over everyone — religious conservatives will not respond to our message at all, but liberals with some commitment to civil liberties can and do respond. Pro-contact positions either don’t think about changing people’s minds at all, or else as I see it they are committed to not winning over any sizable numbers of people at all.
I don’t agree with your last sentence, Ethan. There are genuinely pragmatic and sensible ways of winning over sizable numbers of people that do not include taking (or pretending to take, whatever the case may be) a popular consensus view over all of the issues. One of the ways pro-choice positions do this is by being open about our feelings and views with the many Nons we associate with in real life, and make it clear we are decent people in general. Another way is to focus on important issues we can more readily agree upon rather than “pushing” the more emotionally “hot button” issues on a public that is not yet ready to fully embrace them.
“the PC attitude overcompensates regarding females, who held the same place on the Victorianesque, ‘invariably vulnerable and in need of protective white knights'”
You’re changing the subject.
No, I believe I’m making a relevant example based upon an analogy that is frequently used by you and other liberals of a certain ideological stripe, which makes an important point about the overall issue we’re discussing.
I singled out young teen girls as a common case that resonates with most people’s experience and intuitions.
Translation: you singled out young teen girls, and females in general, because you know how emotionally provocative that is to people in general, and many liberals in particular, and is more likely to get them to sympathize with your point by evoking a common form of prejudice. It’s a form of “framing” for the argument.
Whether it is more or less common in them and the effects of in some idealistic future rearranging society in a different way is complicating and enlarging the issue.
Envisioning a better future where freedoms and benefits we do not now enjoy as the norm are what progressives and liberals are supposed to be working towards, Ethan. When you dismiss such things as mere “idealism”, and insist it’s only “realistic” to consider scenarios that retain the most sacrosanct and commonly accepted mores and institutions of today, then you betray the movement for change under the guise of being “realistic” or “reasonable.”
“If you feel that someone is so typically incapable of handling such a situation, then I do not believe that removing their rights is a solution, but rather educating them.”
Sure, let’s educate our kids about everything. Educate our 6-year-olds so they can enter binding legal contracts. Until the revolution fixes everything, there are going to be limitations.
Working past those limitations as quickly and judiciously as possible should be one of our goals, IMO. If we agree something of the present system is not to our benefit, then we should be conducting more discourse about how best to go about eliminating it rather than arguments over how and why it should be retained until some major revolution. There are ways of improving things, and even for some fundamental change, within the context of the present system, and we should make note of that.
Also, such relationships are perilous at any age, but the difference is that they are vital to the happiness and well-being of adults or older teens, but of marginal benefit to young teens. It’s trade-offs and probabilities.
Again, you are making assumptions and decisions for all young teens without allowing any of them to speak for themselves, or giving any of them the opportunity to prove they are capable of running their lives and making decisions as individuals, rather than as one monolithic group whose needs are pre-determined by an adult agency. That is tyranny, not freedom, I’m sorry to say, regardless of how sincere the intentions may be.
“And the semi-subtle demonization of males and condescending canonization of females implied by your analogy”
You earlier promised to ignore that part. If you’re not going to, let me say that you’re complicating the issue unnecessarily.
I think, Ethan, you may be the one complicating the issue if you continuously bring up such loaded analogies, and then cry foul when I take them to task and point out how these attitudes are all relevantly connected as symptoms of a much larger issue. Just sayin’.
I raise the man-with-young-teen-girl case as a clear example that resonates with most people’s intuitions, without any need to look at the exact boundaries of age and gender.
Translation: See my above refutation of this…
“[the baseline probability of children’s interest in sex being low] doesn’t hold up for the reason Tom mentioned, and for many other reasons discussed with you here and elsewhere.”
Tom said (“The only plausible reason I can see…”). Dismissing out of hand any other motivations is very far from a strong argument.
His point was, I believe, that other motivations do not hold up to scrutiny.
“It’s highly intellectually dishonest …”
Failure to accept one particular claim as to how present reality is actually a perverted form of some deeper reality which has seldom if ever been seen to occur is hardly intellectual dishonesty.
When you ignore valid scientific research and clear empirical observations because they contradict a pervasive cultural system of beliefs, and present these beliefs as facts, then you are indeed engaging in a form of intellectual dishonesty.
“..to consider how the majority of children in this society behave in front of the adults who have such complete power over them, and whom they know will slap them down the moment they express the slightest form of sexual expression, to be emblematic of how they are in a natural state, regardless of the type of society they live in.”
Teens are generally very bad at keeping their desires secret because they will be punished for them.
Which may be why so many teens are constantly punished and committed to humiliating forms of public censure, including increasingly in public via the Internet. And which is why they feel the need to be secretive rather than honest and open about their feelings in the first place. And the reason so many of them (but far from all) are so “very bad” at keeping their desires secret is because their parents, teachers, and other adults in their lives frequently spy on their activities, including (and maybe particularly) what they are discussing behind the scenes online.
Many want cool toys (and sometimes shoplift to get them), no curfews, they want to drink and use drugs, they want sex with peers. They very often just do those things despite punishment, and when they don’t they are very vocal about wanting them. They say much less about the desire to have sex with adults and do much less of it. Prepubescents say and do very, very little of it.
Because if they express an open interest, or complain loudly, about wanting to have romantic relations with adults, they will receive typically far worse punishments than those regarding any of the examples you described above. They will likely have their computers removed from their possession, have their cell phones confiscated or even more strongly monitored – with all of their private communications on any type of social networking venue (including cell phone text archives) read and disseminated – and will likely be forced into behavior modifying therapy at the hands of unscrupulous social workers, and likely even any adult platonic friends they may have subjected to a humiliating investigation, if not arrested. You know as well as anyone who lives in this hysteria-ridden society that parents, teachers, social workers, etc., will be considerably more likely to panic and react in extremely tyrannical ways if their kids express a desire to be sexual with adults. It’s completely normative in our society for teens to complain they want to date peers, or seek general sexual knowledge/understanding, or want the best “toys” (if by that you mean the latest iPhone or MP3 player, etc.), but it’s ridiculous based on simple empirical observation to say that adults hold any of what you mentioned above, including even discussions of wanting to experiment with alcohol or marijuana, to be comparable to saying they want full sexual freedoms, particularly to date adults if they so desire.
As for pre-pubescents, they are even more heavily monitored than teens, and have only recently begun to join the online world in any significant capacity. Any pre-pubescent who openly stated they wanted to be intimate with adults would be even more quick to be dragged into a social worker’s office, and their parents would likely come under suspicion by the CPS. Even young kids who live in today’s society are well aware of this! Downplaying the stigma of youth intimacy with adults in our society, and trying to compare it to issues more commonly and readily able to be discussed by them with society at large without severe censure, is incredibly disingenuous.
“Society provide[s] harsh punishments for children who express the least bit of sexual interest”
You are focusing on a few cases that match your expectations — your friends’ daughter is an anecdote. Large segments of US society are much more relaxed about this — half, maybe?
Only if you live in a different reality than I do, Ethan. The hysteria that is still ongoing is certainly not the product of a society that is largely – e.g., by half – reasonable about this subject! Again, simple empirical observations via reading any media outlet should suffice here.
Even in those halcyon 1980s, teens and prepubescents did not inundate adults with their demands for sex.
It’s not about inundating adults with a desire for sex, it’s about a significant minority of them having a romantic interest. Please do not exaggerate when I’m saying here. The hysteria was here by the ’80s, so let’s go back to the ’70s instead: the hysteria was not yet here, but most of the non-Internet related laws were nevertheless on the books by then. Keep in mind what happened to celebrities like Errol Flynn and Roman Polanski for having relations with underage girls. Such things weren’t prosecuted nearly to the extent they are today, and it was possible to sit and have reasonable discussions about it with many parties during the ’70s, the most liberal decade in recent memory. But to say that virtually no teens have any interest in adults is to try and pigeon hole human sexual diversity to fit with the limitations expected by modern cultural attitudes and legal demands. The world prior to the 1970s likewise made it appear that vanilla homosexuality was far less common than it is today, because the ability for minorities who had such desires to discuss it with the public was extremely limited and “tossed under the rug.” You’re seeing a similar phenomenon with gerontophilia today, and using the same methods and rationalizations to dismiss its relevance as was done with homosexuality in the not too distant past. I’m sure that during even the 1970s, the idea of anyone living then actually seeing the full legalization of homosexual marriage was considered an idealistic pipe dream too.
Exaggeration aside, it was never very common. As best I can tell, it was mostly kids who lacked sufficient love and attention at home putting up with sex to get that love and attention.
Which is a bigoted belief on your part to justify the continued demonization, cultural marginalization, and criminalization of the gerontophilic attraction base.. all to fit your position, and to in turn justify the same types of strictures aimed at your fellow MAPs. Let’s wait until the time comes where all young adolescents – and even prepubescents – are truly free to discuss their feelings on these matters without the fear of having what little freedom they have taken away, or social workers and/or LEOs knocking on their door. What you said above is something you can only say under the geronto-centric tyranny of today, because contrary to what you claim, you well know that almost all underagers are in absolutely no legal or political position to publicly contradict you.
Most of this is retromping and restomping of old ground, at least for those who have read our GirlChat discussions. You’re still wrong. 🙂
But there was this one point:
Very few of the scientists take that rabid view, for instance.
You only have that position, Ethan, because you often discount the many scientists who have criticized the common views: Okami, Kilpatrick, Sandfort, Franklin…
The rabid view I was referring to here is the socially conservative view — that children’s sexuality is nonexistent and/or it must be suppressed at all costs. I am saying that few scientists have THAT view. The scientists you mention are on the other end of the spectrum.
I think the context makes my meaning clear, but I can see how there was room for honest misinterpretation.
Most of this is retromping and restomping of old ground, at least for those who have read our GirlChat discussions.
But I’m sure those who visit this blog and have not read our previous discussions on these topics elsewhere are fascinated and enlightened 🙂
You’re still wrong. 🙂
As always, you do such a fine job of proving that, Ethan 😉
But there was this one point:
[snip…]
The rabid view I was referring to here is the socially conservative view — that children’s sexuality is nonexistent and/or it must be suppressed at all costs. I am saying that few scientists have THAT view. The scientists you mention are on the other end of the spectrum.
I can’t agree with that, Ethe, as I see too many people who claim to be scientists or have a Ph.D. regularly associate with the child protection industry, and are heavily involved in pushing the belief that if children express any degree of sexual curiosity (meaning, if they are caught) then there needs to be an investigation of their home life; that the child is likely suffering from abuse or emotional illness, etc. Too many scientists are guided by their emotions, cultural beliefs, conditioned loyalty to prevailing societal institutions, and (oftentimes) the pursuit of profit over and above any type of objective scrutiny. Isn’t Dr. Judith Reisman a Ph.D? How about Dr. Phil? And Dr. Laura Schlessinger? You don’t get more mainstream, louder, or socially influential than these scientists, or build more lucrative careers off of being mainstream and appealing to popular belief. A lot of people do not like these individuals, granted, but that hasn’t hurt their overall popularity and profit margins.
Try googling for “my preschooler is masturbating”. I see no panic in any of the top hits, and a lot of “it’s natural, gradually get them to do it in private, etc.” That doesn’t sound like a society that is nearly uniform in its vicious attack on any form of child sexuality.
And yes, surely there are people with “Ph.D.” after their name who can be convinced to publicly lobby for any position that will get them viewers or acclaim.
20:21:58
Try googling for “my preschooler is masturbating”. I see no panic in any of the top hits, and a lot of “it’s natural, gradually get them to do it in private, etc.” That doesn’t sound like a society that is nearly uniform in its vicious attack on any form of child sexuality.
This was being overly technical, Ethan, and you know it. Nowadays, masturbation can be accepted and even considered funny with pre-schoolers, but largely because they are believed to “not know any better,” just like people may laugh at a 2-year-old for crawling underneath a woman wearing a skirt and peer upwards. But masturbation only involves an action with themselves. Society has moved beyond viewing self-pleasuring as inherently bad or wrong, as long as it’s done in private. When it comes to just about any type of sexual interaction with other children, and particularly with adults, beyond simple hand-holding or simple kissing (with peers only), however, then you have extreme hysteria.
And yes, surely there are people with “Ph.D.” after their name who can be convinced to publicly lobby for any position that will get them viewers or acclaim.
And also professional “acceptability,” which puts a lot of pressure on individuals from every possible political affiliation or organization to publicly hold positions that do not detract from the most hot button and socially controversial issues. How “seriously” they are taken by others in their profession, and their employment and funding prospects, may largely depend upon this.
“Even in those halcyon 1980s, teens and prepubescents did not inundate adults with their demands for sex”….Hi, This may come across as slightly anecdotal but when I was 21 I had a 16yo girlfriend who I asked out on her 16th birthday (not a day before) After spending time with her and her friends around 15 and 17…The topic would often be on boys, But it would never exclude men my age or older 30+ Just ask teenage girl what she thought of Brad Pit; Yes he was exceptionally good looking, But he would come into the category that you mention that are supposed to have very little interest in older guys — And when they mention how they would like to ‘fuck’ him, It contradicts your position.
Thanks for your notes Ethan72
> “1. While some parts of society are against children’s knowledge of sexuality,…”
You are undoubtedly correct. I wish I had enough hours in the day and years of life left to me and brain cells in my skull to do more than think about an ‘averaged out’ conception of social attitudes.
> “2. You speak of future regret based on society’s negative reactions, but…”
I agree with your point here – a section I omitted (otherwise this essay would have been far too long) was about how openness and honesty was necessary for consent (of whatever kind) to be valid. This, of course, applies to all relationships – not just child/adult ones.
> “3. Surely some “antis” will use “informed consent” as effectively a buzzword…”
I don’t doubt that most antis hold their opinions sincerely. However they have gotten away too easily with holding those opinions without having to think further than their gut-instinct about the issues and questions involved. If they find the questions we ask on the issue too detailed then they have effectively let the ball drop in their half of the court. If an anti considers it a step too far to be asking ‘what information is required for consent to be informed?’ then he’s really betraying that his beliefs are very weakly worked out – after all the the phrase ‘informed consent’ metaphorically pleads for that question to be asked.
I see no reason to make any concessions to antis who have never thought about or reasoned out their position. A good intellectual drubbing from someone they regard as sub-human might do them some good and make them reluctantly aware that the issues are more complex than the default culture presents them.
> “4. Your hypothetical child could exist, but lots of us think…”
The point of this hypothetical child was to illustrate how an anti’s use of ‘informed consent’ is ultimately a pretext to stop children consenting. How common such a child might be is irrelevant to the little thought experiment built around him/her.
However committing suicide and removing healthy limbs are not the same as asking a much-loved uncle to stroke your bum. There is no intrinsic harm in the latter and
Having your bottom stroked by someone you like and trust is something, I guess, every human, maybe every mammal, has the potential to find pleasurable, nor is there any intrinsic harm in the act. I doubt the same could be said for limb removal.
openness and honesty was necessary for consent (of whatever kind) to be valid.
Thanks for recognizing the problem. It seems you are moving from consent as a legal concept to consent as a moral concept — and if so, large numbers of legal adult relationships will fail the test.
I see no reason to make any concessions to antis who have never thought about or reasoned out their position.
Fair enough, though from your original formulation I sensed a broader criticism. I’ve stepped up to the plate and will do my best. I’ve conceded “incapable of informed consent” as an absolute and instead talk about probabilities and risks.
How common such a child might be is irrelevant to the little thought experiment built around him/her.
I’ve conceded the point of the thought experiment. But when it comes to setting social policy, how common people are is extremely important.
Consider criminal law. It is never 100% certain that an individual actually committed a crime. Between possibilities of framing, police misconduct and outright police and witness fraud, we will always run the risk of imprisoning innocent people. The absolutist position is that we should therefore never put someone in prison. While there’s much room for improvement in practice, social order requires that we do protect ourselves against some dangerous individuals, even if we necessarily make a few mistakes now and then. Probabilities.
However committing suicide and removing healthy limbs are not the same as asking a much-loved uncle to stroke your bum. There is no intrinsic harm in the latter
You’re trying to have it both ways here. If probabilities don’t affect your thought experiment, they don’t affect mine either. Intrinsic harm must be weighed against benefit. It may be very rare that a child is in such intractable psychological pain that suicide is a valid option, but that rarity does not invalidate the case. Similarly with a child who is in agony because having some particular limb is incompatible with their most basic happiness.
Switching back to the real world, while often there would be no harm in your uncle stroking your bum upon your request, consider the case of the uncle who SAID that you requested he stroke your bum, but you actually did no such thing but instead gave signs that a neutral party would have seen as not consenting. If the baseline probability of the child ardently wishing for such bum-stroking is low, and you are a pedophile who would desperately want to stroke that bum and thus as a fallible human have a strong tendency to interpret ambiguous consent signals the way you want — arguably better to just disallow any such bum-stroking.
Link to my blog once again in anticipation of Tom applying the muzzle: celibatepedos.blogspot.com.
>“Thanks for recognizing the problem. It seems you are moving from consent as a legal concept to consent as a moral concept — and if so, large numbers of legal adult relationships will fail the test.
As it stands we’re in no position to do anything about the legal conception of consent. However we are in a position to address our own ethical conception of consent. I think my ideas about consent, however, do have legal implications.
>“Fair enough, though from your original formulation I sensed a broader criticism. I’ve stepped up to the plate and will do my best. I’ve conceded “incapable of informed consent” as an absolute and instead talk about probabilities and risks.”
Yes, but one must never forget to what extent those probabilities and risks are dependent on social context.
>“The absolutist position is that we should therefore never put someone in prison. While there’s much room for improvement in practice, social order requires that we do protect ourselves against some dangerous individuals, even if we necessarily make a few mistakes now and then. Probabilities.”
I agree. I hope that my essay doesn’t give the impression of absolutism – though one of the dangers of abstract thinking is that of sometimes giving the impression that you’re painting with only one colour to you brush…
No, my preoccupation with having a clear idea of consent is that society, and ourselves, employ the most accurate concepts in determining how to behave and live ethically.
What I’m most certainly NOT saying is that because children can consent then ‘all children can be considered to be consenting all of the time’! Very much the contrary.
But whenever a paedophile states that they believe that children are capable of giving ‘consent’ (even, in theory, giving ‘informed consent’) the world (which is not very accustomed to tailoring its demands to the wishes of its children) instead hears him saying ‘I have a right to demand sex from children and they have no right to deny it me’.
That is, of course, absolutely NOT what I am saying. Those who manipulate children, pester them or coerce them, or treat them with disrespect must remain answerable to the law.
>Switching back to the real world, while often there would be no harm in your uncle stroking your bum upon your request, consider the case of the uncle who SAID that you requested he stroke your bum, but you actually did no such thing but instead gave signs that a neutral party would have seen as not consenting. If the baseline probability of the child ardently wishing for such bum-stroking is low, and you are a pedophile who would desperately want to stroke that bum and thus as a fallible human have a strong tendency to interpret ambiguous consent signals the way you want — arguably better to just disallow any such bum-stroking.
You raise an interesting point here, and one I’m very much concerned with – how to act ethically as a paedophile.
To stay with bum-stroking: is the man who refuses to stroke a girl’s bum out of fear really acting more ethically than the man who does stroke the girl’s bum?
To boil the question down to its crystal: is refusing a child the love, affection or pleasure she craves inherently more ethical than giving it?
In the context of a society verminous with stigma the answer has to be a reluctant ‘yes’ – but we must remember that WEIRD societies are freakish outliers when looked at in the broader context of history and anthropology.
As to ambiguous signals – yes, if in doubt, the easier ethical route is inaction.
However, another option (in a hypothetical world where doing so wouldn’t land you and her in trouble) is simply to try it and see how she responds – if she tenses up and reacts negatively you have your answer; if she relaxes and sighs and, when you take your hand away, she says ‘that’s nice – do it again’ likewise you have your answer. This is how intimacy proceeds – small, testing sallies – all it requires is sensitivity, alertness to the other’s needs and responses and consideration.
Also, whilst, norms and teleios receive a life-time’s education from a culture dense with examples and role-models on how to be good lovers (from parents, school, film, literature, tv etc etc) paedophiles have as role models and teachers the unfortunate men caught up in the net of the law – their cases being reported only from one cliché-ridden and dishonest angle, or the monsters who are, for the most part, the creation of the unhinged hysterical imagination of the mob.
I’ve spent quite some time ‘counseling’ young paedophiles who have come to us distressed: society is a mirror and the image they see of themselves in society’s mirror is of a hideous monster – how can these young people learn self-respect, and respect for their love, when all society allows them to know of themselves is that they are monsters?
That, I suspect, may be why the darknet apparently has so many paedophiles who are disrespectful of children – these are people who have assumed and adopted the monster mask that society tells them is the only identity available to the paedophile.
This is a way of saying that in a society where children’s right to say ‘yes’ is recognised alongside their right to say ‘no’ there will also need to be an (informal) process of socialisation and education for child-lovers similar to that which teleios receive.
As it is many paedophiles do educate themselves – through literature, reading books like Tom’s ‘Radical Case’, through films like ‘Dreamchild’ and websites like Heretic TOC and GC and BC – seeking out, against the grain of our culture – what it is to live ethically as a paedophile – but that self-education is, I have learnt, only available to a lucky few.
Most young paedos are lost in a hall of mirrors that feels more like a ride on a ghost train.
is the man who refuses to stroke a girl’s bum out of fear really acting more ethically than the man who does stroke the girl’s bum?
I know very little about you — there are many lengthy discussions here in TOC land that I haven’t read. I see you as a thoughtful and sincere person trying very much to do the right thing. I don’t know about your personal experience with children.
But I raised three daughters, with bums and bodies flying every which way. I know a LOT about kids. Prepubescents need hugs, snuggling, and an understanding and respectful ear from parents. If they don’t get those things there, it’s great if they can get that level of parental interest elsewhere. As they grow older, kids usually elect to get a lot less of that kind of physical contact from anyone.
Some girl might possibly be interested in some bum-touching as a matter of exploring boundaries and forbidden things. Some who have been (against their natural inclinations) introduced to these things by adults might seek such touch from others as part of what they’ve learned. A very few might just want it. But I’ve never seen any evidence that a child (who has not already been persuaded to do this with others) would feel at all hurt or rejected if such bum-touching was not forthcoming — until she’s well into puberty. I am generally sex-positive and would not have been panicked by sexual interest shown by my girls or other kids around me, so I don’t think I applied a filter to never see such inclinations.
So I find your hypothetical to be wildly unrealistic, and the sort of thing that will make teleiophiles see you as an alien being.
is refusing a child the love, affection or pleasure she craves inherently more ethical than giving it?
Love and affection are basic needs for children. Pleasure (implicity sexual pleasure) is something entirely different. Childhood is like adulthood to the extent that there are tons of things you might want but don’t get — particularly other people who don’t want to play the make-believe you want to or do the same things you do. If you’re an adult and no one who you like wants to share sexual pleasure with you, that comes to be a matter of notable distress. (Exclusive pedophiles are stuck with notable distress, and that sucks.) But young teens and below? No way.
I’m of the opinion that a place like Virtuous Pedophiles (of which I’m co-founder) is the most healthy place for young pedophiles. You learn that you’re not a monster, you learn there’s no need to be ashamed of attractions, you can talk about the proper role of fantasies, legal pictures, and erotic stories, you can learn about how to relate to children, carefully setting aside sexual inclinations — maybe avoiding such situations entirely if they are too frustrating, etc. You can discuss the pros and cons of coming out to selected people, share frustration at having to keep a big secret, etc. Write to virpeds@gmail.com if you want to join and take a look around. We welcome people who don’t share our values if their goal is to respectfully look things over and not post.
For the typical pedophile, discussing how sexual interactions might go in some hypothetical revised world focuses attention on something he will never get. It’s a recipe for frustration. If a pedophile happens to lose sight of the caveat “not yet”, he risks doing something dangerous for all concerned.
It’s fine for people of a philosophical bent like us to talk about such things, though I think your premise of young kids who really want such things is wildly unrealistic. If we had a fetish for applying body paint to kids, we could have long discussions about which kids truly want to have their bodies painted and how to negotiate consent for painting arms and chests and backs and legs. We could talk about society’s disapproval of such body-painting, or whether a kid could decide to allow such painting because he likes us and wants to make us happy. Or because we pay him or her. But to talk about engaging a child’s inherent solemn desire to have their body painted sounds kind of wacky.
Even though I would in a sense love to do sexy things with a 5-year-old girl, reasons pile upon reason for not doing that. After hypothetically changing society to remove all of those reasons we can, I still see no inherent interest lurking in the 5-year-old girl. Society is full of people who care deeply about children, and I’ll leave it to them to figure out what degree of sexual activity is healthy for them. I bow out and have a realistic expectation for my lifetime at the very least that no such activity will ever be possible.
thanks for your comment, ethane72 – you raise some very important issues.
>“Even though I would in a sense love to do sexy things with a 5-year-old girl, reasons pile upon reason for not doing that.”
In the context of the society we live in, yes. But not in a philosophical sense, nor when we take a historical or anthropological perspective.
>“But to talk about engaging a child’s inherent solemn desire to have their body painted sounds kind of wacky.”
No doubt to the huge majority of people in our society it is ‘wacky’ to discuss whether children have a right to ask for and receive sensual pleasure from an adult. They are simply wrong. It is a reasonable discussion to have and the implications of the question are huge.
My goal is not to avoid appearing ‘wacky’, my goal is to get as deep an understanding of issues that concern me profoundly.
>“For the typical pedophile, discussing how sexual interactions might go in some hypothetical revised world focuses attention on something he will never get. It’s a recipe for frustration. If a pedophile happens to lose sight of the caveat “not yet”, he risks doing something dangerous for all concerned.”
Let’s not infantilise paedophiles.
I think your ‘typical paedophile’ is a lot stronger on self-control than your ‘typical teleio’. They have to be. Anyway I’m sure they don’t need any prompting from me as far as generating fantasies and dreams is concerned.
But what if the ‘bum stoking’ scenario weren’t a hypothetical one? What if it were something that had actually happened to me?
Would you say that I shouldn’t report this incident, this ‘fact’, because it may stimulate someone’s imagination or offend someone? Wouldn’t this amount to suppressing evidence and data?
>“After hypothetically changing society to remove all of those reasons we can, I still see no inherent interest lurking in the 5-year-old girl.”
Those are some colossal imaginative steps you’re taking, ethane72:
first you imagine a hypothetical society in which child-adult intimacy is legitimate (that society would have to be very different to our own – maybe one as suggested in my essay “https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2015/05/24/the-future-is-green-and-liberating-for-children/” ?);
then you imagine what the upbringing, life and interactions of a child would be in that society (very different to our own – imagine something like a tribal society such as Malinowski studied in the Trobriand Islands);
then you imagine an individual child and try to imagine what her feelings and desires might be. And you conclude from this act of imagination that this particular 5-year-old girl is exactly like your idea of what a 5-year-old girl is in your own society.
This sounds like a scientist trying to imagine how an intelligent silicone-based life form would function in the liquid methane oceans of Titan, and coming to the conclusion that they’d prefer marmite to marmalade on their toast which, coincidentally, happens to be the scientist’s preference too.
A vivid imagination is wonderful thing but it’s dangerous to mistake the products of one’s imagination for facts.
There are other issues your comment raises, but I’ll post this now and return to the other issues later.
I certainly can’t prove that a desire for partner sexual pleasure could not be uncovered (or incited) with appropriate social conditions, and never meant to imply I could. I think you are much further from being able to prove that it can be in any significant percentage of children. We’re going largely on intuitions here. My strong intuition is that if you succeeded in removing all shame and stigma around sex, many children would opt for prostitution — freely enough that the market would support a rather low price.
You can think about whether that would satisfy any desire you might personally have for adult-child sex, or if you are looking for something more magical and mutual.
I’ve spent quite some time ‘counseling’ young paedophiles who have come to us distressed….
Would you be able to elaborate on this a little, Lensman? Who do you mean by ‘us’?
Stephen
>“I’ve spent quite some time ‘counseling’ young paedophiles who have come to us distressed….
Would you be able to elaborate on this a little, Lensman? Who do you mean by ‘us’?
It’s an image- & video-free support community on the onion network.
I am involved with a small group of MAPs trying to improve the availability of compassionate therapy for minor attracted people, so I might quiz you about this again at some point in the future, if that’s OK? My E-mail address, by the way, is minormattersmail@gmail.com should you feel like getting in touch.
My fav intergalactic champion has done it again! 🙂 Thank you for another fine guest blog that gave me a lot of good insights and food for thought, Lensman. One thing I would like to comment on, though:
Even if a child does adequately fulfill the normal criteria for being “informed” (i.e. those that are assumed in adult-adult sex) there is one criterion that will ensure that the child cannot ever be fully informed: the knowledge of the nature and extent of social stigma associated with child/adult sexual/sensual relationships. If the child is ignorant of this, she clearly is not “informed”; if she is aware of the stigma, faced with such a horrific prospect, she is unlikely to wish to engage in the sexual activities.
I fully agree that concern over future sociogenic harm and consequent reconceptualization of the experience is a very good reason to avoid breaking these laws, in addition to the natural desire to want to stay out of jail and to keep your hypothetical partner from being forced into brainwashing “therapy.” I would certainly never encourage anyone to break these laws, and I always strive to meticulously abide by them (quite well, I should add). But one thing I must ask regarding the above excerpt of yours.
If a hypothetical girl should know about the stigma beforehand – and I think it would be difficult for at least some of them not to – would all of them invariably avoid initiating such contact? Some would, no doubt; but wouldn’t others possibly simply decide not to tell anyone about the experiences to avoid the backlash they know they would be likely to receive? Or at least only tell someone they may meet in the future whom they were aware to have had similar positive experiences as children, and/or who made it known they have strong gerontophiliac inclinations?
I must say that a few much younger women of legal age I have dated in the past did have such mutually consensual experiences as children (some of them were gerontophiles), and didn’t seem fazed by the stigma. And they were young enough to have experienced the hysteria throughout their lives, including their formative years.
> “If a hypothetical girl should know about the stigma beforehand – and I think it would be difficult for at least some of them not to – would all of them invariably avoid initiating such contact?”
You’ve certainly got a point, my favourite ‘person who opposes official policy, especially that of an authoritarian state’ 😉
I know that children, as you point out, often engage in such relationships knowing that they are forbidden and with an awareness of the stigma.
However I would question whether a prepubescent, especially a young one (3-9), could have a sufficiently sophisticated experience and knowledge of society to really be cognisant of the nature, extent and risks of this stigma.
I can fully accept that Teenagers, who are by nature rebellious, could make a pretty informed decision on this and set themselves against the current of society and face down the stigma.
Writing the essay inadvertently snooked up the idea that Consent isn’t quite the bottom line – since the idea that a baby consents to being suckled requires such a loose definition of ‘consent’ that the word becomes meaningless. Maybe it is… I think that there is a deeper issue here, but I haven’t yet had the courage to grapple with it.
But I suspect that the Romantic idea of ‘love overcoming all’ may be relevant. Maybe if the love between an adult and a child is strong enough, that love will defeat the stigma society seeks to load on the relationship. Maybe if the love is strong enough that last seemingly uncrossable inch required for the child to give ‘full informed consent’ melts away and becomes irrelevant.
I’d like to think so.
A good post, I enjoyed it. But in many ways the entire conversation about children and sexual consent, is a waste of time.
My reason for saying this is that there is an elephant in the room, and that elephant is child sexuality. The debate about consent is possible only because children are thought to have no sexuality. If they have no sexuality, then there is no possibility of sexual knowledge, hence consent becomes an issue because any sex with anyone is introducing them to knowledge which they would not otherwise possess. This erasure of child sexuality has been going on in Western societies for some three hundred years and has been promoted strongly since the 1970s, mostly via radical feminist thought about rape and power relatioinships.
If children possess a sexuality (they do) and if they are free to explore it as children (many do so, but at some risk due to our current belief in “childhood innocence”) then the issue of consent becomes null and void because they would in fact possess the relevant knowledge.
In any event, the discussion of consent can proceed if and only if children are asexual. It is relevent then only because they are presumed to have no knowledge.
With this in mind, any discussion of “informed and free consent” is a tacit acceptance of a view which I believe to be profoundly wrong. Researchers, from Freud onward, have acknowledged that children’s sexuality is essentially the same as adult sexuality, and that the only real difference is the ability to procreate.
Childhood sex includes “rehearsal” of positions, oral sex, mutual masturbation… and more, including genital sex, but only if children are permitted to be themselves with other children. Such a child would have no difficulty “consenting” to sex with an adult, though there may be some doubt as to whether a sexually satisfied child would be interested.
The issue of child sex, consent and the erasure of child sexuality from our discourse has been very effectively discussed by Steven Angelides. The article is freely available on the net, but I have made a copy available here for those who are interested to read a scholarly article on the matter. I personally find his argument very convincing and believe that ongoing investigation into child sexuality is more important than discussions of consent.
>ongoing investigation into child sexuality is more important than discussions of consent
Couldn’t agree more. Trouble is, what we are getting is non-investigation: research is denied grants and would in any case be in trouble with ethics committees. Only the most indirect and useless empirical investigation is allowed. There are exceptions to this, but usually only in connection with problems such as prevention of teen pregnancy, HIV, etc. The taboo aspect is researching any positive aspects. Occasional stories of kids having sexual encounters with each other in kindergarten (featured here on H-TOC) provide a welcome glimpse of reality but are invariably framed in the media in shock/horror terms.
Yes, research is denied grants, yet there is a great deal of informatin which is helpful. The difficulty is in finding it , working out how it helps understand child sexuality, and presenting it in as many forums as possible.
Of course it is difficult. My most recent piece of writing has been ignored or rejected by many editors of jurnals, yet I will send it out a few more times before posting it myself.
The piece I am working on at the moment focuses on Clancy’s The Trauma Myth and is an attempt to show how her ideas are nullified, or at least severely diminished, by the simple fact of child sexuality. This much, at least, can be and should be done.
Agreed. Glad to hear you are making an important contribution.
I gave up reading the article you linked, from the Journal of Faggots and Lesbian Hordes, as it begins by praising the CSA industry from the very opening paragraphs. Pure victimologist FemiScum garbage!!!!
The author Lensman states that ” paedo ” is a taunt used by kids nowadays, but provides no evidence of this. It is true, however, that at my school boys and girls were conditioned to think any relationship with someone more than one form below themselves as ‘inappropriate’.
Angelides is not concerned with denying sexual abuse; nor, for that matter, am I. What the paper is about is the manner in which child sexuality has been taken out of the discussion of abuse. This is important information for anyone wanting to alter the discission with the aim of understanding consensual adult-child sex, and being able to distinguish between abuse and non-abuse.
I regret that you did not feel able to read the paper and take from it the interesting and important ideas in it, ideas which do not totally support the CSA industry but which open up areas of discussion—anti-feminist theory ideas, at that.
To be honest, I can’t be bothered to read the, err, ‘discourse’ and don’t give a toss what any Gay or Feminissimo has to say about anything, because it’s just a few obscure people speaking to each other.
“I’d be amazed if other readers of this blog hadn’t been called a ‘paedo’ – in the UK it’s become quite a common taunt used by kids against adults.
Sometimes it’s used as a weapon by schoolchildren against their teachers – something which has happened to a (non-paedo) friend of mine, and seriously affected his career.”
Yes, relationships between men and boys have been absolutely destroyed by the Feminist filth, and there is no going back.
“Yes, relationships between men and boys have been absolutely destroyed by the Feminist filth, and there is no going back”….Agreed
>”The author Lensman states that ” paedo ” is a taunt used by kids nowadays, but provides no evidence of this.”
I’ve got personal experience of this for a start – walking along a canal and a bunch of kids calling me ‘paedo’ because I was taking photographs.
I hasten to add that I wasn’t photographing children or even pointing my camera in their direction. In fact I wasn’t even aware of their existence – I was probably photographing a dead dog or a rusty bit of barbed-wire or such-like…
It’s ironic, of course, that those kids were, inadvertently, 100% right. But I guess that if they called everyone who passed by with a camera a ‘paedo’ they’d eventually hit gold and be correct…
I’d be amazed if other readers of this blog hadn’t been called a ‘paedo’ – in the UK it’s become quite a common taunt used by kids against adults.
Sometimes it’s used as a weapon by schoolchildren against their teachers – something which has happened to a (non-paedo) friend of mine, and seriously affected his career.
Thanks for your encouraging words, bj!
Yes, I think that if child sexuality were accepted the discussion on consent would be very different. But I don’t think it would go away: after all the sexuality of adults is accepted and consent still remains an issue for teleios.
It seems that the real enemy of society (and I would argue Capitalism) may be more child sexuality than paedophilia.
The draconian laws and unhinged hysteria suggests that Society is bent on persuading itself that child sexuality doesn’t exist: it has outlawed all representations of it, including cartoons, and criminalised all who who have witnessed it (through seeing child porn) or actually participated in it.
By these means child sexuality is being ‘disappeared’.
I think there are many ways in which childhood sexuality is being hidden, denied and generally caused to disappear. Certainly the elements you mention are a part of it, but they are the latest manifestations, not the whole story. And yes, I suspect that the primary enemy that is being fought is childhood sexuality. Bluntly, if children were not sexual, harmless consensual adult-child sex could never occur, rather, all sexual contacts would be abusive in the sense that the sex always would be forced and potentially violent.
But, leaving that aside…
From my point of view, based on a reasonable amount of academic style research (I only have recently begun to research this area, so I have much more to discover) I suspect that the primary cause is religous and cultural, and based on and in the desire to regulate and control sexuality which has been elevated to a hallmark of “evil”. As I said, more research has to be done before I can argue fully for this, but if we look at other, non-Western, “primitive” societies, we find an entirely different cultural attitude to sex between adults, between children and between children and adults. One example is the pre-contact (with the West) culture of Hawaii and the surrounding islands. See this article as an example.
What examples such as this mean is that there is a need to investigate childhood sexuality as though it is merely sexuality, because it is the same as adult sexuality. This doesn’t entail that consent is not an issue, but in the society referenced, the issue isn’t one of whether or not a child can consent to sex, but whether or not they did consent to sex.
Another aspect, for me, is the category error made when non-violent harmless (Clancy’s “non-traumatic sexual abuse”) consensual sexual acts with children are held to be in the same category as violent sexual assaults. The two types of act are not the same conceptually, yet many act and talk as though they are the same. It only is when (i) children are believed to be totally non-sexual and (ii) all sexual contact with children is therefore conceived as assault, that the issue of consent becomes as potent as it now is. And this is the result of applying radical feminist theories to the issue, especially notions of rape and power. (I think I have repeated myself a little here.) But, if an event is non-traumatic at the time, is requires quite an effort on behalf of the culture and its police (psychologists and other theorists) to turn it into something traumatic—and this effort has been going on for a long time.
I have just completed the first draft of a philosophic paper attempting to clarify some of these issues which I can make available to you if you are interested. I’ve offered it to TOC via email, but really, sometimes I write like a 6 year old (when I was 50 my eldest son told me I was a 5 year old in a 50 year old body… so now I must be 6!), but I would be more than happy to have some comment from you, after having read your posts here. (As it is a first draft, I will not make it publically available until it has received considerable revision.)
>“the issue isn’t one of whether or not a child can consent to sex, but whether or not they did consent to sex.”
That’s a very succinct way of putting it. Unfortunately the job in hand remains that of persuading society that children can (and do) consent.
>“Another aspect, for me, is the category error made when non-violent harmless (Clancy’s “non-traumatic sexual abuse”) consensual sexual acts with children are held to be in the same category as violent sexual assaults.”
Absolutely. But this grotesque conflation serves the purposes of the antis very well – conceptually shackling consensual acts to murder and rape turns even the mildest act of child-adult intimacy into an act of such horror that the whole issue literally becomes ‘unthinkable’. Societies have always protected its most delicate and vulnerable parts with this ‘unthinkability’ and those delicate parts are usually related to ecomnomics. Think: how many Roman or Greek philosophers – for all their perceptivity and questioning – managed to conceptualise a criticism of slavery? ‘None’ (though many wrote about the ethics of being a good slave owner). Of course the economies of both ancient Rome and Greece were very much dependent on slavery.
Society has ‘unthinkable thoughts’ – it’s hard to know what they are unless you have to think them, as we do. These ‘unthinkable thoughts’ indicate where the most vulnerable, soft organs of a society lies. The strateties by which these thoughts are rendered ‘unthinkable’ are complex and fascinating.
>“I would be more than happy to have some comment from you, after having read your posts here.”
I’m flattered that you should ask me bj – I’d be happy to read your paper. I’ll send you an email address to which to send it via your blog.
Yes, you are perfectly correct in what you say. This is where the importance of academic writing and research lies, I suspect—it is they who tend to think the unthinkable in a way which makes it palatable to others, the example of Rind, at. al. not withstanding.
As to being flattered, perhaps you should wait until youi read it (I have sent it); you may not like it at all.
I should also say that the introduction has not yet been finished. I only started writing it today, following the standard Oxford procedure of writing the conclusion first, and the introduction last. lol
This thread may help. http://8ch.net/younglove/res/26642.html#q26796
Fantastic! Thank you so much, Lensman!
I particularly liked this:
“This means that there are actually many moments in an intimate encounter where the progression of the interaction can be either halted, or diverted. The law sees ‘consent’ as a unitary kilogram of ‘macro-consent’ – whereas the actual practice of intimacy is more an accumulation of a thousand separate grams of ‘micro-consent’.”
That is what a lot of affirmative consent proponents are saying: consent is an ongoing thing and can be revoked; consent to oral doesn’t necessarily imply consent to anal, etc. A lot of people find this a sticking point. It puts me in mind of the young Philip Larkin’s fury that he had to pay for dinner and a show without “BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG” the girl in question “as a matter of course”. (I got that out of Andrew Motion’s biography, which also mentions that as a young man Larkin was adamant that fourteen-year-old girls were much more attractive than women of twenty, and liked to write stories about schoolmistresses caning schoolgirls.) To him, the girl was not holding up her end of the bargain, and I can see that that would be aggravating, though of course it doesn’t excuse rape any more than someone promising you a present and then going back on the promise excuses your robbing their house.
But these days things are somewhat different. Young men and women frequently have close friendships and genuine buddyish, pally interactions. Sex is less often a matter of formal negotiation — I took you out to the dance, you agreed to X, which everybody knows is is you implying that you agree to Y — and more often a matter of friends fooling around and having fun. Barbara Hewson, the barrister TOC mentioned elsewhere who said the age of consent should be lowered to thirteen and old men shouldn’t be persecuted on the basis of historic accusations, elsewhere said something about a rape case: that if girls and boys are drinking together and get into bed together, everyone knows what’s going to happen (I can’t find the exact quote). Well, in my last year of undergraduate I saw several young men and women pile into bed together, very drunk but fully clothed, and giggle for a while and then drop off to sleep. Nobody raped anybody. I know because I was the designated driver and I sat there the whole time reading the paper and waiting for people to start waking up so I could start taking them home. I’d have noticed. It all depends on context, and the context these days is often, or at least more often than it once was, informal and chummy, and thank goodness for that.
Thanks for your appreciative comments A.! I’m glad you liked that paragraph – I spent literally days honing it till it read like a poem 😉
I think that there’s a phenomenon I’ve recently become aware of. It’s what I call (and I have an ugly phrase for it – apologies) ‘fuck-mindedness’.
It’s what you describe – a goal oriented conception of sexuality in which the goal is penetration and presumably ejaculation. Decent Girlover’s comment on this page (https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/the-staircase-has-not-one-step-but-many/?replytocom=8637#comment-8637) is informed with this mentality – it can only understand ‘sex’ as ‘penetration’. Larkin, and presumably most men of his era, would have been ‘fuck-minded’.
I think ethical prepubescent-loving paedophiles won’t be. And this is why I think we should be careful about using the word ‘sex’ – a casual onlooker (or ‘onreader’) of our discussions about whether a 5 year old can consent to sex will, unbeknownst to us, be understanding very different things to what we intend. For me ‘sex’ with a 5 year old may just be stroking and kissing and tickling – but the uninformed onreader will be seeing a man penetrating a small child.
‘Sex’ is just not the right word for what paedophiles want to share with children. If it takes a clumsy phrase to say what we really mean so be it – there is too much at stake.
Re the situation today – I believe that the move from industrial to service- and consumer-based capitalist societies has involved a softening of the demarcation between the feminine and the masculine.
When ‘real men’ worked in heavy industry and mines men really did have to be strong, have a great capacity for endurance and be ruggedly stoic. Nowadays society demands flexibility, and a lot of more caring qualities – men can be nurses, infant teachers, and house-husbands.
The famous photo of a muscled man holding a baby, which was very popular in the UK during the period of transition from industrial capitalism to consumer and service capitalism, embodies this transition. Men were becoming ‘new men’ and adopting more feminine qualities.
As someone who’s worked a lot with adolescents I’ve been struck by how much more girls and boys mix in secondary schools than they did when I was their age. In my day and age, though our school was mixed, boys didn’t socialise that much with the girls and vice versa. Nowadays things are so much more relaxed. The girls and boys understand each other better and, yes, seem to respect each other more.
A corollary of this is that there’s a lot more sexual activity between adolescents now – or there is a lot more than in the secondary school I attended. Or rather there’s a lot more sexual activity going on now than I ever got the chance to enjoy 🙁
Your comments on fuck-mindedness and sex and five year olds hits a chord with me.
When I was five, I had an astounding sexual relationship with another five year old. She and I engaged in acts which were fully “adult” in every respect bar penetration and procreative ability.
Interestingly, many of my favourite sexual encounters with my two wives were the same… no penetration but a lot of fun. (The second most traumatic event in my life was when we were discovered by her parents and was subject to abuse by them. My parents were much more sanguine, not disutrbed at all, in fact, but her parents already ahd done the damage.)
The point is that nothing I did at five or at fifty seems to be anything but sex, irrespective of penetration. (One of my first wife’s friends used to say that “penetration was poor man’s sex. That made me laugh.)
With all this support and evidence how adult-child relationships can occur without harm, a legal child porn industry like the current one now might as well exist later on, who knows?
If children can consent to sex then something like what I said in the prior comment might later become a reality. I seem to feel like you would have children and feel sexually attracted to them…
Well I sure hope it wouldn’t be like the current one. If it were we’d be seeing groups of men standing around ejaculating on one boy or boys with silicone-injected buttocks having their heads pulled back by the hair as a prelude to rough anal sex. When child porn was legal it seems that most of it simply involved photos of children playing or posing naked, but then adult porn was a whole lot tamer in those days, too. A mother on MetaFilter writes of her child: “I do not care if he looks at pictures of naked ladies. (Or men, whatever his preference may be.) However, I am not comfortable with him being exposed to the violence that has become a common factor in most recent porn that I’ve seen. I do not want him to think that holding the back of a woman’s head while holding her nose closed until she opens her mouth wider is a good blowjob. I do not want him to think that it’s normal to slap a woman’s breasts hard enough to leave handprints. I do not want him to think that ‘cocksucking slut’ is a term of endearment.”