The precipitous downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein last month over allegations of “casting couch” sexual harassment and even rape, dramatic though his fall from grace was, can now be seen as just the beginning of a mighty cataclysm, a cultural October Revolution to rival in scale and significance its political predecessor in Russia exactly a century before.
Weinstein himself has been accused of impropriety by at least 77 women, mainly actresses and models, including 12 allegations of rape. While none of these has so far resulted in criminal charges (but it is still early days), the man’s own admissions of dubious behaviour hardly exonerate him.
Even if many of the accusations are no more than hot air, they have nevertheless been very hot. Hot enough to ignite a conflagration of further accusations not just in the entertainment business (where actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis C.K., and filmmaker Brett Ratner all had projects cancelled once the finger was pointed), but also in US media organisations and in other countries, especially within the British political scene. In the so-called “Pestminster” scandal, Westminster politicians from both of the main parties came in for a drubbing, the biggest scalp being that of Michael Fallon, the Secretary of State for Defence, who was forced to resign for the heinous crime of touching a woman on her knee 15 years ago. Even his accuser, journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer, admitted that she had not been “remotely upset or distressed”, and thought the pressure for his departure from office was an over-reaction. But he was made to go anyway, in a move that further destabilised an already weak government. Along with the farce there was also tragedy. Carl Sargeant, a minister in the Welsh devolved government, hanged himself following unspecified sexual allegations.
Russia’s Revolution was famously described as Ten Days That Shook the World. Is it ridiculous to compare that vast upheaval to women’s (mainly women’s) current uprising against men’s, well, risings up? I thought about characterising these events in a less dramatic way, as something almost routine. I could have spoken of the latest “moral panic”, following many others in recent decades, most of them focused on various aspects of “child abuse”, real or imagined (mainly the latter). But the term “panic” didn’t seem to cover what is now going on, which smacks more of a determined, long-brewing, revolt rather than a panicky reaction to a newly-perceived danger. I could also have dubbed it the latest “witch-hunt”, which seems to be the cliché of choice among those who really are panicking, including men who see unsolicited pussy-grabbing and tit-squeezing – or even outright rape – as their inalienable right. However, the term “witch-hunt” implies an unjust campaign against innocent people, but there is nothing unjust about calling to account those who really have engaged in sexual assault – and my impression is that a substantial proportion of the complaints are probably genuine. So the term “witch-hunt”, like “moral panic”, fails to capture what is going on.
A “revolt”, by contrast, conjures up visions of seething discontent, with pressure slowly building from below and then erupting violently, with uncontrollable consequences that may in some cases be just and in others grossly unjust. In such a scenario, even entirely well-behaved, respectful men (and women) are right to be alarmed, because revolts tend to be instigated and led by opportunists and extremists – attention-seekers and compo hunters, in this case, aided and abetted by sour-faced, fun-hating, feminist zealots. In this scenario it is not just the bad guys who need worry: innocuous flirting between adults is also being put off limits, with a consequential poisoning of the atmosphere that threatens legitimate courtship and sexual relations in general.
Nothing could be more profound or revolutionary in its implications. The mass nature of the movement, and hence the scale of the threat, is perhaps best symbolised in the emergence of the hashtag #MeToo, under which banner women have been rallying in droves to share their own experiences of alleged sexual assault, harassment, or rape on social media. It has been called the Weinstein Effect, which sounds rather bloodlessly scientific, like Boyle’s Law. For me, though, there are echoes of “I am Spartacus”, Hollywood’s entirely fictional but highly emotive rallying cry of solidarity among the oppressed in the great Roman slave revolt.
So, yes, the revolt against men’s sexual behaviour is a pretty big deal, and this is a view that receives interesting support when taking an ultra-broad perspective. By that I mean not just the most dramatic moments of history but also the very deep past, as studied by evolutionary biologist and anthropologist David Sloan Wilson. He feels society has reached one of those pivotal moments when a new norm is being created, and enforced much more strongly than before. Evolutionary theory, he reveals in a recent article, can tell us a lot about norms:
In any animal or human society, social status can be achieved in two ways: by physical intimidation or by cultivating a reputation as a cooperator. Status is taken in the first case and bestowed in the second case. In most animal societies, status is mostly of the taken variety. If overt bullying is rare, it is because the hierarchy was previously established and is no longer challenged. In most hunter-gatherer societies and many other small-scale human groups, status is mostly of the bestowed variety. Bullying doesn’t work because those being bullied have the collective power to resist.
The coming of agriculture and a rapidly growing population largely put paid to this benign power of collective resistance. Increasing competition over the land needed for cultivation led to territorial wars, and fighting them successfully meant people were obliged to give unquestioning allegiance to the warriors who became their chiefs and kings. These had to be incredibly ruthless, brutal characters in order to fight their way into the job. Thus they were definitely status takers. They did not go blathering on at some job interview about how passionately they would work to alleviate the miseries of the poor in the hope of having status bestowed on themselves for being nice guys.
These tyrants, as they often were, could enslave whom they wished and make them compliant in all manner of ways, including sexually. The most legendary figures, such as Genghis Khan had no shame over cornering as many women as they could physically find the time and energy to screw; and they would slaughter hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in order to secure their domination. Rather than lowering their status, as rape and murder would today, these sociopaths used such crimes in order to cement their position at the very top of society.
They could do no wrong. Their word was law. A great sultan could have a huge harem with hundreds of concubines kept for his exclusive use. He would have hundreds of men castrated at his command to guard these women against more sexually potent rivals. Rulers could even defy with impunity the supreme taboo, against incest, with the royalty of ancient Egypt being just the most famous example among many. As for children being sexually off-limits, not a bit of it: the kings of Tonga took upon themselves the “duty” (poor things) of personally deflowering every virgin in the kingdom – and they did not wait until the child’s 16th birthday.
The change from the power of naked military might to the power of money that came with the growth of capitalism created a new class of status takers – a class that includes the Groper-in-Chief of the United States, Donald Trump. If the day comes when even this most truly Alpha of all males can no longer flout the rules with impunity, women will have good reason to celebrate. As Megan McArdle has written in a very reasonable article, men should not be vindictively punished for past deeds they may genuinely have thought at the time were acceptable; but only when the Trumps of the world get the message that they can no longer be status takers will we be sure progress has been made.
Profound movement in this direction, fuelled from below, has been building gradually for several centuries now: rulers eventually needed the support of the people in order to raise finance for their wars, which they did through parliaments based on an ever-widening democratic franchise. This now includes women, who are increasingly becoming prime ministers and presidents. Business moguls, for their part, have begun to need a more educated, sophisticated workforce, with female as well as male participants, contributing organisational and creative talent rather than muscle. These are key features of modern society that are beginning to see powerful men somewhat cut down to size: once again, as in hunter-gatherer society, everyone is being made to play by the rules. And not just by paying lip service. Those who will be most successful in having status bestowed on them are the ones who truly take to heart the fact that they must win the hearts of sexual partners, not just drag them off by their hair like cartoon cavemen.
We kinds, at least those of us who have been successful with kids, have always understood this. Utterly powerless compared to parents, kind men (and some kind women) have always been obliged to win the friendship and high regard of children, rather than just taking sexually what we want. We have never, in modern times at least, been in any danger of feeling a misplaced sense of entitlement to kids’ bodies in the casual way that The Donald and so many other men evidently feel they have a right to grab any woman they fancy.
In itself, this is good. We should not feel entitled to others’ bodies, whether they belong to children or to adults. As we all know, though, it is possible to have too much of a good thing; or rather the good element, which in this case ensures that we are well-mannered seekers of bestowed status (and that we are truly kind in every sense), can all too easily be outweighed by less benign pressures. Instead of merely being constrained within entirely proper and necessary bounds of kindness, kind people are viciously oppressed. Our sexuality and reasonable aspiration towards loving relationships are crushed beyond all reason.
The way things are going, if extreme victim feminism becomes all-triumphant and men are in effect neutered, the consequences will be far more shattering for humanity than the mere hiccup that was the Russian Revolution. We kinds (including female ones) should thus feel a considerable degree of solidarity with men in general in these difficult times. While we should agree with the feminists that any sense of sexual entitlement is wrong and needs to be tackled, we should also join well-behaved men in facing down the anti-sexual zealots, for some of whom “feminazis” is not an unfair description.
AN ITEM IN THE PIPELINE
Today’s blog, the first for nearly four months, comes as a bit of a surprise to me as much to anyone out there who has noticed the return of life to Heretic TOC. The news over these months has been as amazing and appalling as ever, with enough going on to justify at least a blog every week, but unfortunately I remain very busy with other things and cannot report that service will now be returning to normal.
On this one occasion, though, I have had a particular reason to break my silence. Well, two reasons really. There is the obvious one that the Weinstein Effect was crying out for comment. The other is that I wanted to do what I could to revive interest in Heretic TOC because a potentially very significant guest blog has been commissioned, and I don’t want to run it at a time when the readership has entirely buggered off elsewhere in despair of seeing much going on here. Be on notice, then, that a real event may be on the way. No promises, as I have yet to see a draft of the piece, but I certainly hope to in the near future.
important news have started to leak into popular media. While Feminists consider porn consumers as ones who like anti-women humiliation, scientists proved that cumshot scenes are liked more when porn actresses demonstrate pleasure, not disgust. Thus, porn has nothing to do with degradation of women or rape propaganda.
minors and virgins are “protected” from sex offences the most, bu it has been found out that “females who are older, less healthy, and who have more sexual partners face a higher risk of victimization” through rape:
I can explain it as if older prostitutes are the most prone to be used by police for provocations and false allegations
there must be another explanation because these data are got from clinical, not law enforcement sampling. I may suppose that by pretending to be victims there women tried to drag people’s attention, like in Decameron, day 3, novella 3. Or their frivolous way of life is more dangerous. Or rapists chose victims that are the least deserving being believed.
in a new study “Survivors of child sexual abuse… were more likely to experience patterns of (campus sexual violence) characterized by multiple forms of CSV and co-occurring consequences.”
a new text against demonization of sex offenders:
“Male victimization experiences with female‐perpetrated stranger sexual harassment”:
people are found to be “harsher toward male perpetrators (of “sexual assault”), and to a lesser extent, toward perpetrators who abused female victims. Moreover, male survey respondents were also more lenient than females when attributing blame. (…) This study demonstrates (…) the strength of preconceived stereotypes about sexual offenders.”
attitudes correlating with “women’s action for men”:
“A Theory-Based Intervention to Reduce Risk and Vulnerability Factors of Sexual Aggression Perpetration and Victimization in German University Students”
https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2022.2105290
a new study on “Gender Differences in the Experience of Sexual Harassment and Assault, and Attitudes toward the #metoo Campaign” — by Hagit Bonny-Noach, Osnat Roth-Cohen & Vered Ne’eman-Haviv (2022) in Smith College Studies in Social Work, DOI: 10.1080/00377317.2022.2111398
legal approaches to “sex harassment” compared:
“Those who will be most successful in having status bestowed on them are the ones who… win the hearts of sexual partners, not just drag them off by their hair”?
That’s naive. “Status takers” don’t let “well-mannered seekers of bestowed status” display their manners and talents to potential sexual partners, and the latter have to choose among “status takers”, not among “seekers of bestowed status”. “Status takers” consider themselves as those who protect their (actual and potential) sexual partners from grooming.
It is interesting that children are WANTED to be “protected” more than they WANT to be “protected”. Old women “protect” young girls from “sexual harassment”, but they don’t want to be “protected” themselves.
Everyone in this blog knows that moters are sexually aroused during breast-feeding, and fathers are also sexually attracted towards their children. Family is true harem where children are guarded against more sexually potent rivals, i.e., strangers. “Child protection” is never disinterested.
It is true that women “protect” girls’ virginity, not their own. Leonard Sisiphys Mann says FGM “is a practice organised and promoted by mothers and grandmothers”, and Brongersma describes MGM as a practice organised and promoted by men.
I know just two examples when FGM was performed by a male doctor (by Roland Freeman in 1914 and Isaac Brown in 1866). In general, GMs are made by same-sex adults that are less sexually attractive than those who are mutilated.
Breast ironing, f.i., is performed “by mothers, aunties or grandmothers” (Inna Lazareva, the Independent, 26.01.2019) — neither by fathers, nor by uncles, nor by grandfathers. Feminists think that girls’ breasts are ironed because “mothers fear their children could be more exposed to sexual abuse” (the Wikipedia), but one Cameroon mother told CNN “the goal was to make her less desirable to boys — and stave off pregnancy” (Nkepile Mabuse, 27.07.2011). No fear of sexual “abuse” at all, mothers wanna have sex with boys instead of their daughters.
“Islamic… MGM (unlike Judaic MGM when the boys are circumcised the 8th day after birth…) is performed on children old enough” because Islamic men prefer (almost) pubescent girls, and Jewish religion allows sex with three-years-old girls. That’s why Jewish boys are considered as rivals at earlier age than Muslim boys.
There is no child protection, there is just sexual competition.
>Jewish religion allows sex with three-years-old girls
Reference, please, Cyril. Such a controversial claim should be accompanied by supporting source/s.
I have no time to read the sources, but here are some links:
• https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Judaism/talmud_child_sex.htm
• http://www.come-and-hear.com/editor/p_america_2.html
• http://www.answering-christianity.com/age3.htm
• https://dailystormer.name/talmud-pedophilia-the-jewish-religion-allows-sex-with-3-year-old-baby-girls-and-little-boys-under-nine/
• https://soc.culture.jewish.narkive.com/8R0QGpvh/sanhedrin-55b-p-376-a-jew-may-marry-a-three-year-old-girl
• http://talmud.faithweb.com/articles/three.html
• https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=92184
These links are found through the query: “talmud and sex with three-years-olds” in the Google.
Thanks, Cyril, for going to the trouble. Some amazing stuff, here, clearly, even making allowances for difficulty of interpretation.
The photographs that I’ve seen here and there in the more recondite corners of the Web show an elderly male person wielding the razor, with male youths restraining the girl, as women stand cowering in nearby doorway covering either their mouths or their eyes, and looking cleary horrified – ‘this can’t really be happening! “
Tom writes that today rape and murder lowers somebody’s status — I disagree. Those who rape and kill in prisons are respectable, not despised. On the contrary, those who cannot defend themselves are despised as cowards.
After WW2 German women and girls were raped by Jewish “displaced persons” in UNRRA camps and by soviet soldiers which are considered as heroes now. We know that German POWs and non-German female collaborators were exploited, humiliated, raped, killed and tortured by Americans, Brits, Frenchmen, Poles and Southern Slavs — and nobody says that veterans and patriots are scumbags…
Those who kill MAPs are quite respectable. “It’s not murder — murder is the unlawful killing of a human with malice aforethought.”
>nobody says that veterans and patriots are scumbags…
But acts of vengeance of the type you describe are viewed with embarrassment not pride. They have been swept under the carpet of history.
Here is an interesting article about the 1982 film ‘Rita, sue and bob too’
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/rita-sue-and-metoo/20655#.WjLEqbacbVo
Yet another scandal, with a difference: “For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.” https://deadspin.com/teen-girl-posed-for-8-years-as-married-man-to-write-abo-1820305588
Omnipolitics16 was just released from prison, and replied to me. With his permission, I share his reply with the online (pro-)MAP community. It is very slightly edited to omit some strictly personal details (like real names) and correct some grammar mistakes. So, here is Omni’s mail to me, behind the lines:
______________
“Hello Explorer,
Sad to say that the accusation of theft & probation violation set against me is actually true, and there are reasons why I acted on theft but they are very personal to me, all I am saying is that I had some problems with people and I was broke and needed money, the sex offense I committed in February (distributing & possession of pornography) made it hard to find a job altogether. I took the advantage of my unemployment, and landed myself in a cell. I was released today (obviously). And yes, Explorer, you can share this with the MAP community if you would like.
Omnipolitics16”
_____________
A plea for survey participants via B4UAct:
http://www.b4uact.org/request-for-maps-to-participate-in-study-about-attraction/
How can there be people who believe that there are anti-feminist women like.. Lauren Southern?
No, there are no anti-feminist women. All women seek their greatest benefit at the lowest cost, and the status quo gives them all the freedoms and privileges without demanding any responsibility in return. You can’t beat that. You can’t beat Free.
You know what an anti-feminist woman is? A pro-patriarchy woman. In other words, women should not be able to vote, should not have sexual freedom, should not be able to divorce and should not be able to work in an office. She would have to marry a man with resources, who could support her and her family and devote her whole life to taking care of the house, man and children.
Any of you have you met any women who would defend that?
I have contacted Omnipolitics – we had some e-mail exchanges in the past – and asked him about his current legal situation. I hope he will respond. And, if he permits, I will share his response publicly, here with you.
Anyway, it is important to remember that, for now, we do not know for certain what the accusations against Omni are. And it is even more important to remember that anyone is innocent until / unless being proven guilty.
Yet, I think, paedosexuals should not be reminded of a danger of false or unproven accusations. They are too often subjected to them themselves.
Have you heard recently explorer that omnipolitics16 is in jail? It is true, I had a email exchange with one of his personal friends, who stated that omni is in jail for a charge recently pointing to theft and possibly distributing of CP. Parents of his also confirmed that he is in custody currently. Once he is out, I will contact him, which his friend stated was very soon.
I’m starting to think thanks to the Hollywood scandal, that legal adulthood at 18 is a house of cards and a lie.
Lately, the production companies are throwing girls to fame, who the next day after turning 18, are already drilling 4 dicks into a gangbang. Pal don’t fuck with me, at that age you are still a kid and you don’t have a fucking clue about life, to fuck around in front of the whole planet. The age at which it is legal to make sex should be regulated. Minimum 22 or 23 years.
That’s why I’m seeing more and more cougar and milf porn. Because there you have the guarantee that whoever fucks in front of a camera is because he really wants to and not because they have filled his head with birds in the middle of a party up to cocaine and dollars in his pocket.
Hello tom, is there anyway i can contact you instead of on blog or on a private chat & voice line.
Email: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk
I see you have a WordPress blog, NUCKLEARONLINE. Looks interesting, although I haven’t checked it out in detail yet. I am happy to hear about activists’ work and ideas but I should warn you that I don’t have much time for extensive private discussions in this area. My activism, if it can be so called, is more for academia these days than the wider world of public discourse.
It is just as well that I had my Mandella moment then, when I thought that I had replied to your last email, but in fact had not. (Intended humor, may have failed.)
The important point, however, is that you are still woring—I presume sexnet is hearing from you a lot.
At one time you were talking about doing up the blog as a book, and at another about doing a revision of Radical Case. One wonders about these projects, but hopes to see new work out there somewhere, somehow, whatever form it takes.
I gues I should get around to replying to your last email, a year ago was it? hmmm… Slackness apologised for, truly, but I am not sure that I have an answer to your questions as yet. They put me into a spin from which I may be recovering. At least, I feel an answer forming at long last. (Comments about this made on LSM’s blog did not and do not represent my position, as I … )
>One wonders about these projects
O ye of little faith! 🙂
I have just this week completed a 15,000-word philosophical article that I expect to be submitting to an academic journal within the next couple of days, after a final read-through. As for which journal and what precise topic, I’d rather keep things under wraps for the moment.
Other projects you mentioned have not been abandoned. The H-TOC book is next in line, so I hope that will come to fruition by no later than the middle of 2018. I am now thinking it makes sense to defer the new version of Radcase until 2020, though, which will make it a 40th anniversary edition. Not that I will be lazing around until then: I expect to be doing other academic articles.
Indeed, no, I have a great deal of faith. I merely forget, occasionally, to use it.
All I can say is that I am very happy to know that your plans continue—40th anniversary, wow.
I look forward to reading it all.
Thank you carroll, I am quite inactive on the blog at the moment because of problems with my PC, but i will be active again on it soon. Have you heard Pro map youtuber omnipolitics is in custody? Also seen the vids to amos? I havent yet, but will soon. (thinking of talking about it in my next blog entry.)
>Have you heard Pro map youtuber omnipolitics is in custody?
Any more details? Where did you here this?
One of my contacts knows omnipolitics personally since he is a friend of his, and he gave me info after I tried to get my monthly update with omni. (Emailed it to me recently about it after I msg him about what is going on with omni, and I have been upset ever since, which explains my inactivity on wordpress.) The reason he is in there is unknown to me at the moment, but when I talk to him again I will hope he is okay & he didnt do any sex crime.
Thanks. I hope you can find out more, and tell us about it, including any possibility of giving him support. The first thing on my mind in that regard is whether he has a lawyer.
ATM the only thing i have for an update is why he was detained, it was a robbery charge. Friend stated it just 15 min. ago when I chatted with him, Fortunetly I dont know if this is true since he just stated it. I hope it’s not… I will find out when I talk with him soon.
>a robbery charge
Not what I expected to hear, for sure! Thanks for the info.
Today’s Grauniad and Dhimmipendent offer us an opportunity to observe the differing priorities and concerns that inform the media, the public, politicians etc when it comes to the sexual identity and integrity of females. It seems grotesque that the first report (from the Guardian) should exist at all when we live in societies where the second report (from The Independent) is necessary:
On the one hand, in the Guardian:
“New York art museum refuses to remove painting of girl after ‘voyeurism’ complaint”
“New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has refused to remove a 1938 painting by the artist known as Balthus that depicts a young girl in what some are saying is a sexually suggestive pose.”
“An online petition that had garnered thousands of signatures on Monday urged the museum to rethink its decision to display the painting in light of today’s climate around sexual assault.”
“Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses, The Met is romanticizing voyeurism and the objectification of children,” the petition reads.
“The petition’s author, Mia Merrill, suggested that the painting be replaced by one created by a female artist of the same period.”
On the other hand, in today’s The Independent:
“Drop in number of new FGM cases reported could be misleading, charity warns”
“The latest figures show 1,060 women were identified in the NHS as having experienced FGM, also known as female circumcision or “cutting”, down from 1,570 in the first quarter of reporting.”
“Earlier analysis showed one woman or girl with FGM is identified or treated every hour by the NHS, and it is thought to affect 200 million women and girls worldwide.”
“The Local Government Association, which represents councils, said the fact that 14,250 women had been identified in two years showed the “scale of the challenge” to tackle FGM.”
“Charities told The Independent that the numbers unearthed by the NHS are just the tip of the iceberg and work was needed to address understanding amongst patients and medical professionals.”
….
It seems that if you tickle an eager little girl’s genitals, and give her the pleasure and love, you get banged up in the slammer: if you take a razor or pair of scissors to them you get “very careful conversations” and “some professionals might not be reporting FGM because they believe it would undermine patient confidentiality”
I wonder if the same midwives – if they encountered a loving, consensual intimate relationship between a child and an adult would treat is with the same sensitivity and confidentiality?
Good for the museum for refusing to remove the painting.
You probably already know this, but it’s a new discovery for me: Moolaadé, the last film by pioneering Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, is a slightly stylised look at a small-scale revolt against FGM led by a woman in a Burkinabe village. It got lots of positive attention, awards etc. and I liked it a lot myself. It’s on YouTube with subs. I also very much liked Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl. The girl in question describes undergoing FGM; being sexually abused as a prepubescent by the husband of the man she worked for; falling in love at first sight with a slightly older white boy, with terrible consequences; starting her period at thirteen and a half and being married off posthaste to a much older man…whereupon she promptly ran away and embarked on a wholly consensual romantic and sexual relationship with another man, twice her age!
>The girl in question describes undergoing FGM; being sexually abused as a prepubescent by the husband of the man she worked for
Husband of the man? What, Gay marriage in Somalia? Presumably this should be wife of the man or husband of the woman? Anyway, my confusion prompted me to look online, where I saw a Kirkus review with the following information:
>Whether recounting her experiences as a brave nine-year-old Muslim girl in a nomadic village taking pride in her ritual clitoridectomy (a practice she defends in a milder form), as a rebellious adolescent bride, or, after fleeing her husband, as a resourceful teenage prostitute on the streets of Mogadishu, she is possessed of a strong will and a quick wit.
This intrigued me. What sort of clitoridectomy does she defend, and why?
The review is here:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/aman-with-virginia-lee-barnes-janice-boddy/aman-the-story-of-a-somali-girl/
A mere typo…I meant woman, of course! My poor old keyboard has taken a bit of a battering over the years and isn’t as responsive as it was!
Yes, as I recall (book not to hand) FMG is so prevalent where she lives that she sees intact adult female genitalia only once she’s an adult herself and is singularly unimpressed. She thinks they look ugly, etc. She has undergone a fairly severe type of FGM with infibulation — when the infibulation is torn open she bleeds profusely and passes out in terrible pain, and it’s common for her and other infibulated girls to have non-penetrative genital sex with men, what they call ‘brushing’, i.e. rubbing the glans penis on the female external genitalia, because anything else is difficult to impossible, and very painful. The honesty in recording her views on the matter recommends the book, in my view.
There I go again…FGM, not FMG!
@Tom ===have you considered that your need to feel self-sacrificial comes about not just through an admirable concern for the child’s needs but also from the psychological pressure on you in our society to be “good===
sure yeah i’ve considered that, but i’m just reporting what i feel. as a rule, psychological pressure on me to be ‘good’ provokes the exact opposite reaction, but i don’t get that w my lgfs. maybe its becos i’m already being ‘bad’ simply by making my paedophilia into a thing and taking it out there into the world, but i just do not feel a ‘burden of responsibility’ to be ‘platonic’. i’m not platonic, i’m just restrained and i guess somewhat limpid.
i love them but i do my best not to ‘worship’ them, becos in my experience that is one thing their mothers DO NOT want me to do. also, i know they are kids and i always have that in mind. i can be the responsible adult when required and, as far as my subjectivity allows, everything i do with them is for their sake.
it makes me happy to do that. i doubt it would make me happy to have a furtive sexual encounter develop into a crisis. i cant put it any simpler than that, sorry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foutPY888vc
Someone needs to help him. Amos is struggling to come up with the research.
“Can a fucking baby give consent?”: marthijn.nl/p/103.
Martijn Uitenbogaard’s assesses Amos Yee’s ‘debate’ with nine others in the lengthy YouTube video Hypersonic posted above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZdny86yOAk
I was worried that this might happen.
At it was not his host who banished him, but child “protection” services. The host himself was willing to let him leave there, despite his disagreement with Amos’ position on child-adult sex.
Yet child-“protecting” public servants probably thought that anyone who do not condemn intergenrational intimacy must himself be a convert peadosexual. Or dangerously insane person (there already seem to be videos on YouTube insisting on Amos’ madness). Or, at the very least, a nihilistic immoralist who can be a “bad influence” on children. And his host had to comply.
Another shameful errata for yet another too-hastily-made post:
“At” = “At least”
“who banished” = “who had banished”
“to let him leave there” = “to let him live there”
“anyone who do not condemn” = “anyone who does not condemn”
“convert peadosexual” = “covert paedosexual”
I miss “edit” functuion when I post comments on WordPress blogs… 🙁
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/205652786?t=10m
That is an interesting discussion with Amos there. The guy interviewing has a point about very young kids 4 -5 and not understanding implications such as HIV etc. The argument does get weaker the older the kid gets. like looking both ways on a road, Or what mushrooms NOT to eat. I remember when around ten messing around with cigaretts (they were easier to get hold of in the 80s, a were ids haha)! but after seeing an advert with tar on lungs, I soon threw them away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uw9NWF7Z6w
Well that was painful to listen to. What a poor debate! Andy Warski with his countless irrelevant analogies and constant obfuscation, and Amos Yee ill-prepared to firmly counter even weak objections to consensual adult-child sex, by bringing facts to bear to bolster his arguments.
Amos should realise that no major American youtuber and patreonite with in excess of a quarter of a million subscribers is ever going to risk losing his fan-base by appearing to objectively debate the topic of paedophilia with anyone.
Woops! Further erratum: NOT Andy Warski but Destiny
I sent him a bunch of stuff and he never replied. Oh, well. But the last video that Hypersonic shared has some interesting comments in the page. His first pedophilia video, in which he invites people for a “civil debate”, had a popularity proportion of 1 like for every 4 dislikes, last time I checked, before the video became age restricted and then removed. But the latest one on the issue has a proportion of 1 like for every 2 dislikes. The comments, however, seem to show that people are starting to feel disappointed with the amount of youtubers trying to argue with Yee only to end up resorting on emotion. Taking the issue for granted, people are ill-prepared to debate pedophilia in an impartial manner, they think it’s going to be an easy win. But quickly lose their temper. What I think that Amos is missing, the crucial argument that he is missing, is how age of consent harms minors. If he argued upon that point, not only the opposition would become angry, but also confused about their own position on the subject. Hikari mentioned that some researchers found out that 66% of the American population lose their virginity before 16 anyway, imagine if they were all prosecuted. Not to mention the kids being put in the registry, as we see in SOL Research. I wish he could focus more incisively in that issue. It would be nice to see them at least admit that age of consent is too high, which is half a win.
I’m also thinking right now of Robert King, a distinguished conductor specialising in early music. In 2007 he was convicted of sexual contact with five boys aged 12-16, which had occurred a long time previously, when King was in his 20s and early 30s. What it seems happened is that back then, when he was a music teacher, the charismatic King would befriend and mentor boys who showed musical promise and also make friends with their parents, coming round for dinner at the family’s home and so on. When alone with the boys, King would sometimes playfully wrestle with them, and this sometimes led to his touching their genitals. One of the former boys in particular claimed that King had given him a lot of alcohol; King strongly denied this, in fact denied everything, and was acquitted on one charge. He got three years and nine months in prison (I’m guessing he’ll have done half in custody?) but was not ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register, in part because since his contact with the boys he’d married and had a son. It would have seriously messed up his career if he had been made to sign, not least because early music often requires boys’ voices: King has worked with the best boy choristers in England and with the brilliant Tölz Boys’ Choir from Germany. But his career is not messed up. He’s gone on conducting and making successful recordings and publishing volumes of music he’s edited. The thing is of course that if you’re not interested in that kind of music, you probably don’t know who he is. That makes him easier to protect, I guess. There’s no general public to be satisfied, only a bunch of musicians and music lovers. Which brings us in a bit of a roundabout way to this Financial Times article by Gillian Tett, which argues that the ‘information cascade’ created by new technology is partly responsible for all of this: https://www.ft.com/content/6973e6d6-d047-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6
I hesitate to link here to MetaFilter because, while a great place in many ways, it can be wildly over-the-top about sexual harassment and the like. (Which isn’t my only problem with the place: posters there tend to embrace the highly individualistic ethic that’s very common among the upper-middle classes in the US and that can lead, in my experience, to people abandoning suffering Friends and Relations because their suffering is inconvenient and then acting smugly virtuous about having done so. But I digress.) However, I thought two comments made by a sex worker poster there were worth linking to. De-hot-linking, just in case — lots of tech-savvy people and lawyers there. Replace the xs with ts.
First: hxxps://www.metafilter.com/170585/The-Myth-of-the-Male-Bumbler#7234086
Second: hxxps://www.metafilter.com/170585/The-Myth-of-the-Male-Bumbler#7235135
(Oh, if you can’t read the FT article because of the paywall, run a search for the title and the text’ll come up.)
There’s an interesting discussion of this issue in the first 45 minutes of of the latest episode of the ‘Very Bad Wizards’ podcast.
https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/128
The episode includes a discussion with Christina Hoff Summers in which she brings some sanity to bear on the issue.
Also listen out at the beginning for the ‘bad language and bad jokes warning’. It is spoken by the little daughter of one of the presenter. She has a lovely voice.
[for those of you wondernig Very Bad Wizards is ” a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.”]
Thanks for introducing us to that podcast, LSM. Sounds good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgJXFXSnn3M
Amos Yee vs. Ranthony debate
Tuesday, November 28 at 8 PM EST
I don’t agree with Roy Moore’s politics. At all. But from what’s been reported, e.g. in the detailed Washington Post article, the way he behaved with 14-year-old Leigh Corfman when he was 32 was unimpeachable. He chatted with her, asked her about what she liked to do, and told her she was pretty. She was excited and flattered but also nervous — pretty standard for 14-year-olds trying out their first romantic and sexual relationships. They kissed, and twice he tried to go further sexually than she was ready for, so both times she put a stop to things, and both times he accepted this apparently without trying to pressure or cajole her into anything more, and took her home at her request. That’s a pretty good example of responsible behaviour in such a situation, you know?
This interesting article by Kathryn Brightbill of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-op-roy-moore-sex-allegations-evangelicals-20171114-story.html discusses “parent-sanctioned relationships” between teenaged girls and youngish adult men in US evangelical culture. In this 2014 Vanity Fair article https://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2014/06/monica-lewinsky-humiliation-culture Monica Lewinsky says, “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” And one of the young women who was involved with journalist Glenn Thrush states here https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/20/16678094/glenn-thrush-new-york-times that “She doesn’t believe she was pressured or that she was a victim. But she also…wants others to know about what happened.”
Here https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/rebecca-traister-on-the-post-weinstein-reckoning.html Rebecca Traister says that after much thought and talking to her former colleagues, she decided not to name “the Harasser” at her former job. She also writes, “Yet you can feel the backlash brewing. All it will take is one particularly lame allegation — and given the increasing depravity of the charges, the milder stuff looks lamer and lamer, no matter how awful the experience — to turn the tide from deep umbrage on behalf of women to pity for the poor, bullied men. Or one false accusation could do it. One man unfairly fired over a misinterpreted bump in the elevator could transform all of us women into the marauding aggressors, the men our hapless victims.” I know I am far from the only woman who has been worrying about much the same thing. You can see weariness with victim culture beginning to bubble in as prominent a piece of pop culture as (bear with me) Frozen, the 2013 Disney movie about sisterly love and a powerful cryokinetic queen that was beloved by preschool girls and teenage boys alike: right at the end, a weak little higher-up who’s been involved in a plot to take over our heroine’s queendom protests as he’s kicked out, “This is unacceptable. I am a victim of fear. I have been traumatised!”
Also, it should not be forgotten that the Groper-in-Chief (great title) called for the execution of the Central Park Five, then 14-16 years old, and has refused to accept their innocence: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york Defender of the wrongly accused he is not. Ken Burns’s documentary on the boys’ case is very good.
Tom, maybe you haven’t noticed, yet the 5th “like” of your blog is from the Heaven007, who is “global paedophile conspiracy” seeker and – apparently – a follwer of David Icke’s teachings.
I don’t know why such person would like your blog.
It is possible, however, that he didn’t even read it properly, just noticed that it is talking about “sexual abuse” accusations.
Yes, I noticed, but thanks for mentioning it anyway. David Icke and I used to work together back in the 1970s, but then he went insane and declared his own divinity, so not much surprises me now!
You worked together with David Icke?! This is a surprise indeed. So, he wasn’t then what he is now – an infamous “reptiloid-hunter”, a “far-out” type who is strictly avoided even in the “fringe” communities? Being a member of several such communities myself, I can attest than Icke is clearly rejected not only by “mainstream”, but even by the sane “heretics”.
And he is rejected for a reason. Once I read one of his books, just out of curiosity. It was the most convoulted and baseless nonsense that I ever encoutered.
And yet, once he was different – and he worked with you. Was he a PIE supporter, then? Or not? Even if he wasn’t, his former relationship with you may be a stunning revelation for his numerous followers.
Can you tell us a bit more? If Icke’s fans found this blog, it would be good for them to learn that Icke once were your acquintance, maybe even supporter. Maybe it will allow them to look at him more crtically, and to start questioning his views, including his paedo-hating. However, I suspect, people who believe in such overt absurdity as Icke’s current teachings won’t question him no matter what.
David Icke never supported either me or PIE. We were both journalists together at a paper called the Leicester Mercury. He had been a professional footballer but had to give it up when he got arthritis. That’s when he joined the Mercury as a sports reporter. After that he was in local radio and then he became a very successful TV presenter, with his own show. He even went into politics and became one of the leading figures (joint leader, I think) of the Green Party. Not long after that he announced that he was the son of God and unsurprisingly his career went rapidly downhill!
He didn’t seem at all odd when he was at the Mercury. He was simply a competent, sensible sports reporter. So what happened? I have no idea.
God took a paternity test, and bingo!
You knew David Icke back in the day, when he was sane? Was he at least a fun guy to hang with back then? I am totally curious!!!
I worked in general news, he was in sports. We exchanged a few words at the occasional office party, or drinks after work, but there was very little contact during the working day. A fun guy? His colleagues in sport may have found him so, but to me he was just well mannered, rather quiet and totally unremarkable.
Amos Yee’s “Why Pedophilia Is Alright” video was deleted by YouTube. More censorship.
Before its erasure, this video was mirrored by guess who – James Carter, one of (no longer in existence?) Heart Progress (former?) leaders. He still has his YouTube channel, and regularly publish new videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg7SQoNjYt5wAiEqVeAuOew
And here is his copy of Amos Yee’s video, apparently unnoticed by YouTube censors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=302XEF-2GoU
I hope it will remain unnoticed by them. In fact, it was Amos’ previous fame and relatively large following that brought him all the censorship he faces now. The worst horror of the anti-paedos and child protectionists seems to be the support of MAP-and-liberated-child cause by the public figures who are not themselves paedosexuals and already have some social status or, at least, as in case of Amos, some cultural influence.
That’s why, I think, the pro-intergenerational sex views of prominent people of the 20th century like Michel Foucault, Camille Paglia, Harry Hay, Allen Ginsberg or Hakim Bey are so commonly and conviniently ignored and avoided.
hi..pardon my woeful ignorance (no idea why I never established this before) but will this video play here even when it is (inevitably?) CENSORED on YouTube? Or not? Was thinking that the very simple way in which this chap talks about things might come in handy at times..in certain situations…
>will this video play here even when it is (inevitably?) CENSORED on YouTube?
If the present link breaks (whether through censorship or technical failure) then the video won’t play. So the question is, Could H-TOC, or a friend of H-TOC, copy the video and be ready to provide an alternative link if needed? I really don’t want to get into video hosting (more time, more work) but if someone else wants to keep their own copy of videos, that’s fine by me. I would publish any link they could provide. How about you, Mr Turp? Would you do that?
Unfortunately, all people have to do to enact this type of censorship is to hit the “flag” button, or if a bit less lazy, email the administration and complain they were “triggered” by the “inappropriate” opinions expressed. That’s all it takes in today’s climate.
Hey, Tom! I am always sad to see you go on a sabbatical (it’s doubly depressing when you and Lensman are on a sabbatical simultaneously!), but when you do come back, you do so in style! Even if this is not a full “return” to regular posting.
As you may know from my recent article on GC, I have indeed called the situation you addressed in this post both a “witch hunt” and a “moral panic” in a sense, even though I do not think your interpretation of it as a “revolt” is an incorrect interpretation either. How do I justify my interpretation, though?
Lensman described it best in the non-Muslim-bashing parts of a post he made below, and I could not (and did not) express it better. However, I will link the explanation I gave there in response to what I took as a critique of my interpretation here, so you and other readers of your blog can respond to it on your blog:
https://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/721443.htm
Also, Tom, I see many indications that this revolt, as you described it, is taking on the form of a witch hunt and moral panic by the way it keeps intersecting with judgemental attacks on older men who display simple attraction to younger women of legal age, i.e., referring to them as “creepy old men” if they so much as look at a younger woman who is bending over, etc.
I address that in this other new post on GC you and your readers may be interested in checking out:
https://www.annabelleigh.net/messages/721441.htm
And once again, the witch hunt connotations creep (pun intended) into this revolt in the way that it’s exclusively men who are targeted with sexual assault charges, even in situations where a woman in a position of power was described in detail by the complainant as the obvious initiator of the accused sexual assault, to the point where the man who was accused was an inebriated individual whom the complainant admitted was literally pulled out of his stupor by the female aggressor and pulled onto the alleged victim. And where the complainant admitted to having had a romantic relationship with the man she accused after the described attack took place (while she was married to another man), and only accused him after that relationship ended on a bad note.
The actual example of the above is one of the lesser known sexual abuse allegations to follow in the wake of Weinstein, Moore, and Franklin-inspired debacles that was just shared with me earlier today by a member of another board. It has to do with the firing of Jordan Charitan of the Leftist online news outlet The Young Turks, after a 21-year-old news ingenue Carly Hammond accused him of sexual assault, and which The Huffington Post reported as “rape” before retracting the article.
Hammond was interviewed by Tim Black on the latter’s YouTube show TBTV to give her side of the story, and despite its length (over two and a half hours), I strongly recommend it be listened to in its entirety by all interested readers here. I in no way think that Jordan Charitan was an innocent, of course, but note how Hammond openly explains early on in the report about how Charitan’s colleague and sex partner Chelsea Lyons initiated that sexual aggression, yet Lyons was not charged with assault at all, but only Charitan. Also note her description of how she only accused Charitan after she had a relationship with him for a few months, and how she left her husband to be with him, which only made things worse for her when the relationship with Charitan ended. Even Black suggested, despite a high degree of sympathy for Hammond, that this “sounded like a relationship” that ended badly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCMvqR9Y5Ig&list=PLXVF-HB1CgYertDf9HM074s4_IRDUNMcY
So, is this indicative of how a legitimate revolt is being unfairly used by those with an SJW-mentality to target exclusively men? Is the fact that Chelsea Lyons, the main sexual aggressor in this situation, wasn’t charged along with Charitan, force us to wonder how many women in positions of power have likewise been aggressive abusers, but are simply not being acknowledged or accused as their male counterparts are? Are there situations where women in positions of power are using male co-workers to initiate acts in tandem with them, confident that only her male accomplices or lackeys (whichever the case may be) will be under fire if charges/accusations are made? How did the women who managed to force themselves into positions of power throughout history tend to behave? Did white female plantation owners in pre-Civil War America never abuse the slaves of both genders they owned along with their male counterparts?
Finally, note how Carly Hammond made a point early in the interview to play the demonization of legal intergenerational attraction card by lamenting how when an 18-year-old female friend of hers got a job as a bartender to help with her college tuition, she found herself subjected to “dirty old men staring at her” whenever she bent over.
So, the problematic situation was these guys simply looking at her, with the main problem being that they were older? Was this taken to mean that she and her friend expected only younger male patrons to show signs of being attracted to her, not the older men at the bar? Were they under the presumption that the older male patrons would only be looking at the female bartenders who were approaching middle age? I mean, seriously, WTF is it with this type of bias? She seriously only admonished these “creepy old men” for looking at her friend’s butt, as if it was inherently hostile and an act of assault for these men to show signs of admiring her physically.
That example, I think, strongly indicates that the moral panic we are familiar with is, at some level, feeding into and partially acting as the fuel for what you described as a legitimate revolt, Tom (and which it likely is on a certain level). Carly Hammond seemed to think this was a legitimate example of what young women have to deal with from older men: ogling! This didn’t even have to do with touches on the butt or the knee, or any type of physical contact or verbal overtures at all!
Hence, it seems like older men who have relationships with younger women are being singled out among the general population of men who are targeted. This all seems to tie in to the ongoing moral panic.
Let us also note how a few times in the interview, Hammond tries to play the “young and naive” card in her defense, despite the fact that she was a legal adult. This, she seemed to think, would bolster her case since Jordan Charitan was much older (somewhere in his 30s, I believe; as was Chelsea Lyons).
There are many analyses among media outlets and YouTube channels of the Left that are harshly hostile to Charitan over this with all the usual statements, and are easy to find in myriad numbers via search engine. As I see it, though, the most calm, reasonable, and fair analysis of the situation, which was sympathetic but still critical of Charitan, and was frank about Carly Hammond but NOT attacking her in any way, was Left commentator Jamarl Thomas’s analysis, which can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BclNIfkCPiI
I strongly recommend that all readers interested in this topic, which the Jordan Charitan/Chelsea Lyons–Carly Hammond situation is highly representative of IMO, to watch his entire analysis. It isn’t perfect, as he doesn’t mention what I consider to be the very important involvement of Chelsea Lyons as the initiator, but it’s largely very informative and insightful. He does, without attacking Hammand, make a case that this was an instance of regret sex on Carly’s part, which I do agree with, while also agreeing with Thomas’s critique of Charitan that he behaved very inappropriately and unwisely for the reasons Thomas mentions. I do not think this applies to the likes of Weinstein and Moore, but it does, I believe, make the case that a witch hunt may be beginning to be spawned by what you explained as a revolt, much as a hurricane can spawn tornadoes.
As Thomas also mentions, Hammond and others sympathizing with her seem to be unable to decide if younger people who are legal adults — say, 18-21 — should be given special consideration in situations when they are sexually interacting with adults who are older (say, 10 years older or more). Thomas points out that insisting on agency in all areas except the sexual for legal adults begins to show how many people want to have their proverbial cake and eat it too, and how this can come back to bite young adult women on the arse if they end up losing the right to say “yes” in these types of choices.
I encourage everyone to listen to Thomas’s analysis, in addition to Tim Black’s interview with Carly Hammond, and make their own judgment. I will end this by saying that I think Jordan Chantlin made a big mistake to refuse to be interviewed, and he should fire whatever publicist may have given this advice, because it only made him look bad. Always respond in a reasonable manner to such accusations.
To end this sub-thread that I ended up starting, Tom, I figured you and the readers here may also want to check out Chelsea Lyons’ side of the story, in a 30-minute interview with Claudia Stauber on the Unpopular Opinions media show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADQ1GQxPNeU
I think this interview in particular is important because it features two women who are sympathetic to Jordan Charitan, one of whom was actually present at the incident in question, and another who has been, according to her, also unjustly accused of improprieties in the past. This shows that not all women are on board with the more hysterical parts of these trending accusations. It also makes clear that not all women are “out to get” men, just as there are many men who are indeed “out to get” their own gender. This is not, and never has been, a male vs. female issue, despite what certain regressive extremists would like to make it out to be.
I cannot, of course, say that Chelsea’s version is all correct while Carly Hammond’s version is entirely wrong, but I will say two things about it: 1. Chelsea was calm and rational, and not attacking Carly in a histrionic fashion, and 2. She noted that Carly still has her “friended” on Facebook and has never said a word to her about the matter in addition to having never accused her along with Jordan Charitan. Why did she not accuse Chelsea along with Jordan? For that matter, why did she also not accuse Ty, whom she was also reputedly intimate with in that room? I think it’s interesting, again, that the only one of the three she accused was Jordon, whom she left her husband to have a relationship with that ultimately didn’t work out; and despite the fact that according to Carly, Chelsea was the main sexual aggressor.
What do I think? I think that, whatever actually happened, Jordan, Ty, and Chelsea never should have had someone they didn’t know too well join them in these intimate after-work social parties, especially not someone who was lower on the employment status totem pole in the company. That was just begging for trouble, and it’s an important lesson we should all infer from this.
> is this indicative of how a legitimate revolt is being unfairly used by those with an SJW-mentality to target exclusively men
Plenty of this going on, I’m sure.
>a witch hunt may be beginning to be spawned by what you explained as a revolt, much as a hurricane can spawn tornadoes
A powerful comparison, in every sense!
Disestablish and deemphasise marriage, that’s what I say, D. Women on average lose their sexual attractiveness earlier, more rapidly and more thoroughly than men do, and I think women on average would deal with this difficult biological reality with rather more level-headedness did our culture not suffer from the collective nuttiness of expecting people to get the large majority of their social, emotional, financial and practical support from one other person: their romantic and sexual partner. I agree with a lot of what Elizabeth Brake says here: http://slace.syr.edu/issue-1-2013-14-on-equality/recognizing-care-the-case-for-friendship-and-polyamory/ . Eve Tushnet, a Roman Catholic lesbian who follows her church’s teaching on sexuality, meaning that she’s decided to remain celibate for life, has a lot of good stuff to say about the under-valuing of friendship in our culture, e.g. here: https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/01/24/beyond-religious-life-and-marriage-look-friendship-vocation
Forgot, good article by Michael Cobb here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/opinion/the-supreme-courts-lonely-hearts-club.html
The devaluation of non-sexual close relationships, especially friendships, is I think a ‘Kind people’s issue’, and not just because it increases the threat younger women pose to older women. It’s not exactly the most pressing Kind people’s issue at the moment, but still. Even in a society where adults were completely free to have consensual sex with children and adolescents and form close emotional bonds with them, most adults exclusively or predominantly attracted to kids would probably need at least one or two close, long-lasting, non-sexual relationships with other adults, whether family or friends or both, in order to get some of the things that kids often can’t quite give, because, well, they’re kids. This guy, for instance, http://www.just-well.dk/CrimeWithoutVictims/erik.html says “I am indeed happy in the company of boys. They give me a lot, emotionally and otherwise. But I do sometimes feel a need to talk with an adult.” He also mentions that when his ‘boy-friends’ grow up, they often stay in touch with him as friends. In our hypothetical Kind people’s utopia, many relationships between kids and adults would probably be quite fleeting, because that’s the nature of the beast, and when they did last for decades or whole lifetimes, in most cases they’d probably be lasting as friendships, not romantic and sexual relationships. These ‘Interviews with Three Boys’ https://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/trade/appendix_e.htm provide touching examples of once-sexual intergenerational relationships that have become friendships with the passage of time and look set to last that way: “First; I hope Ferdinand and I stick with each other for a very long time, keep seeing each other for a very long time, just as friends, talk to each other as real friends. I am glad that I got to know Ferdinand. I still see him as my father. Still now, even though I now live in my own place,” says 19-year-old Stephan.
I was delighted by the ruling a few years ago that a little Canadian girl had three parents: the lesbian couple she lives with and her biological father, a male friend of the couple who donated sperm to one of them and, in accordance with the wishes of all three, is closely involved in the child’s life. It’s the way of the future, I hope. Original article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/della-wolf-is-b-c-s-1st-child-with-3-parents-on-birth-certificate-1.2526584 and they’ve now had a son: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/1st-canadian-family-with-3-parents-on-birth-certificate-grows-1.2950107
Sorry but having sex with women over the age of 18 is a barbaric, antiquated, morally repugnant but socially sanctioned act such as killing animals that feel pain and breathe and eating their bodies full of cartilages and blood-soaked bowels, and adultophilia is mostly a social sexual perversion that produces weakness, stupidity and venereal diseases in human chimpanzees.
I can’t believe you approved this comment. But I was today in a forum and they have started to say that all those who have sex with minors an any age should have many years in prison so…
Lately I am more sensible, but sometimes I can’t anymore and I have to call to a total war directly. I don’t understand how all of you can endure what we endure without becoming totalitarians and intolerants in the process like me. I understand that homosexuals hated us straight people to death when they were locked up and beaten. I understand if a pedophile totally hates non-pedophiles, even me. You can’t avoid hatred if you get crushed every day of your life.
>Lately I am more sensible, but sometimes I can’t anymore and I have to call to a total war directly.
At the risk of sounding like a parody of the bleeding-heart liberal, I can understand this. Some of us who have been around for a very long time have been fired up over the years with flames of every colour, from yellow to red to blue. But then we grow old. We get burned out. The flames of passionate anger die down. The grey embers can be stoked from time to time, but mostly we just smoulder peacefully!
Dissident, my friend, please understand that I’m not moslem bashing.
What I’m doing is bashing anyone and everyone who commits or defends FGM, MGM, the storing of girls and women in cloth bags, child-marriage (especially non-consenting child marriage), religiously-sanctioned sex slavery, child rape, or the idea that ‘silence is consent’.
If some of the people who defend these attitudes, or commit such acts, are moslem, well then, yes, I will call them out and bash them; and in the clearest, most trenchant manner possible.
I am also happy to similarly bash any Jains, humanists, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, Hindus, Jews etc etc who defend or commit FGM, MGM, religiously-sanctioned sex-slavery, who defend child rape as legitimate etc…
Dissident, my friend, please understand that I’m not moslem bashing.
You do this very thing frequently, Lensman. I usually try to overlook it. But this time… wow.
What I’m doing is bashing anyone and everyone who commits or defends FGM, MGM, the storing of girls and women in cloth bags, child-marriage (especially non-consenting child marriage), religiously-sanctioned sex slavery, child rape,
And you actually think this is going on in large numbers in the world… by primarily Muslims. Please someday find proof, or as I said elsewhere, you are going to sound disturbingly like those who have claimed Satanic ritualists, sex traffickers (the current incarnation of ‘white slavers’), and sadistically homicidal high-ranking politicians, and owners of popular pizza franchises are doing all of the above. Or “pedophiles.”
or the idea that ‘silence is consent’.
No disagreement there. If someone isn’t showing enthusiastic response, and is just sitting there or laying down in silence, they are passively resisting due to being too terrified or otherwise disinclined to make it clear they are not into the advances they are receiving.
If some of the people who defend these attitudes, or commit such acts, are moslem, well then, yes, I will call them out and bash them; and in the clearest, most trenchant manner possible.
You frequently accuse Muslims of doing this, Lensman. You know I am not exaggerating, and everyone who has read your otherwise brilliantly insightful and well-researched blogs and comments here are likewise well aware of this. Muslims seem to be your scapegoat of choice, much as “pedophiles” are for the non-Kind majority. I cannot succeed in overlooking this all the time, so there are going to be times I will call you on this despite the immense respect you know that I have for you as both a person and a researcher.
I am also happy to similarly bash any Jains, humanists, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, Hindus, Jews etc etc who defend or commit FGM, MGM, child rape, religiously-sanctioned sex-slavery…
Your use of the term ‘scapegoat’ here Dissident is wrong-headed in the extreme. What LSM does in relentlessly bringing to light practices that without any doubt still lie within the heart of Islamic understanding in very many places on this globe, is something quite different in kind.
It should not have escaped your notice that true ‘scapegoating’ is on another level of social complexity altogether. A level that goes as deep as it gets. You might well say that, for all the paradoxical problems that besiege the Western social mind with the advent of extra-procreative degrees of sexual freedom, the consequent generation of a signifier as sheerly palpable as that of ‘paedo/phile’ (sometimes I wonder why it hasn’t just e-volved into paedovile) can surely be seen as serving a scapegoating function. That is to say, its true function is not one of which those who ‘benefit’ from it are really aware. They are way too busy trying to identify the latest form of the ‘goat’ to notice or care.
In fact, I would say it is not even possible to have a “scapegoat of choice”. Real scapegoats are (non?) entities whose selection has ‘always already’ preceded one, and whose clear and present danger one only needs to re-confirm with the most perfunctory (but invariably peremptory) sign. Scapegoats in other words are the essence of contagion.
Continuing to confuse the irreducible concern of LSM that the clarity of our mission ( if I may so call heem ) could ever be mixed up with things as complexly awful as Islamic patriarchy and the simultaneously bizarre relation of Western institutional feminism to same, with a blindly religious drive towards identifying the ’cause’ of all the problems that beset us… well, Dissident, that is just nuts.
I suggest we all go back and re-read LSM’s terrific essay on interesting parallels and differences between how Moslems and paedos are “perceived” in the public (excuse for an) imagination, and then come back here fully refreshed..
There may be a strong misunderstanding regarding exactly what I’m critiquing Lensman about in regards to his critiques of Muslims, so I will endeavor to clarify.
Mind you, I am not defending the dogma of the Quaran, nor that of any other “Holy Book.” What I am doing, however, is critiquing LSM for his highly exaggerated and often outright illogical claims that Muslims all across the world typically live their lives in complete compliance with the most negative precepts of their holy book’s doctrines that were written thousands of years ago.
I know far too many Muslim people personally to be more than well aware that they are not advocating, let alone practicing, enforced child marriage, painful genital mutilations of female children, sexual slavery, severe wife and child beatings, etc., as a matter of course, either here or in the Middle East. It is these outrageous claims of his that I am taking issue with. We Kind folk, as a group, are no more immune than any other group of people to scapegoating and getting pulled into emotionally fueled forms of bias and hatred that cause us to identify an “enemy” and insist that their “vileness” is far out of proportion to anything that is occurring in the world we know.
Why do I compare LSM’s vicious and constant diatribes against contemporary Muslims in general to the paranoia reflected against the Kind community? Because it has many parallels, including the very similar types of outrageous claims that have absolutely no evidence to back them up; the degree of vitriol that leads to a crusader-like fixation on preaching these claims; and even the obsessive focus on sexuality and, more specifically, sex-negativity as an important component of the stew.
The final parallel is the societal popularity of the hatred, something that is implicit with the seething, disproportionate loathing of Islam in the Western world today and the very similar outrageous claims said about other, non-Islamic institutions, both religious and secular, by others during the present era. Extraordinary accusations of barbaric sexual abuse and violence, often in tandem, that are largely focused on children and/or women are a commonality in all of these strange contemporary narratives.
As I said before, there are very valid critiques of the Quaran and all organized religions, as well as the other secular institutions that these claims have been thrown against. But what we’re seeing are accusations that are way out of proportion to reality, and driven by out of control emotions that compromise reason to the extent that they are more akin to a moral crusade.
Dissy, my friend – I promised I would bow out of the debate, and I have so far refrained from replying to the comments you and Tom booted into the open goal I thus gifted you.
But I feel I really should pick you up on something you wrote in your response to ‘Warlbling Jay’.
You wrote:
“[LSM]… claims that Muslims all across the world typically live their lives in complete compliance with the most negative precepts of their holy book’s doctrines that were written thousands of years ago.”
I have never knowingly made such a claim. I specifically reject the implications of the ‘typically’ and the ‘complete’.
However, I acknowledge that one can sometimes express one’s thoughts in such a way as to give a false impression – so if I have ever written anything that says (or implies) that which you claim, I would be grateful if you could quote it here.
I invite anyone reading this comment to read through our exchange – nowhere in our exchanges have I said all moslems perform FGM, or that all moslems defend it.
Unfortunately there is a very pervasive mind-set which takes any criticism of any single aspect of islam – and universalises it into an attack on all islam and all moslems.
And this is how the term ‘islamphobia’ so often works: I say ‘mutilating little girls’ genitals is wrong’ and I, like the man who steps out of his house expecting a light shower but who instead gets hit by a hurricane, get accused of unfairly attacking all moslems and all islam…
‘When you attack the least part of me, you attack all of me’…
‘de islame nihil nisi bonum’…
This mindset prevents any criticism of islam. And whilst it is understandable that it be pervasive amongst moslems – it is more worrying that is has also become very widespread amongst non-moslems.
Quite simply, I criticise FGM because it is an evil that exists, that actually occurs. That is my starting point. Once one has identified an evil next one should seek to understand the ideological structures and/or interests which perpetuate, spread and defend it. That is what I have done and that is what I will continue to do, despite any efforts to prevent me.
To put this in a broader context: I plan to eventually address MGM. Be sure that I will include in that blog-post Judaic MGM and the MGM that is omnipresent in (even secular) American society.
I wonder whether my criticising an aspect of Judaism will provoke similar levels of outrage and silencing as my criticism of FGM invariably has? I wonder if my criticism of secular American society will raise as many hackles?
I think I already know the answer.
I criticise FGM because it is an evil that exists, that actually occurs.
Hardly the only such evil. You defend denying children rights, and demanding even stricter consent. Perhaps I’ll be “abused” the next time a girl silently smiles at me, or God forbid, actually hugs me.
At the risk of pissing youi off in a rather egregious manner: You consistently and persistently talk against Islamic people. You persistently and consistently make claims the sound as though you believe that all Islamic males … insert negative belief of your choice. Unlike Dissident, I have chosen to ignore these comments when they are made, but feel that I shuld support his comments about this. Sorry about that, 99 …
as one who thinks forever about reciprocity and what our generating of language has to do with that at any moment, I would like to experiment with the following: may I ask what it is in you that motivated the above comment? Is it anxiety to ensure that you are never thought of as an “Islamophobe”? Are you yourself a Moslem, who feels “support” is all that really matters? What would you say is YOUR particular interest in storing women in black cloth-bags? It just seems to me that, given the social volatility of a subject such as paedophilia, it would be a blessing to be more assured of where one’s interlocutors are ‘coming from’ at each stage of the game, exactly?
You are right to question from whence that comment arose, and, although it may not be appropriate to do so, I shall answer in full.
The reason a full answer may not be appropriate is that it is rather personal: I have been just a tad misanthropic recently, possibly as a result of taking Phosophorus (6C), which has resolved some issues, but raised others. This has led to the need to use Sulphur as an intercurrent before trashing my misanthorpy and my glorious nasal infection with Kali Bichromicum (30C—moving up a bit, but not enough to be painful).
This—my hopefully temporary misanthropy—was the actual motivating force behind the comment.
Interestingly enough, there are about four people outside of my two children whom I have any interest in communicating with at all, and LSM is one of these.
I am neither Islamic nor in favour of genital mutilation. In fact, I have been against genital mutilation since the late 1980s, when I first read about it, courtesy of the Deakin University women’s studies department. (I feel that I also have to say that I have not been genitally mutilated, nor have my children.)
What I object to, and always will object to, is best left to another time, and probably another place, as I have no desire to stretch TOC’s patience.
In any event, my apologies for any offense given.
I believe it was germane to Tom’s post for me to bring up FGM because such practices put much of the #metoo movement’s concerns into a very sharp perspective. However, I have been troubled by the fury my raising the issue has caused.
That criticising FGM should provoke such outrage confirms my belief that this is an issue that needs to be tackled in the paedophile community, and tackled clearly, and without obfuscation.
I can recall no comment or article on the paedosphere which condemns FGM with anything like the same level of fury as I have experienced whenever I have written about FGM. As so often the fury is directed at those doing the ‘pointing-out’, not the horror that they are pointing at.
How about venting that fury against FGM, rather than those who trouble your peace of mind by reminding you of its existence and its nature?
There is clearly some boil that needs to be lanced here: when normally intelligent, rational, independent-minded people who purport to love children, promote their agency, their sexuality and their capacity for consent – when such people are more outraged (MUCH more outraged I would say) by the unobfuscated mention of FGM than they are by thing itself (little girls being held down and, without anaesthetic, having the clitorises snipped off and/or their labia infibulated without their consent – a struggling screaming bleeding child not being, in my book at least, a ‘consenting’ child) then moral compasses have gone seriously awry.
There is already a split in the paedosphere between Virpeds and Radical paedophiles.
Maybe there needs to be a further split – on one side paedophiles who openly and honestly condemn GM, and on the other those who either condone it or who believe the issue needs to be handled with such soft kid gloves that there is no detectable pressure on either those who do it or the law to stop the practice.
So given that, despite the pressure that has been put upon me, I’m going to go ahead and write on the issue, I would like to ask the following questions of those whom I have offended – so that I might write a less inflammatory essay:
– how should I write about FGM so as not to provoke the outrage that some have predicted?
– are there any subjects/issues/identities/beliefs that I should, at all costs, avoid bringing up?
– are there narratives that are more desirable than others? for example, should I endeavour to paint FGM as an ‘African tribal’ practice or an ‘islamic one’?
– what do I do with inconvenient statistics, facts or experiences, that go against the thrust of the desirable narrative? Do I dismiss them as biased? as outdated? Is the best strategy to question the person or organisation’s motives for stating such facts, statistics, experiences etc – as apologists regularly do to dismiss Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s accounts of her FGM?
I’m very glad that you mentioned this, LSM. I mean, whether it “best to paint” FGM as an Islamic practice or African tribal one. Would you concur that the best of our information (very scarce at that) points to the understanding that it does indeed have its roots in the pre-Islamic? That Islam at some point adopts it and makes it more-or-less an ‘institution’? What, I’m wondering, would be the erm..benefits of opting for the roots version? When so little (so far as I know) is available in the way of concrete facts there? I suppose you are asking yourself the very same question?
Hi Warb, Yes, I absolutely agree with your analysis – that FGM is a pre-islamic practice that has been institutionalised by islam through mohammed’s advocacy of it in the Hadith.
I think my question of how to ‘paint’ FGM was ironic – ‘sardonic’ even.
Of course, if one is seeking the truth one should not have an agenda, one should not seek to support one narrative or another – and I feel that my thinking on FGM has been impartial to the extent that my anger and indignation is provoked and directed at the practice first, the ideological structures that support it second, and the practitioners last of all – and thinking honestly about it seems the best way of getting to grips with the phenomenon.
Unfortunately those who want to promote a particular narrative, those who openly aim to minimise islam’s culpability in promoting and perpetuating FGM, pretend not to see it that way.
To them my impartiality, to them will, appear as partiality. To the friends of a guilty criminal being remorselessly tracked-down the motivation of the detective will feel something like persecution.
I’m interested in pre-islamic FGM – it’s nature and extent. It matters a great deal whether Aisha had undergone mutilation, and, if she had, what the nature of the mutilation was and at what age it occurred.
My thinking is that Aisha almost certainly had been FGMed – in the Hadith (including the authorised Hadith) mohammed repeatedly specifies that both men and women must be ‘circumcised’ and that sexual congress must only happen between two ‘circumcised’ parts. If he penetrated an un-FGMed Aisha he would have been breaking his own rules. Which, of course, is something he did very frequently…so that line of enquiry leaves me (as as a rare non-moslem who does not buy into the myth of mohammed’s perfection) none the much wiser…
To address your question – by ‘roots version’ do you mean the pre-islamic version?
Well, if the pre-islamic version were what is described as ‘pricking’ – arguably the mildest form of genital mutilation – then it would be great if all those who practised Type I to III FGM were to revert to mere pricking (which is actually classified as type IV FGM – a ‘catch-all’ category which also includes vaginal scarification and Gishiri – the insertion of a knife into the vagina – both of which ARE tribal practices and not islamic – but whose incidence is now vanishingly rare).
But there are clues in the Hadith as to what pre-islamic FGM might have been.
Mohammed appears not to refer to FGM in the quran (though I’m about to reread the quran and this is one of many things to which I will be alert, which I wasn’t alert to decades ago when I first read it). But in (I think) 6 verses in various Hadith he clearly advocates it:
“Abu Hurayrah said: I heard the Prophet say: “The fitrah is five things – or five things are part of the fitrah – circumcision, shaving the pubes, trimming the moustache, cutting the nails and plucking the armpit hairs.” (Bukhari 5891; Muslim 527) – (islamic scholars generally interpret non-gendered commands as applying to both genders. Of course this doesn’t remove the question of whether the word used here for circumcision describes a gendered practice or not – but I think the following hadith answer that question)
“Abu al- Malih ibn `Usama’s father relates that the Prophet said: “Circumcision is a law for men and a preservation of honour for women.” (Ahmad Ibn Hanbal 5:75; Abu Dawud, Adab 167)
“When anyone sits amidst four parts (of the woman) and the circumcised parts touch each other a bath becomes obligatory.” (Sahih Muslim 3:684) – (here mohammed is referring to coitus)
So clearly mohammed was aware of its existence. And so, if he doesn’t forbid it in the quran we must assume that it was not by oversight – it being the word of god ‘n’shi. However 90% of the quran was rejected and burnt when it was compiled by scholars several centuries after mohammed’s death – so there is the possibility that mohammed did forbid FGM in the quran, but in a lost Surah.
However, to give mohammed credit – in one verse of the Hadith (Abu Dawud – not a suni hadith but variously ranked as 3rd or 4th in reliability by scholars) reports:
“Narrated Umm Atiyyah al-Ansariyyah: A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband.” (Sunan Abu Dawud 41:5251)”
This remark was made in Medina – so it would be at a time of when Aisha was alive (she was born in Mecca) but I’m not sure of the exact chronology of this remark or how it synchronises exactly with Aisha’s life – but I suspect it might be possible to elucidate this.
It is also so imprecise that it is virtually meaningless – it is a formula like ‘X-1=…’ – everything depends on the value of X, which we don’t have. The woman could have been merely pricking the clitoris, or she could have been performing horrors that make Type III FGM appear veritably benevolent. We don’t know where we are on the scale.
But it shows that mohammed (someone, remember, whose actions and deeds were bloody, libidinous and cruel to an extent that the most devout jihadi can only fantasise about) had concerns for the over-severity and damage of FGM. Remember that even Type III FGM doesn’t affect the physical PLEASURE of the man – other than being turned-off by having to pound through scar tissue and penetrating a bleeding, weeping or screaming, suffering child or woman – the physical pleasure is presumably the same. So presumably the damage this woman was inflicting was verging on being such that it would affect the man’s pleasure – I prefer not to imagine what that might involve.
What he meant by ‘better for the woman’ is not clear – probably that she has less chance of falling ill or dying from the procedure.
Anyway, if one takes the most severe FGM commonly practised by moslems – and assume that it is, as the practitioners would claim, ‘halal’ and in accordance with Abu Dawud 41:5251 – one has to imagine, in the incident reported above, something worse. which suggests that pre-islamic FGM was likely to be severe. That mohammed ‘toned down’ the severity of the mutilation.
Given that mohammed married Aisha towards the end of his life and that her parents were long-time followers of mohammed, and that Aisha was born when mohammed would have been around 46 (?) and that by that time mohammed was well established as the leader of his band of maurauding bandits – it is reasonable to suspect that Aisha would have been FGMed by the time she was nine, but probably a milder form than the one being performed by the woman in Abu Dawud 41:5251.
Whether this would have involved infibulation – which would, to any reasonable ethical standards, mean that Aisha couldn’t consent to penetration (other than maybe under anaesthetic) – is another question, one which I suspect can only be resolved by a study of pre-islamic FGM practices in Arabia.
I cannot say otherwise, LSM. Thou art a paedophile and a scholar. I’d include the gentle man bit but the rhythm would be lost. Truly, the way in which your findings flow onto the web page without a hitch the way they do leaves me in a certain kind of awe. I feel by contrast but a saturated child of the porniverse, hung out to dry from time to time by something called his ‘intellect’. Again, dismay at how I cannot survey your post as i write this. But what comes home to me overwhelmingly again and again is exactly how these..these gnarly snippets of vague signage ever came to be holy writ, holy writ commanding the assent of millions.
I don’t think anyone here (or at least, not anyone I have read) is in favour of genital mutilation. Unfortunately, you do often appear to make this an anti-Muslim issue; perhaps your ideas could be re-written so that it does not appear so?
Perhaps I should say that I do not have many Muslim friends. my most recent contact was with a couple of men who took great delight in telling me that they would kill me as soon as sharia law was brought into Australia. Their hatred and anger was evident, and the manner in which they treated the non-Muslim women working with them was such that they were asked to leave both the farm and, as a result, the country. (They were being sponsored, staying here depended on the good will of the people for whom they were working.)
But is this what all Muslim’s are like?
Perhaps all Christians are Jew hating purveyors of the next shoah?
It is my firm belief, despite my general loathing of humanity, that the vast majority of people are good, well intentioned, and only nasty in a passing sense.
If you are linking genital mutilation to a generalised misogyny, then there may be some point, but I feel it is a distant point, because most men do not hate women that much.
Of course there are some exceptions…
I once knew a woman, a little younger than I was at the time, who had been mutilated genitally, not for any religious reasons (the Greek Orthodox church doesn’t actually encourage genital mutilation), but just because her father was a complete bastard and cut her badly. Imagine my horror when our sexual activity led to the discovery of her poor mutilated labia. Perhaps the more horrifying thing was that she said I was one of the few who actually noticed. Perhaps, but most likely the other just ignored the evidence…
Actually, the most horrifying thing is that her father did it, and much more, as you can imagine. Would you believe me if I said I am fighting back tears now, as I write? Your belief doesn’t matter, because I am.
Anyhow, do you get the point?
My kids tell me I have had an interesting life, but unfortunately it has had far too much of this type of crap in it. And it is enough to tell me that genital mutilation does not belong to any religion, but to the nastier among us.
I’m rambling, and I know it, but it willl tell you a little about where my comments are coming from.
>”you do often appear to make this an anti-Muslim issue; perhaps your ideas could be re-written so that it does not appear so?”
It IS an ISLAMIC issue.
Islam is by far the single strongest correlator of FGM and it is the only ideology that still demands it that is wide-spread and growing.
FGM is actually a growing phenomenon (The FGM rates in the Maldives – that had for decades had a O% rate of FGM – are now rising steeply, since an islamic cleric there issued a fatwa calling for FGM on islamic grounds – http://www.lapidomedia.com/maldives-cleric-calls-fgm-islamic-grounds).
The only way to doubt that is to doubt the evidence – the facts, the statistics and the historical evidence, the texts.
It is an ISLAMIC issue. Islam is the only growing ideology that promotes FGM. But what some have done here is to turn it into a MOSLEM issue, an anti-moslem issue, because that is the most effective way of silenceing or discrediting me, and bypasses the need to address inconvenient statistics, or the textual evidence from islam’s holy books, or the historical continuity of the practice through islam’s history.
Likewise one could try to silence someone criticising Nazism by accusing them of being anti-german. Or, as happened in India in the 19th Century, when Hindus tried to prevent the outlawing of Suttee by claiming such laws were anti-Hindu. They weren’t ‘anti-hindu’- they were ‘anti-suttee’ and ‘pro-hindu-widow’!
Likewise, if some choose to slander me as anti-moslem for writing honestly about FGM I will reply that I am not anti-moslem, I am anti-FGM and I am PRO-moslem-little-girl.
If you disagree about it being an islamic issue, I would welcome a debate – but over the statistics, facts, historical evidence, quotations from the quran and hadith, NOT, as has been happening – over my right to address this issue, or my motivation. These are cynical distracting tactics and dishonsest – attacking the messenger, not the message.
As it is I present statistics, quotes from the hadith and experiences of girls who have been FGMed and all I get back are ‘anti-moslem’ or ‘islamophobia’ – this is not debate and exchange at its highest level – or at least one side is not doing itself proud. It reminds me of someone writing at length, developing reasoned arguments and quoting studies and experiences that children can enjoy and consent to intimacy, only for their opponents to say reply ‘you are only arguing that because you’re a paedo’ or ‘children can’t consent. End of.”
The response to my stand against FGM has been no better than that.
I don’t see the relevance of a debate over my motivations. My motivations should be clear enough – I love little girls, I respect them, admire them, I argue for their rights, not least their sexual rights and autonomy. I have loved and been loved by little girls and when I see footage of a little girl being FGMed I imagine one particular sweet gentle funny girl in her place… mutilating their genitals is, in my world view, an abomination, and I would oppose it whichever belief system advocated it.
The fact that islam is broadly responsible for FGM being wide-spread in the 21st Century is not a fact of my making. If you don’t like that statement, go to the statistics, the facts, the evidence, the hadith, the quran, the demographics and statistics of non-islamic FGM – and argue with them.
But don’t think you’ll prove anything worthwhile by questioning my motives. Doing so is a waste of time – it won’t silence me and you won’t learn anything worth learning.
Here are statistics and quotes I’ve presented elsewhere on this page – which shows the 12 countries where FGM is most common and their FGM rates, statistics from notoriously islamophobic organistaions such as UNICEF, RCOG, The Guardian, the BBC…
You ‘do the math’ and see if you can still deny a correlation between FGM and Islam. At the other end of the scale you could look at all those countries where there is a negligible rate of FGM and see if any of them are islamic.
Somalia 98%
Indonesia 97.5%
Guinea 96%
Djibouti 93%
Malaysia 93%
Egypt 91%
Oman 90%
Eritrea 89%
Mali 89%
Sierra Leone 88%
Sudan 88%
Gambia 76%
Burkina faso 76%
Ethiopia 74%
Mauritania 69%
And here are relevant quotes from the Hadith:
“Abu Hurayrah said: I heard the Prophet say: “The fitrah is five things – or five things are part of the fitrah – circumcision, shaving the pubes, trimming the moustache, cutting the nails and plucking the armpit hairs.” (Bukhari 5891; Muslim 527) – (islamic scholars generally interpret non-gendered commands as applying to both genders. Of course this doesn’t remove the question of whether the word used here for circumcision describes a gendered practice or not – but I think the following hadith answer that question)
“Abu al- Malih ibn `Usama’s father relates that the Prophet said: “Circumcision is a law for men and a preservation of honour for women.” (Ahmad Ibn Hanbal 5:75; Abu Dawud, Adab 167)
“When anyone sits amidst four parts (of the woman) and the circumcised parts touch each other a bath becomes obligatory.” (Sahih Muslim 3:684) – (here mohammed is referring to coitus)
“Narrated Umm Atiyyah al-Ansariyyah: A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband.” (Sunan Abu Dawud 41:5251)”
FGM is also advocated in ‘the Reliance of the Traveller’ – the ‘handbook’ of Sharia:
e4.3 “Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris (this is called Hufaad)”
I can also point out that no school of islam – none of the four schools of Sunni Islam, nor Shia islam etc condemn or forbid FGM – all schools of islam either recommend or advocate FGM (I can provide the links and quotes for this if required).
Nor is FGM anywhere forbidden in the quran.
Yeah, and ok. I was trying to provoke you into a different awareness of this and that. I won’t say where or what: it didn’t work. If nothing else, yoiu should be aware that I agree with you about genital mutilation.
Anyway, I leave you with the following:
https://theconversation.com/female-genital-cutting-common-in-indonesia-offered-as-part-of-child-delivery-by-birth-clinics-54379
Sorry if I’ve come across as being a bit strident towards you BJ – I know you are against FGM – you caught the brunt of a generalised frustration. I over-expressed myself and you had the misfortune to be, metaphorically, the closest person.
the link is interesting – not least:
“Indonesia tried to ban the practice in 2006. But religious clerics reacted by releasing an edict declaring that it was part of a religious practice. “
No worries, you know. I’m not bothered. I’ll try again, one day, if the two great idiots don’t blow the world up, and us with it.
But, what I found interesting about that article were the comments about how the practice usually involved little or no pain, until the medical people got involved with scissors, for fuck’s sake. At one time, it seems to have been quite benign in Indonesia, but not so any more. Sigh.
” and only nasty in a passing sense”…..but its too late for some homosexuals once their thrown off the bridge!
Yes, passing nastiness can cause great pain and many deaths, and may even become the dominant belief system. The problem is that most people believe their beliefs are wirth promoting, because they are right and you and I are wrong. This is, perhaps, the greatest stupidity in which humanity indulges, each believing the other is wrong and being willing to kill for it, even before the hat is dropped.
Your friend Bj, becoming more sour with every day.
Dear LSM,
I respectfully suggest that what you and many others in this forum are carefully avoiding — for some reason — is that these incredibly cruel things can be done to small children as long as adults are allowed to think of their children, as their actual PROPERTY.
‘This child is MINE, therefore I will mutilate her, or him, if I wish to do so’ says the father, or mother?
Even I caught myself saying ‘…my two sons’, in the past, but in my case I was not implying that I owned them!
M T-W.
Dissident, once I replied to you on the LSM’s blog, asking whether you are going to publish your proposed feminism-related guest blog that was rejected by Tom as a comment here:
https://consentinghumans.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/request-for-contributions-from-female-paedophiles-sabbatical-announcement/#comment-2888
I did it this way with my own rejected guest-blog about my child liberationist positions. And, I think, it would be a suitable way for you, too. I don’t want your text to remain unpublished!
I responded to you over on Lensman’s blog. Thank you for letting me know you had responded, and sorry for overlooking it!
After the Roy Moore case. Thousands of people on Twitter have joined the #meat14 campaign to publicly denounce that “an adolescent is too young to consent with an adult” and their full support of the age of consent:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-41967461
That is laughable if it wasn’t misguided and dangerous. They are all of fertile childbearing age. I have discussed why twelve is a good age for penetrative sex but not before with Tom, I digress!
Isn’t the age of consent 14 in many European countries, including Germany? Or something has changed since I have checked it last time?
Since if it is, Europe should seem like a “paedophiles’ land” to these Americans.
Not all 14-year-old girls are fertile. Some haven’t had their first periods yet, and that’s considered medically normal. Docs will only start investigating if a girl hits her 16th birthday without having menstruated, though more recently many are moving it down to the 15th birthday. Typically, girls have a lot of anovulatory cycles in the first two years, and especially the first year, after menarche. And if they do fall pregnant, it’s well-established that it’s not a good idea for girls under 15 to carry pregnancies to term and give birth, because in such cases the risks both to the girl and to the foetus/baby are substantially increased. The pelvis is still developing at that age.
Fortunately, we live in an era of condom dispensers.
To counter the #meat14 stuff, two rather more cheering stories, both from women, which I found while reading the Internet. This one’s from the comments on a statutory rape article at the Yes Means Yes blog: “I grew up in a country where 14 is the demarcation line provided no money or coercion is involved. I started necking at 12 with classmates and petting at 13 with slightly older boys and when I lost my virginity I was 15 and the relevant guy 22. I called the shots, I wanted him, oh and I was fully informed and prepared in a way I doubt that many Anglo-Saxon youngsters are. Until I was 25 every single one of my partners was older than I was, and until I was 18 every one of them would have broken statutory rape laws in the USA. These men were no predators either: as I said, I hunted them down, not they me…These men were my lovers, each of them a partner of mine for several years, and I parted amiably with all of them.”
And from Captain Awkward: “I was in a long-term relationship with a 10-year age gap at 15 (although tbh, we met when I was 14), which at the time gave me a sense of power, importance, and agency that I couldn’t get anywhere else. Other vulnerabilities made this person also a source of shelter and safety. Having a place that felt safe, and that I felt I had control over, was priceless. It was also useful. I honestly can’t say if I loved this person, although at the time I believed strongly that I did — even so, having one space where I felt safe was perhaps necessary to give me some perspective and room to consider who I was and what I wanted…At 15, I would literally clean the house of/maintain the bodily hygiene of my 10-years-older partner. Also did a lot of ‘if you don’t like your job, get a new job’ cheerleading, which led nowhere. Disorienting to say the least! It turns out what I wanted was not him – I wanted a clean slate! Travel! Sex with new people!! Flirting with people my age!!! – and in fact that I had vastly outgrown him. We broke up pretty uneventfully; I felt coldhearted and he felt lonely, but respected my decision.”
I read somewhere that 17 – 25 is the strongest time to give birth. But a 14yo is in a better position then a 40yo.
Not necessarily, according to the medical and nursing people I’ve spoken to about this. Depends on a lot of things, apparently. Likelihood of getting pregnant does peak in the early 20s and drop off fairly steeply after 35. But the statistics aren’t always top-quality, as pointed out here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-long-can-you-wait-to-have-a-baby/309374/
They’re also beginning to discover that men over 45 have an increased risk of fathering kids with autism, schizophrenia etc., apparently due to mutations in sperm. But I digress again.
>>>>>>They’re also beginning to discover that men over 45 have an increased risk of fathering kids with autism, schizophrenia etc., apparently due to mutations in sperm. But I digress again.<<<<<<
Just as well I got in and had kids at 43 and 44, then. But damn they are fine, strong yoiung men, with only a lightly twisted attitude to life. But, I digress with you…
If that’s what older women have to offer, a man could certainly not be blamed for wanting to date 14-year-olds!
Some US states allows for marriage exceptions, so the high age of consent may be partially mitigated.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/america/200000-children-married-us-15-years-child-marriage-child-brides-new-jersey-chris-christie-a7830266.html
http://www.tahirih.org/pubs/understanding-state-statutes-on-minimum-marriage-age-and-exceptions/
The #meat14 campaign (hmm looks like “meat 14”, as in “meat for 14 year old girls” hahahaha sorry I had to) is just an example of how the left is willing to toss away their socially liberal ideals to attack someone they do not like. Similar to how the right will throw away their economically conservative ideals to fund a massive military.
The reality is 14 year old girls are engaging in sexual relations and always have been. To pretend like one was an innocent cherub (which then assumes sexual relations are bad) at nearly any stage of their life is purposefully lying, for most people at least.
Here are some of the benefits of an older male dating a young teen female: maturity (less worry about a young boy pumping and dumping if the girl wants a serious relationship), experience (less worry about the male hurting her or mistreating her), money (let’s face it females care about this, and an older male can provide more for the young girl), educational help (the male is beyond the level of education the female is at so he can help her with work and future planning), etc. Now I am not saying a young female should date an older male or that it is always better for them. I am saying there are benefits and there is nothing wrong with it.
The #meat14 campaign is mindless virtue signaling and ignores the realities of humanity. If a young teen girl likes giving and receiving oral sex, what does it matter if her partner is 14 or 34? Until these sexually close minded prudes can provide evidence of innate harm that somehow adult sexuality imparts harm when it interacts with child or teen sexuality then, as far as I am concerned, they are victims of modern social values and irrational fools.
We may disagree for reasons often stated, but nothing unusual about this. It’s typical mainstream, feel-good rhetoric that is repeated endlessly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzVaeodnam0
Meanwhile from across La Manche one can hear cries of ‘Sacre Bleu’ at the prospect of the French government imposing a minimum age of sexual consent.
The need to amend the law was brought to light by the jury verdict in the case of a 30-year-old man who, back in 2009, allegedly lured an 11-year-old girl into a sexual relationship. Last week, the man, a Cape Verdean native, was tried by a jury court and acquitted after prosecutors, who were seeking eight years in jail for the defendant, failed to prove that the sex was non-consensual.
Under current French law, only sexual acts committed with the use of violence, coercion, threat or surprise are considered to be rape, regardless of the victim’s age. Penalties are tougher if the victim is under the age of 15, but there is no minimum age of consent.
>11-year-old girl …prosecutors…. failed to prove that the sex was non-consensual.
Fascinating! I don’t have time to check now, but I think the position in the UK was not so different before the Sexual Offences Act of 2003. There was a particular case in the 1980s where the de facto consent of a seven-year-old girl appears to have been accepted by the judge. Actually, as I have just remembered, I wrote about the case. See here:
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/tag/william-watson-sweeney/
Use search term “Watson-Sweeney” to find the case on the page.
Feinmann: You make a mistake. In France there is an “age of sexual majority” or “age of consent”, under which consent is not valid: it is 15 years. Sexual contact of an adult with a person aged less than 15 years is called “atteinte sexuelle sur mineur de 15 ans”, it carries a maximum penalty of 5 years of prison and a 75000 euros fine (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atteinte_sexuelle_sur_mineur_en_droit_fran%C3%A7ais). What the French government intends to put into law is that under a given age (between 13 and 15), consent would not be invalid as now, but presumed non-existing, so the sexual contact of an adult with a person below that age would be considered as sexual assault or rape, which carries a heavier sentence. It would not be necessary to show that there was no consent, since it would be assumed from the start. This is similar to the UK, with minimum age for sex at 16 and presumption of non-consent (thus rape/sexual assault) under 13.
There were two cases of sexual encounters between an adult and a 11-y-o girl, where either the public attorney or the judge considered that there was consent, so the relation could not be considered as rape. But this does not mean that the relation was legal, in case of consent, it is still “atteinte sexuelle”.
Concerning sexual harassment, the government intends to propose a law that has been called “sexual security”, which reminds of the “homeland security” laws taken under the pretext of terrorism, which eroded civil liberties. So sexual harassment will be dealt with in the spirit of State security.
The government also intends to do an “anti-porn” campaign in schools and there are proposals to teach kids about “consent”, it certainly will need some twisting, since they decide that when an underage youth says “yes”, this means “no”.
Don’t shoot me Christian, I am just a lowly messenger: https://www.rt.com/news/409794-france-consent-age-introduce/
Russia Today? One should be very cautious treating the material presented by them. They are a propaganda channel with an aim of painting the West as “morally fallen” and thus may easily twist or even simply invent information for sensational and propagandisitc effect.
Much like New York Times, Washington Post and other Western propaganda channels.
I prefer alternative media, but I treat them very cautiously as well – it is common for such independent news sources to be notably ideologically biased and thus guilty of selective perception and inadequate interpretation.
And, considering the questions of intergenrational sexuality, alternative sources are as unreliable and intensely emotionally charged as the mainstream ones. It is hard to find reliable and unbiased information about the child-adult intimacy. I was lucky to stumble upon Judith Levine and her “Harmful for Minors” book years ago. Then I started to look into the controversy surrounding the book and learned about the similar controversy around Rind et al. meta-analysis, about Tom O’Carroll, and so on. Soon I found IPCE and acknowledged that there are the whole loads of valid scientific and scholarly works supporting the possibility of consensual and harmless child-adult sex.
Most people, be they within the “mainstream” or outside of it, in “fringe”, “radical” and “alternative” zones, had never even heard about these works.
Or, if they occasionally learn about one or two of them, they usually furiously dismiss them because of pervasive sex-negative, age-segregating indoctrination that modern Western people, be they inside or outside of the sociocultural mainline, are subjected.
P.S. And, Tom, welcome back to active blogging! You can see how strongly were you missed – 44 comments and 4 likes in just 4 days!
>Tom, welcome back to active blogging!
Thanks, although my other projects mean I will not be as active as I would like.
OK Explorer, if you don’t like RT, how about …
this one: https://sputniknews.com/europe/201711141059091741-france-underage-sex-law/
or this one: https://www.news24.com/World/News/france-sexual-consent-law-under-spotlight-over-sex-with-11-year-olds-20171116
or this one: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/11/22/france-sex-consent-age-minimum/886388001/
or this one: https://www.11alive.com/article/news/nation-now/in-france-there-is-no-minimum-age-of-consent-for-sex-that-may-change-soon/465-cdf547eb-7d4f-4d66-adeb-70263268aa22
There you go, two from the US; that should keep everyone happy seeing as we don’t need to be at all cautious treating the material presented by the Yankee press.
I would like to ask Tom, who is obviously exceedingly astute when it comes to matters of bona fide research, how one might go about explaining why the kind of detail one comes across so easily in articles like TOC’s excerpted Guardian piece pertaining to Mo/Aisha &c – is not to be found when it comes to similarly long-gone lasses such as Saint Augustine’s own ‘pre-pubertal item’, who(m?), along with his later concubine arrangement, the great man felt unworthy of having so much as her name recorded for posterity?
Perhaps the greatest sparring-partner I ever had on social media excommunicated me as of last December, when I insisted that he grind out not one further word about Mo/Aisha until he – as a self-described “Augustinian Libertarian” no less – seek out what facts might be found concerning these, the (then) orthodox comminglings of the Bishop from Hippo..
[TOC adds: Sorry for late posting of this item, which for some unknown reason went to the spam folder. Will reply ASAP.]
[good to see your comment here, Turp, despite it smelling faintly of canned meat…;-). I hope you don’t mind me butting in on a question you address to Tom ]
Augustine did not consider or proclaim himself a prophet during his life, nor has he been considered so afterwards. No Xtian, I suspect would turn to Augustine as a model of how to live a perfect life.
However, in verse 68:4 of the Quran mohammed puts the following words into the mouth of ‘allah’/the angel Gabriel: ‘And you [muhammad] are surely on exalted quality of character’.
The result of this is that: “to the Muslims, his life and character are an excellent example to be emulated both at social and spiritual levels.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_in_Islam#The_moral_character_of_Muhammad)
All moslems, for the rest of that religion’s existence, are obliged to take his life as a model for their own, and to shape their laws and society based on a carbon-copy of mohammed’s life and commands.
This means that after his death there was special pressure on his followers to memorise, and eventually record, the details of his life. The hadith effectively deliver a promise made in the quran (that of there being a ‘biography’ of mohammed).
Xtians (or non-Xtians for that matter), however, are not similarly obliged to consider Augustine’s every act as perfect, and to copy those every acts in their own lives. Hence Augustine’s lack of biographers.
Of course, the important question is not what mohammed/Augustine/Gavin the Goat-Herd etc did or didn’t do – human history comprises billions of people, all of whom who lived past infancy doing both good things and bad things in their earthly span.
The important question is whether it is wise to elevate someone to a status of perfection. And if so, whom?
Whether it is right that in the 21st century (or any other century) 1.7 billion people find themselves compelled (often on pain of death) to consider a 7th Century warlord’s every act and word (no matter how wrong many are to a ethical person’s instincts) as exemplary, perfect and to be emulated in every last detail at both an interpersonal level, legally and politically.
Re Aisha – the only text mohammed originated is the quran.
There is no mention of Aisha the quran.
We only know of Aisha from the Hadith. The chroniclers were probably interested in her due to her political significance during her adult years rather than her childhood marriage – she was just one of many concubines mohammed had (between 19 – 33, depending on how one defines ‘wife’ and whether dishounoured marriage contracts count, and not including the hundreds of women and children he kept and sold as sex slaves).
well I am a tad confused now dear LSM as your response seems more of a digression (a fine one nonetheless) than a direct addressing of the question concerning absence of easily accessible detail from the Christian (do you X out Christ for tactical, strategic, or simply stylistic purposes?) history books compared to the Hadith? Perhaps you meant to imply by your pointing up Augustine’s obvious humility that his sin of omission in omitting his wee sweetheart’s name was further evidence of his modesty? Ha! I know it’s a stretch, but… well, I’m now consulting Rebecca West’s grand essay on Saint A (bookloused edition) and am staggered to (re)discover the wealth of detail therein. If my rightful inheritance of ADHD from the internet has not by now thoroughly precluded any chance I might still have of making my way through these very intense pages, I may come out more leonard – sorry, learned, than I was before! I must note that, in replying here, the text of that which I’m replying to, is automatically occluded… oy vey! Perhaps this WordPress quirk might be rectified? I know I’d prefer to double-check the exact cut of the other fellow’s jib before typing into the void!
and I’m still puzzling over the ‘canned meat’ jibe, which alarmingly, I just did not ‘get’!
Thankyou to the person here also who referenced ascendant star Jordan Peterson’s ‘Scar is Like a Good Paedophile” lecture and its rapid descent into hollow stereotypes (somewhat ‘understandable’ perhaps given JP’s weird love, not to mention seeming intellectual dependence on, (Jungian) archetypes???) I took it upon myself to make a suitably counter-sweeping statement beneath that lecture’s appearance on YouTube.
I will apologise and elucidate twice Mr Turpitude – once for my lame reference to ‘canned meat’ and the other for the overlong and possibly irrelevant body of my comment
‘canned meat – AKA ‘spam’ – the folder to which such esculents are consigned which also briefly contained your erstwhile-errant message.
On the St Augustine front – I don’t think that there are any biographers of St Augustine from his own time – he exchanged letters with Jerome, but these don’t amount to biography.
What we know of St Augustine comes from his autobiography. And yes, apparently he does not record the names of his wives.
Neither does mohammed in the text he originated (though, of course, the quran, strictly speaking, is a work of ‘fiction’ rather than ‘biography’).
The reason why we know of Aisha is that every detail of mohammed’s life was of interest to his chroniclers – because the quran instructs his followers to follow his example.
…and on The Myth of Male Power, there a biological reasons for the expendability of males, not just in humans but all sexually reproducing species.
I think rather than arguing like school children over which sex ‘sacrifices’ the most, its better to focus on the relationship between the sexes. Just as not all women parrot feminist dogmas (yay Camille Paglia) not all men are misogynists.
What we need to understand is not what irrational and unjust beliefs the ‘other’ holds, but why</u.
A timely and thought-provoking article, Tom. And (to my mind) this phenomenon becomes more perplexing when set in a larger context.
I suspect that, taken historically and geographically, there has never been a culture in which sexual misconduct and abuses are rarer than in Modern Protestant countries, and where the power and status of men and women, both in law and in attitudes, has been as egalitarian. Moreover there has never been a time or culture where sexual misconduct has been more openly called out, reported or talked about.
This is an unquestionably good thing.
But, in a sense, the battles that have been fought by generations of women, gays and racial minorities, have been won. But those whose lives are defined by battle and the exhilaration of victory, are often reluctant to leave the barricades, and because of this they seek further victories – the skirmishing, rape and retributions that follow successful battles are a feature of warfare.
The phenomena we are seeing here is that of people who continue manning the barricades after the war has been won. And such a mind-set requires finding an enemy to fight against.
An analogue of what is happening is that of phantom limbs: amputated feet and hands that still ache despite their no longer existing. This happens because the nervous system ‘looks’ for the absent part that is no longer firing signals. To do this it turns up its ‘sensitivity’ to maximum, and the ‘white noise’ of that particular part of the nervous system ends up being amplified to the point of pain.
These movements in our society have a supply and demand imbalance – they need fascists, misogynists and racists. But because REAL fascists, misogynists and racists have become rare, they have had to develop a heightened sensitivity to find them at a lower level of wrong-doing. Consequently they interpret as ‘fascist’, ‘misogynist’ or ‘racist’ acts, ideas and speech which have no such intent.
Which is not to say that abuse, rape and sexual manipulation don’t happen. No society can ever be free of these things. But what matters is Society’s response and attitudes to these things: a country (and there are several) which does not recognise the concept of ‘marital rape’ will be able to boast zero rates of marital rape; on the other hand a country which has gone to great efforts to promote an open dialogue on rape, trained the law enforcement agencies to handle cases sensitively, and which does not punish women for reporting incidents, and which promotes respectful attitudes towards women, will record higher rates of sexual aggression than countries where rape is hardly thought a crime.
A corollary is that such sexual aggressions, because of their presence in the public discourse and because of the high recorded rates, will appear to be more of a problem in the UK than in, say, Somalia.
And this paradoxes has led us to a situation in which, on the one hand, an MP can be sacked for touching the knee of a journalist 15 years ago (a journalist that was not bothered by the ‘assault’), and on the other hand we are blithely and uncritically importing, nurturing and protecting a sexual ideology that promotes, defends and enacts sexual abuses of Sadean bloodiness and cruelty.
To quote you Tom:
“These tyrants, as they often were, could enslave whom they wished and make them compliant in all manner of ways, including sexually. The most legendary figures, such as Genghis Khan had no shame over cornering as many women as they could physically find the time and energy to screw; and they would slaughter hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in order to secure their domination. Rather than lowering their status, as rape and murder would today, these sociopaths used such crimes in order to cement their position at the very top of society.
They could do no wrong. Their word was law. A great sultan could have a huge harem with hundreds of concubines kept for his exclusive use. He would have hundreds of men castrated at his command to guard these women against more sexually potent rivals. Rulers could even defy with impunity the supreme taboo, against incest, with the royalty of ancient Egypt being just the most famous example among many. As for children being sexually off-limits, not a bit of it: the kings of Tonga took upon themselves the “duty” (poor things) of personally deflowering every virgin in the kingdom – and they did not wait until the child’s 16th birthday.”
Anyone who has read the Quran, and relevant sections of the Sahih Hadith, will recognise a description of mohammed’s sex life here. The perfect man whose life is to be held (by his followers) as exemplary in its every aspect.
In the UK an ideology is imposing itself that promotes genital mutilation of children of 5 to 8 years of age (the ages when they are likely to be most psychologically damaged by the procedures), female children undergoing clitoridectomies and labial infibulation, male children preputiall circumcision – preferably without anaesthetic; where little girls are sent abroad for child-marriages to strangers, arranged without their consent; where quranically-compliant sexual slavery gangs are being discovered in more and more urban centres; an ideology which demands that little girls and women be increasingly stored in black cloth bags and deprived of their capacity for social engagement; an ideology that teaches “silence is consent”; an ideology that considers that mohammed did not rape nine-year-old Aisha because the tearing open and penetration of her almost-certainly infibulated genitals occurred within a ‘marriage’ (if she consented before the act, her screams of pain when the scar tissue started being ripped open, stretched and pounded, would surely have signalled a withdrawal of consent to any ethical paedophile).
How is it possible that one MP touching a reporter’s knee can have greater repercussions, and create greater outrage amongst us, than that fact of even just one little girl being shipped off to Pakistan to have her clitoris snipped off and her labia stitched together (without anaesthetic, because the pain is considered as an important part of the experience)?
MPs are being sacked over knee-touching whilst these evils are being passed over in a kind of embarrassed silence on the part of the very people who should be condemning them in the most vigorous way possible – people who describe themselves as ‘feminist’ or of the ‘left’.
[i]How is it possible that one MP touching a reporter’s knee can have greater repercussions, and create greater outrage amongst us, than that fact of even just one little girl being shipped off to Pakistan to have her clitoris snipped off and her labia stitched together (without anaesthetic, because the pain is considered as an important part of the experience)?
MPs are being sacked over knee-touching whilst these evils are being passed over in a kind of embarrassed silence on the part of the very people who should be condemning them in the most vigorous way possible – people who describe themselves as ‘feminist’ or of the ‘left’.[/i]
excellent point leonard sisyphus mann.
Tom thinks 4th wave feminism is incoherent, but i think this is the exact kind of inconsistency that it has risen against. lets forget about petty score settling among privileged westerners and help afghani girls get an education.
>lets forget about petty score settling among privileged westerners and help afghani girls get an education.
I imagine the wonderful Nobel-winning teenager (as she then was) Malala Yousafzai would agree with this, and so do I. It’s not just a petty thing, though, when guys are driven out their livelihoods, and even to suicide, over relatively minor allegations.
>The phenomena we are seeing here is that of people who continue manning the barricades after the war has been won. And such a mind-set requires finding an enemy to fight against.
Yes, I think this part of your analysis is very strong and superbly expressed. The latter part also makes a strong point, although your description of the “rape” of Aisha surely goes far beyond the evidence in highly emotive fashion.
Just by way of balance (I do not vouch for its veracity), I offer below a view of the marriage to Aisha (admittedly in a Guardian article by a writer clearly committed to combating “Islamophobia”) that hardly suggests a marriage founded on rape and cruelty:
The Guardian article is disingenuous and tendentious: it ignores authentic (sahih) Hadith that give a negative picture, whilst favouring merely good (hasan) Hadith, and even I suspect drawing on some fabricated Hadith. The article also determinedly wrings the best possible interpretation from those Hadith it chooses not to ignore, and focuses much on Aisha’s long life AFTER mohammed died, when she regained some agency and freedom, but which is irrelevant to the question of what sexual laws and mores regarding children should promoted in the 21st Century.
I’m writing a blog-post on the whole Aisha/mohammed episode which will compile all the passages from the sahih (‘authentic’) Hadith – and some from the hasan (merely ‘good’) Hadith – pertaining to Aisha’s prepubescence (the sahih Hadith state that she had her menarche at the age of 15, BTW, not at 9 as many like to claim) and try to reconstruct the narrative from a neutral point of view, so I’ll keep my powder dry and won’t make a long post here.
Let me only provide three quotes from the sahih (authentic) Hadith that undermine the claim made in the Guardian that “Muhammad and Aisha had a loving and egalitarian relationship”:
mohammed beat Aisha: “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain” Sahih Muslim (4:2127),
Aisha testifies to her own misery, and that of other women who were followers of mohammed: “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women” Sahih Bukhari (72:715).
mohammed and Abu Bakr (Aisha’s father) used to make each other laugh was by watching each other beat Aisha and their other wives:
“he found Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) sitting sad and silent with his wives around him. He (Hadrat ‘Umar) said: I would say something which would make the Holy Prophet (may peace be upon him) laugh, so he said: Messenger of Allah, I wish you had seen (the treatment meted out to) the daughter of Khadija when you asked me some money, and I got up and slapped her on her neck. Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) laughed and said: They are around me as you see, asking for extra money. Abu Bakr then got up went to ‘A’isha (Allah be pleased with her) and slapped her on the neck” Sahih Muslim (9:3506).
The Guardian article somehow also fails to address the experience of vaginal penetration of a child who has been subjected to labial infibulation.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s description of her wedding night is brief but eloquent “He gasped and shoved and sweated with the effort of forcing open my scar. It was horribly painful and took so long. I gritted my teeth and endured the pain until I became numb.” (Infidel p143).
Note that this occurred when Ayaan was an adult – one can presume that the same experienced by a child of nine would be more painful and disressing, especially since the scar tissue may be only a couple of years old, fresh and probably infected.
Longer, more graphic descriptions of FGM and penetration of infibulated genitals can be found on the internet, as can statistics concerning the death-rates of little girls and women who die from FGM and/or the wounds sustained on their wedding nights.
>Longer, more graphic descriptions of FGM and penetration of infibulated genitals can be found on the internet, as can statistics concerning the death-rates of little girls and women who die from FGM
I do not doubt it. I do not favour circumcision on anything but medical grounds for either sex. My point was only about Muhammad and Aisha. However, you have definitely managed to find significant rebuttal evidence of the Guardian version. I look forward to your blog on all this with great interest.
With respect to my friend Lensman, analyzing the various denominations of Islam is probably the one area of scholarly knowledge that I would take his research with a huge bushel barrel of salt. There is actually a good degree of info to be found online that, interestingly, correlates with what was said in The Guardian article you quoted from:
http://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma_women.shtml
The thing is, there are multiple translations of what was said in the Quaran. No doubt Lensman found a translation that was to his liking, considering his attitude towards Islam (hint: it isn’t very good). Note these various translations of how Muhammad treated his wives that can be found with sufficient research:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/my-beauty-is-for-my-husband-to-see-not-the-world/how-prophet-muhammad-pbuh-treated-his-wives/481723468514411/
Note this source here, which attempts to sort out the conflicting ways the scriptures from the Quaran have been translated:
http://www.answering-islam.org/Shamoun/treatment_of_wives.htm
The choice translations that Lensman seems to favor appear to be similar to, if not outright taken from, this fundamentalist Christian blog that is dedicated to “educating” (read: attacking) Islam. Yes, I know Lensman is an atheist, not a Christian (and certainly not a fundie!), but he has nevertheless been more sympathetic to even Christian fundamentalists than modern Muslims, even those who are not extremist/fundie:
http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2015/06/aisha-describes-treatment-of-women-in.html
I am keen to get to the bottom of all this, Dissy, along with other readers I’m sure, so thanks for all the links. Or perhaps I should say I am keen to go as deep down into the evidence as possible, because I suspect that the hole will get darker as well as deeper the further we dig, without much hope of arriving at a clear answer. But we’ll see.
I have read several different translations of each of the three verses and have found only differences in wording, not sense.
Let me bat the ball back over the net to you Dissy:
can you quote any respected and impartial translations of the verses in question which deviate significantly in sense from what I have quoted?
(here are the translations I used for reference:
mohammed beat Aisha: “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain” Sahih Muslim (4:2127),
Aisha testifies to her own misery, and that of other women who were followers of mohammed: “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women” Sahih Bukhari (72:715).
“he found Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) sitting sad and silent with his wives around him. He (Hadrat ‘Umar) said: I would say something which would make the Holy Prophet (may peace be upon him) laugh, so he said: Messenger of Allah, I wish you had seen (the treatment meted out to) the daughter of Khadija when you asked me some money, and I got up and slapped her on her neck. Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) laughed and said: They are around me as you see, asking for extra money. Abu Bakr then got up went to ‘A’isha (Allah be pleased with her) and slapped her on the neck” Sahih Muslim (9:3506).)
I think all of those comparisons I made clearly spell out how subject to individual interpretation these scriptures from the Quaran are, with one favored over the other depending on the individual mindset of those who read it. They can easily be interpreted in the nastiest way imaginable by those who want to damn Islam in a very general sense, including those who are jumping on the “child abuse” bandwagon so popular today. What is most certainly not in favor of your interpretation, I would argue, is your frequent illogical insistence that the very immoral and outright nasty interpretations you read from the scriptures are still being practiced today, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. You also continually insist that Muslims still adhere to the nasty historical interpretations of the scriptures when that is clearly not the case with how they are living their lives today, and this can be readily discerned not only by the many people in my home country who live and work with a large Muslim population, as well as anyone visiting the Middle East.
What is also not in your favor is the frequent similar claims made by individuals against other religious sects they dislike, including (as I have pointed out) to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And the fact that these are likewise often made by otherwise insightful and erudite researchers who seem to jump on this bandwagon to an outright hysterical extent. It seems as if it’s a strangely but maybe understandably common phenomenon for people to jump on precisely this bandwagon whenever their emotions are fired up against certain groups, whether of a religious nature (in your case) or a completely secular nature (in the case of those who have accused the British parliament and the Clinton Foundation via the “Pizzagate” claims of similar child-abusing atrocities). All of these institutions, both religious and secular, are very ripe for legitimate criticism, don’t get me wrong. But the common hysterical, totally-without evidence claims that they harbor the most brutal types of always sexually-based abuses of children and (sometimes, as a corollary) women? This cannot be a coincidence, I think, and it really speaks to the emotional over-eagerness of human beings to pull at these particular heartstrings of the public in order to damn or demonize this or that institution that they dislike, rather than resorting to more logical critiques that would most often be totally on target.
When I see a close friend of mine, who is aware I am a hebephile and fully supportive of my attraction base, who had justifiably bad experiences (of a non-sexual nature, I should point out) with the Jehovah’s Witnesses make the same types of accusations against them as I hear you so often make against Muslims — in both cases, with no evidence whatsoever that this is actually going on in the modern world — it forces me to make these observations and consider these conclusions.
I for one would just like to say here that am boggled by how strikingly, even inescapably apposite this ‘phantom limb’ analogy of LSM’s is …
I agree. It is the masterstroke of a superb analysis.
I see circumcision bad in both boys and girls, But the hysteria over girls routinely shipped off for the cut has been overplayed in the UK. Most who were cut were cut before entering the UK. But I agree circumcision is backwards.
In reply to Libertine;
Not to mention, hideously painful and totally barbaric?
Backward? Isn’t that the opposite of ‘damning with faint praise’? Why not call a spade a spade?
Backward is no endorsement. But the hypocrisy from many anti FGM campaigners towards people who highlight how MGM it pretty much the same albeit the extreme end is worse for females, Is shocking. They rather we just go away and shut up. In this BBC documentary about ‘Extreme wives’, She talks about how bad FGM is while meeting hundreds of circumcised boys. Everybody is celebrating their rite of passage while blood is running down their legs, The paradox! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09fp2qm
This Guardian article offers some statistical indication to the extent of the problem:
“A report last year on FGM by a coalition of medical groups, trade unions and human rights organisations estimates that there are 66,000 victims of FGM in England and Wales and warns that more than 24,000 girls under 15 are at risk. More than 2,000 victims of FGM sought treatment in London hospitals alone in the past three years.”
– https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/06/female-genital-mutilation-foreign-crime-common-uk
– link to the Royal College of Obstetrians and Gynaecologists report mentioned in article.
“In the UK an ideology is imposing itself that promotes genital mutilation of children of 5 to 8 years of age (the ages when they are likely to be most psychologically damaged by the procedures), female children undergoing clitoridectomies and labial infibulation, male children preputiall circumcision – preferably without anaesthetic; where little girls are sent abroad for child-marriages to strangers, arranged without their consent; where quranically-compliant sexual slavery gangs are being discovered in more and more urban centres; an ideology which demands that little girls and women be increasingly stored in black cloth bags and deprived of their capacity for social engagement; an ideology that teaches “silence is consent”; an ideology that considers that mohammed did not rape nine-year-old Aisha because the tearing open and penetration of her almost-certainly infibulated genitals occurred within a ‘marriage’ (if she consented before the act, her screams of pain when the scar tissue started being ripped open, stretched and pounded, would surely have signalled a withdrawal of consent to any ethical paedophile).”
Seriously, Lensman? I wish I could say I was surprised to see this dreck from one of the most erudite, well-educated, and well-spoken members of the Kind community whom I am proud to call friend, look up to, and recommend to all interested readers. Except when it comes to your outright bizarre and absolutely histrionic hatred of anything Muslim, and your insistence that they are routinely meting out mass sexual atrocities against underaged girls in the modern world with a degree of hysteria and lack of logistical possibility that actually rivals the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the U.S. in the 1980s and the British V.P. sadistic abuse panic and sex trafficking “epidemic” panic of the past decade in terms of outrageous, utterly unproven claims. It also, disturbingly enough, reminds me of all the claims against various groups harboring “pedophile infiltration” stories, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And this, as everyone knows, is coming from someone who respects you immensely. Ordinarily, I read everything you have to say with great interest, and benefit from it immensely, while doing my best to “zone out” your vicious and outrageous attacks on contemporary Muslim society. Oftentimes, I succeed in overlooking it, to focus on the immense amount of great, well-researched, and thoughtful material that flows from your pen. But then I see something like the above, and I can’t help but say, “geez, as much as I hate to do it, I have to give a reality check to my friend, even though he will never listen, so the reality check will have to be given in terms of simple principle.” The well-deserved respect you have earned from others here makes them reluctant to say this, but there is no way I can ignore this all the time, despite having at least as much respect for you as anyone else here.
Trust me, Lensman, I have many Muslim people in my community, including having some of them for physicians, and they are mostly kindly people who do not have forced child marriages, nor do they conduct themselves in the negative manner of what you described regarding Mohammad. Nor are they sending their children off to Muslim nations in the Middle East in forced marriages to grimy adult sadists. My community harbors many fundamentalist Christians, as well, and trust me, they adhere to the Bible in a most literalist fashion, and if they had their way, Americans would be living in a very strict theocracy right now. I am, of course, against religious fundamentalism in all its forms, but none of it in the modern age is nearly as bad as the fictional Satanic cults whose meme filled the nightmares of many Western citizens a few decades ago.
I ask you, Dissy, how should I be speaking out against, for example, FGM?
Given that FGM and islam powerfully correllate, and that mohammed not only failed to condemn FGM, but actually advocated it, is there a way of criticising and condemning FGM that wouldn’t make me seem to also criticise and condemn Islam?
The criticism I often receive for my stance against FGM seems to be informed with the notion that criticising islam is a worse outrage than FGM itself.
Should I therefore stay silent over FGM?
A parallel:
– is there a way of condemning the genocide of Jews that doesn’t implicitly condemn Nazism?
– if there isn’t, Is it therefore ‘naziphobic’ to condemn the Genocide of Jews?
– should one stay silent over the concentration camps for fear of offending nazis or their apologists?
My thinking on these matters is quite simple:
– FGM, MGM, sex-slavery, the wearing of the niqab etc are all things which are (other than when MGM when is performed medical reasons) simply wrong.
– therefore, and especially as a paedophile, I feel it is my duty to speak out against these wrongs.
– islam is the only significant political ideology/religion that currently spreads, promotes, perpetrates and defends these practices.
– one cannot therefore speak out against these evils etc without also addressing the ideology that spreads, promotes, perpetrates and defends these practices. To do so would be like criticising the inequalities of wealth in the USA without addressing the nature of its economy or the nature of capitalism.
– if this offends those who believe islam should be above criticism, it is a risk I will take.
****
I don’t doubt that you have good moslem friends who would never FGM their daughters. I have a vaguely-moslem friend who drinks alcohol and eats sausages.
But these are statistical outliers – almost-certainly educated people who are more ‘western’ than ‘moslem’, people who allow their ethical instincts and intuitions to prevail over what is commanded of them by their religion.
However, if you lived in Egypt, Somalia or parts of Birmingham, England, I suspect that you’d find it less easy to find moslem friends who didn’t have their daughters mutilated.
Here are statistics percentages of FGM-ed females in 15 countries 2013 UNICEF report on FGM, and diverse other sources (collated at Wikipedia):
Somalia 98%
Indonesia 97.5%
Guinea 96%
Djibouti 93%
Malaysia 93%
Egypt 91%
Oman 90%
Eritrea 89%
Mali 89%
Sierra Leone 88%
Sudan 88%
Gambia 76%
Burkina faso 76%
Ethiopia 74%
Mauritania 69%
Do you see what all these countries have in common?
Add to this that the form of islam that is rising to the top, that is asserting itself, is not the moderate version.
Why is it that it is the reformers that have to go into hiding, or exile, or who require police protection from their fellow moslems?
Why did Ayaan Hiri Ali end up being the first modern refugee fleeing from islamic persecution in the Netherlands? why do Asra Nomani, Maajid Nawaaz and Irshad Manji all have to have 24-hour police protection?
And why do hate preachers such as Anjem Choudary, Yusha Evans and Linda Sarsour not require protection from attacks from moslems angered by their version of islam?
****
>”nor do they conduct themselves in the negative manner of what you described regarding Mohammad.”
Dissy, it’s not me ‘describing’ mohammed’s actions. It’s the Hadith.
In friendly diss-agreement
LSM
>Do you see what all these countries have in common?
Yes, they are all underdeveloped countries with low levels of education and income. It is significant that Qatar, where I worked for some years, is a Muslim country that is not on your list. It is a wealthy place with good education, including for girls. My guess is the rate of FGM there is very low, and that this is also the case among western Muslims after the first generation or so, once families have become exposed to western education.
There are Muslims, as you say, who drink alcohol and eat sausages. In large parts of the Balkans that has been the norm for the large Muslim populations there. Muslim cultures are capable of change, just like others. They are not fixed by the Koran or the Hadith or the more backward aspects of Sharia law. Yes, these are supposed to be absolute, and some fundamentalists will continue to insist on this just as Christian fundamentalists won’t accept evolution etc., but the majority will move on when they are in a modern secular culture.
For a different view of what Islam can be, try the BBC’s three-part series Science and Islam about the leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries. If Islam could be at the cutting edge of science so long ago, it could happen again. The presenter of the show is Jameel Sadik “Jim” Al-Khalili, a professor of theoretical physics. He has a daughter. My guess is that she has not undergone FGM.
And last, but not least: Mohammed is a proper name and must therefore be written with capital M!
>”they are all underdeveloped countries with low levels of education and income.”
No, what they have in common are that they are all moslem countries.
For those parts of Indonesia where statistics are available, there is a 97% FGM rate. Indonesia can hardly be considered as underdeveloped, nor can Egypt or Djibouti. I could equally have mentioned Iraq which as rates of between 72% and 80%; Malaysia, a prosperous country, has rates of 93%.
I could also mention a plethora of underdeveloped non-moslem countries that appear to have low or no significant incidence of FGM – the Republic of Congo, the poorest country in the world, has rates of 5% (10% of its population is moslem BTW), Burundi does not appear in FGM stats, nor does Madagascar, nor do a plethora of islam-free African countries.
Also bear in mind that many rich moslem countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, UAE have either consistently refused to co-operate with UNESCO, or with other monitoring agencies, or don’t compile statistics on its prevalence. However, it is generally understood that FGM rates are high in these countries, and that rates for Saudi Arabia are in the high 90s.
To quote from page 23 (page 31 if reading PDF format) of the 2013 UNICEF report:
“Although no nationally representative data on FGM/C are available for countries including Colombia, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, evidence suggests that the procedure is being performed. It is also practised in pockets of Europe and North America, which, for the last several decades, have been destinations for migrants from countries where the cutting of girls is an age-old tradition.”
>”Muslim cultures are capable of change, just like others.”
So we have to patiently wait for generational change for the eradication of FGM, I guess. And people like me who recognise that this practice is abominable will have to learn not stop mentioning it for fear of offending those who practice it.
In the meantime how many millions of little girls and women will have to endure this horrific procedure, and to die either as a result of the procedure or as a result of wedding-night injuries?
Granted that myself, as a European, can do little to affect the practice of FGM in, say, Mali. But it is a practice common in Western Europe, and becoming increasingly common as moslem populations grow and those populations become more fundamentalist.
Take the UK. FGM was first made a criminal offense in 1985 as was “taking a UK citizen or permanent resident abroad for the purpose of FGM”. In 2013 it was estimated were 135,000 women and children in the UK who had experienced FGM. The government in 2016 estimated that “170,000 women and girls in the UK have undergone the procedure.”
Despite this there has been only ONE prosecution for FGM in the UK (in 2015). And that was received with great ambiguity, seen as being ‘islamophobic’. Hypocrites such as Brid Hehir (Fear, loathing and FGM)advocates that we take a softly, softly approach to FGM in the UK, slow, generational education instead of the protection and Justice these little girls deserve.
A thought experiment. If Suttee had been a practice advocated in the quran or hadith – would:
1/ it still be common in backward moslem-majority countries today?
2/ would people like Brid Hehir be today advocating a softly, softly approach to its eradication in the UK?
3/ would some non-moslems feel uneasy condemning the practice because to do so was ‘islamophobic’?
I suspect that the answer to all three of the above is ‘yes’.
***
FGM has three purposes:
That of destroying the girl’s sexuality (esp clitoridectomy); that of guaranteeing virginity for her future husband by sealing the vagina (infibulaton); and that of ‘breaking’ the child’s spirit, much as the experience of being branded used to used to systematically ‘break’ slaves.
Add to this the fact that Islamic FGM and MGM is practiced on ‘children’, not ‘babies’. This makes the exprience ‘meaningful’ – whilst a baby will experience extreme pain during circumcision, he can not locate that pain within a system of self-knowledge and social awareness. Islamic FGM is done to children of all ages (but predominantly 5-8) and subjects them to an experience so painful, so humiliating, so marking in a psycho-social sense, that it breaks the person – their vigour and rebellion and independence and love of life is scorched out of them. As with branding they are made subservient, slaves fearful of what their god/owners/master(s) are capable of inflicting on them.
Islamic FGM and MGM (unlike Judaic MGM when the boys are circumcised the 8th day after birth http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4391-circumcision) is performed on children old enough to have a sense of self, a sense of their sexuality, an ethical sense, are old enough to remember the procedure, a sense of personal dignity. From what I can tell, and from various anecdotal sources (accounts, photographs – see photograph below – and film footage) anaesthetic is not used. Indeed, amongst the mothers (it is a practice organised and promoted by mothers and grandmothers) the attitude is that the pain is an integral part of the rite of passage.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali managed to psychologically survive her FGM experience. Her sister didn’t. After the procedure Ali remembers that her sister was no longer the same little girl she was before, she no longer had her love of life, was no longer head-strong and rebelliousness, but had been broken by the experience and was subservient, obedient, unquestioning, depressed. She would go on to commit suicide.
>”There are Muslims, as you say, who drink alcohol and eat sausages.”
I have little problem with such moslems. My problem is with moslems who FGM, advocate sex slavery, advocate the hijab/niqab, who believe in jihad and spreading islam, who advocate dhimmitude etc etc etc
Moreover, I suspect you will find that few of the world’s 1.7 billion moslems are of the kind that drink alcohol and eat sausages.
***
(Tom, I actually sat down at my computer to pursue my work on the Cantor rewrite we’ve discussed.
Two hours later I’m still working on this comment. I’m going to bow out of this particular exchange with you and Dissy, and try to resist responding further. This is not because it is not important or interesting, and not because I don’t welcome and enjoy the debate – but because I’m preparing a series of post covering FGM, mohammed and Aisha, and all aspects of paedophilia, child-sexuality and islam – and those posts will present facts, statistics and evaluations more coherently than I can here, ‘off the cuff’ as it were – I feel like a boxer preparing hard for a big, challenging fight, and who, when challenged to a pub brawl in the days prior to that fight has little interest in engaging in said brawl. Not that you and Dissy are mere ‘pub-brawls’, of course – since I expect (and hope) that both you and Dissy will be two of my most challenging opponents and critics when I eventually post the afore-mentioned essays. Which is another way of saying that you both should start getting into training too and learning your Surahs… 😉 )
FGM is bad enough without exaggerating the horrors, which does not serve the case against it well. Credibility is lost when the impression is given that most FGM is of the worst type (Type III, (infibulation or pharaonic circumcision), which is “sewn closed” kind. This really is ghastly and life-changing but is essentially confined to Africa. The Muslim population of Asia is vastly greater, with India (not Pakistan) having the greatest number.
>Indonesia, with a 97% FGM rate, can hardly be considered as underdeveloped, nor can Egypt or Djibouti.
None of these countries is in the lists of developed countries, according to IMF and OECD criteria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
You also say “Malaysia, a prosperous country, has rates of 93%”.
Prosperous for some, no doubt, but this country also fails to make it into the list of developed countries. It is classed as an “emerging economy” by the World Bank, in a “developing country”. The main point, though, is that “sewing up” is not a feature of the culture here. Yes, other circumcision procedures can also be drastic, but they are not necessarily so.
I would also point out that Muslim doctors, who are by definition among the more educated classes and are more likely to have been exposed to secular cultures, appear to be standing up to the religious authorities in Malaysia:
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2016/10/17/muslim-doctors-against-female-circumcision/
Doesn’t it make sense to support these doctors, rather than trashing their religion?
Muslim medical figures are quoted in this story as saying:
“There is not a single verse in the Quran or anything from the collections of hadiths (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) that makes female circumcision a requirement”.
Also:
“According to the sirah (life story) of the Prophet, he never carried out circumcision on his daughters.”
It might be possible to argue that these quotes are inaccurate, but that would be to miss the point. The point is that these educated, forward-looking Muslims are doing their best to ditch the more embarrassing parts of their religion. Shouldn’t they be helped, rather than have their noses rubbed in embarrassing hadith etc that make their task harder?
As for deliberate intent to break people’s personal dignity etc, this may be the intention with the worst practices, but they are not the most prevalent ones, even when practised without anaesthetic. Boys in some Islamic countries also undergo circumcision without anaesthetic at an age when they will remember it. It is meant to be an ordeal, but to go through it bravely is a source of pride. I say this not to excuse or recommend it but to suggest that the ordeal part is not simply a sexist thing aimed at crushing the spirit and will of females.
PS: I have just noticed your additional point about bowing out because you are in training for a “big fight”. Fair enough. I might not have bothered with my present comment had I seen this additional bit earlier on. However, now I’ve done it I might as well post it. Hope the training goes well!
I have little problem with such moslems. My problem is with moslems who FGM, advocate sex slavery, advocate the hijab/niqab, who believe in jihad and spreading islam, who advocate dhimmitude etc etc etc
Moreover, I suspect you will find that few of the world’s 1.7 billion moslems are of the kind that drink alcohol and eat sausages.
And that is the problem with your unproven and frankly outrageous beliefs on this topic, Lensman: that the great majority of Muslims in the world today are still practicing abominable things like sex slavery, forced child marriages, clitoral mutilations, and beatings. As Tom noted, it’s your extraordinary exaggerations and demonization of the majority of the Islamic population of today’s world, not your reasonable objection to various interpretations of the Quaran’s scriptures that were written thousands of years ago, that are the issue here. It’s easy to find many Muslims who do not practice such atrocities simply by making friends and contacts with many of them, which can be readily accomplished in person with the many Muslims who live and work in Western nations, and with those in the Middle East via online communications.
Your obsessive need to shatter Islam by making these outrageous claims is simply mirroring the exact same thing that various antis are doing with just about any type of institution they dislike, even if they have valid reasons for disliking various aspects of these institutions. The only difference is that you do not overtly thrash pedophiles, but you most certainly do skirt sex-negativity tropes when you have made comments proclaiming your belief that forced celibacy (which children definitely do face in the modern world) is actually a lesser atrocity in your eyes than forced sexual relationships (in which there is no evidence to be going on in to any great extent in the modern world, contrary to your claims about Islam) rather than the two opposite extremes being of comparable ethical severity. Both of these situations can be adapted to by kids, but both are against human freedom and actually result in similar psychological problems and anxieties.
The fact that you are dead set on composing an entire blog entry on a topic that is bound to be filled with grossly exaggerated biases and outrageous claims based on a super-lengthy plethora of very selective interpretations of ancient scriptures, and quotes taken from notoriously unreliable and hysterical NGO organizations that you would wisely take with a grain of salt if made by these sources against any other topic, is further indication that your falling victim to a moral crusade. I cringe at the reaction that coming post of yours is going to receive, and what it may do to the high level of respect deservedly earned by the rest of your truly excellent and importantly insightful blog, but it’s your choice. Your terrific blog deserves to weather that coming storm, and I certainly hope that it does. I’d get an umbrella and start putting up the storm-proof windows just in case, though.
> I’m not doing battle here, Sean
Me neither! 🙂
Glad you picked up on this news Tom, it is hard not to notice, and indeed a mighty cataclysm. Astonishing is how blithe the general population seem to be about it, though. I have not overheard a single conversation about it. Could it be people are numbed into a kind of traumatized silence? The power of the Weinstein effect is that what we have all mindlessly consumed and enjoyed on screen for so many years has been shown up to be built on corruption, predation and opportunism. This ‘figurehead’ of our sexual morals and ideals is now being all but criminalized, leaving us very confused and frightened indeed. Not a good time to be a young man, even less so to be an old one.
It’s really no revelation at all to anybody remotely involved in the arts, but the chances of predation v opportunism being objectively differentiated are slim with so much disaffection and hysteria around.
I strongly disagree with not calling it a witch hunt. The fact that genuine victimization is in there does not preclude this. The question is how a cause is carried out. This one is carried out with immense violence (albeit psychological), lashings of media-fed hysteria and ignorance all encapsulated in a term ‘sex offender’ which carries all the exact equivalent stigma the word ‘witch’ would have had in 17th century England. It’s one of the most subtle yet vicious and out-of-control ones humanity has ever known. It needs to be labelled as such, as McCarthyism now has, and fought on those terms if any kind of equilibrium is ever to be restored.
> I have not overheard a single conversation about it.
Maybe it depends on one’s social circles and to whom one listens. There is plenty of discussion on social media. Does that count as a sort of conversation?
>I strongly disagree with not calling it a witch hunt.
I suppose by avoiding the term my main concern was to take the discussion in a different direction, that would get us kinds really thinking. In the unlikely event of me being asked for my views by the BBC or some other major media outlet, I suspect that I too would go for the witch-hunt line: it’s a simple concept and that’s how you need to focus when all you are going to get is a quick soundbite.
Here, though, talking among ourselves, I think it may help to be as calmly analytical as possible, if only for the sake of our own sanity. It would be easy for me to do an angry, rabble-rousing piece, getting everyone into a riled up, bitter mood. That would be fine in a revolutionary situation in which we, rather than the other side, were in a position to start storming the barricades, and we needed to fire ourselves up for immediate battle.
Realistically, though, we are not. We need to plan for a longer-term way of creating a viable life for ourselves in a world that is unlikely any time soon to start thinking as we do. I don’t think this entails either howling in rage or grovelling in the face of popular prejudice. The most dignified course, I suggest, is to be as rational as possible, looking at all sides of the existential conundrum in which we find ourselves.
Yes, today’s McCarthyism, taking shape right in front of our eyes. And the term of choice seems to be “child predator”.
Roy Moore is one already, it seems.
Hi, Tom! I’m a reader from Portugal. I don’t speak English, but I can understand it a little bit when I read it. It’s very difficult to me to write in English, but I’ll to try (I apologize for my abundant mistakes).
I know your books, your articles and your activism. I have seen in YouTube the documentary ‘A decent life’ (with subtitles in Spanish). I have read some articles writed by you and I’m reading your book ‘Paedophilia: The Radical Case’. I have read about your biography and your activism since the 1970a in PIE. I find all fascinating: your life, your books, your articles… Thank’s and congratulations! It’s increible that exists someone like you in the world. I often ask myselfs how you could to endure the social pression.
I would like to see an edition in Portugese or in Spanish of ‘Pedophilia: The Radical Case’. That would bee very well for ALL, because your book can help many people to understand a lot of things, and because it’s very difficult for many of us to read in English. Do you think that will be possible a translation of the book in other languages? I’ve read in your blog that you are writting a new updated version of the woo and a new book about pedophilia in Ancient Greek, isn’t thath so? Whent they will appear? I have read also about a book with the posts of Heretic TOC. That will bee a very well idea.
If I could speak English better I could answer you a lot of thinks. But I don’t can, so I briefly want to ask you:
– I think pedophilia is a sexual orientation different from simple homosexuality. I think you could speak about different sexual orientations, between the simple heterosexuality, simple homosexuality, simple homosexual pedophilia, simple heterosexual pedophilia. But I think that pedophilia could be considerated a sexual orientation itself. Do you think I’m right?
.- I think that the current situation of pedohiles is analogue, or very similar, to that of jewish in nazi Germany, or the homosexuals in the past or currently in some non-occidentals lands. I think that nowadays occurs a very genocide against a sexual minority. And I think that that requires a sexual revolution in order to stop and change the currently situation. Mi questions are: Do you think that this situation is comparable with other historical and political situations that have originated some revolutions (for exemple the Russian Revolution)? Why people, masses, don’t revolts against this situacion? Why the activism of PIE, NAMBLA, Martijn and others don’t suceeded? Why the left don’t defends pedohiles? Do you think that the current situation of pedophilia will change in the future?
I would like to know also what you think about pedophilia in Ancient Greece. It’s taht a simple myte or really pedophilia was accepted in Ancient Greece? There are currently lands or cultures that accept pedophilia? Or in the past?
See you.
Many thanks, Angeru, for your appreciation of my activism. I am very flattered by your determination to read Paedophilia: The Radical Case in English even though, as you say, it may be quite hard going for you.
You have asked a number of interesting questions, some of which would need a whole book in order to give a thorough answer, or just to explore possible answers. I will think about these questions and try to give some initial, brief, thoughts about them in the next day or two.
https://pedrapapeletesoura.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/hoje-nao-tem-aula/
It’s not a translation to Portuguese, but just notes that I made about the book, both in English and Portuguese. They should get the book’s point accross.
br, by the way
Hi Angeru,
Good to hear from you. Your written English is easy to understand, so there is no need to apologise for any errors. You write:
>I would like to see an edition in Portugese or in Spanish of ‘Pedophilia: The Radical Case’.
I would like that too. I have your email address, so we can talk about this elsewhere.
>I think that pedophilia could be considerated a sexual orientation itself. Do you think I’m right?
Yes. You might like to look at this blog of mine:
https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/the-seven-ages-of-sexual-attractiveness/
Unfortunately, this blog starts with some difficult words, including the very first one, “neologophilia” which is my own invention. It just means a love of inventing new words! As you will see in this blog, strange new words have been invented in order to give a name to various sexual orientations, including attraction to people at a variety of different ages. These “chronophilias” (another new word!) are discussed.
>I think that the current situation of pedohiles is analogue, or very similar, to that of jewish in nazi Germany, or the homosexuals in the past or currently in some non-occidentals lands. I think that nowadays occurs a very genocide against a sexual minority. And I think that that requires a sexual revolution in order to stop and change the currently situation. Mi questions are: Do you think that this situation is comparable with other historical and political situations that have originated some revolutions (for exemple the Russian Revolution)? Why people, masses, don’t revolts against this situacion? Why the activism of PIE, NAMBLA, Martijn and others don’t suceeded? Why the left don’t defends pedohiles? Do you think that the current situation of pedophilia will change in the future?
There are many linked questions here, but I think I can give a fairly short answer.
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 has been described in a book called Ten Days That Shook The World but really it was part of a socialist ideology and movement that dominated the 20th century but lost its energy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the developed West, at least, the ideological vacuum this left soon began to be filled by feminist ideology. Whereas socialism emphasised income equality between the working class and the moneyed classes who controlled the economy, feminism focused on what has proved to be a slightly (but only slightly) easier target: equality between the sexes. This too started as battle for workplace equality, especially in terms of equal pay, but has since become far more ambitious and profound, extending to a wish to end the perceived exploitation of children as well as women in a “patriarchal” society dominated by men. The analysis has thus turned into a very wide-ranging attack on “male power”.
This revolution, which has been gathering momentum for over 40 years, has been hugely successful. It has not proved possible (despite the efforts of PIE, NAMBLA and others, which you mention) to present a viable alternative narrative, despite the fact that our positions have been well grounded in scientific research. The narrative(s) we have put forward have been very limited in their appeal because (a) we are a very small minority and (b) children, who could be on our side, are for the most part not well placed to be politically militant. There are some talented youth activists, but they seldom make any impression before their mid-teens, by which time they are already looking to their adult future rather than their childhood past. They are more likely to be interested (and a good thing too) in saving the planet from global warming, or reducing the fees students have to pay for their higher education, than in children’s sexuality and socialisation.
So, for these reasons, I do not see much scope in the foreseeable future for progress of the type we would like to see. If others are capable of building a more successful narrative I would be happy to see it!
>I would like to know also what you think about pedophilia in Ancient Greece. It’s taht a simple myte or really pedophilia was accepted in Ancient Greece? There are currently lands or cultures that accept pedophilia? Or in the past?
One of my projects in the pipeline is to finish an extensive interview by email with an expert in this field. We started early this year but had to break off, unfortunately, as personal circumstances arose which prevented him from continuing at that time. I hope to revive the project before long. We had already exchanged several thousand words each and were perhaps one third of the way through what I hoped to cover.
I believe that this recent #metoo campaign is, in part, a result of our sexually schizophrenic (as in split mind) culture. We have girls and women who fear revealing sexual assault because they feel they will be shamed. This rarely exists in a truly sexually open culture. We have girls and women who make their own decision to have sex to get a part and they later regret their decision because of that same shame. Common culture is still quite restrictive sexually, particularly with girls and shockingly more so with boys than in the past.
My example with that last point is student/teacher sexual relations. Generally, most have seen it as abuse if the teacher is male and the student female. No matter whether the relationship was wanted or not. Usually though, if the teacher was female and student male then people saw it as okay. Modern men’s “rights” movements have been pushing to stigmatize relationships where the student is male. Sadly, this has been gaining traction.
Another example is 14 year old Mr. Wolfhard from Stranger Things. A hot late 20s model essentially made a positive comment toward him and everyone freaked out calling her disgusting. Then even Mr. Wolfhard said it creeped him out and that it was wrong. No one in hell would any 14 year old be creeped out that a hot female model found them attractive. Barring religious/social indoctrination.
In contrast to all this, popular media reflects our true nature. It is much more sexually open, much more sexually accepting and expressive. A significant amount of the population is fine with preteens deciding their gender and taking hormone therapy in their tweens/teens. Preteen boy drag queens are shown off and celebrated. Businesses still sell sexy clothing for little girls and little girls love it. The internet has restored the sexual knowledge children have, especially tweens and teens.
Hell, we have a president who said “grab em by the pussy, they let you”. A president who has, in the past, made clear to a ten year old that he would date her in some years. A president who is then generally opposed to openly sexual attitudes. It seems everyone wants to be sexual themselves but restrict everyone else. The president, feminists, etc.
Then again, we have the World Health Organization saying sexual activity between minors is fine and healthy as along as contraceptives are used and sex education is given. Granted I just shifted from America to the world, but the world is generally opposed to child sexuality in most western nations, especially when adults partake in its expressions.
So, like this comment, society is in turmoil over sexuality. It is all over the place.
>So, like this comment, society is in turmoil over sexuality.
Turmoil or not, it’s a good comment, AR.
Oh, BTW, I hope your monika doesn’t mean you go in for shooting dozens of people? You post doesn’t suggest a crazy type but “American Rifleman” is definitely a provocative name!
Thank you!
My moniker is what I consider myself, a rifleman. I am willing to defend life and liberty and I am trained and armed to do so. So, clearly by that line one can tell I am truly American lmao
>clearly by that line one can tell I am truly American
Truly, the Atlantic is broad and deep. We have the same language on either side but not the same culture.
Dear Tom,
Your arguments are, as always, too deep for me! Is there really any difference between the hunter coming into the winter cave with food for the starving and giving the choicest pieces of dinosaur meat to the prettiest girl; and those boys in that oak tree?
My many thanks, as always, for your wonderful blog. The parts of it that I can understand, that is!
Just joking… Again, my thanks, M T-W.
>giving the choicest pieces of dinosaur meat to the prettiest girl
Well, the reference to “dinosaur meat” is amusing, but if your intentionally Fred Flintstone take on prehistory misses my point, it is perhaps because my point needed expounding at greater length than people might wish to read.
The key passage was this, from David Sloan Wilson:
“In most hunter-gatherer societies and many other small-scale human groups, status is mostly of the bestowed variety. Bullying doesn’t work because those being bullied have the collective power to resist.”
The giving of favours is not the same thing as the absence of bullying but it is something which, in hunter-gatherer society is likely to be the subject of communal knowledge, discussion and either approval or disapproval. There is not much you can hide from other people in a small community with no locked doors, and your prestige is likely to hang on your reputation for being a fair sharer and a fair cooperator. Even the biggest and strongest hunter who gives undue favours to one person, or who otherwise behaves badly, can be cut down to size very effectively and swiftly through group ridicule. It is effective because we are a status-seeking species. If we sense that a particular behaviour is making us look small or stupid, we will have a very strong motivation to change that behaviour.
For adults, of course, a good reputation will come after years in childhood learning what is socially expected. In all societies children are born without any culture or rules, hence their behaviour is not exactly polite and fitting at all times!
interesting.
one thing to consider is the role of trust in social relations. trust is at least as fundamental a particle as power in this regard, having recently emerged stripped of its sentimental guise, in formal terms, in the calculus of the prisoners dilemma and more recently the block chain and smart contracts.
while power is a game of winner takes all (amazon, facebook, net neutrality r.i.p.) trust is an enabler of cooperative action. the fascist propaganda of moral panics and crap cop shows like svu are aimed at eroding trust, but i think its possible that what you describe -an end to masculine norms that tolerate sexual violence- could be a harbinger of a society in which trust is not being eroded but is being _explicitly_ nurtured and valued.
so, if i’m right, maybe we can still bring down the gold plated arseholes in their maseratis, and improve the lives of women and children while we’re at it.
>trust is at least as fundamental a particle as power in this regard
You are definitely onto something big with this theme, Sean. I doubt we are going to be enhancing intimate personal trust by using block chains any time soon, so if we want to strengthen it, where should we be looking? You say the developments I describe may be a harbinger of a society that nurtures and values trust, and I hope that turns out to be right.
Many would say just the opposite, though i.e. a key feature of the changing times is that men are now trusted less and less. The missing factor is what it takes to earn trust, and how that trust will be recognised and appreciated in future without our culture turning into a dreary, unsexy, unaffectionate, unloving one in which any form of touching, or even the merest hint that touching might be nice, is itself regarded as a breach of trust.
I guess what I was getting at in reference to block chains was that trust is an actual thing that can be quantified and articulated in a productive way, and not some namby pamby metaphysical abstraction. In this sense it can be seen, potentially at least, as a genuine foil to the concentration of power.
I think where this plays into gender politics is that, where trust is in short supply, power is what is being negotiated. fourth wave feminism has really made this explicit by aligning itself with other disadvantaged groups, such as ethnic and sexual minorities. The powerless are children, women, non-binary genders, people of colour, the poor and probably some other poor saps. prisoners. drug addicts, etc… few of them have much reason to trust any body, let alone rich, white, straight men. Their struggle is to equalize power, not to expand trust.
Paradoxically, it’s trust that makes them powerful, and they need it more than they need power. what trust they have is based on a mutual experience of discrimination, degradation and disadvantage, and so the thing that makes them weak also makes them powerful.
the exact population they trust least is rich, old, white, straight men. the more of these categories one can fit into, the less one will be trusted by anyone but ones own peers. paradoxically again, the power of rich, old, white, straight men, like weinstein and trump, is exactly what makes them vulnerable, because they are well outside the circle of trust
a few years ago i went thru a more or less voluntary self outing, and for a while i was public enemy #1 in my community. banned from visiting my lgfs and so on. it was really devastating actually. but i made a point of not being ashamed, of being open and honest about my orientation, and after a while some of my friends recognized that i wasn’t the power crazed child molester they’d imagined. they realized i was marginalized and stigmatized and struggling to own a nature that has come to be almost universally reviled.
suddenly i was being welcomed back into the fold and, best of all, i was being trusted. not because i’d sought to be powerful, but because i’d shown myself to be weak.
i like the taoist and buddhist ideals of strength that are also based on revealing weakness. resistance is brittle and tiring. submission is tough and enduring. something like that. 😀
Ah, right, now I get it! Very insightful comment!
>fourth wave feminism has really made this explicit
I confess, I have lost count of the waves. I just know it feels like we are drowning!
lol. i suspect it’s third wave feminism you struggle with most: educated housewives who want to be coal miners but never quite get the time, they’re so busy, what with yoga, coffee with the girls and pushing a baby stroller around in the park (while ‘the enemy’ digs himself an early grave keeping them in the manner… 😉
i think it goes something like this…
1st wave – blue stockings. suffragettes, bohemians, etc
2nd wave – bra burning, hairy legged hippies, midwives, etc
3rd wave – power dressing executives, wimmins studies graduates, etc
4th wave – global activists, syndicalists, collectivists, multiply disadvantaged low wage battlers, pussy rioters, etc
i’m proud to call myself a feminist but i think the gender performance that really needs work is masculinity. being male is less natural than being female, so there’s always room for improvement and no excuse for being a dick. don’t be fooled by the decorum and makeup. women are the feral sex. they’re the ones who die protecting their young.
> they’re the ones who die protecting their young
And men are the ones who die protecting their women (along with their country and their kids).
No wonder I had trouble with 4th wave: it doesn’t sound very coherent.
if you mean men going to war, well war is performative. also, a lot of soldiers are adventurers, at least when they sign up. warfare is also extremely rare in nature, only observed (in mammals) among other hominids (ie, some great apes). there seems to be a cognitive rather than instinctive component to it. also, organized warfare clearly reflects a rigid dominance hierarchy that can only be a clue to its actual function.
in contrast, it is common for female mammals of many species to show extreme courage in defense of their young. that does’t mean fathers can’t be equally protective, but it isn’t typical of apes. the best male parents in nature are in species like prairie dogs that exhibit much reduced sexual dimorphism and dominance competition.
when warfare is a grass roots affair, as with the french resistance in world war 2, women prove themselves to be as courageous, daring and selfless as men.
i don’t want to be too much of a gadfly right of the bat (you might go on retreat again!) but i’d like to open your eyes to the possibility that feminism is as valid an emancipatory struggle as the one we consider our own. when historic accusations of abuse lack proportionality, i think we have to understand that those accusations occur in the context of many centuries of abuse so callous it seemed invisible, normal, even noble. women have suffered at the hands of men for a long time.
when i get to know a little girl, i’m alert to the woman she could be one day. i want her to be confident and independent. ok, you aren’t attracted to girls, but you understand the idea tha paedophilia can be a kind of nurturing, so you must understand the way men feel who love a boy with more or less selfless commitment, and want the child to go out into the world as an adult.
i think we, meaning all of us arseholes who don’t drive a gold plated maserati, have to learn to be generous in our attempts to understand one another’s struggles. if we don’t, we will lose all trust, and then we’ll just be solent green to the arseholes who do.
>…you might go on retreat again
I’m not doing battle here, Sean. There is no question of advancing or retreating in my present contributions. More a matter of trying to maintain a reasoned balance between competing stridencies out there beyond this forum, which is why I agree with you when you say:
>we…have to learn to be generous in our attempts to understand one another’s struggles
My point about men being the primary self-sacrificers in warfare is a major theme of Warren Farrell’s book The Myth of Male Power, which I gather has become something of a sacred text of “the men’s movement”, which I put in quotes because it may be split even more radically than the women’s movement. It is an excellent book, in my opinion, which makes a great many good, evidence-based, points. That does not mean it should be cited uncritically though. I don’t think Farrell himself would want that. He is a reasonable guy who started out as a feminist and may well still regard himself as one in a carefully defined sense. And his book was hailed as an important fresh perspective by Camille Paglia, no less, which I think is a good sign even though I don’t always agree with her.
You say:
>…you aren’t attracted to girls
Oh, but I am! Just as much as to boys!
so i think 4th wave feminism is very coherent. 🙂
The powerless are children, women, non-binary genders, people of colour, the poor and probably some other poor saps.
So it’s much the same old identity politics that corrupted the Left, beginning even before the fall of the USSR, and now serves to rip Western societies apart?
I doubt a model describing Oprah Winfrey or Hillery Clinton as powerless has ever been tested against reality!
As you mentioned game theory, perhaps you could explain the utility of pedophiles supporting feminism, which have served to restrict their freedom, and that of children?
Hi, Nada! That may, of course, depend largely on what version, definition, or “wave” of feminism we are talking about here. Too many people confuse organized political misandry as a legitimate form of feminism (they often call it “radical feminism”).
Hi Nada,
==the same old identity politics .. now serves to rip Western societies apart?==
as opposed to, say, uniting them in opposition to the same old hegemonic politics?
==I doubt a model describing .. Hillery Clinton as powerless has ever been tested against reality!==
she was powerless to prevent the election of Donald Trump
==As you mentioned game theory, perhaps you could explain the utility of pedophiles supporting feminism, which have served to restrict their freedom, and that of children?==
the winning strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma is reciprocity. repay trustworthiness with trust, punish untrustworthiness with distrust. children are more or less naive actors who depend on the goodwill of others for their survival. they have no choice but to trust the adults around them, at least until that trust is shown to be misplaced.
regardless how many children might have experienced positive sexual relations with adults, and i know there are some, there are also vast numbers who have experienced manipulation, exploitation and abuse. girls in particular learn from infancy that their femininity is predicated on their sexual desirability and availability. girls’ relations with older males are played out in the context of this organizing erotic field, yet they must retain their optimistic initial strategy and trust those males, especially if they are caregivers or immediate family.
the fact that many girls, and boys, have found their trust misplaced, in the experience of sexual abuse, is reflected in feminist (especially separatist) dogma, with slogans like ‘all men are rapists’. the incest narrative also originates in this position, and it was from it that women began to articulate their role as protectors of children in general, regardless of gender, from men.
based on the idea of ‘incest’, as a model of the betrayal of trust inherent in child sexual abuse, there developed a tendency for feminists (and almost all of society) to conflate paedophilia with child sexual abuse. adults in intimate contact with children are ‘in loco parentis’ regardless of their blood relationship. i tend to agree with this view, in that sexual relations with children must conflict with the nurturing role, to some extent at least.
paedophilia therefore comes to be interpreted as a kind of incest, and so a betrayal of trust of the highest order. the result is an extreme reluctance to believe that adult (male) sexual attraction to children can be expressed or articulated in any way that admits trust.
trust is dead.
i don’t know how we get out of this impasse, but i can say that my own experience of being more or less open about my attraction to little girls, at least with their caregivers, has led me to believe the situation isn’t hopeless. i’ve never sought any kind of liberty to be sexual with my lgf’s, and i never would. i don’t necessarily think it would be wrong, but i don’t think its practical and, to be honest, i’ve never really wanted it that much.
i’ve had some very painful experiences through outing myself, but i’ve also been constantly surprised by the trust and generosity i’ve been shown by some …mothers in particular, who have supported and facilitated and VALIDATED friendships i’ve formed with their daughters.
i don’t know where a pro choice ideal fits into this. i’m not anti choice, but i can’t imagine a path from where we are now to a place lions lie down with lambs. you never know, but for now, for me personally, to be trusted with children by people who know my sexual orientation seems like a victory. and do you know what, the first extension of trust was my own. the first few times i was honest about my feelings was literally like a step into the void.
the essence of reciprocity of trust is that loss of trust is seldom a final state. trust can be regained, but it is a long and committing objective.
>sexual relations with children must conflict with the nurturing role, to some extent at least.
How so? Doesn’t it depend on what such relations are like? In a good few pre-WEIRD cultures genital stimulation of infants and young children is considered an unremarkable aspect of normal parenting. Far from conflicting with nurturing, it is an aspect of nurturing.
====>sexual relations with children must conflict with the nurturing role, to some extent at least.====
==How so? Doesn’t it depend on what such relations are like? In a good few pre-WEIRD cultures genital stimulation of infants and young children is considered an unremarkable aspect of normal parenting. Far from conflicting with nurturing, it is an aspect of nurturing.==
quite so Tom, but I suspect the sexual activity you mention was probably not seen as a ‘sexual relationship’ but rather, as you say, as an ‘unremarkable aspect of normal parenting’ — albeit a sexual, or at least genital one.
a sexual, as opposed to a nurturing relationship, is characterised by sexual desire and sexual appetites, which are unique among desires and appetites in that their object is another human being.
consequently there is a real sense in which the beloved is possessed and more or less consumed in the satisfaction of that desire. The more reciprocal (that word again) the articulation of sexual desire, the less opportunity for cannibalism, but the potential is always there.
in contrast, the _ideal_ nurturing relationship is a giving one, not a consuming one. so all i’m saying is there is an intrinsic conflict of interest in adult xhild sexual relations.
but it isn’t algebra is it. the human heart is always going to confound a simplistic analysis. i felt sexual desire as a child, so i understand that it isn’t necessarily asymmetric.
have to go. life is happening.
>…quite so Tom, but I suspect the sexual activity you mention was probably not seen as a ‘sexual relationship’ but rather, as you say, as an ‘unremarkable aspect of normal parenting’
It was unremarkable because it was accepted, not because there was no sexual gratification for the parents. Bear in mind that most women palpably have a strong urge to be physically intimate with children, and a high percentage of “normal” men (selected randomly for comparison groups in experiments) get erections in response to images of naked children. Most adults, to be sure, have a stronger sexual attraction to teenagers and young adults than to children, so it is likely that in most cases their sexual attraction to children remains subconscious. But it is there, subliminally. Parental feelings for children are not as “pure” as our culture likes to think.
>…in contrast, the _ideal_ nurturing relationship is a giving one, not a consuming one.
Giving versus consuming is a questionable binary. Giving versus taking would be a more exact expression of binary opposites. Put that way we can examine validity of the binary more closely. When the word “taking” is used it enables us to pose an important question: “What is it that is taken away?” What does the child lose in the course of this “taking” or “consuming”? What benefit is now absent that was there before?
You made an even more questionable connection to cannibalism, in which one person consumes another. In that case it is obvious what is taken. In order to eat them, you must first kill them. So their life is taken. But after sexual relations with a child, what is lost? Their life? An arm? A leg? Their soul? These are WEIRD ideas, with no intrinsic connection to the child’s welfare.
yeah but attraction isnt action. part of my ‘devotion’ is a subsumption of my desire to the good of my beloved. my greatest good is the happiness and success of my lgfs as adults. i nurture them as much as i love them. it makes me happy to sacrifice my needs to theirs.
if i felt they _needed_ my sexual interest, i would oblige, but that just isn’t the message i get. they love me. i love them. we both know there is romance. …but its pretty tame.
> it makes me happy to sacrifice my needs to theirs.
Which is to be commended, but have you considered that your need to feel self-sacrificial comes about not just through an admirable concern for the child’s needs but also from the psychological pressure on you in our society to be “good” (i.e. non-sexual with children) as defined not by the child’s needs but by mainstream morality?
ps…. i said “sexual desire and sexual appetites are unique among desires and appetites in that their object is another human being”. … this is an overstatement. for example, the object of a desire for children is desire for another human being isn’t it.
and, for women in particular, a desire for children commonly expresses itself as ‘fuck me now’ horniness, so another illustration that we’re in the midst of some kind of celtic knot here.
Hello sean, and thanks for your reply. I’m sadly pressed for time, so my reply will be brief. I look forward to returning to such subjects at a later time, as well as to guest blog you were once invited to write.
==the same old identity politics .. now serves to rip Western societies apart?
as opposed to, say, uniting them in opposition to the same old hegemonic politics
Racism, sexism etc is unlikely to unite anyone but possibly the number of people matching the arbitrary pattern, or those irrational enough to explicitly act against their own interests. Demanding a tyrant match a pattern is also very different from demanding an end to tyranny.
As for Clinton being powerless, compare her vast wealth and support to that of the poor people, who dared not to vote for her, despite her own sense of entitlement.
the winning strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma is reciprocity.
Assuming this is true, there’s no reason for pedophiles to cooperate with those denying us and children freedom or assume their “holy” motives are based on anything but ruthless exploitation (defection instead of cooperation).
In a way, I am thankful for loving girls, more likely to follow a nice strategy than an evil one, than young women, who are much more likely to follow an evil strategy, at least if the articles are any indication.
I’m skeptical that again favoring trust is possible in the relatively short term we (either pedophiles or humanity) might have left according to the estimates of far greater minds than at least my own. I try, however, as far as I’m able and the little girls have so far proven resilient to the hateful propaganda they are fed by the wider society. It is my hope that they’ll continue on this path, favor stable relationships and eventually have children their own.
heeeeee’s baaaaack! 😀
Isn’t that what they cry in terror when they spot the ogre/monster in horror movies? 🙂
Dear Tom,
Now in my 80th year, I can look back to growing up in the 40s and 50s and being told: “Mike, I might allow you to listen to Dick Barton Special Agent on the radio if you do your homework now”. This was benevolent autocracy? Without it the household sank into anarchy and chaos? Yes!
But it was also the way of the world. The ‘quid pro quo’ of life, the give and take that bonds the world together with deals and agreements, pacts and treaties.
About the same time as wanting to hear the latest adventures of Dick Barton, Jock and Snowy, I went with some of the smaller boys in the village to the great oak tree wherein was built a tree-house presided over by the older boys. We sprogs wanted to join, of course. The price of admission? Strip off and do a dance for the older boys. I walked away sadly…
Why? The others did the dance and I was scorned as a coward. The truth was that I had been circumcised because of a persistent, virulent infection a couple of years earlier and I was desperately shy about my “round-head” appendage! The only one in the village… I laugh about it now, but then, it wasn’t funny.
Sad? Yes, but it was the way of the world then and now and always will be. Those who are bigger and stronger, richer and with more resources, will always hold hold a supplicant to ransom?
As I have said, there are obvious degrees of calumny involved in this. Yet one thing is certain, this recent Harvey Weinstein thing will give strength to both the extremists on the one hand and the pragmatic money-makers on the other!
M T-W.
Hi, Scholar’s Ink, or M T-W. to give your signing-off initials. Thanks for your interesting comment, which certainly reflects the wisdom of age, which of course I respect — not least because I too am a septuagenarian, albeit not yet on the cusp of octogenarian status like yourself!
However, even the perspective gained from eight decades of life is a bit dubious as a platform from which to assert “it was the way of the world then and now and always will be”. Mankind has been around, after all, not for eight decades, or centuries or even millennia. These all count as recent times when looked at from the perspective of the deep evolutionary past that I was writing about. In terms of “bestowed status”, the concept at the heart of my piece, there are good scholarly reasons (but by all means dispute them if you think you have the evidence to do so) to believe our social arrangements were fundamentally different back in pre-agricultural times.
If things could be so fundamentally different in the past, who can possibly say that future changes will not be equally radical?
i was one of a select minority of roundheads at my prep school so i feel your pain. i envied the cavaliers, even more when i saw what they could do with that thing…