Remember Judith Levine? Author of Harmful to Minors?
Back near the beginning of the millennium, soon after the White House had been occupied by a certain William Jefferson Clinton, she wowed us with this wonderful book that challenged the trend towards the ever more suffocating “protection” of children, which she saw as harmful because keeping kids “innocent” actually meant keeping them ignorant of good sex and relationships education while also depriving them of their own sexual and romantic expression.
Widely praised, Harmful to Minors was named by sex education body SIECUS as one of the most influential books of all time about sexuality. Hell, it even carried a foreword by a prominent member of the Clinton administration, Surgeon General Dr Joycelyn Elders.
Now, Levine is at it again, with a book out recently titled The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence. It is co-authored with Erica R. Meiners, a professor of education and gender studies.
The title will ring alarm bells for some MAPs: feminist interest in sex offending has generally been bad news ever since feminism some decades ago stopped being mainly about greater opportunities and freedom for women, and began to focus on victimhood instead. This was a shift that saw more and more emphasis not just on tackling real evils such as violent domestic abuse and coerced sexual acts, but also on eliminating “child sexual abuse” (CSA) with willing child participants, and cracking down on alleged “harassment”, “rape, “grooming” and “trafficking” no matter how non-harassed, non-raped, non-groomed or non-trafficked the so-called victim happened to be. Such feminists have tended to be as hostile to sex as any prudish Victorian “purity” campaigner, and have been firm supporters of draconian punishment.
Levine and Meiners take a very different approach, though, which we may feel deserves close examination. As the publisher’s blurb puts it, they make “a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice”.
The approach they reject, the one that is obsessed with often fabricated victimhood, and which promotes ferocious retribution via ever-longer prison incarceration, has been dubbed carceral feminism by its opponents, including Levine and Meiners. They distinguish it from abolition feminism, the latter being based on positive, not oppressive, ways to reduce sexual violence. They note, for instance, that the innovative, community-based, help for offenders available in recent years through Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) has been plausibly credited with achieving a 70% reduction in recidivism in crimes including sexual violence, such as real (as opposed to statutory) rape, and truly abusive acts against children. This is a massively successful strategy compared with putting offenders in prison and on sex offender (SO) registers, which make it all but impossible for them to lead a good and productive life.
Promoting enlightened ideas such as COSA is great, but the political forces favouring heavy punishment are immense. It’s not just carceral feminists: traditional conservatives are notoriously penal hard-liners too – pandering to their prejudices over the years has resulted in an ever-expanding prison system in the United States that now amounts to a huge industry, with over 2mn prison inmates detained in unproductive, wasted, lives at a cost of $ billions. This deeply illiberal thinking has even been adopted by politicians we might have hoped would take a more progressive line, notably the already mentioned Bill Clinton, whose 1994 crime bill played a major role in cranking up the punitive state, in part by throwing a huge amount of money into building more prisons.
And guess who was Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, spearheading the bill into law? Joe Biden! The President Elect, as he has now become, was responsible for bringing in the harsh three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, which resulted in a massive upsurge in people being jailed for life over mainly minor and often poverty-related offences.
With so much backing for the carceral state, stretching right across the political spectrum from pugnacious “law and order” Trump to his more emollient successor, will it ever be possible to bring about meaningful change?
Levine and Meiners argue that a successful challenge to the system is going to need strategic alliances among those who are opposed to it. Until now, they say, opposition to the violent state has been too fractured, not least in the US along race lines. They note that activists against the prison industrial complex are more likely to be non-White, while those advocating for men on the registry are mostly White. Moreover, neither side has had much use for feminism: “For many on the registry, feminism is public enemy number one.”
But they say feminist analysis now has a vital tool that urgently needs to be put to work, a tool that can help not just females, including the mothers, daughters, wives, and girlfriends of men and boys who are on the registry and in prison for sex offences, but also these males in their lives, whom typically they love dearly and whose family life depends on them.
The tool is a conceptual one, called “intersectionality”.
White feminists, the authors tell us, tended early on to think in universalist terms, seeing women as a universal oppressed entity, regardless of race, social class or sexuality. Black feminists challenged this: they had many survival issues to deal with, not just rape; so their concerns were orientated more on race and class lines.
Only in very recent years has “intersectionality” exploded onto the scene as an all-pervading buzzword for activists across the whole Anglophone world, but the term was coined back in 1989 by black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. It has been summarised as:
…a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities (e.g., gender, caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, height, etc.) combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies advantages and disadvantages that are felt by people due to a combination of factors.…
Levine and Meiners argue that any successful movement must be intersectional. It must take into account a range of cross-cutting, intersecting aspects of who we are, because we are all intersectional beings. And when they say all, they pay MAPs the compliment of counting us in as fellow humans (chillingly, as we know, many do not) explicitly naming us among the candidates who could fight to beat the vilification of which they speak:
Race, class, gender, sexuality, or ability cannot be separated from one another in thinking about people, systems, or politics. Nativists, racists, and the state’s punitive bureaucracy can defeat intersectionality by assigning labels – “illegal alien,” “felon,” “pedophile ” – that flatten identities to one vilified thing. If kept apart, groups of people are inevitably marginalized, and fissures open that resist healing. Movements falter. No movement can understand what it’s up against, or how to fight back, if it doesn’t locate itself at the crossroads of identities, situations, and oppressions.
OK, so what useful crossroads can we MAPs place ourselves at? Where can we find the strategic alliances we need? Whose identities intersect with our own?
From their American perspective, Levine and Meiners see great potential for SO registrants, who are disproportionately White, to join forces with others who suffer grave injustice in the legal system, who are mainly Black, noting that African Americans are disproportionately charged, convicted, and sentenced.
[CORRECTION: SO registrants, are NOT disproportionately White. What I meant, and should have written, is this: “There is a higher proportion of SO registrants who are White than would be expected from the relatively low proportion of Whites in the criminal population overall.” My thanks to “onkse” for pointing out my error. See comment below.]
It has to be said that such an alliance looks a very big ask. The authors tell us that for White registrants to join forces with the anti-prison movement would mean assuming a kind of kinship with Black folk, and acknowledging that in spite of the depredations they suffer as “predators”, they still enjoy White privilege – what the pioneering African-American scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois called “the public and psychological wage” of Whiteness.
Really? At this point, I have to say, one begins to wonder what planet Levine and Meiners are on. It was perhaps broadly true, more than a century ago when Du Bois was making his mark, that nearly all Whites in the US were clearly privileged compared to nearly all Blacks. But those days are long gone. Try telling the poor White registrant how privileged he is when he has lost his job, family and friends, and is banished to eking out a desperate life under a bridge at a highway “intersection”! Who could possibly find headspace for such nonsense, we might think, except elite journalists and academics whose privilege is so secure they have lost touch with the lives of those on the margins?
We might even begin to see all this banging on about “White privilege” as anti-White racism. If so, we would be in good company: conservative gay writer Douglas Murray has argued very persuasively along these lines in his book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, which I recommend as an antidote to fashionable “wokeness” and “grievance studies” across a range of issues. Likewise, Andrei Arkhanguelski takes on the ugly, bullying excesses of some Black Lives Matter ideologues in a superb essay of around 10,000 words (take your time, he’s worth it!) titled “The destructive effects of identity politics and cancel culture on society”. Access is free, at Medium.com.
That said, it would be grossly unfair to Levine and Meiners to accuse them of racism. They are doing their damnedest to bring people together against state oppression, not split them apart along race lines – or other lines, for that matter: they counsel that White registrants need to stop seeing themselves as the only people who are unfairly targeted by the justice system despite not being criminals in any true sense; they need to take on board that Black lives really are held cheap by many police officers, and Black men, especially, may end up in prison effectively for no good reason. To Black anti-prison organizers, they say they must stop recoiling away in moralistic horror from White MAPs, and instead work with them. Also, “queers must not succumb to sexual McCarthyism, seeking safety and respectability by renouncing others more ‘despicable’ than themselves.”
That’s a lot of lecturing from these authors. Will anyone be listening?
Some will be reflexively dismissive, such as a conservative MAP friend of mine (yes, I believe in listening to people with different views to my own) whose antennae are well tuned to anti-MAP injustice but whose tribal instincts oblige him to Other everyone else who falls foul of the law: to him, they are obviously the real bad guys. They are the real murderers, gangsters and rapists, he insists. Why would we want to make a strategic alliance with people like that? It is a view that completely misses the unnecessary incarceration of those who are unjustly targeted on a racial basis for trivial or concocted offences.
Other MAPs, such as Peter Herman, of NAMBLA, take a much more positive attitude. Writing as a guest blogger here at Heretic TOC not long ago, he said:
Those who have an innate love for boys and are White (heaven protect those with the double jeopardy of also being Black) may not be immediately visible, but in a different way are denied much of “White privilege” and are ideally positioned to understand Black anger.
I replied somewhat sceptically:
We can express our solidarity with Black Lives Matter. That’s good. But will they join our struggle in return? Can we expect to hear “Thank you, brother! Your life matters too! We will work with you to end your oppression!” Don’t hold your breath.
Also, in an email exchange to which I was privy, NAMBLA member Ben Lavry said he had tuned in to a Zoom event associated with the Levine and Meiners book. Nearly all the participants he could see on screen were White women, most of them elderly. Not a bunch of activists who would have a lot of street cred on the ’hood, we might think, or wing cred in Rikers Island or San Quentin.
Early days, though. The book is essentially a manual for activists, and its message needs time to filter through, with potential for finding its way into the hands and hearts of all manner of community groups – including all those mothers, daughters, wives and girlfriends I mentioned earlier: we should not underestimate the change-making power of women in this struggle.
There have already been some healthy developments along these lines. The National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL) in the US has had some notable successes. NARSOL’s former Californian chapter, CA RSOL, challenged ordinances governing registered sex offenders in federal courts across the state. During 2014 over 20 municipalities were sued by CA RSOL. These efforts culminated in victory the following year when the Supreme Court of California declared residency restrictions unconstitutional, citing their unfairness and counterproductive effects.
Women have been prominent in all this. Through peaceful demonstrations, educational forums, and political events, Women Against Registry has given the cause visibility and political credibility. As Levine and Meiners say, the registrants’ rights movement is a women’s movement.
I mentioned “hearts”. The target of The Feminist and the Sex Offender, though, is also “minds” and “plans”: the book is all about intelligent political tactics, compromise and alliances, all of which are desperately needed but none of which is intuitively appealing to the heart. It is a crafty game, in other words, and one in which women could end up helping us MAPs more than we are able to help ourselves. How ironic would that be for those among us who hate feminism?
THE BARONESS OBLIGES
It you were choosing the name of a villainess for your next pulp fiction thriller you might well settle for Baroness Black: tradition, after all (black as sin, black-hearted) has no qualms about the racist implications of equating black with evil.
Be that as it may, the real baroness of that name goes a long way to realising this “black sheep of the family” potential, having just come out with a deliciously wicked memoir in which she skewers her many enemies, sparing no details about her life of epic extravagance, sexual shenanigans (including with a Doberman!), and goldmine of a marriage to newspaper tycoon Conrad Black, who was later brought low in a corruption scandal, jailed, and latterly pardoned by his pal President Trump.
Her Ladyship was once so rich she could afford bedsheets at £10,000 each, a vast wardrobe of exclusive dresses, shoes, handbags and jewellery, and shopping trips by private jet, ending up for the evening in one of her many luxurious mansions dotted around the globe.
Oh, yes, and not just the one jet either: “It is always best to have two planes, because however well one plans ahead, one always finds one is on the wrong continent”, she said.
Priceless! Literally!
But that’s not how I knew Her Ladyship when she somehow graciously found time to write to me between all the shopping, the partying, the hobnobbing with presidents and princes, and the, er, dog pleasuring. Back then, maybe twenty years ago or more, to me she was just Barbara Amiel, a trenchant columnist for The Times, and later The Daily Telegraph. I knew Conrad owned the latter but I had no idea he was her husband.
I can’t dig out the details because my desktop search is playing up at the moment, but it might have been soon after one of her articles, headlined “Paedophile hysteria is turning us into a brutish society”; or perhaps an earlier one in similar vein. Anyway, you get the drift. For a right-wing socialite, she had a surprisingly enlightened and humane view of adult sexual attraction to children, and was brave enough to express it. I wrote to tell her how pleased I was, and she replied with evident delight at finding at least one person who had not been appalled.
Before hooking up with Black, according to The Times, she was much sought after by another media mogul, Australia’s Kerry Packer. On two occasions he is said to have paid her £100,000 for the pleasure of her company of an evening while he gambled in a smart London casino.
Happily, I can report that she didn’t charge anything at all for sending me a nice letter!
A MALIGNANT PETER PAN
Douglas Murray is on a bit of a roll this week for coverage in Heretic TOC. I mentioned his book The Madness of Crowds, above, and now I come to another I am sure many here would like to know about. This second one is Bosie: The Tragic Life of Lord Alfred Douglas, which was first published in 2000 and has now been reissued for the 150th anniversary of Douglas’s birth.
Famed as a lover of Oscar Wilde, “Bosie” plainly makes a fascinating subject for a biography, starting with his family. “The Douglases were mad”, declares reviewer Roger Lewis in The Times unambiguously. Flying into fits of rage, gibbering and snarling as an inherited trait was only the start of it. We hear that one ancestor impaled a cook’s boy on a spit and roasted him – which sounds a great deal more grotesquely criminal than the sodomy of which Lord Alfred’s father accused Wilde.
Bosie himself, we learn, was a ghastly narcissist, given to blaming all his self-made misfortunes on others. Mollycoddled and spoiled by his mother, he “remained at heart a little boy until his death”, according to Murray. Lewis sums him up as “a malignant Peter Pan whose chief mode of communication was the tantrum”.
One point of particular interest here is that Bosie’s life demonstrates the terrible power lovers have to retrospectively withdraw their consent, as it were, and to re-write history regarding the nature of a relationship. After Wilde’s downfall, Bosie eventually repudiated him and became vehemently moralistic. Lewis notes:
Paradoxically, the person he started to resemble was his own bigoted father as he started threatening to horsewhip Wilde’s old friends, like Robbie Ross, for being sodomites. As Murray discloses, Bosie now “felt anger, bitterness and hatred” about every aspect of Wilde, whom he declared was “the greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe” since the Reformation. “He was the agent of the devil in every possible way.”
Extreme rejection of this sort, I suggest, has nothing to do with the original relationship with Wilde, or what the pair of them did in bed. Instead, it has everything to do with the disgrace heaped upon Wilde and Bosie’s keenness to distance himself from it. Such is the awesome power of a hostile culture.
a new study comparing the recidivism of sexual and non-sexual offences, over the child and over the adult:
“Since the 1990s, however, the Canadian criminal justice system has taken a different approach to the issue of sex offender recidivism.., focusing on treatment, rehabilitation, and community risk management.., weighted pooled recidivism rates have declined since the 1970s by more than 60%.”
Tom, do you know these books:?
I read an interesting article by Amia Srinivasan, the author of the second book. This is it:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex
Both books no doubt include politically important analysis but they are not anywhere near the top of my reading list. But if any heretics here would like to review them I imagine we would be keen to read what they discover.
I’ve just read this article, and, talking from my personal experience, not the women rejecting me as a lover is the problem, but the men (mostly the women’s boyfriends, husbands and fathers) who’ve forbidden me to offer sex to women (to harass the women sexually, according to their terminology). The real problem is jealous and rivalry, not the lack of attractiveness
Tom, this new book may be interesting for you: Newport, Melanie D. This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2g7v1m4.
Thanks, Cyril.
Far too many prisoners in hellholes at all levels in the US, from local jails through to state and federal prisons. The facts are already very well known and are often written about. The question is, How can it be changed?
I haven’t read the book, but the whole approach is highly suspect. It isn’t that we haven’t tried to join ranks with other groups. It’s that other groups refuse to join ranks with us. It’s not that we failed to understand the importance of intersectionality. It’s that the intersectionalists, run by feminist cabals, refuse to understand the importance of us. And so we are always sidelined.
Tom wrote below:
Exactly. Intersectionalism intersects on the non-existence of Tom OC.
›…the innovative, community-based help for offenders… is a massively successful strategy compared with putting offenders in prison ans sex-offender (SO) register…‹
There cannot be community-based help for “sex offenders” Police are willing to infect my PC (2016) and arrest me during a single-man demonstration (2019) to prevent children from seeing my post(er)s but they brought children to me in order to have a reason for arrest (2019-06-26), make children film me (2019-05-23 and twice on 2020-07-10), show children naked from a balcony (one of the sundays 2016-07-05/-10-05), follow after me to the toilets of the National Mining University (~2016) and police building (2019-06-26), etc. In order to justify keeping me under illegal home arrest police sends children to walk in front of me while I go to the movie-club (2018-05, winter 2019/2020), workplace (2019-04), hospital (2020-06-10), library (summer/fall 2016) — and strong men walk after them or after me in order to protect children from me while they are sent to walk by me! Police used a Ministry of Justice of Ukraine’s public lawyer “Maxim Schults” to recommend me film suspicious passerbies, which I did 2020-06-06, and charge with stalking (2020-11-29). So, police and community are prepared to subject children to “sex abuse” in order to present me as an abuser. That’s why there will never be any alternative to “carceration feminism”.
>So, police and community are prepared to subject children to “sex abuse” in order to present me as an abuser. That’s why there will never be any alternative to “carceration feminism”.
Your country is very different in some ways to the English-speaking western ones, Cyril.
However, a year has passed since this blog was published and I must admit I cannot see any progress resulting from the developments described in the book by Meiners and Levine. I contacted the authors but they have shown no enthusiasm for intersectional cooperation with Heretic TOC.
›Your country is very different
Come on! The day before yesterday I’ve read the William Percy text, about “Derek Longdan” CP provocation against you. One Dutch anti-CP campaigner claims that children get psychological trauma when they know somebody fapped on them. So the British police subjected porn-models to psychological trauma when they made you transport CP to “Derek.” Police are similar in all countries of the world.
great site tom, but you wouldn’t welcome my thoughts !
Well, there’s a challenge! You could well be right. I might find your thoughts deeply uncomfortable and even painful. But do not hold back on that account. I prefer not to hide from what readers really think.
As long as you express yourself in courteous terms – the usual rules here – there is every prospect any further comment you make will be not only read by me but also published.
You may want to add this to your blog roll, I’m not sure.
https://blsafety.net/
I learned about it today. It’s a site that gives advice on how to keep yourself from being exposed as a boy-lover or doxxed. It seems to be ran by a boy-lover and the advice can be extended to MAPs in general.
On the Mega Archive – one that is among the links of the Tom’s “Hotspots” – there was once a wide selection of the German-language books that suddenly disappeared without a trace someday. That was a pity: I have just raised my German level to the point when I could have read all these books without difficulty…
So, I’d like to ask: does anyone know who compiled this archive, so (s)he may be asked where the German books have gone? Maybe someone who knows the person who provided the archive to us may contact him or her and ask if the books in German will be back one day?
Hey Tom. You’re one of my heroes. Love your stuff mate. When I talk to people about age of consent activism, I send them straight to your blog. However, I’m curious about your opinions on the age of consent. I’ve always thought it should be around 12-14. It’s easy to convince people that teenagers should have the right to choose who they want to be in a relationship with. Plus, there’s good science showing 14 year olds have the same decision making abilities as 21 year olds. And that 13 year olds, in relationships with guys 20+ experience no negative effects from the relationship. However, when talking about children, IE, 4 year olds, you don’t support like lowering the age of consent to 4 right? I feel like Amos Yee, and other activists, would make much more of an impact if they talked about teenagers, as opposed to 4 year olds.
Why do people need “decision making abilities” in order to experience such a natural thing as an orgasm? This is as logical as saying that 4 year olds should abstain from eating chicken beacuse they don’t know the mechanisms governing digestion processes.
So, ok. Lets say a 4 year old boy is enticed with candy, to give someone a handjob. Then, when he becomes an adolescent, he realizes, one, he isn’t gay. And two, the person he gave a handjob too is also mentally retarded, and incredibly low status, leading to a large sense of shame.
Aside from the social shame aspect of sex. There’s also a spiritual aspect. You exchange energies with the person you have sex with, taking on their emotions and characteristics.
Shame
Emotional attachment that leads to massive amounts of suffering
Sex addiction, leading to over-masturbation, and degeneration of the physical body.
Stds.
Merging your energy with hundreds of random dudes.
Sex isn’t the same thing as eating chicken lol.
Mate, nobody is going to accept a world where their 4 year olds get passed around in preschool. Be an ally, and advocate for a reasonable age of consent at adolescence. Or else you’re wasting your potential on something that’s never going to happen.
I like you for questioning the age of consent. But you’re talking about 4 year olds. It’s unreasonable. Come to the center.
Well, a lot to disagree with, Allen. Some thoughts:
1) In a modern intellectual climate, it is effectively impossible to advocate the softening of a sexual restraint on anyone before the supposed “full maturity”. No matter if you argue for more freedom for 12-year old adolescent or 6-year old child, the amount of hatred and the level of repression you will receive will be quite comparable. So, if you are willing to sacrifice your public image for advocating for something that despised by nearly everyone – and yet true and worthy of such sacrifice – there is no pragmatic reason to make compromises. Take it ot leave it.
2) The idea of the fixed “age of something”, be it age of “consent”, “majority”, whatever, is objectively inadequate and unjust. It is so not only because all people develop with different pace, thus many people fully capable of something would be inadequately and unjustly banned from doing this something simply because they have not reached a specific fixed age. It is also because a single person oftentimes develops with different pace in different aspects of his or her existence: say, one may become intellectually sophisticated in a very young age, yet still remain very emotionally vulnerable, and vice versa. To the contrary, the approach that was once formulated by radical child liberationists – ABILITY, NOT AGE – is both adequate and just, evaluating each case individually, on its own merits.
3) The children’s and adolescents’ abilities and capabilities in ALL spheres are almost always notably underestimated and severely undervalued nowadays. Even preadolescent kids are in fact much more intellectually sophisticated, emotionally resilient etc. than most modern people tend to think. As a child raised in a near-anarchic society of 1990s Russia, when children were largely left to their own devices by the adults too concentrated on winning bread to control their kids’ life and behaviour, I can attest to it.
4) Emotional attachment exists in any interpersonal relationship, whether or not it involves an (overt) sexual element. Any interpersonal relationship may indeed cause severe pain if being somehow shattered or torn apart… or provide with great joy, with new experiences and venues of development that would not be available without involvement in this relationship. The inclusion of sexuality simply enrich it further, providing the participants with a lot of new possibilities – in case of children, these include bodily exploration, emotional growth etc. – as well as, surely, with additional risks; possibilities and risks are always coming together. But the exact possibility-risk ratio is radically different in different cases: a relationship with an responsible and reasonable paedosexual adult brings more possibilities than risks; the relationship with reckless and ruthless scoundrel bring much more risks than possibilities. To equate them is just plain false.
5) Any activity – and any relationship – may degenerate into addiction. Eating, BTW, is quite addictive: ask all people who are sensually and emotionally dependent on junk food, understanding that it damages them yet unable to reshape their eating habits. Yet it does not mean that children, or other people, should be forbidden to eat; their parents – and other people in their life, say, an adult friend who is, occasionally, becomes a sexual playmate – should help them to develop better eating habits.
6) Many people here, being materialists and opponents of heretical science like parapsychology, would simply dismiss your point about energy merging. I, not being a materialist and having a friendly interest into the heretical scientific research areas, will not do it. This interest of mine, however, also taught me to be very cautious claiming the acts and effects beyond the material, and to always base my claims of them on a solid evidence. So, I will say: we know of many cases of such relationships being positive and fruitful, recalled with warmth by now-grown former kids; of the relationships that very definitely did not damaged them, and even quite evidently benefited them. So, whatever conjunction of energies took place there, it was quite clearly beneficial for the children involved! Again, the benefit surely depends on the qualities of a specific relationship, and on the adult participating in it; if the adult, and the relationship, is quite ugly, the result will likely be damaging… but oftentimes, it evidently isn’t.
7) If the first six points are understood and accepted, it becomes crystal clear that the whole problem are not sex-involving child-adult sexual relationships as such, but the differentiation between the merits of different relationships with different people, some of whom are quite benevolent, and worthy of being related to, and some are not (until / unless they change their ways for the better). But the insanely hostile attitude of the modern society to ALL such relationships, based on the demonstrably false belief that ALL such relationships are equally and intrinsically nonconsensual and damaging, and the resulting secrecy of such relationships being formed and maintained in the moment, is EXACTLY what makes such productive differentiation impossible. Were such relationships, in general, be acceptable, and thus usually known to family, community etc., it would be quite possible for the other adults in child’s life to monitor them somewhat, and to intervene if would be really necessary. What should be changed, is the dominant social attitude.
8) In the end I would add that no one can be sure what amount and intensity of social change is “realistic”. During the last few centuries, the Western(ised) societies have transformed, deeply and profoundly, several times, each time bringing changes so radical that they would seem impossible – or even completely unimaginable – to the people of previous eras. Just look at the fundamental change of the status of women; the modern sex / gender equality would be simply unthinkable for the people who lived centuries ago. There is no reason to preemptively proclaim any social change “impossible”.
@explorer. A well thought out rebuttal. Well done.
1.I personally convinced a child psychologist, who originally wanted the age of consent to be 25, that it’s cool to date 14 year olds . I did this because I made it very clear I wasn’t talking about children. A 14 year old with two middle fingers up to the police, and her parents, is cool. A 4 year old in diapers that says goo goo gah gah is uncool. If you think the hatred towards intergenerational relationships with teenagers is the same, i invite you to type into the youtube search box “Mötley Crüe – All In The Name Of… HD Live Moscow”
And listen to Motley Crue sing about banging a 15 year old in front of an audience of 800,000 cheering fans.
When Amos yee started his whole pedo activism thing, we saw in the comment section, people saying things like “he’s not even talking about teenagers, he’s talking about small babies, wtf”
We saw similar things with Zhang muyi, and Akami Miki, on chinese social media. People saying things like ” He met her when she was 8. This isn’t even lolita, ie, the attraction to 13 year olds, this is just weird”.
It’s way easier to convince people that it’s fine to date a teenager. I do it all the time. The age of consent is still 13-14 in multiple countries. We had the case recently in germany where the 14 year old ran off to france with her 47 year old uncle. The parents made the police bring them back, and the court ruled she can do whatever she wants.
Teleiophilia is biologically inferior to Ebophilia. A girls reproductive value declines after around the age of 19. In the past, men that married young teenage girls had a leg up over their competition. It’s an easy argument to convince people of. Dating 2 year old isn’t though.
2.A teenager can have sex, without physical injury. A four year old can’t.
3.When studying children, teenagers, and people 20+, in terms of health making decisions. The 14 year olds were the same as the 21 year olds. The 9 year olds differed from the 14 and 21 year olds.
4.There’s not much to explore in the physical body. Two arms, two legs, and a dong.
5.The majority of murders in the world occur between two people that have had sex. It’s not the same as addiction to junk-food.
6.Evidence about things like this are found through contemplative practices like meditation. As for the argument about the relationship being mutually beneficial for both parties. Amos Yee said this same thing. ShoeOnHead responded to this exact comment with disgust, as did her audience. People think it sounds creepy, and weird. Because they are thinking about a 2 year old and 60 year old man. The reaction is different with teenagers. So again, what is more reasonable to argue for? What is more likely to happen?
7.Possibly. But it’s really just never going to happen. And even if it did, as I said before, a 4 year old doesn’t even know his sexual orientation. What’s stopping that four year old boy from being enticed into something he knows nothing about, by a 60 year old guy, then becoming a teenager and realizing he isn’t gay. And also, lets say the 60 year old isn’t just gay, but also has a mental handicap. How would you feel knowing that all your sexual partners were low status, mentally handicap, nerds, that you don’t even want anything to do with?
8.Inferior, teleiophile men have always been cucked. Benjamin franklin was talking about bringing back corporal punishment, for domestic violence cases, long before the suffragette movement. I don’t think the move for womens rights was that much of a radical shift at all.
Anyways, we share a few differences in opinion, but that’s ok. You’re still more of an ally than a granny banging teleiophile 😉
Best of luck buddy.
“Anyways, we share a few differences in opinion, but that’s ok. You’re still more of an ally than a granny banging teleiophile 😉”
I hope I won’t disappoint you too much, Allen, by confessing that a teleiophile I am – yes, a disturbingly “normal” heterosexual cisgender teleiophile male adult. My sexual attraction is to the female adults of roughly my own age – this is, in their 30s, sometimes even 40s (does the sexual desire to women somewhat older than me make me a “granny banger”, I wonder?) 😉
The reason I’m here is my devout John Holt-style (ever heard about him? maybe even read?) child liberationism – combined with sexual liberationism and general libertarianism / anarchism, and the MAP ally-ism resulting from these worldview-choices of mine.
You correctly assert the aesthetic and spiritual superiority of childlove.
As for the remark about cucked men, this is true.
Male society is so cucked that there is simply no hope for the glories of childlove.
The comment concerning the Chinese couple is depressing if pedohostility exists in China also. How sad. China might have offered some hope as it will be the dominant superpower within thirty years. Probably sooner.
The truth is that men are the most disgusting cucks and the truth that most men given the choice prefer twelve year old beauties over 20 year old is suppressed.
I was sitting on a bus and a beautiful girl of twelve got on and she had lovely dark hair, a winning smile and sandals. Oh, she was a darling! You could actually feel the energy surge through the adult men as she said “hi” to everyone. In order to display such confidence she simply must have been in a sexual relationship either with her father/uncle or another older male.
One of these men on the bus, about twenty years old, was with his ugly same age girlfriend and I sensed her rebuke of him. I bet he jerked off that night thinking about that girl!
The beauty and truth of Girl-love is dead and that is a sad thing. There is no hope for the future. Fuck humanity and fuck the Great Reset! This whole Covid scam…
I was saying on Eivind Berge’s blog how throughout history the most beautiful girls were 11 to fifteen, as may be discerned from studying paintings and reading. Men today are such pathetic cucks. The Antifeminist then mentioned how the sculptor Canova immortalised the sexuality of girls in their early and mid teens. This is true beauty, not ugly, miserable adult women who hate men and are jealous even of their own daughters.
Well, the 1970s and early 80s were a period of great Enlightenment but that is gone now and all that is left of it in the English language is this blog and O’ Carroll twisting in the wind. Depressing.
Only male run societies will save us. We must abolish universal suffrage and introduce an authoritarian child-love society.
>So, ok. Lets say a 4 year old boy is enticed with candy, to give someone a handjob. Then, when he becomes an adolescent, he realizes, one, he isn’t gay. And two, the person he gave a handjob too is also mentally retarded, and incredibly low status, leading to a large sense of shame.
There is no reason why realising you aren’t (predominantly) gay should make you feel ashamed of having once engaged in gay sexual activity. Nor is there any reason why anyone should feel ashamed of giving sexual pleasure to someone with learning difficulties as long as it was done in a safe and mutually consenting way.
Of course this is not the world we’re living in. In the actual world, these things are a source of shame. So with current social attitudes your scenario is indeed likely to cause problems. But the shame is ultimately unnecessary and so the attitudes ought to change. And if we ever reach the point where legalised sex between 4-year-olds and adults could be seriously contemplated by most people, then these attitudes would probably have changed anyway.
Age of consent reform is a secular process – currently it is outside the political mainstream altogether. I think a future where laws are liberalised is inevitable. Having said that, first it makes sense to see children with a sense of independence and autonomy. This is a long and possibly distant process that will play out on an unknown timescale. Perhaps a sense of shame holds politicians back from considering AoC reform – that and its virulent unpopularity among the public. And is that shame justified? I do not think so, because above all children’s wellbeing and happiness are to be celebrated, and there is an erotic drive from a very young age. But initially, we should see children as deserving of a greater degree of independence and self-expression – which is I believe an inevitable result of changing social conditions.
Hey Zen thinker. Nice to meet you. Are you a fellow Buddhist perhaps? 😉
Anyways, in response to your comment about children deserving a greater degree of independence, it depends on who you’re referring to when you say children. If we’re talking about teenagers, as judith levine states in her first book, girls from the ages of 12-16 shouldn’t be subject to the same laws as a 4 year old.
Teenagers, that know if they’re gay, straight, bi, know what they want in a sexual partner, know who they want, and are aware of what’s going on around them, of course deserve a greater degree of independence. Telling a teenager, who has two middle fingers in your face, who she can and can’t date, is basically harassment. And it’s annoying.
However, if you’re talking about actual children. IE, 4 year olds. They definitely don’t need more independence. They would walk out into traffic and get hit by a car.
We should be reasonable in our activism, so as to not become memes to the general public.
The general public is already a meme. They call a 15 year old with a beer in one hand, and a cigarette in the other, a “child”. Which is pretty hilarious. But to one up them in their lulz by saying 4 year olds should be independent, is counter-intuitive.
I just think the pedos need to come to the ebo side. We’ve got braces, parties, pigtails, and mick jagger. It’s great over here.
It’s not even a case of activism on my part (I’m not an activist). It’s simply socio-cultural observation. Children are flooding the new forms of social media (the ’13’ minimum requirement is pathetically enforced), they’re accessing pornography (note, not really a good thing for developing brains, but again, pathetically enforced), they’re much more self-conscious (fashion, makeup, etc), they’re constantly exposed to and imitative of the pop music scene, with mature language and sexual themes, celebrity children are constantly in the tabloids and gossip mags, the Daily Mail attacks Tom in one article then brazenly flaunts children in bikinis in the next, the internet age has fundamentally reshaped childhood in every way…these new socio-cultural influences acting on even young children are a complete paradigm shift, and no-one knows yet what the upshot is of such a rapid change, but you can bet that eventually laws governing ostensible ‘child safety’ will develop and liberalise to meet the new reality. In the Reg Bailey report of 2010 the theme was very much ‘let kids be kids’. Well (aside from the saccharine sentimentality of that phrase) that is very much a distant dream now, as social forces are taking over, and in any case ‘activism’ only succeeds if it fortuitously meets the requirements of the time.
A suspected MAP is raped with a piece of pipe and killed by villians in Russia:
• https://www.gazeta.ru/social/2020/08/27/13213447.shtml
• https://www.znak.com/2020-08-27/v_verhney_pyshme_rassleduetsya_zhestokoe_ubiystvo_muzhchiny_kotorogo_prinyali_za_pedofila
• https://lenta.ru/news/2020/08/27/kidscrime/
• https://www.mk.ru/incident/2020/08/27/rossiyanina-oshibochno-prinyali-za-pedofila-iznasilovali-truboy-i-ubili.html
Russia is sick. Surprisingly though, their age of consent law is still lower than in america, the land of the chains.
Not only Russia, unfortunately. Once-free Netherlands is doing ever worse… As well as the rest of the world:
https://marthijn.nl/p/211
In this excellent video Thaddeus Russell interviews philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar, who has some very radical views about the moral and legal status of child-adult sex. The section about that begins about 31 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIG__mlSEms
Yes, just seen the relevant section, which lasts about 20 minutes.
Around about 46 minutes in, Russell addresses the audience, asking if any of them them experienced an underage relationship with an adult. Let’s hope some will report any positive experiences to him, especially if he can find any who are brave enough to be interviewed about it on his show.
I am puzzled about something and maybe you, Tom, or someone else can help me out. In 2015, Kershnar published a book called Pedophilia and Adult-child sex: A philosophical Analysis. This book can be found in full on the ‘Mega-archive site’ (see the blog-roll to the right). But his web page at Fredonia says that in 2015 he published Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Defense. Are these really two different books? Could he really have published two entirely different books on paedophilia in the same year? Or are they just the same book issued under different titles? But that seems just as implausible. The other odd thing is that I can’t find any information about Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Defense, even on the the website of the publisher (Lexington). What’s going on?
In front of me, as I write, is a hardback copy of Kershnar’s book, with the title Pedophilia and Adult-child sex: A philosophical Analysis.
Key in this title at Amazon or Google Books and it comes up immediately. Key in the other title, Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Defense, and you get, well, a load of titles but not the one you searched for, whether in hardback or any other format.
So why is the “defense” version on the author’s official university website page? I don’t know but I can think of a couple of plausible possibilities:
1) The “defense” version was the title Kershnar wanted but his publisher thought it was too committed and hence too risky.
2) The “defense” version was a Freudian slip on Kershnar’s part. Asked by the university to give info for the faculty webpages, the actual title slipped his mind and he subconsciously came up with a version that would have been “repressed” but for the slip.
I guess we could ask him, but an email I sent about a year ago went unanswered (as indeed did another email I sent to his interviewer, Thaddeus Russell).
Very plausible. I think theory 1 is more likely as there are two distinct differences between the title Kershnar gives on his web page and the real title (the omission of ‘pedophilia’ and the replacement of ‘analysis’ with ‘defence’). It seems unlikely that he would mangle it up that much by mistake.
Good point!
People should give this youtube video a like. Also, buy the book and give it a 5 star rating on amazon.
Dating in the #MeToo era:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hKiNkvn0N8
Hilarious all-too-true satire; just a shame reality is a lot less amusing!
I’ve been following the Orwellian nightmare currently engulfing the Labour party. Here is a pertinent video:
https://twitter.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1334480600946929667?s=20&fbclid=IwAR0ssuWNwJcPlO08Ra62aPo0dCq7h_0XJ2EnkFoBTMvAyTSc-SukT9gyBrE
Being suspended from the Labour party is starting to look like a proof of one’s integrity.
And I include you in that, Tom!
In the video she says that for a left-winger, “to be called an anti-Semite oneself is about as low as it gets, it is a bit like being accused of paedophilia or something, I cannot think of anything worse.”
Those who have learned to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism have still to learn to break other amalgams, like “paedophilia = child rape”.
Thanks, Stephen! Unfortunately, I cannot access the Twitter link as I have been kicked off that platform just as I have been booted out of Labour!
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j8t7rthwvU&has_verified=1
She is plainly a good woman. It’s a shame she knows nothing about paedophilia but that is not the real issue in this video.
Yes, I noticed the remark about paedophilia, but didn’t get too annoyed, as it didn’t seem important in the context. To be honest, I’ve got to the point where, when listening to anything on the general topic of marginalization or persecution, I feel practically certain that someone is eventually going to make some kind of derogatory remark about paedophiles. I’m almost hardened to it. ‘Almost’, but not quite. It still hurts a bit, particularly when it’s someone you admire.
I think the term ‘paedophilia’ is problematic, as in the last few decades it has been conflated with rape, murder and acts of heinous violence. I doubt it can ever be rehabilitated from media, political and popular misuse.
In fact I reject that label personally. My sexuality is heterosexual with strong MAP elements. I don’t mind the MAP moniker at all although I don’t call myself exclusively MAP. To the outside world I am simply a heterosexual. If the political and cultural climate were more favourable I might discuss it openly, and indeed I would love to discuss it more broadly in society.
But outside safe spaces like this blog, you simply get (often violently) shut down.
So much for the arc of moral progress.
But the saying is “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” So it’s basically optimistic. No, we don’t have justice now, and maybe we won’t have it for quite a while, but we will have it eventually.
I know how you feel. I try to avoid listening to anything in the english language. Because I know sooner or later, someones gonna bring up the age of consent topic and trigger me.
I’m curious to know, then, Allen, what language(s) you prefer to listen to things in. If it’s your native language, what is that, if you don’t mind me asking?
In the title of her article in <em>Signs</em> 36(1), 2010, Elizabeth Bernstein wrote “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism” to characterise the campaign against “sex trafficking” (in reality, prostitution) waged by a coalition of Evangelists, feminists, NGOs, etc.
I have also read “punitive feminism” elsewhere. Now, I introduce the term “McCarthyist feminism” to denote the type of feminism that equates accused of sex offence with presumed guilty, calls for harsh punishments, persecutes sexual deviance, slanders opponents, and denounces the “sexual revolution” of the 1965–1975 period as “only for men.” Just like Joe McCarthy, they are upper-class Americans persecuting deviants in the name of “freedom.”
>“McCarthyist feminism”. Very appropriate!
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2704/two-new-books-argue-for-a-more-forgiving-stance-on-sexual-violence-24258
A (quite negative)review of Levine’s new book as well as of a new book by Joann Wypijewski. In fact, so negative that it made me want to buy and read both of them!
I tried to access this but was faced with the most rigorous ‘captcha’ test I’ve ever come across and failed it. But it says I can try again later!
Strange, I didn’t get a captcha test at all.
Just like you, though, I failed such a test a few days ago, in my case when trying to access Microsoft customer services. The test presented me with about six different pictures, each showing a mouse in a maze, with a piece of cheese located in another part of the maze.
I was required to click on the picture showing which mouse was going to go hungry because getting at the cheese would be impossible. Unfortunately, the pictures are quite small and the time allowed is about 0.1 of a nanosecond! It soon becomes clear that the solution is quite easy: the answer is a picture where the cheese is immediately surrounded by four impenetrable “walls”, so the route taken by the mouse is irrelevant. On each showing of the picture array, though, I was unable to spot the image and click on it at the required speed!
The whole point of a captcha test is to prove that you are human. But this one seems to set a performance standard that requires you to be superhuman!
However, I did eventually manage to get connected to customer services after I noticed there was an audio option for subhumans such as myself! In this case you hear a voice reading out a list of numbers, which you must key in, in the correct order. This, too, requires you to get a move on or you’re zapped. Anticipating this, I got my skates on and just about made it.
I find myself wondering whether this hard test thing is just some sort of sadistic joke dreamt up by the engineers at MS, Google or whoever in an idle moment.
Looking “captcha” up, I see it stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
So far as I am aware, Stephen, you and I are both humans. What does it mean if we struggle to pass the Turing test? Could we both, unbeknown to ourselves, actually be robots or replicants or something?
Am I a robot? Well, I seem to be conscious. But then perhaps a robot could be conscious. So that doesn’t prove I’m not a robot.
Discuss.
Ha, ha, tough one! I’d better phone a friend. Maybe E.T.!
Seriously, though (and at the risk of going into philosophical overdrive), there are some writers who think, in effect, that we are simply robots who happen to be made of organic stuff instead of microchips etc. I think that would be a fair characterization of Daniel Dennett’s view, for example.
Is Dennett wrong?
No, I think he’s right. What I object to in Dennett, though, is his claim that he has ‘explained consciousness’. He has done no such thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure that consciousness is something that really needs explaining.
Yes, it is pretty negative. There’s a lot one could say about what I am sure is egregious misconstrual of the authors’ arguments, but I’ll just briefly comment on this phrase from the review:
‘the small “registered citizens’ movement,” an advocacy group made up primarily of white male sex offenders and their female relatives.’
I can almost hear the disgusted tone in which the reviewer might have said these words!
Thanks, Liz, for this link. Stephen James, in his response to your post (q.v.), says he thinks the author must have made an “egregious misconstrual” of the authors’ arguments. I would say there was some distortion, especially in the last paragraph, but perhaps the main problem was a straightforward clash of values. The reviewer puts a high value on anger and hatred; the authors do not.
[…] naquilo que os une, que é o amor a Deus. Isso me lembrou de um texto que eu li semana passada, no Heretic TOC. Trata-se de uma resenha do livro The Feminist and The Sex Offender. Se aplicarmos o preceito de […]
Readers may be interested in reading the document linked below. I wrote this document to try to increase understanding of the problems minor-attracted people typically face when they try to obtain help from the mental health profession. All the case studies are from Britain, but I am sure similar situations have arisen in other countries.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gbne5oloni4clgu/Therapy%20for%20MAPs.pdf?dl=0
Thanks, Stephen, for this link and for writing what is a very powerful account of the scandalously worse-than-useless state of “help” available to MAPs in the UK from mental health professionals.
It is also characteristically concise: Stephen does not waste words, and those he does use pack a mighty punch.
I value that compliment highly, Tom!
Tragic and a sad indictment of the popular view towards a MAP sexuality. I hide it from everyone. And there’s no way I’d trust the NHS with my innermost soul, those people are perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately institutional stooges. As someone said, be a friend to all men, but be alone in your own mind. Don’t be naive and look out for your own interests. Times will change, but for now caution and reticence are abundantly warranted. Pray for a more enlightened Age, because:
It’s been a long
A long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh, yes it will
Hey, Tom, I was having a discussion with someone on BC and he showed me that, in Harmful to Minors, Levine says that pedophilia can be cured. I re-read the quote, found in your old review of that book, and it seems to me that she is mistaking pedophilia for an act, centered on desire for childish attributes, that may be found in selected adults.
https://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/tomoc_rev_lev.htm
So, it’s implied that the cure for pedophilia would be finding adults with childish characteristics. I wanna ask if you have contact with Levine and, if you do, can you ask if she still thinks that way?
Contacting her, and asking just this question, is already on my “to do” list, but thanks, Yure, for giving me a nudge to get on with it! Incidentally, the quote you mention above has already been pointed out in the comments here: see Nada’s post of 3 days ago beginning “In an effort to understand…”
Thank you.~ Much appreciated.~
The issues discussed in this post (the main one, that is, about Judith Levine) are very important ones. The only reason I’m not commenting is that, as far as I can see, the Dear Leader has said it all!
>The only reason I’m not commenting is that, as far as I can see, the Dear Leader has said it all!
LOL! If that is a reference to your host and moderator at Heretic TOC, I should emphasise that it is possible to disagree with the line I take without being arrested in the middle of the night, never to be seen again!
However, if you are saying the immortal words of the North Korean leader are the only ones to which we need pay attention, on this blog topic or any other matter, I am lost for words! 🙂
It was, of course, the latter.
Of course! Silly of me! 🙂
>>they counsel that White registrants need to stop seeing themselves as the only people who are unfairly targeted by the justice system despite not being criminals in any true sense
Do they present any actual evidence that Whites on the SOR believe this?
Given Levine’s earlier hostility towards pedophilia, and this recent flirtation with Intersectionality, does the authors state that straight white heterosexual pedophiles having sex with 6-year-old girls are NOT criminals in ANY true sense?
Here’s is one, of many, relevant episodes of the Unregistred podcast, featuring author expressing mild criticism of feminism’s role in police brutality and mass incarceration:
https://unregistered.blubrry.net/episode116-2/
Really? Do you have any “actual evidence” of that, Nada?
My reading of Harmful to Minors suggests something close to the opposite: she is pro-sexuality in general, sympathetic to children’s sexual expression (possibility, at least for older children, including with adults) and sympathetic towards MAPs. As for paedophilia itself, she questions its existence, which I suppose could be seen as not exactly an endorsement.
But her denial that paedophilia is a sexual orientation does not come from the same conservative source that presents homosexuality as “a lifestyle choice”. That is a view grounded in the religious idea that some people deliberately run away from God and choose a path of wickedness.
Levine, by very sharp contrast, is coming from a social science perspective based on the view that we are all shaped primarily by culture and that there is nothing innate or fixed in our sexuality. In my review of HtM I took issue with what I called her “social fundamentalism”. See here:
https://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/tomoc_rev_lev.htm
Thanks for the link, which I am sure is interesting but it is well over two hours. Could you recommend the most relevant 15 minutes? I say this as someone who did eventually take the time to read one of this podcaster’s books, A Renegade History of the United States. This was well worth the time but I tend to be less patient with podcasts.
In an effort to understand what pro-sexuality, hostility and sympathy towards a sexuality entails, as well as setup a level playing field:
Are religious Conservatives, who consider homosexuality a “life-style choice” or argue it can be “cured”, hostile towards it? Sympathetic? In this special case, are they pro-sexuality? Are they pro-sexuality in general?
You claim Levine is sympathetic to children’s sexual expression (possibility, at least for older children, including with adults) and sympathetic towards MAPs.
In NAMBLA’s review (https://www.nambla.org/levine.html) of HtM, we find:
“In fact, nothing in Levine’s book suggests that the author condones pedophilia. (“No sane person would advocate pedophilia,” she said in her interview with Salon.)”
While your own review contains this wonderful passage from Levine:
“In other words, there may be nothing fundamental about a person that makes him a ‘paedophile’. So-called paedophiles do not have some genetic, or incurable, disease. Men who desire children can change their behaviour to conform with the norms of a society that reviles it. Paedophilia can be renounced; in the medical language we now use to describe this sexual proclivity, it can be ‘cured’.”
Could younger children, who desire adults, also be “cured” (perhaps by sex-education, indoctrinating them in anti-pedophilia)?
Then your claim is at least plausible. But would having pedophiles and children “cured” or subjected to a “desire education” (of Levine’s invention?) be a trivial prize to pay?
I understand the desire of some MAPs to find any non-MAPs supporting them. But finding support for a small subset of MAPs does not imply support for MAPs.
Nada asked:
Put it like this. What we typically see from the religious conservatives is extreme, visceral hostility, often with intense hatred expressed at the personal level. These are people, one feels, who would in another age quite literally have had us heretics burned at the stake after inflicting the most appalling torture to extract “confessions”.
Admittedly, where homosexuality between adults is concerned, they take a “hate the sin, love the sinner” approach these days, rather than burning “faggots” (faggots being fuel for fires) as sodomites. Does that mean fundamentalist hatred against gays is over? Very doubtful. It’s not so long ago that electric shock treatment, nausea therapy, etc, were being used as instruments of purgative torture to “help” them. Officially, this was secular medical therapy, but it echoes punishment meted out to sinners.
Their present emphasis on “cure” rather than punishment, might superficially seem similar to Levine’s approach to paedophilia, but really there is a vast difference.
Christian suspicion of sexual desire in all its forms, even for the necessary business of reproduction, has very deep roots.
Levine’s attitude could hardly be more different. In Harmful to Minors she went way out on a limb, at considerable reputational risk, to make the case for a far more positive view of child and youth sexual expression. Arguably, her good work in this regard would have been severely compromised by also trying to be a cheer-leader for paedophilia at the same time. Politically, it would have been impossible to sell. It is doubtful she would even have found a publisher.
Accordingly, isn’t it somewhat unreasonable to lambast her for failing to attempt the impossible?
She certainly went much further than I would have wished when she said paedophilia can be renounced, or cured; but the tone of her work judged as a whole is far more humane and well-intentioned, in my view, than that of religious opponents. As for children, I see little appetite on her part for “curing” them of their sexuality, quite the opposite.
Do you know if Judith Levine thinks that teleiophilic homosexuality is not a sexual orientation either? And if she doesn’t think so, then why is homosexuality a sexual orientation and pedophilia is not?
If Levine seriously believes that pedophilia is something that can be cured/renounced, then I can’t see why she should be better than James Cantor or Virped on that point.
Good questions, Sugarboy.
In my review of her book Harmful to Minors, I described her as a “social fundamentalist”, which certainly fits her renounce/cure view of paedophilia and – to be fair to her – much else in her social analysis.
As a woman, she might also be particularly disposed towards thinking that teleiophilic homosexuality is not a fixed orientation either. There is plenty of research support for the view that women’s sexuality is far more fluid in orientation than men’s, which is what makes “political lesbianism” possible. Once we take this thought on board it is not hard to see how women might over-generalise their experience and assume that male orientation is at least to some extent chosen.
Why, then, would Levine downplay this possibility of choice with regard to teleiophilic homosexuality but give it credence in respect of paedophilia?
My guess is that this is just a tactical concession. Unlike the religious conservatives, she has no interest in trying to “cure” gay people. But in order to advance her pro-sexual agenda for children and youth, she cannot afford to allow arguments against paedophilia to hamstring her case.
Actually, in her latest book, with Meiners, there is a revealing passage in which she mentions her own sexuality. It is in one of a number of panelled-off “convo” pieces with her co-author, where they have a short debate, or conversation between themselves. Meiners has just been taking Levine to task for being “nostalgic” in her defence of flirtations at work, where men, as she believes, hold most of the power.
Levine responds:
The fact that Levine tells us straightforwardly that she is heterosexual in itself tells us she believes in the concept of sexual orientation, rather than total fluidity. Also, revealing, I would say, is what she calls her “sympathy” for men, and her faith in their capacity for change – not through shame and blame but implicitly (and as we discover elsewhere in her writing) through encouragement and education, in order to improve their appreciation that, for example, male bosses who view workplace sexual favours as a sort of perk of the job are mistaken if they think their underlings are all happy about this. This is not at all the same thing as the hostile, punitive approach taken by the religious conservatives, whether towards teleiophilic homosexuality or paedophilia.
But, hey, I am being obliged to work very hard here against a lot of scepticism and suspicion of feminism. It is hard to see how the Levine-Meiners approach will ever get much traction if even such an open-minded forum as Heretic TOC is unenthusiastic. Perhaps it is because none of us is incarcerated at the moment. Perhaps we would take a different view if we were held in “civil commitment” at some ghastly psychiatric gulag, with only women – wives, daughters, mothers, girlfriends – as activists with some chance of throwing a lifeline.
>What we typically see from the religious conservatives is extreme, visceral hostility, often with intense hatred expressed at the personal level.
We get such hostility for their opponents too, and they typically have the support of Big Tech and the state for their antics, such as forcibly detecing, “curing” or catching pedophiles.
>Christian suspicion of sexual desire in all its forms, even for the necessary business of reproduction, has very deep roots.
Yet, the societies the Christians inhabited were relatively tolerant towards us, in contrast with what we face today.
>Arguably, her good work in this regard would have been severely compromised by also trying to be a cheer-leader for paedophilia at the same time.
The work (of questionable utility) would be compromised by NOT claiming pedophiles could be cured? By insisting good groups, like gays or feminists, could be cured just as easily as the bad ones, pedophiles or some straights?
Kinsey managed to write about sex in a fairly neutral manner, and his work is good (at least in the sense of inspiring further work in the area), so it can be done under seemingly hostile political conditions.
>As for children, I see little appetite on her part for “curing” them of their sexuality, quite the opposite.
What I had in mind was analogous to cured pedophiles. I have seen children (girls) conforming to norms, despite the suffering it cost them and desisting at at the earliest possibility of marginal acceptance. (How fluid are girls, relative to boys or women?)
In closing, I find it Levine’s view about (some) straights chilling. They not only can, but have to change. Do they desire re-education, or will it forced upon them? In particular, this will be a hard sell to ex-convicts or people on the SOR.
Ok, I’ve had a chance to read the book. Here are my thoughts.
Reminds me in some ways of Roger Lancaster’s ‘Sex Panic and the Punitive State’, published a decade earlier. I agree that sex offender registries are morally wrong (whether public in the US or private in the UK), a way of shaming and stigmatising people and a double punishment. I like the idea of restorative and transformative justice, as I especially dislike the principles and philosophy of punitive justice, generally speaking. I agree that Black people in America are incredibly stigmatised, and mass incarceration is a kind of 4th wave of persecution (after slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow); therefore I am very sympathetic to the principles of Black Lives Matter. I despise carceral feminism but like the sound of abolition feminism. And I think political activism for an end to the violence of the State is very important.
I think with the election of Biden at least the worst injustices of the Trump administration will be consigned to the past. However Biden is a moderate, and the senate will likely remain GOP, so it is questionable how far progressive causes will advance in the next four years. I do not seek progressive causes for themselves, but as a useful alliance in the fight for an end to the discrimination against minor attracted persons, where one is forced to hide away one’s sexuality like the gay community of yesteryear. Also, I think it’s important to note, as Levine does in the book, that sexuality does not in any way define or label an individual, and the person in all their complexity, interests, and agency, far exceed such a narrow summation. And this is why SO registries are so inhuman, because they define and limit the individual to a legal transgression often based on sexual difference. There is nothing qualitatively different between the persecution of Oscar Wilde or Alan Turing, and the persecution of MAPs today, both societally and legally.
The policing and justice wing of the State, on both sides of the Atlantic, perpetuates a heavy violence against its citizens, especially marginalised groups. But the arc of history shows a continual improvement over time – in Elizabethan England they were hanging the starving poor for stealing food, and of course the infamous and brutal ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ used against religious opponents who were later made saints and martyrs. We simply cannot trust the morality of the State; it always overreaches and of course represents the interests, greed and selfishness of the powerful. If the price of securing MAP rights is allying with progressive causes, I think that is a small price to pay.
Many good observations here, ZT. I particularly liked this:
I think the lot of this was well said, Zen! Just two things I would like to comment on:
I agree that Black people in America are incredibly stigmatised, and mass incarceration is a kind of 4th wave of persecution (after slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow); therefore I am very sympathetic to the principles of Black Lives Matter.
I am ambivalent about the movement for mainly this reason: it is not a fully united movement with a consistent focus and set of ideals. Like any movement these days that specifically puts a specific race or gender in its name, it will attract many reactionary elements among the Authoritarian Left, like SJWs, that will attempt to use the movement to pit blacks and other minorities against whites (particularly white hesterosexual men) and denounce the latter as the primary cause of all problems so as to downplay efforts to get all working people to mobilize as a class. This benefits people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations with six figure incomes to millions or billions only for obvious reasons–it helps people of color and women within this monetary range to “rise up” and be considered bastions of their community, while allowing affluent and outright wealthy white men pretend to play “martyr” or “progressive” while expunging their “guilt” over what they allegedly do just for being white while having the actual source of their privilege downplayed or overlooked.
There are doubtless many genuine progressives in the movement with basically good intentions and even outright noble goals, but to give the overall movement the appearance of unity they have chosen to tolerate the many bad eggs among them rather than denounce their words and actions, and to clarify the main purpose of the movement. This reflects badly on them as well.
I think with the election of Biden at least the worst injustices of the Trump administration will be consigned to the past. However Biden is a moderate, and the senate will likely remain GOP, so it is questionable how far progressive causes will advance in the next four years.
Alas, Biden has no progressive blood in him whatsoever. He was used by the wealthy DNC to sabotage the primary campaign of an actual (if somewhat milquetoast) progressive who was very popular with the people so that a centrist/moderate who serves Wall Street and will conduct business as usual (e.g., fighting wars for profit, passing pro-business legislation, keeping universal healthcare and other progressive economic policies off the table) got elected. Biden stands for the same basic world order as Trump, and it was in fact a confluence of Republicans and Democrats of the “billionaire class” (as Sanders called them) who made sure that Biden won, and it wasn’t to advance true progressive causes. That said, he just barely won against the likes of Trump (!!), and many allege that Biden’s slim victory with the popular vote was due to a combination of the bipartisan tampering noted above and because Trump messed up so badly on the handling the pandemic in the US.
But, you might say, at least with Biden the progressives in the Democratic Party will push him to the Left once his administration starts, correct? Not likely any more than they succeeded in doing the same with Obama over eight years, despite the fact that the Democrats enjoyed a majority of control in Congress at the time. This time around, Congress as well as the Supreme Court is dominated by Republicans, so Biden would have a very tough time pushing progressive legislation through even if he wanted to.
Thanks, Dissident. In terms of political questions I’m quite happy to hear different opinions. I think to target the carceral state one needs a broad coalition, clearly the Orwellian sentencing for some low level non-contact MAP infractions is matched in absurdity by the policy of locking up vulnerable (often Black) drug users.
On Biden, tbh I’m just glad Trump is out. Let’s see how his administration develops, we might be pleasantly surprised given the energy of the Democrats’ progressive wing.
On Biden, tbh I’m just glad Trump is out. Let’s see how his administration develops, we might be pleasantly surprised given the energy of the Democrats’ progressive wing.
I’m thankful Trump is out, but very regretful that Biden is in. I feel no cause to celebrate, because the “Trump derangement syndrome” as many progressives in the media called it, caused too many progressives and all Democrats to focus all their energy on getting Trump out at any cost with no focus or major concern on getting an actual progressive into the White House. In other words, they made the mistake of loathing Trump on a personal level rather than focusing on his policies and the world order he stood for, which is why they were willing to hand the office to another wealthy with a horrible decades-long record that stands for the exact same world order as long as he “wasn’t Trump.” Where is the ire among Democrats for the very predictable screw-over that the DNC pulled on Sanders?
Let’s see how his administration develops, we might be pleasantly surprised given the energy of the Democrats’ progressive wing.
The progressive wing of the Democrats let us down big time during Obama’s eight years in office, going along with every move to the Right on economics and foreign policy that administration implemented, and during a time when the Democrats had a majority of seats in Congress. Throughout the mere four years of a Trump administration we saw them go along with everything Pelosi and the DNC did, including voting to continue spiraling the wealth upwards and keep every plank in the ‘Green New Deal’ off the table. I believe all the evidence suggests that the progressives in America need to stop looking to the Democratic Party and start looking for their own political solution. Otherwise, we are simply going to be in the same situation again, and over and over again: a disastrous Biden administration paves the way for a nutcase Republican administration who messes things up worse, but all the Democrats will only vote for the latest multi-millionaire nutcase they push through the primaries just to get the Republican nutcase out of office. And business as usual continues indefinitely.
>…they were willing to hand the office to another wealthy with a horrible decades-long record that stands for the exact same world order as long as he “wasn’t Trump.”
Yes, and we mustn’t forget how awful the Vice-President-Elect is too.
>Throughout the mere four years of a Trump administration we saw them go along with everything Pelosi and the DNC did, including voting to continue spiraling the wealth upwards and keep every plank in the ‘Green New Deal’ off the table.
Presumably, you would include the “Squad” in this criticism.
>I believe all the evidence suggests that the progressives in America need to stop looking to the Democratic Party and start looking for their own political solution.
I agree – including appropriate direct action, wouldn’t you think?
You say “going along with every move to the Right on economics and foreign policy that administration implemented” & “along with everything Pelosi and the DNC did, including voting to continue spiraling the wealth upwards and keep every plank in the ‘Green New Deal’ off the table“.
Just what is the end goal though? As far as my comment contributions to this blog go, I share in the goal of wider recognition and acceptance of MAP sexuality. However, that doesn’t automatically make me left wing on economic issues, lol! Fiscally I’m not too keen on the idea of high taxes. In some respects I’m conservative, in some moderate, in some progressive. MAP is just one progressive issue among many – it makes no sense to me that it is on the fringe of ‘polite’ and acceptable discourse, or that it is currently politically dead – but I am not necessarily just for that reason a Sanders/Corbyn supporter.
I doubt Sanders or Corbyn would have furthered MAP issues. Maybe they would have softened the edges but that’s about it. However as for their economic agenda, I happen to disagree with it. People could have faced a tripling or quadrupling of their council tax under Corbyn. Income tax would have risen substantially. That is less freedom, not more.
Now the Democrats are well known to be economically in bed with Big Tech and Wall Street, but socially they do have a progressive agenda. And it is really the social side that we need to see progress on. Sanders was no more likely than Biden to support MAP rights, however in Biden we have the ‘right’ party in office – or controlling the executive at least – and that is a bonus for socially progressive causes. Remember the corporate agenda is very keen on LGBTQ+, and there are faint glimmers of a sign, Netflix being one well-known example, that powerful elements in American culture are at least open to the idea of furthering child sexuality and normalising children’s sexual expression. Trump, Cruz and their ilk are the prime enemy of this – Biden is in a different league (he has even been called a ‘paedophile’ himself, by none other than Don Jr), Biden is way more open to a social-corporatist agenda of softening the edges around child sexuality.
Remember continental Europe – and I am thinking particularly of France – has always had a liberal approach to child sexuality, as evidenced by the slew of French intellectuals actually speaking out in this regard – but in the Anglosphere America takes the lead, and Britain follows behind like a so-called ‘pet poodle’. Therefore for the Anglosphere change must originate in America. No 10 could have the famous Victorian prude William Gladstone in office and it would make little societal difference if America was liberal.
So I honestly believe a Biden administration will, with a subtle hand, continue to at least abet if not actively participate in, the promotion of child sexuality which is being transformed anyway by technological change, and broad cultural forces outside anyone’s control. And MAP rights will follow, one day. But currently – an obvious point – MAP rights are completely outside the Overton Window of any acceptable political discourse, so the first goal should be to, with all patience, try and nudge the Overton Window a bit closer to the goal of MAP recognition and support.
And I think this does require a subtle approach, because the political reality just is not there at the moment.
Maybe they would have softened the edges but that’s about it. However as for their economic agenda, I happen to disagree with it. People could have faced a tripling or quadrupling of their council tax under Corbyn. Income tax would have risen substantially. That is less freedom, not more.
We, the people, need to stop our obsessive fear of the taxation issue. For one thing, no progressive I know of supports a heavy burden of taxation on the average joe and jane, but dependent on level of income. Secondly, having to pay for every needed service out of pocket, and said services only being offered and provided if they make some fat cat a profit, is going to bankrupt millions of average people and subject them to innumerable additional hardships far faster than a system of reasonable progressive taxation. As will funding a bloated military and bail-outs for the wealthy, something you almost never hear standard conservatives complaining about.
Now the Democrats are well known to be economically in bed with Big Tech and Wall Street, but socially they do have a progressive agenda. And it is really the social side that we need to see progress on.
First off, I disagree that this social agenda is more important than actually feeding everyone, providing them with shelter, needed medical care, and a life with a reasonable degree of material comfort to satisfy their psychological as well as physical needs.
Secondly, the Democrats version of “social progress” has been defined over the past decade as pushing a divisive form of identity politics that demonize white male heterosexuals openly and incessantly, and to bestow entitlements rather than basic equality on “marginalized” people. This has served to drive not only many in this demographic, but also many women, LGBTs, and racial minorities who do not want such hatred promoted on their “behalf” into the arms of the Right. That helped pave the way for a four-year Trump administration. What further “progress” of this sort is needed? This is just a scheme to take our attention off the economic issues that put different sub-groups among the labor class in destructive competition with each other in the first place.
Sanders was no more likely than Biden to support MAP rights, however in Biden we have the ‘right’ party in office – or controlling the executive at least – and that is a bonus for socially progressive causes.
The authoritarian Left is not socially progressive, but very regressive. They give the entire Left a black eye.
Remember the corporate agenda is very keen on LGBTQ+, and there are faint glimmers of a sign, Netflix being one well-known example, that powerful elements in American culture are at least open to the idea of furthering child sexuality and normalising children’s sexual expression. Trump, Cruz and their ilk are the prime enemy of this – Biden is in a different league (he has even been called a ‘paedophile’ himself, by none other than Don Jr), Biden is way more open to a social-corporatist agenda of softening the edges around child sexuality.
To the contrary, the Democrats have been every bit as hostile to MAPs/Kind folk and the notion of nuance in youth sexuality as any conservative. They support the LGBT community because it is politically safe to do so, and in fact contitutes political suicide not to do so in the current climate. That is not courage and commitment to principle, but crass opportunism. The Democrats were attacking and condemning Cuties and Netflix as fervently as anyone on the Right; there is currently bipartisan consensus on the moral panic. No matter the extent of Biden’s predilections, whatever they may be, he would never publicly support MAPs, and in fact the LGBT community goes out of their way to distance themselves from us Kind folk in very cruel and vindictive ways.
Your last two paragraphs were very well said IMO, save for the idea that a Biden administration will be better for us over the long run. What we need is a truly progressive climate akin to the one from the 1970s, and for that progressive politics has to go back to being truly progressive rather than selectively so.
If one considers that the main purpose of a society is to provide the material means of existence of its members, then the main social divide is economic, the stratification into social classes. You have wage workers who sell their labour force for a wage, and at the opposite capitalists who earn profit from the wage workers they employ; in between, you have the middle class living by directly selling the product of their labour. And it is well known that the first factor in health and life expectancy is social status.
Now I noticed that the two diagrams that you show do not include “social class.” Indeed, “intersectionality” was promoted first by people in upper middle class layers, such as academics and journalists, and in the USA, a country where the labour movement never had a political expression: the two parties that get almost all votes (Rep. and Dem.) correspond to the British Tories and Whigs, or the French LR and LREM parties, there is no Labour Party in the USA. So they can speak of “oppression” without looking at economic exploitation.
One can say that “intersectionality” is the political coalition of fashionable identities.
I have an argument against “intersectionality.” It claims that in lesbianism the two oppressions against homosexuality and against women intersect. However, in the whole era of Abrahamic religions, lesbianism never was demonised and repressed at a level comparable to male homosexuality, which was specifically singled out. In England, male homosexuals were hanged from the 16th to the early 19th century, female ones were not, and I know no lesbian counterpart to the trial of Oscar Wilde.
There are different forms of oppressions. Workers are exploited but not stigmatised. Religious and sexual minorities are often stigmatised, but not exploited. Workers from racial minorities can be both stigmatised and over-exploited. We need such distinctions.
In the USA, the war on drugs has been the driving force behind the establishment of the “carceral state,” where that country has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And there consumers of illegal drugs have been stigmatised, robbed of their property (through civil forfeiture), and massively incarcerated, with overly draconian penalties. Richard Lawrence Miller has compared their fate to that of Jews under Nazism, he has even expressed fear of an extermination of US drug users. It is astonishing that there is no mention of them here.
You make many good points here, Christian. As you say, neither of the two diagrams has social class as an element of intersection but the second, more detailed, one does include “income”, which can perhaps to a considerable extent be taken as a proxy for class.
You write:
The concept originated, as I noted, with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is indeed an academic. That does not mean she ignores economic class though. She has routinely foregrounded this by reference to “compound discrimination”, as in this example she is said to cite frequently:
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Williams_Crenshaw ]
If Crenshaw claims poor whites are “privileged” when compared to any sufficiently rich black (including herself), she can rightly be said to ingore class. As evidenced by the article below, her Intersectional followers certainly do!
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/07/white-privilege-an-elite-ideology/
Thanks for this link, Nada. The article is excellent – one of the best I have seen in Spiked.
You know what, my support for Levine/Meiners has been at best lukewarm and is steadily getting cooler. I think I was right to give their ideas an airing but I do not find them convincing. The problem is, what other strategy is going to tackle the carceral impulse and bend the arc of history towards enlightenment?
For what it may be worth, Tom, I feel that Levine and Meiners deserve a lot of support for their courage and the multitude of things they get right despite the severity of the one or two major things they get wrong. I believe we can support them for the former while standing firm on our beliefs regarding the latter, which you do well in your essay. I think we have discussed before that you often have to accept some bad while applauding someone for serving the greater good, as long as we seek to make it clear where we do not agree and why we do not, with the hope of reconciling said grievances with the source in the future.
I think the main source of the “bad” in regards to Levine and Meiner, as has been touched upon well in this thread, is the fact that they are “upper middle class” journalists. As such, they are in a position to take the “universal white privilege” myth for granted as being true, along with a feeling that a focus on it somehow exonerates them, in the eyes of their readers, of any “guilt” their relative material affluence may confer upon them. Levine, to her credit, is not ignorant of class, as her first book devoted an entire great final chapter to how poverty impacts children far worse than exposure to sexual knowledge. Since that time, however, there has been a much larger degree of pressure to comply with the “privilege” theory among her economic demographic. I’ll have more to say on that in a day or two, so I don’t overload you with so much info to moderate in a single day 🙂
Three excellent comments from you today, Dissy!
I’ll be very keen to see that one, so keep ’em coming! As short and sharp as possible, obviously, but even your longest post today is very good.
Excellent post Tom, and thanks for highlighting another valuable resource.
I for one really appreciate your efforts at bringing us the latest thought on MAP issues, I don’t know where else I would go for this information.
I totally get your scepticism about the woke left but let’s be glad for allies where we can find them.
Love this! Thank you so much! Will be great for that project I told you about in our last video meeting!! 😉
The new Levine book looks quite nice. I fear I don’t have much time to read it at the moment, tho…
Interesting information about Bosie. I believe Robbie Ross was a much nicer man and stayed loyal to Oscar till the end.
I assume this aspect of the book is probably the most likely to get many readers of the blog interested in the book.
“From their American perspective, Levine and Meiners see great potential for SO registrants, who are disproportionately White, to join forces with others who suffer grave injustice”
I’d be interested in the source(s) for that. It seems sort of counter-intuitive that most SO registrants are disproportionately White. I think I’ve seen one or two academic articles noting that people of color receive much harsher sentences for sex crimes than White people (maybe it was also mentioned in a chapter in the War on Sex by Halperin). This, together with the stereotype of people of color as “sexual predators” and the history of a lot of innocent black men being arrested by racist juries for allegedly raping White women, it’d be rather unexpected if nevertheless SO registrants are disproportionally White.
Another review of the book even says the book directly contradicts this claim:
“They point out that these policies have produced the regressive result that the campus allegations have disproportionately targetted African-American males (pp. 27-28), even as the sex offender registries and carceral state also do (p. 50).“
http://wapercyfoundation.org/?p=925
“Try telling the poor White registrant how privileged he is when he has lost his job, family and friends, and is banished to eking out a desperate life under a bridge at a highway “intersection”!”
I think that’s a misinterpretation of the authors’ strategy. It’s probably not helpful if registrants start fighting with each other instead of against their common oppressors. So if White registrants can acknowledge that non-White registrants might sometimes experience even more oppression than they do that could be a step towards more solidarity. After all, if indeed African-Americans are disproportionally registered as sex offenders, then dismissing racism as irrelevant for an analysis of the situation non-White registrants are in would be quite dismissive. It’s been a while since I skimmed through the book, but if the authors haven’t already done so then my assumption is the best way to get more insight into such questions might be to start interviewing non-White registrants
Thank you, onkse, for your well informed input.
You were right to query my claim that SO registrants “are disproportionately White”. That was misleading, arising from an underthought attempt on my part to be concise.
Let me quote exactly what Levine and Meiners said. It may give you some idea as to what I was clumsily trying to convey:
What we can correctly extract from this, I hope, is that there is a higher proportion of SO registrants who are White than would be expected from the relatively low proportion of Whites in the criminal population overall. Sorry I messed up my expression of this point.
As for your suggestion that I misinterpreted the authors’ strategy, I feel this claim is less well substantiated than your first point.
It indeed is, though I fear for substantiating it more I’d need to somewhat exceed the word limit for comments. Hence I’ll link to it instead: https://pastebin.com/vHDWGtiw
gist of the main point within the word limit: The authors observing acknowledging White privilege can be beneficial for White registrants is not the same as them blaming White registrants for anything, nor them saying White registrants are less oppressed than e.g. Black billionaires. One can disagree with the authors that acknowledging White privilege would significantly help White registrants, but the oppression of White registrants living under a bridge might not be so different in severity (if not in nature) from that of many non-registrant poor Black people living under a bridge who live in constant fear of police brutality since their early childhoods. If asked, many might indeed express gratitude for not having to deal with racism on top of everything else, i.e. acknowledge their privilege in this specific dimension if we go by common academic conceptualizations of that term.
I wrote: “Try telling the poor White registrant how privileged he is when he has lost his job, family and friends, and is banished to eking out a desperate life under a bridge at a highway “intersection”!”
Onkse objected: “I think that’s a misinterpretation of the authors’ strategy.”
My point was about the likely reception of the authors’ strategy among Whites who have been badly impacted by registration. I felt (and still feel) I had to acknowledge there would be a sceptical response to Levine and Meiners’ message before going on to say, as I do later in the blog, why their reasoning should be taken seriously.
There was no non sequitur, as Onske suggests at the start of the pastebin link. I did not make the argument in question, so it cannot have been invalid. On the contrary, as I did not make the argument, the claim is a straw man.
That said, Onkse goes on to make plenty of good points, especially in the pastebin comment.
In the above comment, Onkse writes: “the oppression of White registrants living under a bridge might not be so different in severity (if not in nature) from that of many non-registrant poor Black people living under a bridge who live in constant fear of police brutality since their early childhoods.”
So far, so good. Then Onkse adds, “If asked, many might indeed express gratitude for not having to deal with racism on top of everything else…”
I would just say they might indeed express gratitude if they are well informed and thoughtful individuals, especially if they have gone through some of the consciousness-raising work that Levine and Meiners appear to have in mind. My “Try telling…” point, repeated at the top of this present comment, reflects the difficulty of getting to this stage. It acknowledges that it is likely the message will be resisted even by some readers here, despite the fact that Heretic TOC has a far more sophisticated readership than typical social media platforms.
Coming back to Onkse’s pastebin comment, it seems Onkse read and respected the comment policy with respect to length. Thank you, Onkse, for that! The policy, however, is flexibly applied. Basically, if I feel a comment is worth running at length, it will go in.
I do actually feel that Onske’s long pastebin comment (about 1000 words) is worth reading, and I urge readers to do so. Apart from the first line (instead of “I think it’s a non-sequitur to arrive…” it would be OK to substitute “I think it would be a non-sequitur to arrive…”) I find a great deal of good thinking and information in this.
I think that contradictory statement of Whites receiving disproportionate sentences for sex offenses may be related to the cultural bias that the majority of MAPs and even genuine situational child molesters are White males. Hence, while her statement doesn’t hold true for White sex offenders overall, if more properly worded, it can point towards the above bias in regards to White males incarcerated specifically for offenses against kids. Still, more research on that very specific demographic of sex offenders needs to be conducted.