With a single bound he was free. So was she. What about they?
HE is Thomas Hubbard, professor of classics at the University of Texas, Austin, who resigned after campus protests and a mob attack on his home provoked by a disgruntled student who used his scholarship on pederasty in ancient Greece and his discussion of boy love in modern times to brand him a paedophile and call for his sacking. He left the city to live somewhere more congenial, sued for defamation, won a handsome financial settlement, and now heads the prestigious William A Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies.
SHE is Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex, who resigned after coming under comparable hostility, this time from radical trans activists. While empathising with trans people, her sin was to challenge the view that it is possible to change sex, as opposed to gender. Biologists in general agree with her: physical intersex conditions and sex-change operations make no difference to the fact that sex in fundamentally binary. She too, has fallen on her feet. She has just accepted an offer to join the recently announced new University of Austin, which proclaims that it will be dedicated to academic freedom. Ironically, this new institution is in Austin, Texas, the very place Tom Hubbard had been hounded out of.
THEY is (are? Sorry, can’t get the hang of these newfangled pronouns) Allyn Walker, a transgender assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University (ODU), Norfolk, Virginia, who was placed on “administrative leave” last week after a social media storm and rightwing news coverage (a graphic on Tucker Carlson Tonight read “THE LEFT’S DEPRAVED NEW LOW”), followed by campus protests calling for their sacking. This furore had been triggered following an interview Walker gave with Prostasia, in which they expressed the view that the stigma to which MAPs are subjected, not least through hostile use of the word “paedophile”, is unhelpful for the protection of children. What is going to become of Walker now that life on campus has become unsafe for them, a point no one disputes? The university president has been despicably unsupportive and would clearly love to see Walker walk. Maybe they should indeed vote with their feet and apply for a post at the University of Austin – or even the William A Percy Foundation! The world could be their oyster!
That said, this is a fast moving story. It is conceivable Walker could be terminated. Just one day after the Daily Mail ran a lengthy story headed “Trans university professor sparks fury after claiming sexual attraction to children isn’t always immoral”, they dropped another blockbuster titled “Fury as Old Dominion university REFUSES to fire trans professor who said pedophiles can’t help their urges and should be given child sex dolls”. Walker actually said more or less the opposite: most paedophiles can control their “urges” and their behaviour but, like everyone else, they have no choice as to their sexual orientation. But, hey, that’s the mendacious Mail for you!
The sex dolls bit was lifted from Walker’s PhD, a juicy attack line the sluggardly American media have been slow to catch up with. Their focus has so far been on the Prostasia interview and a book by Walker that gave rise to it: A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity – brought out, incidentally, by the University of California Press, a point little mentioned in all the smear stories. Makes sense. Naming this prestigious publisher would confer respectability on the author, and they would not want that.
While media pressure alone, especially an ocean away from Virginia, would be unlikely to precipitate Walker’s culling, the old guard at Old Dominion appear to have no more than the shakiest of grasps on the importance of freedom within the intellectual community – vital for study, discussion, and research undertaken without fear of jobs being in peril for saying “the wrong thing”. Or, more likely, most of the old guard do understand the principle but the top priority of the people in charge these days, now there are so many universities competing for undergraduates, is to keep these student “customers” happy by doing what they say and giving them what they want – which may not always be the same thing as providing a worthwhile education that challenges their preconceptions.
The shakiest grasp of all in this case might well be that of the ODU’s president, Brian Hemphill. Following the university’s official statement, which had itself failed to give robust support to Walker, he sent his own personal email to faculty, students and staff, saying:
Many individuals have shared with me the view that the phrase “minor-attracted people” is inappropriate and should not be utilized as a euphemism for behavior that is illegal, morally unacceptable, and profoundly damaging. It is important to call pedophilia what it is. As a father, I am troubled by this narrative and its potential consequences for my children and that of future generations.
In other words, he goes out of his way to distance himself from Walker and their ideas – grossly misrepresenting them in the process – rather than offering any backing.
Even worse, arguably, a statement made by the “As(t*)erisk Trans* Student Advisory Board,” failed to express any solidarity with their beleaguered trans colleague. Instead, they released a statement denouncing the “misappropriation of exclusively queer experiences” in Walker’s book, saying that the controversy generated by the author’s research “innately included and simultaneously maligned [the trans community] without our consent.”
Tom Hubbard’s response on Sexnet totally nails it:
Apparently the inclusive asterisk doesn’t include Allyn Walker. As usual, the people who most ostentatiously advertise their allegiance to diversity and inclusion are the first to engage in ideological purges of anyone they choose to label as deviant….
What are “exclusively queer experiences”? I thought the point of the term “queer” was to be inclusive of any sexual orientation that differs from the social norm. Doesn’t the acronym LGBTQIA+ suggest the opposite of “exclusive”?….
I also don’t understand the phrase “innately included and simultaneously maligned [the trans community] without our consent”… Who is authorized to give consent on behalf of the whole trans community? It is a highly diverse set of individuals ranging from self-identified autogynephiles to people who deny that there is such a thing. “Innately included”? I thought the trans activists were against the idea that sex is innate. These people are scarcely even literate, let alone logical.
As I said, though, it’s a fast moving story, and elsewhere on the battlefield the news is not as bleak. We are beginning to see a welcome rallying around to Walker’s cause. The most visible signs, so far, have been in the American higher education media, where there have been strong statements of support from academic figures.
Adam B. Steinbaugh, a program director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said FIRE is “concerned by the deteriorating situation at ODU.” Noting that there had been credible threats of violence against Walker – who was given an armed guard before being sent on leave – he said the appropriate response to “unpopular, controversial or dissenting speech” is to “punish those who are attempting to silence a speaker through threats, not silence the speaker on the threateners’ behalf.”
Those silenced by the bullies tend to include not just the controversial speakers themselves, of course, but also well-wishers who may have much to lose by offering public support. So it has been encouraging to learn that Jezebel, an online culture/lifestyle magazine with a feminist slant, ran a good article on the controversy at the weekend, putting the record straight on Walker’s work, with input directly from an interview with the central figure. Walker took the opportunity to reveal to Jezebel that they had received an “outpouring” of support in the wake of the storm.
The latest development, as I write, is that support has also been rallying behind the scenes among academics who are set to go public. A letter backing Walker, their work, and freedom of expression in higher education, has been drafted, circulated, and signed by sympathetic researchers. A copy of this letter was circulated on Sexnet, so I saw it at the weekend. A well-crafted piece of work, it is scheduled to plonk down with considerable heft into President Hemphill’s in-tray this morning (of which there is about two hours left, US Eastern Standard Time, as I write). So there’s some bang up-to-the-minute news for y’all heretics here that I knew before he did!
Now, I said the letter is well crafted but I will not be adding my name to it. For one thing, although I have well over 100 academic citations for my books and academic papers, I would be only dubiously qualified as a “researcher” within the intended terms. Also, as an even more controversial figure than Walker, I would not wish to embarrass or compromise anyone by appearing among the signatories.
More fundamentally, though, I do not support one important aspect of the impression the letter gives. I hope it has long been clear to regular readers of Heretic TOC that I am passionately opposed to any form of child abuse, including coerced and manipulative sexual contacts. However, the letter emphatically and repeatedly repudiates “child sexual abuse” (CSA) without ever defining the term, leaving the strong impression it is thought there could never be any positively experienced child-adult sexual contact – a stance that echoes the line taken by Walker themself in his Prostasia interview. Although I could sign the letter with no overt dishonesty, by contenting myself with the thought that my definition of CSA would exclude consensual contacts, I would not be comfortable to leave readers with the impression that I was some sort of “virtuous” anti-contact MAP.
So I am very pleased to see action being taken in defence of academic freedom, along with what I hope will be morale-boosting support for Allyn Walker as an embattled individual, but I have major reservations about their work. Based on descriptions of this work in the Prostasia interview, I will not be rushing to read the book. I have heard it is well written, with some interesting content, so I don’t want to be too harsh; but there is plenty of reason to believe it is hardly as ground-breaking or daring as all the fuss suggests.
Bear in mind that even Virtuous Pedophiles has been widely trashed in the social media as a front organisation for active “abusers”, “child rapists”, etc.; it is not necessary to be genuinely radical or “outrageous” to be painted that way. Bigotry far outweighs facts in this regard, sadly. Even after the Trump presidency, the sheer blatancy of this “Who cares about evidence?”, “Who cares about facts?”, approach to public discourse never ceases to amaze me.
Walker’s line comes across to me as so timid, bland, and boring that even now I struggle to see why it should be controversial. At its heart, they are just saying that if people stay within the law they should not be pilloried as though they were brutal criminals, and that people are responsible for their behaviour but not for what they find attractive. These mild suggestions are so tepid they should be sending folks to sleep, not riling them up.
The difference between my understanding and that of the angry dudes is best explained, I guess, by cynicism. I had not appreciated how deep it runs until encountering a very revealing anecdote from the Prostasia interview:
So I remember a professor of mine asking about my research. And when I said I was studying people who are attracted to children who don’t commit offenses, he said, “Oh, okay, so sex offenders.” And I clarify, no, they have attractions to minors, but they haven’t committed an act of sexual abuse. And he said, “Right sex offenders.” He just could not comprehend the population that I was talking about.
Could not comprehend? Or cynically refused to believe? This is a professor we are talking about, not a village idiot, so I am guessing the latter. The big problem for the virtuous brigade is that self-proclaimed virtue is not the most credible kind. So why set out your stall on that basis?
Much more encouraging than anything I have so far heard from or about Walker, in my view, is a short but genuinely radical point made in favour of academic freedom in the wake of their removal from the ODU campus. It was made by Eugene Volokh, a distinguished law professor whose law review articles have been cited by opinions in eight US Supreme Court cases and thousands of scholarly articles. In his influential blog The Volokh Conspiracy (love the title!), he wrote, “I should note that even advocacy of legalizing such [child-adult] sex is likewise protected by academic freedom principles.”
That’s the spirit, prof!
STILL FAST MOVING…
This fast moving story has just moved fast again.
Word reached me via Sexnet this evening (24 Nov.) that Allyn Walker has today announced their resignation. Very soon after, a news report was put out by Associated Press.
Here is the start of the joint statement issued by Old Dominion University and Dr. Walker:
Today, Old Dominion University and Dr. Allyn Walker are announcing that Dr. Walker has decided to step down from their position as assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at the expiration of their current contract in May 2022. Dr. Walker will remain on leave until that time.
Walker is quoted directly:
“My scholarship aims to prevent child sexual abuse,” Dr. Walker said. “That research was mischaracterized by some in the media and online, partly on the basis of my trans identity. As a result, multiple threats were made against me and the campus community generally. I want to thank Old Dominion University for giving me the opportunity to teach and to conduct my research, and the ODU Department of Public Safety for monitoring the threats against me and the community.”
“I am particularly grateful for the outpouring of support from many among the ODU community, as well as others in my research fields who have publicly affirmed the value of my work in advancing child safety. My Department Chair, Mona Danner, my colleagues, and my students all have been especially supportive. And, finally, I am thankful for the assistance of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) during this time.”
So, what to make of this?
Walker’s apparent lack of anger suggests they may have been offered a generous severance payment. I hope so, because another job could be hard to come by in the circumstances. The new University of Austin is probably the best chance, but it is no means a given that this would be a practical option, especially at this early stage of the university’s planning.
So, can we really say, “With a single bound they were free”?
Not really. Only time will tell.
I’m slowly reading backwards through this blog, so I came to this several years late. As a recently-out trans person and a MAP, my experience of the trans community, if it can be called that, is that it’s no better or worse than most others. LGBTQ+ people are of all political stripes, from fascists to my own revolutionary socialism. The furore over Walker’s book is the usual hysterical MAP-hatred such as that experienced by Judith Levine much earlier when she produced her book Harmful to Minors. Rational thought about minor attraction is always close to impossible for some people though not all.
Good to hear from you Airlane and delighted you have sufficient interest to be reading backwards through the HTOC archive. All shades of political opinion are welcome here, including “revolutionary socialism”. As your host blogger and moderator I’d also like to see a stronger representation of trans views, so feel free.
As the person who is aware how miniscule and fringe – and thus almost entirely powerless – the (pro-)MAP and child liberation movements are nowadays (unfortunately), I always wondered how utterly baseless, and tragicomically hilarious, the attempts of so-called “conservatives” to decry the perceived “normalisation of paedophilia” are. Say, this one…
https://tomwoods.com/ep-2026-the-normalization-of-pedophilia/
Hi Tom,
I was wondering whether you had received my correspondence last week.
Thanks in advance for letting me know.
Kind regards,
AM.
Hi AM. Sorry, I have no record or memory of any correspondence, through email or otherwise. If you want to write privately, this is the best account to reach me quickly: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk
No worries. I sent it via the contact page on this site. Will send again by e-mail.
Kind regards,
AM.
I have now received your email. Thanks, it is very interesting. I will reply by email.
You say you wrote via “the contact page on this site”, so I presume you mean the page reached by the Contact button at the top of the Home page. You may have encountered a glitch following the recent installation of a Captcha anti-bot device. I’ll have to check it out with the software guys. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Kathleen Stock certainly stakes a claim to be “empathising with trans people.” In a review of her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, Adam Briggle, also an academic philosopher (at the University of North Texas) and the father of a transgender child, persuasively questions this claim. Briggle writes:
Briggle finds it ironic that while Stock plans to affiliate with the University of Austin, she has no plans to relocate to Texas. He points out that whatever intolerance “gender critical” academics may face on British campuses at the hands of doctrinaire trans activists pales in comparison to what trans and other queer kids and their families experience in the environment created by opportunistic Texas politicians. Tom Hubbard is well aware of what it is like to become a target for those types.
Thanks, Pharmakon, for linking to this interesting review. I too find Briggle persuasive on the need for greater empathy towards trans people than Stock seems to show. But does that mean it was right that Stock was hounded out of her job, or that support for academic freedom should be anything less than robust? I don’t think so.
Stock deals with his objections already in the introduction and first chapter of the book.
I found the book mostly excellent, lacking neither empathy for trans people, nor humor. Stock’s puzzlement as to why her lesbian man-hating friends suddenly wanted to be men had me laughing out loud.
If this is “hostility”, Briggle should read what our enemies write about us.
Nada, would you be prepared to debate Stock on minor attraction (anonymously if necessary). If the answer is ‘yes’ then I think our little disagreement is at an end.
My wording was a bit misleading, so I should clarify that I meant this purely hypothetically.
There are now some 6,000 likes (plus hundreds of bloodlusting echoes) and counting for a tweet made this morning by some publically disgusturbating fathead called Ashley St Clair. It just says “death penalty for paedophiles”
https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1469696337381924868?t=cHSWVvkm2TlWFOtFiWc1lQ&s=19
I’m sure if social media was around in the 1950s, people would have been saying “death penalty for homosexuals”.
Moreover, I wonder what is to become of Lewis Carroll? He is already dead.
The prevalent tendency is in effect to divide historical and literary figures into three groups according to their likelihood of being paedophiles (using this term in the popular sense, as I am describing a popular way of thinking here). There are those for whom there seems to be no evidence of paedophilia. At the other extreme are the most condemned, those who, going by the historical evidence, almost certainly did indulge in sex with children or adolescents. This group includes Catullus, Tiberius, Andre Gide and Michael Davidson. I think it should now also include Michael Jackson, although there are still diehard fans who would deny it. (Notice what a varied bunch they are, from corrupt emperors to poets and pop-stars.) Somewhere in the middle are those who seem to have had ‘paedophilic interests’, but for whom there is no concrete evidence of actual indulgence. This would include people like Benjamin Britten, Leonardo da Vinci and J.M. Barrie. I think it would also include Lewis Carroll. Being put in this category does not usually destroy your historical reputation, but it does tend to prompt the use of words like ‘disturbing’ and ‘unwise’ in relation to your behaviour or contacts with children.
“Concrete evidence” or not, Lewis Carroll would probably be a “sex offender” according to today’s standard, merely because of the pictures he took.
Yes, that’s very true. It creates a paradoxical situation because even though his literary reputation is still intact, it is known (by some, at any rate) that his photography would probably get him a stiff sentence these days, as you point out.
Excellent summary Stephen. Thanks for bringing to my attention names I was unaware of in this context. As an aside I appreciate the literary qualities of both Catullus and Gide.
Ah, yes, Catullus!
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, / Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi
Lively stuff, for sure! 🙂
Lol, my Latin being only rudimentary, I took the trouble of pasting that line into Google translate. Wish I hadn’t bothered, rather sub-poetic I would say!
I was thinking more along the lines of
“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus…”
when I mentioned literary qualities.
Ha, ha! I wondered whether your enthusiasm for Catullus would take a knock with that one.
However, much better than a crude Google version is a proper translation of the whole poem on Wikipedia, along with an interesting explanation that puts the author in a vastly better light. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
Yes, there’s an interesting philosophical dimension as to what extent the author’s work is reflective or emblematic of the individual. Catullus 5 is truly beautiful, yet I read here it was mocked in “high society” for being “soft” and “effeminate”. The impossibly crude Catullus 16 is therefore something of an artificial construct designed to teach his detractors a lesson.
Taking the famous conceit from Horace:
“Exegi monumentum aere perennius”
much loved by Shakespeare, we can say Catullus has somewhat dubiously immortalised his verse (and himself) with the filthiest opening line in literature. Not what Horace meant I’m sure! It does indeed take a crude sensibility to find beauty in such verse (not something I would level at your door, Tom 😉 ) although it can be appreciated on its own terms as a hyperbolic satirical piece. Which is probably where we both find its value.
At least I’ve found something that surpasses The Miller’s Tale in Chaucer, which now seems comparatively innocent.
Your comment prompted me to do some more reading about the various scenes-of-representation vis-à-vis matters “gay” in the 1950s/60s and at one point was struck by the most intense wave of irony when coming across this:
Coined by the German astrologist, author and psychoanalyst Karl-Günther Heimsoth in his 1924 doctoral dissertation Hetero- und Homophilie, the term was in common use in the 1950s and 1960s by homosexual organizations and publications; the groups of this period are now known collectively as the homophile movement. Popular in the 1950s and 1960s (and still in occasional use in the 1990s, particularly in writing by Anglican clergy), the term homophile was an attempt to avoid the clinical implications of sexual pathology found with the word homosexual, emphasizing love (-phile) instead.
Crazy, huh?
This is exactly what I said in one of my previous posts: “The funny thing is that the word “pedophile” is even more sympathetic than “MAP”, as it is based upon “philos”, i.e. love”.
Yes but don’t you see? The outworkings of all this are more confounding than ever, and have long moved far heyond and out of reach of any etymological tracing. The term consciously deployed to avoid pathologising, ‘homophile’, died out altogether with the linguistic presence/triumph’ of “gay” (which in one connotational form or another had been around forever), whilst a similar term, paedophile, (originating as it happens in a vast tract of pathology), gradually took on another dimension of mimetic life altogether – one more akin to something like ‘vampire’, even.
Language is the unbroken string of exchanges we have had and are having. Concepts and ideas are but temporary ‘freeze-frames’ of the ongoing generation and continuity of our linguistic ‘reality’
Yes, that’s certainly interesting, to learn about early terminology. The success of “gay”, of course, meaning bright and cheerful, has been profound and universal. However I think that, despite Sugarboy’s point about etymology, the strong linkage in the public mind between “paedophile” and “violent child rapist / murderer” makes the word irredeemably toxic. I never use it, MAP is the best we have.
Re Amos Yee
Tom is 50% right it doesn’t have to be like this but with the unacknowledged and continuous persecution of random individuals comes with the random terrorism of individuals and until society start talking about the cycle of sexual offending rather than putting it on the back bencher all the time then the terrorism and the poisonous hatred that a silent majority have in their hearts will continue to take place and from my point of view there will always be civil unrest until the public start listening to reason.
Off-topic: Does anyone have a reliable written resource (preferably from someone involved in formulating the Paraphilias section for DSM-IV, DSM-IV-TR or DSM-5) that states clearly what would constitute acting on one’s ‘urges’ for the purposes of diagnostic criterion B for paedophilic disorder in DSM-5? My understanding is that ‘acted on’ is intended (indeed: has always been intended) to mean committed a relevant criminal offence rather than simply masturbating to thoughts or fantasising without masturbating (which would fall under the behaviours mentioned in diagnostic criterion A). However, I can’t find any distinction between the behaviours of criterion A and the acts of criterion B, and the best I can find in terms of supporting the assumption that criterion B refers specifically to criminal acts is occasional mention of criminal acts in academic papers, for example:
Ricarda Münch, Henrik Walter & Sabine Müller. ‘Should Behavior Harmful to Others Be a Sufficient Criterion of Mental Disorders? Conceptual Problems of the Diagnoses of Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pedophilic Disorder.’ Published online 2020 Sep 15. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.558655
I’ve also found a paper by First and Halon that assumes in multiple places that ‘acted on’ refers to having engaged in relevant criminal behaviour, albeit without substantiation, which, despite the expertise and status of the authors, leaves it open to being countered by another source that takes ‘acted on’ to mean something as banal as indulged in paedolagnic reverie.
Michael B. First & Robert L. Halon. ‘Use of DSM Paraphilia Diagnoses in Sexually Violent Predator Commitment Cases’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online December 2008, 36 (4) 443-454.
Does anyone have more specific knowledge on the matter?
Amos Yee is sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment:
https://www.freespeechtube.org/v/16Fl
Sad that he has fallen into the trap that this malicious (even if probably drunk with the illusive self-righteousness) “paedohunter” girl has set for him…
“Paedohunter” groups are vigilantes but for a MAP to seek out sexual relations with an underage person, knowing the consequences, is a reckless abandonment of prudence and rationality.
Images are the typical legal mistake of MAPs because it is remote from reality and hence easier to fall into, and on a first time possession charge you might get away with probation. This is not an excuse to break the law, you owe it to yourself not to create such dire jeopardy in your life.
But sexual entrapment, it seems to me, must always entail some low level psychosis as it is such a dangerous step for anyone to take, knowing it guarantees several years’ custody.
I’m not saying I agree at all with criminal law and sentencing guidelines – but surely it is an act of maturity and individual responsibility to navigate these waters extremely carefully. I say this in all humility as someone who has made mistakes in the past.
In other words, stay safe. It’s the only way.
I don’t know about this ZT i really don’t. Is the preservation of safety all there is to it?
Is it not the duty of every one of us to sign at some point, as it were, a Declaration of Non-Cowardice?
By which of course i do not mean blundering onto some chatsite somewhere and attempting to carve out a quasi-sophisticated lollipop!
I mean if we are not to stand idly by sucking our thumbs while some godknowswhat ‘process’ or ‘pattern’ does all tbe heavy lifting for us then shouldn’t we be ready willing and able to stick our necks right out on whichever social media is currently humming hardest with prejudice and spite?
How are you yourself doing in this respect lately anyway? I say give all those blind f**kers down at the Nuke-A-Nonce bowling-alley everything you’ve got. Always and without EVER letting up.
Otherwise one may as well just lie back and bask in a bubble-bath of hoped-for humility suds..
>all those blind f**kers down at the Nuke-A-Nonce bowling-alley
🙂
Haha, I’m on this blog, which is a start. Have been for many months now. However it’s safe here. In my opinion, there is very little to be gained from arguing with the general public, you can only expect vicious ad hominem attacks in return.
At least here I can evolve ideas and explore arguments productively and without fear or harassment. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of that.
And bubble baths are nice.
How can you possibly ever diminish the importance of letting the general public know we’re here? To be a vital, persistent and wickedly resilient social PRESENCE?
Not just safely tucked away on a website that none of them would go near with the proverbial bargepole? All of us assigned to our little niches and taking care to not make a single social ripple?
How can you *know” or satisfy yourself so easily that “there is nothing to be gained” ?
Huh? How?
There’s too much hate out there. And the hate, it seems, extends to the social media platforms themselves, who shut down the accounts of those with a pro-MAP position.
Social media is notoriously toxic anyway, but to wave the red rag to the bull seems pointless and suicidal, as one can expect to be gored, and then maybe unfairly shut down for good measure.
It certainly takes a certain character who wants to endure abuse and vitriol at the hands of a disgruntled public. I really don’t think it achieves anything.
As a matter of fact ZT i took on all 7, 000 of the buggers mentioned in my most recent comment above and ‘silenced’ them with one pointed question. At least, there came not a single response. Even the poster of the ‘hate-speech’ did not block me.
You are wrong that ‘pro-MAP’ accounts get shut down. There are at least fifteen English-speaking ones thriving quite happily that i am familiar with, and scores of accounts written in Kanji whose copious festooning with lolicon suggests guess what..
It seems clear you’ve satisfied yourself that nothing can be gained in a public square where virtually the entire world is present. I mean, who, apart from yourself haha, is not? It is not necessarily “notoriously toxic” at all. Most of the time, Twitter especially is immensely, sometimes head-spinningly, stimulating. If one follows an ever-expanding and (wait for it) *inclusive* cast of intel sources, cross-referencing, kaleidoscoping perspectives can mount hand-over-fist.
Or why not carve yourself out a niche on Telegram?
Anyhow i no more “want to endure abuse and vitriol” than you do.. My conscience however tells me that to more or less pretend i/we don’t exist just will not cut it. However slight, or subtle they might be, inroads into a broadening spectrum of social mindstuff can, and are being made.
And i’m saying damn, you really want to be there when they do.
And here, for all Heretics’ delectation – and i should hope, quiet awe – is a prime example of just how stimulating…
https://twitter.com/stacey_rudin/status/1469831918287998981?t=nRFJVF2sDcHTpQJixsnI5Q&s=19
Newgon are setting up a free account service (for activist MAPs and allies on censorious platforms), and other platforms tend to be very open. Quora for example.
I’ve had a brief look at Newgon, it seems promising, although somewhat niche and obscure. But it’s a start.
Not sure I’d describe myself as an “activist MAP” lol, I just enjoy this board for discussion. However words have power and, even if they don’t cut through to the mainstream, they can have an impact, especially when wielded with responsibility and the fair winds of a favourable zeitgeist.
7467438@protonmail.com – I will make one up for you.
Please 1. Acknowledge here, 2. Specify if you want the account as it is now, or with a fake identity.
Thanks, Strat, for your posts today, including your interesting reply to Stephen James.
Newgon these days is beginning to have the feel of an important growing force, after long years in which a bright future by no means looked inevitable. Looks like this is a good time to pay attention and get involved.
No problem, but we are most certainly open to new information (so it might be worth modifying your link). A private group is also being set up. We’d be open to any suggestions you might have for your own article, for instance. An informational resource relies on new material and a team of editors.
To ZT, I would say, once we have the accounts up and running, we would be inclined to give them away to any person who is reasonably well known, and whose presence would help normalize MAPs on social media. One thing worth mentioning is that the one dollar accounts come with foreign phone numbers that must be changed to your own, if you wish to avoid the verification check – usually after 500 posts or so. If you do not change it, you will most likely be locked out of your account, even if you have not fallen foul of the AntiMap policies by then.
Widespread sexting and ready access to adult websites causing sexualisation in children:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/dec/06/three-in-four-girls-have-been-sent-sexual-images-via-apps-report-finds
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/05/campaigners-threaten-uk-legal-action-over-porn-sites-lack-of-age-verification
The easy availability of porn online causes “lifelong trauma” in children as young as seven, according to a study. Failure to introduce age verification “harms their human rights”. It also leads to children acting in “age-inappropriate ways”.
My thoughts on this are that, while childhood innocence is a Georgian or Victorian construct, the campaigners are treating it as an absolute universal across time and space, rather than a particular historical construct which has lasted a couple of hundred years and that we might be moving out of. I see a general inevitability about the fact that advanced communication technology sexualises the child. They are clinging to a relatively recent historical reality anchored perhaps originally in Rousseau, but that vision is proving unfeasible for our digital age. I predict that whatever short term measures may be taken, the broad trend toward sexualisation will continue, with profound impacts, in time, on society and our concept of sexual morality.
It is easy for campaigners to say one should treasure the innocence of the child as a societal asset: “let kids be kids” is the usual refrain, echoed by the Reg Bailey report at the beginning of the Cameron government. However whatever the merits of “childhood innocence”, an entire widespread industry of childhood sexual harms has sprung up, some as in cases of violence or cruelty merited, but many cases stretched thin by a prevailing dogmatism and fixed ideology that “sexual expression of the child is forbidden”. We are beginning to see the eventual unravelling of this now.
> Failure to introduce age verification “harms their human rights”.
The funny thing is that UNICEF, in a report from some months ago, stated quite the opposite, namely that blocking minor’s access to pornography is a violation of their human rights.
UNICEF forgot to acquire important enlightening information from The Guardian, apparently…
Haha good point! But UNICEF is actually a half-decent children’s charity, I donate to them regularly. This coalition on internet safety, with the likes of the infamous NSPCC as members, has a hardline ideology. The coalition reminds me in many respects of extinction rebellion: annoying, extremist, troublesome to government…
Yes we are seeing an unravelling as society, finally in this digital age, starts to slowly mature.
I like to think so. Technology always disrupts society in a seismic way, look at the Gutenberg Press which transformed literacy and the middle class, or radio, which allowed the rise of totalitarian governments. It’s entirely possible that internet technologies fundamentally disrupt the Rousseauian paradigm on the innocence of the child (ironically itself a departure from earlier Christian tradition which saw all humanity, including children, as inherently sinful).
A meme –
And now Bindel’s back at it. Hold onto your hats – this one is really gruesome
https://thecritic.co.uk/call-a-child-rapist-a-child-rapist/?s=09
I thought about leaving a short comment: “Goebbels would be proud”. But there is no space for comments! Goebbels would be even prouder!
Yes, it’s a corker, isn’t it! It seems to have come from the lowest part of her reptile brain.
I sometimes defend feminism to other MAPs on the grounds that a few feminists have lent us some support and there doesn’t seem to be any fundamental incompatibility between rights for MAPs and the basic principles of feminism. But people like Julie Bindel make this a tough stance to maintain!
Oh god no even just a glimpse at the article made me cringe internally.
Tom discussed Foucault in this blog https://heretictoc.com/2021/04/15/everyones-invited-to-reconsider-childhood/ under the heading “NOW IT’S FOUCAULT’S TURN FOR THE CHOP.” Since then, person who made the allegations has since walked them back significantly; Foucault was an “ephebephile” not a “paedophile” at least if his alleged erotic encounters are anything to go by [in French] https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-la-pedophilie-enquete-sur-un-emballement-mediatique_2148517.html . For a defence and well-informed discussion of Foucault re: his accuser, see https://illwill.com/the-black-masses-of-michel-foucault
Btw, if anyone would like to read a little bit more about the story in The History of Sexuality Bindel refers to, I can tell you personally that she either hasn’t read the original report Foucault was working from (which I have), orrr she has but cares more about rendering erotic encounters she dislikes as “rape,” than about recognizing reality and taking seriously – that is, not assuming or over-writing – a former young person’s self-perception. I invite you all to read the Percy Foundation‘s recent review of an important book on Foucault and Sex Crime.
Link here http://wapercyfoundation.org/?page_id=1086
In case you’re strapped for time and don’t want to read the whole thing, you can read from the section entitled “Foucault’s Shadow: The Case of Charles Jouy and Sophie Adam”
And yes I agree with Stephen and do the same thing. In fact I’d probably go further and accuse people like Bindel of being anti-feminist. For me, people like Bindel tend to reproduce patriarchal binaries in emphasizing (not challenging or working to change) the conception of girls as inherently vulnerable and males as active and predatory. Older stereotypes once leveled at women, that they’re “hysterical” and should remain sexually “pure” (innocent), are simply transposed from one edifice of patriarchy (the erasure women’s varying subjectivity) to another (erasure of girls’s varying subjectivity). I think they’ve internalized patriarchy and project it outwards onto those who have the least opportunity to speak for themselves. It may be generally true that legal adults have more power over legal children, but there’s not enough attention paid to how power differences are mobilized; sometimes to the less powerful person’s benefit. Can you tell Steven Angelides had a big influence on me? :p
The example Tom likes to use is a mother caring for their baby or young child; the power differential, or young person’s dependence, couldn’t be much clear, but this doesn’t mean apriori that breastfeeding, for example, are acts of exploitation. Another example would be teaching.
A bit busy so I can’t comment on Bindel’s comments re: Walker, but I’ll come back later on and see if I have something to say!
>there doesn’t seem to be any fundamental incompatibility between rights for MAPs and the basic principles of feminism.
Being charitable, your earlier claim implies the rights of SOME MAPs is compatible with said principles, leaving the rest in the cold.
I doubt Bindel would support even a modicum of rights (those MAPs had prior to feminist reforms). But, based on the articles, she’d at least be refreshingly plain spoken in her opposition, disposing of the pretense of non-feminist rights.
What was my ‘earlier claim’, Nada? Was it elsewhere on the blog? I do not know of anything I have said which ‘implies the rights of SOME MAPs is (sic) compatible with [basic feminist] principles, leaving the rest in the cold’.
>What was my ‘earlier claim’, Nada?
“a few feminists have lent us some support” from your original post.
It seems quite a stretch to go from this to compatibility, which is why I considered the implication of partial compatibility instead.
As it’s trivial to find feminists opposed to even basic rights, from marriage or sex to life itself, for MAPs, what rights are necessarily compatible with the basic principles of feminism?
I think you’re confusing the theory itself with its purported adherents. In my view, the haters of MAPs are not true feminists because they don’t take seriously the rights all people to fair treatment. Now, it is true that fair treatment for all isn’t exactly feminism, but a feminist who rejects it is on shaky grounds, I’d say.
Broadly, I think I agree with you, Stephen. Your point flirts a bit with the No True Scotsman fallacy but seems to rescue itself in your last line: the feminist may still be a feminist, albeit on “shaky grounds”. My guess is that you consciously considered NTS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
No, funnily enough I didn’t. But I don’t think I committed it (as you seem to agree), since my contention that feminist MAP-haters are not ‘true feminists’ was in no way ad hoc. The reason for my last sentence was that I had realized (something I’d overlooked previously) that fairness for MAPs could not be regarded as being entailed by feminism itself, but by a broader human rights position which is probably the most effective justification of feminism. (In the same way, a woman who says ‘I’m a feminist but I don’t believe in rights for men’ would not be inconsistent but her feminism would seem very self-serving.)
Nicely explained! 🙂
I’d like to follow up on this topic by drawing readers’ attention to an article presenting feminist Judith Levine’s view of the affair in which scholar Thomas Hubbard was hounded out of his position at the University of Texas at Austin for his views on ancient Greek pederasty.
Levine is one of a small number of feminists who have given a sympathetic hearing to some of the more radical positions associated with MAPs. In an article from the Intercept, she fiercely defends Hubbard’s right to free speech. But her feminism also leads her to criticise Hubbard in a way that some MAPs could arguably learn from. She says:
“Yet — just as he neglects to place pederasty in the context of a slave-holding, woman-subjugating society — he dismisses feminist “preoccupation” with legal gender neutrality as “quaint” and says girls need to be “protected” until 17 or 18, because they are “easily pressured” and might get pregnant. Apparently, girls have no sexual urges and are too dumb to use contraception.”
The lesson for MAPs that one could glean from this is: “When considering the sexual rights of kids, promote gender equality.”
Levine’s article:
https://theintercept.com/2020/02/16/academic-freedom-free-speech-ut-austin/
Tom’s account of the Hubbard affair:
https://heretictoc.com/2019/12/31/scholar-hounded-over-pederasty-studies/
J. Levine justifies the feminist age of consent laws by appealing to adult predation on children, that is to say the feminist myth of the predatory (pedophile) man, targeting girls, and the “subjugated” woman, who’s above the law and free to target kids. Feminist “gender equality/neutrality” at its finest.
In response to this, I can only ask: Have you ever read anything Levine has written?
Yes, Stephen, I have. Assuming you have,
did you find Levine claims regarding (male) pedophilia, including the implied “predation”, more praise-worthy than Bindel’s? I did not.
Perhaps my rhetorical question was unfair. It is true that Levine is only enlightened relative to a very low baseline.
There are a lot of people who are criminally insane and need to be placed in a retirement village style asylum. These people are incompatible with affording children liberty. We need to offer the mentally substandard 100 grand to get snipped.
Gender equality is important, and that makes it necessary to ignore the positive-recall aspect of Rind and others’ outcome data. The “hard”-outcomes of psychological adjustment should be what we focus on – and it is true they are more gender-equal (i.e. insignificant all round). Positive/negative recall is more like “what-flavour-of-ice-cream-do-you-prefer”, and I tend not to focus on it too much.
There are numerous things that underpin negative recall, including, ironically – misogynistic learnings. Girls want to look “humble”, “polite” in recalling sometimes consensual experiences as abuse.
In formulating a position, you then have to make an “evidence-based” calculation as they say. And a pragmatic one. I have gone for an elective age of license at 12, but am consulting on it:
Newgon.net/wiki/Ethos_of_Newgon
A smart strategic position to take might be to offer a “lesbian exception”, whereby contacts under the age of 12 might not be prosecuted, based on the high rates of positive recall in the Kinsey Reports:
Newgon.net/wiki/File:Lesbians.png
That way, while very few of us are lesbians, we might at least look selfless!
Further, that humblness and politeness is exposed as a universal trait in females that operates regardless of age, and in their recall of most relations with adult men. This is demonstrated by Rind’s recent Kinsey data series, in which he demonstrates how the absence of positive recall in minor female-adult male relations is mirrored exactly in their age-appropriate equivalents.
Concise. Precise. Graphic. Powerful.
Was ever a story told better in numbers? Fantastic!
Love this chart! Is it from a Web site? Wherever you found it, I would be interested in seeing what else is there!
Wow. Only 18% of adult females considered their first sexual experience with an adult male to be positive. I wonder why in every single country ruled by men for the last 10,000 years the age of consent has been lower. And it was only raised when women gained political power. It’s almost like women are eternally traumatized prudes that shouldn’t be involved with sex laws. Yes MAPS, lets all support the feminists. People who rally against rape all day, while simultaneously jerking off to 50 shades of grey BDSM rape porn. Then we can have an AoC at 25, and the death penalty for rapists (people who had consensual sex with their drunk girlfriend). We will have girls twerking on every street corner, and any pervert that flirts with them will be arrested for sexual harassment. Weeeeee Consensual sex is rape. Youth rights are no rights. Oppression is freedom. A guy that flirts with girls is a misogynistic PUA. A girl that flirts with guys is empowered. No sense makes sense. Female power.
Is there a citation I could give with this for those who might be skeptical?
Evidence based can be ruled out from merely reading the recent Newgon updates, as well as the behavior of its supposed activists towards scientifically inclined MAPs, such as Filip. The pragmatism remains a poor conjecture, the consequences of which are not even considered across all MAPs and young people. Why should a rational MAP consider this strategy over any other?
>I think you’re confusing the theory itself with its purported adherents.
I prefer not assuming bad faith and to test theory against observations. And you?
>In my view, the haters of MAPs are not true feminists because they don’t take seriously the rights all people to fair treatment.
“The rights of all people to fair treatment” is a very plausible basic feminist principle, as obviously no non-women are people.
Here’s an excerpt from the documentary The Gender War, where von Wachenfeldt, the chairman of an extremely well-funded (by the state, no less!) feminist group in Sweden, offers partial support:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=B08jFW7tAzc
The full version also pertains to pedophilia and feminist conspiracy theories about it.
> I prefer not assuming bad faith and to test theory against observations. And you?
Well, my suggestion was that feminists who are misandrists or anti-MAP are putting beyond their reach a good rationale for their own feminism, which is that all people have certain fundamental rights. This is not necessarily assuming bad faith.
>“The rights of all people to fair treatment” is a very plausible basic feminist principle, as obviously no non-women are people.
Feminists can define men or MAPs so that they are outside the scope of the term ‘people’ but that would be just a rhetorical trick which proves nothing.
>This is not necessarily assuming bad faith.
In so far you still insists on ignoring evidence of hostility from individuals, who happen to be feminists, and arbitrarily extend feminism, despite now knowing its domain, I’d say it is.
If feminists were the saints you apparently believe(d) they were, we wouldn’t be in this mess, yet we are.
>”ignoring evidence of hostility from individuals”
Where have I done that? In the case of Bindel, for example, I actually resorted to low abuse, accusing her of writing her article out of her ‘reptile brain’. This was a humorous way of expressing the depth of my contempt for her hostility and apparently willful lack of objectivity.
>”arbitrarily extend feminism, despite now knowing its domain”
Are you saying that I am arguing from bad faith? Just because I revised my view to make it more defensible? If you think that, then you accuse others of bad faith much too easily.
>”If feminists were the saints you apparently believe(d) they were…”
What have I said that implied feminists were saints? Again I refer you to what I said about Bindel.
At least from:
Evidence of hostility from individuals have been ignored at least from “I think you’re confusing the theory itself with its purported adherents.”
>Just because I revised my view to make it more defensible?
If the original claim had been even remotely true, there would have been no need for such a revision. Further, we would expect feminists to adhere to it. In a hypothetical world, where such a claim was an axiom, would Levine rushed to defend the age of consent in the manner she did? Hardly.
Bindel’s “argument” goes like this: “Paedophilia is not a sexual orientation; paedophiles choose to be attracted to children, and they do so because they like domination and rape. Therefore paedophiles must be called child rapists.” This is just hate speech, of the same kind as what the French neo-fascist Eric Zemmour says about Islam and migrants. Thus Bindel must be blacklisted, forbidden to write to anyone here or to comment on any MAP bulletin board, and all media publishing her rubbish must be branded as propagating hate and boycotted. Of course, the VPs should be informed that despite all their efforts to conform with social norms and dominant ideology, they are still considered as “rapists.”
> Thus Bindel must be blacklisted, forbidden to write to anyone here or to comment on any MAP bulletin board
Has Bindel ever commented on an MAP bulletin board? If she does, I think it would be more constructive to engage with her and explain why she is wrong.
>more constructive to engage with her and explain why she is wrong
I agree. The mere fact that she had chosen to engage where her words would be little heard, compared to the very influential big media outlets presently keen to give her a platform, would tell us she was curious, and might want to listen.
My own direct experience of her suggests otherwise though. When she interviewed me over lunch in a London restaurant, she appeared to listen with interest, and audio recorded the conversation. But her eventual write-up showed she was utterly impervious to the MAP perspective as I was presenting it, and I don’t think Allyn Walker or any VP representative would have made a better impression.
This is not to say she learned nothing. She might have started with the impression that the meal would be an endurance test, having to put up with the obnoxious outpourings of some sort of moral dinosaur with crudely patriarchal notions and thinly-disguised motives of power and control over women and children. She soon brightened up, though, seeming to relax and enjoy the occasion when it became evident that I had read a lot of feminist books and was not at all sexist as an individual. She very readily admitted she was surprised to find me so well informed on feminist theory and history.
Unfortunately, this did not help in the slightest! It merely seems to have convinced her that MAP activism was a deadly enemy that had to be taken seriously.
This “argument” is easy to rebut. When a pedophile feels attracted to a child that is sexy, and at the same time he is not attracted at all to an ugly and stupid child, it is not difficult to conclude that his attraction is sexually and personally motivated. I don’t see how domination can be contingent on a nice ass…
Pardon my ignorance, Christian, but i was not aware that the likes of Bindel were in the habit of sending, or intending in future to send, messages to MAP boards & websites or what have you? Is this a thing? I wholeheartedly agree with you that Bindel is propagating what does indeed amount to ‘hate speech’ of the most despicable kind but must ask you what sort of blacklist implementation you really have in mind here?
She’s clearly not aware that there are plenty of paedophiles who want to be dominated, coerced, blackmailed and abused by superconfident, precocious, bratty kids.
Christian, I would recommend reading Ethnic Apocalypse by Guillaume Faye.
Nick, the email address you provided when commenting is invalid. Please be sure to use a valid email address when submitting future comments.
I have no words for Bindel’s nonsense except
[MODERATOR: Except??? Caitlin, it looks as though there has been a glitch here: part of your message must have failed to get through. Not my doing, I assure you. No censorship! 🙂 Please have another go when you get a chance.]
Sorry, I posted a long string of angry orange emojis but it seems they vanished as soon as I posted the comment!!!!!
LOL!
The article springs from an inveterate hatred of the Other. It is therefore in bad faith because hatred is never the proper foundation for any philosophy.
Very good balanced article. I see value in Walker’s controversy rather than in their tepid Prostasia comments. That value is represented in yet another exposure of the existence of MAPs to the public (a la no such thing as bad publicity?) and the fact that more academics are getting on board. I guess the fact that Walker is on leave may explain why they have not yet replied to my email. Incidentally the new sex offender film “Untouchable” is an excellent educational doco for the general public. Once Hollywood picks up on portraying MAPs in even a slightly favourable light though the tide is going to start turning positively, probably without a Stonewall Riot being necessary 😉
>Very good balanced article.
Cheers! Nice to hear from you again, JSM, and good that you took the trouble to email Walker.
I mentioned poetry (e.g. Marvell, “Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers”) in a comment several months ago, and more recently painting (e.g. Renoir, “Mme. Charpentier and her Children”). Well, it strikes me that the early 1960s contain some excellent popular songs in a similar, though unintended, vein, such as The Beatles’ “Hello Little Girl” (Decca Audition, 1962) and Sam Cooke’s superlative and soulful “Little Girl” (1963). Historical culture contains so much high inspiration.
Yes, Zen Thinker posted a comment to the article “As sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” of March 18, in which he quoted the poem “To a Child of Quality” by Matthew Prior. I have since presented the entire poem in Agapeta (July 30). The poems “The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers” and “Young Love” by Andrew Marvell are given on the Poetry Foundation website. Scans of his complete poetical works can be found on Internet Archive, both a 1956 reprint of the original in 17th century English, and a 1898 edition in modern English. I will give the two poems in Agapeta. If anyone knows other poems of the same vein, about love of an adult for a little girl, please let me know.
It no longer amazes me, how the fanatics viciously attack the exact people who are materially doing work that serves said fanatics agendas.
This outrage is happening all over the place, these days. It reminds me of the twitter injustice many of us MAPs have suffered, wherein “the queer mafia” decided that concepts like “pride” and “positivity” exist only for their own, selected groups…therefor, MAPs using these concepts must be expunged from the platform. In practice, it’s against the current vague twitter rules to be a MAP standing up for your own basic human rights…no demand for controversial social change being necessary, for action to be taken against you.
The history of the LGBT movement has largely been spent on latching onto anything that can positively move them forward in the moment, while disowning and attacking anything that could hold them back in the moment. It’s why the movement is such a dishonest mess. They’ve not chosen to stand up for fundamental principles and reality, across the board or long term…They just jump wherever they see advantage in the moment [or era], exploit their position and beat down at anything they don’t like…Many of them are abusive, flaming bigots.
I’ll take a look at the sample of Allyn’s book…Not sure if I want to pay 20 to 30 dollars for it, though. I consider these kinds of books important [for the masses], but after more than two decades submerged in this MAP movement and culture…I’m part of the choir that doesn’t need to be preached to…and I share your sentiment, anywhere it comes to “weak sauce” commentary…It’s not cutting edge…It’s all so, so “decades ago”.
This may be a bit of a diverge, but since you brought up the William A. Percy Foundation [which I also consider a good resource], I’m curious of your thoughts on his 2008 critique on “The failure of propedophile advocacy”. You may have already addressed this somewhere, I don’t know.
My default position on this, is that every freedom ultimately relies on the current temperament and open mindedness of a culture. Actual consent, no matter how you define it, is irrelevant to whether any freedom is protected or denied. It’s all about what the majority [or sometimes minority] in power believe, about any one given thing.
There are protected freedoms I vehemently disagree with, where consent of the child or youth is entirely ignored, and where psychological trauma can be established. One such example is forced upbringing in a strict religion, where there is no choice or escape. In the culture I live, this sort of thing has historically been hailed as “a virtue”…actual victims of it all be damned.
There’s plenty of history of “civilized” cultures accepting, promoting and celebrating honestly awful things. The question is, why are they seen the way they are seen.
As to the William A. Percy Foundation, I think it’s good to have unbiased, yet honest, sources who will simply acknowledge the facts as they stand…even when they ultimately don’t agree with us.
Good to hear from you again, Steve, and thanks for your perceptive comments. You wrote:
>since you brought up the William A. Percy Foundation [which I also consider a good resource], I’m curious of your thoughts on his 2008 critique on “The failure of propedophile advocacy”.
I think you must be referring to an essay with this title not by Bill Percy but by his recently deceased friend Wayne Dynes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_R._Dynes
He had a blog called Dyneslines, where this article was posted:
http://dyneslines.blogspot.com/2008/06/failure-of-propedophile-advocacy.html
It may also have appeared at Bill’s personal web site but not, so far as I can tell, at the Foundation site, which is run mainly by Tom Hubbard, I think.
Having just skimmed through the article again, it strikes me as a very well informed and well written critique of pro-paedophile advocacy by a rather sympathetic but sceptical gay guy. He writes:
At the time when Dynes was writing this was unfortunately correct, and remains so. In my last blog, “What do we see, through a glass darkly?”, I explored some thoughts about the social realities in question, and what might change in future.
Incidentally, Dynes’ article appeared in the year before I started getting to know Bill, who discovered my work through my book on Michael Jackson. After that, he commissioned me to dig into, and write about, aspects of several history projects he was engaged on – work that continued for several years and for which he paid me generously. This involved us in numerous transatlantic phone conversations lasting an hour or more, mostly of a scholarly nature to start with but becoming more social as the years went by. He still phones occasionally, although he is elderly now and is no longer doing research. Your post is well timed, Steve. I am reminded that Bill will be 88 on the 10th of this month, so perhaps I should give him a ring! Hope you are keeping well yourself.
I had never read the Dynes blogpost and having read it now, I’m not very impressed. He says at the end:
“… it is unrealistic to argue that adolescents can give full consent to sexual acts in the same way that adults do. Such at any rate is the conventional wisdom on this matter, one of several high hurdles that the propedophile writers do not seem equipped to surmount. Indeed, they shown an almost insouciant disregard for these basic issues and objections.”
What does he mean ‘not … equipped to surmount’? Not intellectually equipped? No, apparently it’s their ‘insouciant disregard’ for the objections. But that seems to run counter to the claim (I paraphrase, of course) that good arguments are all very well, but society isn’t convinced. On the contrary, it seems we should stop being so insouciant and sharpen up our arguments a bit more!
>Indeed, they shown an almost insouciant disregard for these basic issues and objections.”
Yes, I did see that bit at the end. It seemed somewhat at odds with what had gone before. Liberal writers of the older sort tend to do this. Have you noticed? They may be quite sympathetic but also terrified of getting into trouble, so at some point there has to be a disclaimer. It has almost as ritualised and predictable as “If you were affected by the issues raised in this programme…” or “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.”
So I wasn’t that bothered. Or, as Dynes would say, my response was one of “insouciant disregard”!
The ambivalence seemed more pervasive to me. I couldn’t figure out whether he thought the fact that the arguments of the ‘propedophiles’ weren’t cutting much ice with mainstream society was the fault of mainstream society or of the ‘propedophiles’. As you say, he may not entirely have had the courage of his convictions.
Also, to call our arguments ‘ingenious’ is a somewhat back-handed compliment and overlooks the rather basic human rights aspect.
I am also well acquainted with the use of “disclaimer language” (as we’ve called it at GC) that seems out of place in an otherwise relatively objective tackling of a very controversial subject. Bill should know better about giving so much credence to conventional wisdom, as it once indicted the gay community very strongly, and not that long ago in history. If he studied the MAP movement close enough, he should also be well aware that strongly disagreeing with consensus opinion through thick and thin is not the same thing as callous disregard for the feelings of others. Sometimes the feelings of others are inimical to objectivity and do great harm in their own right to innocent people, including the demographic they claim to be out to protect. I want to respect Bill, and I do based on everything I have heard about him here, but that incongruous disclaimer statement at the end of his article puts his credibility on the line even as (he hopes) it covers his ass against the hate mob.
> I want to respect Bill, and I do based on everything I have heard about him here, but that incongruous disclaimer statement at the end of his article
I think you mean Wayne (Dynes) not Bill (Percy). Bill is the author of Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, in which he writes on the subject with no hint of apology. You may judge the tone and content from its description on Amazon:
Bill has been described in the media as a pederasty advocate. His obvious respect for pederastic pedagogy, at least in the ancient world, suggests the description is well founded. But he always felt NAMBLA went too far into politically unviable terrain when calling for an end to the age of consent, and he has never advocated adult sexual contact with prepubescent children.
Nevertheless, he gave a very supportive prepublication endorsement of my book on Michael Jackson’s sexuality. He wrote:
For someone who doesn’t actually support paedophilic relations, I’d say this was pretty bold, wouldn’t you?
I stand corrected. I did indeed mean Wayne Dynes, and I apologize for getting confused with so many names thrown around. I did not mean to disparage the person that I inadvertently disparaged.
Thank you, Dissy!
Even American physicians and pediatrics claim that adolescent can consent. Below is an extract from:
Protecting adolescents: Ensuring access to care and reporting sexual activity and abuse – Position paper of the American Academy of Family Physicians, The American Academy of Pediatrics, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and The Society for Adolescent Medicine.
Published in the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Position statement
… Protection of children and adolescents from predatory, coercive, or inappropriate sexual contact is an important goal of all physicians and health professionals….
… Sexual activity and sexual abuse are not synonymous. It should not be assumed that adolescents who are sexually active are, by definition, being abused. Many adolescents have consensual sexual relationships….
Supporting commentary
State requirements have a significant impact on adolescents, their health and their families
… Well-intentioned but rigid laws can lead to outcomes that are both unintended and potentially damaging to the health of an adolescent. When a state’s laws require that sexual intercourse with a minor be reported to law enforcement or child welfare agencies, a sexually active adolescent in a consensual relationship may be placed in the untenable situation of forgoing essential health care (e.g., contraception, screening or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, etc.) or, if he or she seeks that care, being reported to state authorities…. Laws should not interfere with either an adolescent’s access to confidential health care….
The vast majority of reportable cases of sexual abuse and sexual coercion are identifiable through careful clinical assessment
… The age of the sexually active adolescent, the degree to which the adolescent understands the consequences and responsibilities of sexual activity, and the discrepancy in years between the age of the adolescent and his or her partner are important considerations that must factor into reporting decisions. Although a wide discrepancy in age between partners is of concern when caring for the adolescent patient, partner age by itself is not indicative of exploitation or abuse. Verbal and physical coercion, as well as alcohol and drugs, are some of the strategies used by sexual predators to victimize adolescents. However, sexual abuse and exploitation of an adolescent may occur in any relationship, including those where the partners are the same age, younger, or older….
> Although a wide discrepancy in age between partners is of concern when caring for the adolescent patient, partner age by itself is not indicative of exploitation or abuse.
This, especially, is surprisingly radical. Strange it hasn’t been noticed and commented on here before considering this was published in 2004. Well spotted, Sugarboy!
A brief question arose in my thoughts as i read your conments! A very straightforward but, i think, wholly apposite one? Who among all those commenting here would – should such a product become available or decision be made to emblazon existing garment – defiantly wear a PEDO PRIDE t-shirt?
PEDO PRIDE WORLD WIDE. I have a meme somewhere with this. A pink iron cross flag with an interlocking set of lovehearts in the middle. To offend everyone no matter their political orientation.
[…] https://heretictoc.com/2021/11/23/stigma-stings-destigmatiser-of-maps/ […]
Many individuals have shared with me the view that the phrase “minor-attracted people” is inappropriate and should not be utilized as a euphemism for behavior that is illegal, morally unacceptable, and profoundly damaging. It is important to call pedophilia what it is.
The funny thing is that the word “pedophile” is even more sympathetic than “MAP”, as it is based upon “philos”, i.e. love.
Heh….just try telling *that* to how many million rabid punters out there! Funny thing is though, i’ve lately devised a wee stratagem with the hoped-for goal of achieving a degree of subversion. Whenever someone refers quite without a thought (as they always do) to such and such a violent rape (eg apropos the KR trial) as the deed of a “paedophile rapist” i commence to ask if they’d call a violator of ears an audiophile? A Kraut who dropped bombs on England an Anglophile? A person who tore up film a cinephile? Etcetera..
A good game – and useful! Another one: Is a book-burner a bibliophile?
the funny fact is that Most of the adult people are androphiles and gynephiles themself, but no one of them isn’t hurry to call absolutely all gynephiles like rapists because of cases of gross violence against women. People suspect that in reality, not all people are inclined to commit violence because of their innate attraction.
He left the city to live somewhere more congenial, sued for defamation, won a handsome financial settlement, and now heads the prestigious William A Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies.
Tom, can you tell more about this lawsuit? I could not find anything about it on Internet.
Tom Hubbard posted about it on Sexnet on 2 August. Beyond that, I don’t think there was any detail of the settlement in the media, but the fact that he was suing was mentioned. I think that would have been in December 2019.
Tom’s Sexnet post was very lengthy and detailed. I will confine this response to a key paragraph:
There’s a lot of interesting detail here:
http://wapercyfoundation.org/?p=796
Yes, superb account! Well discovered, Stephen!
Meanwhile, does this call for a resounding WTF? or whaaat?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/24/pupils-targeted-tiktok-paedophile-craze-now-cant-go-back-school/?s=09
W.T.F!? This story is INSANE! The only silver lining is that it would make for a good drinking game; you read it out and every time someone gasps or looks shocked, you drink. The paedophile panic drinking game! XD
Heh heh… For sure Prue and i found myself making this tweet in response to the news:
Hopefully the aspect of this that’s revealing a purely *contagious* fever will contribute to a sort of ‘comic relief’, perhaps even ultimately leavening the use of what is otherwise the most weaponized word in the world?
Elsewhere however the highly respected Ayaan Hirsi Ali has weighed in with a very unthoughtful anti piece for Unherd, of which Tom as subscriber is probably already aware?
https://unherd.com/2021/11/paedophilia-is-not-progressive/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=4fd82bf7da
I’ve found it very dsiturbing trying to comment at Unherd. Without fail every comment i make is dropped, within minutes, to the very bottom of the always burgeoning comment stack, and for no obvious reason at all..i mean, no less upvotes than many others (1 or 2:) . This pretty much ensures, with the intense comment traffic, that it will be read hy few if by any.
I can only express the hope that heretics will get in there and do their very best thing as the website obviously attracts a large contingent of what one might call the ..more upper echelon intelligentsia..?
> of which Tom as subscriber is probably already aware?
Yes, and to which Tom has already responded, about half an hour ago. My comment has so far attracted one down vote, which is enough to take it down the stack; but, of course, readers do have the option of clicking the “latest” button, where mine was still near the top a minute or two ago. In case anyone finds it hard to find, and for the record here at HTOC, here is what I wrote:
That is superb, Tom. No other word for it. Thankyou for ‘reprinting’ here. You have mastered the sustained control of an even tone, and keeping everything pertinent to the nth degree. I myself find it very difficult in such contexts to avoid a certain anger infusing my prose, which manifests I guess as a kind of.. bluster? Nonetheless it’s never less than surprising what one finds oneself composing under the felt pressure of great waves of socially-programmed auto-repulsion! Hrsi Ali’s scare-quotes around “suffering” are indeed the most despicable, lowest of moves, (and did you know she has also been collaborating with the doyen of grossly indulgent victimary exploitations the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof?)
I am gonna try and get these finest words of yours out there, somehow, anyhow. Yes, even broken up into serial tweets and instas..
Psssst! You misspelt Manichaean
>You misspelt Manichaean
That’s what I started with. My spellchecker rejected it! 🙁
Anyway, glad you liked my post so much! 🙂 Good luck with getting anyone else to pay attention. Ain’t easy, is it?
Just letting you know i already serialized your words into tweets (without one single error!) and delivered them straight to Hirsi Ali herself’s social media door.
Brilliant! Well done, Mr Turp!
Oooooh do report back to H-TOC if you get a response! I’ve only just realized that the woman who authored the UnHeard article you linked (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) is on the board of advisors for the new University of Austin project Tom mentioned in the blog. See https://www.uaustin.org/board-of-advisors
The university has generated controversy supposedly for championing free speech and committing to “freedom of inquiry” and “unfettered pursuit of truth“! What a joke! Already, at least one of their advisors is clearly not ready or willing to engage in an “unfettered” pursuit of truth!
“I am a firm defender of academic freedom. And I believe the problem of paedophilia needs to be studied. But that does not mean that we can ignore the danger destigmatising paedophilia poses to children. We should not be normalising the idea that it is tolerable to fantasise about sex with children. A university and a university press should not be pushing this kind of harmful material.”
Whaat!? She thinks it’s intolerable to fantasize about “sex w/ children” (whatever that means)? Maybe it’s intolerable for her, keeps her up at night with all those intrusive thoughts, but what’s she gonna do about it? Far from a slippery slope to the “normalization of pedophilia” (again, whatever that means), I think her article represents a slippery slope in the push to normalize “thought crime.” This woman is dangerously unhinged and needs to log off and touch grass for their own mental health! That’s it, I’m done memeing for one post! #TaketheMAPpill :p https://www.freespeechtube.org/v/16bP
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has until now defended freedom of expression vigorously, putting her own life at serious risk by rejecting Islam, the religion in which she grew up, and campaigning against forced marriage, honour killing, and female genital mutilation.
This record quite possibly gives her the most impressive free speech CV of the whole University of Austin (UATX) board, and indeed a strong claim, along with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, to being among the world’s most courageously outspoken people.
So it could well have come as a serious shock and disappointment to the rest of the UATX board that she would suddenly abandon what she called her “free speech fundamentalism” on this issue.
Accordingly, I think it remains to be seen whether her view is shared by anyone else on the board, and whether UATX is just a “joke”. Just to underline the impressive nature of Ali’s record, which was doubtless why she was given a place on the board, see key paras below from WP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali
Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim who rejected the faith and became an atheist and has been a vocal critic of Islam. In 2004, she collaborated on a short film with Theo van Gogh, titled Submission, which depicted oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law, and was critical of the Islamic canon itself. The film led to controversy and death threats. Van Gogh was then murdered several days after the film’s release by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic terrorist. Hirsi Ali maintains that “Islam is part religion, and part a political-military doctrine, the part that is a political doctrine contains a world view, a system of laws and a moral code that is totally incompatible with our constitution, our laws, and our way of life.” In her book Heretic (2015) she calls for a reformation of Islam by defeating the Islamists and supporting reformist Muslims.
In 2005, Hirsi Ali was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards, including a free speech award from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Swedish Liberal Party’s Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship.
Yes, it’s an impressive record. I guess everyone has their blind spots.
Many people claiming to defend freedom and human rights have a one-sided approach, focusing on the wrongs of “the guys on the other side” and downplaying or ignoring those of “our guys.” I previously read that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Islamophobic, and given the stress in some of her articles on “Western values,” one can wonder if she is really independent or just a supporter of “Western” (US + UK + EU) imperialism. So I ask several questions: did she defend Julian Assange, the Palestinian people, the Rohingyas? What is her opinion on the US blockade of Cuba, the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the war on drugs and mass incarceration in the US?
Going by this earlier piece of hers you have a good point, Christian, at least with regard to the Palestine question. She makes a strong case that anti-zionism includes a strong strain of anti-semitism but she says not a word about injustices suffered by Palestinians for which Israel arguably bears strong responsibility. Her article is very one-sided.
How influencers have legitimised anti-Semitism
https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-influencers-have-enabled-anti-semitism/
She makes a strong case that anti-zionism includes a strong strain of anti-semitism
I obviously cannot speak for every anti-Zionist out there. What I can say with certainty, however, is that being opposed to Zionism does not automatically make someone anti-Semitic… not by a long shot. Being opposed to Israel as a concept–i.e., the idea that any nation based on any form of ethnocentrism is an innately bad idea–also in no way denotes hatred against Jewish people.
One can display disgust with both Jewish and Palestinian acts of terrorism in the name of defending one’s tribe without taking the side of one ethnic group against the other. Tribalism is itself the problem, and Zionism is a clear manifestation of that tendency. Personally, I take the side that both Jewish and Palistinian citizens have equal right to that land, and should have equal rights in all things, including the right to live in peace and under a system that encourages cooperative co-existence rather than competitive opposition. In what way is that “anti-Semitic”, or in any way taking sides in a tribalistic manner?
>>the idea that any nation based on any form of ethnocentrisn is a bad idea
I would ask Dissident if there exists any nation on earth that does NOT
evaluate other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of its own culture? (Yea even if the standards and customs of that country have been sufficiently warped from without by now to believe they were “really” multicultural all along?)
Could there have ever even been the advent of anthropology, that is, an actual science of the human (it was to begin with at least!), if every culture on earth had remained somehow perfectly compact and intact in its standards, customs and values? (Which would of course, have required an ‘ethnocentricity’ that was total?)
What’s more is not Israel, along with its parliamentary body the Knesset the most ethnically diverse and diversely-represented of populations in the entire Middle. East? I believe there is no getting around this fact.
Understanding the rôle of firstness in human affairs is what we must also reckon with, equipped with just as much passion and intensity as we normally devote to that of tbe egalitarian
I would ask Dissident if there exists any nation on earth that does NOT
evaluate other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of its own culture? (Yea even if the standards and customs of that country have been sufficiently warped from without by now to believe they were “really” multicultural all along?)
So, what is your point there, Warbling? That it’s okay for Israel to spread a blatantly ethnocentric message just because all countries tend to look at things through a biased cultural lens? You should know that I am very critical about many aspects of Western culture, but Israel with its Zionist foundation makes no pretense to multi-culturalism or inclusivity, and instead proudly boasts of its ethnocentric policies and mission.
What’s more is not Israel, along with its parliamentary body the Knesset the most ethnically diverse and diversely-represented of populations in the entire Middle. East? I believe there is no getting around this fact.
Then why aren’t the Palestinians allowed to peacefully co-exist within the boundaries of Israel? Why are they forced into confinement into the Gaza Strip because they are not Jewish? Why does its right-wing ruling party and all advocates of Zionism call anyone who disagrees with their ethnocentric foundation “anti-Semitic”? I’m surprised you haven’t called me and other opponents of Zionism that yet, considering how defensive you get whenever anyone criticizes Zionism or the Israeli government, Warbling.
Understanding the rôle of firstness in human affairs is what we must also reckon with, equipped with just as much passion and intensity as we normally devote to that of tbe egalitarian.
Translation (I believe): Egalitarianism is not all it’s cracked up to be, and those who are ethnocentric and put their tribe above all others might very well have something good to say if we just consider why they’re saying it.
They are saying it, Warbling, because they want to grant privilege, exceptional treatment, and control over discourse to any powerful bureaucrat or activist who happens to be Jewish. If you agree with ethnocentrism, or at least Zionism, at heart then it’s to be expected that you want to smear egalitarianism as something that is haughty and “out of touch” with the world. No, egalitarianism is about international and multi-cultural equality and cooperation, it’s about holding everyone accountable for their behavior towards others, and it’s about saying that no tribe has special interests above all others. It’s about preventing anything like the Nazi Holocaust from ever happening to any group of people ever again, instead of just people of my own tribe, or any other particular tribe. Ethnocentrism only leads to the type of separatist hatred and demands for privilege and moral superiority that leads to holocaust events.
Hence, I’ll stand beside egalitarianism over any form of ethnocentrism any day of the century.
The thunderous manner in which you misread/assume me to mean that i think any less of the human fundamentality of the egalitarian than i do of firstness shocks me. Please allow me then to explain if i can exactly what i mean by “firstness”.
I mean that at the base of any human order at all is (the firstness of) the first user of the sign (= minimal unit of language) in his róle as the instigator of mimesis, the * first * to intentionally perform an act that will be imitated by others.
In this core definition no distinction is made between the firstness of authority and the merely temporal priority of being the first to discover something or to perform an act; what is essential is this priority itself. Whether the context on which all firstness depends is the ‘known universe’ or two people * en situation * what defines firstness is a deviation from co-temporality, a break in symmetry, a temporary or permanent hierarchization.
Surely no reasonable person would set about trying to deny that such interactions are necessarily at work in every conceivable sphere of human activity planetwide?
Isn’t it time to pause on the thunderous declamations for a while and try to think as parsimoniously as we can about the irreducible componentry at the heart of any social order and its clearly inexhaustible generativity guaranteed by the sign?
Which i believe have everything to do with instinctual ‘programming’ no longer being able to deal with that feature most characteristic of the higher animals, that of mimesis, or the capacity to imitate? And consequently, eventually to desire?
I am not at all sure whether to proceed with our ‘discussion’ of matters pertaining to Israel and ‘the Jewish question’. But what leapt out me was your assertion that the Palestinians are confined to Gaza because they are “not Jews”. Isn’t the truth rather that they are there because whoever the ‘Palestinian’ people might really be it is almost immaterial because whatever they might feel or think is automatically overshadowed and subsumed by the voices of some truly remarkable examples of your “cloaked human authority figures”, to wit the maniacal leaders of Hamas? Whose ambition is no more to live in peace than is yours to cozy up to the ‘paedophobes’ ?
Without taking away any of Ali’s truly commendable acts of courage, what distresses me most about her dogmatic attitude on “pedophilia” is how far a serious emotional disconnect with any given issue can cause such an admirable figure to willfully and thoughtlessly compromise her overall dedication to some very important principles. And how they have no problem with doing so whatsoever if said issue is popular.
If Ali is strong enough to oppose the fundamentalist aspects of Islam in her native land like she has, then there is no reason to believe she could not exercise the same level of thoughtfulness and emotional control when it comes to this topic. Does she really believe what she says about it, or is she just virtue signalling? Because of the emotionally charged nature of the MAP issue there is never any way to know for certain.
One other thing I want to note, just because I think it’s slightly relevant: I sympathize with the issues many have with organized religion. However, becoming an atheist in response is not the only legit response, IMO–just as repudiating the SJW-tainted Left doesn’t mean that embracing the Right is the only alternative. There are non-organized systems of spirituality, which completely lack the political-military-authoritarian-moralizing aspects Ali identified and lamented, that can serve as a good alternative to some, as it has for me.
Good to hear from you again, Dissy. I might have more to say later, although you make good points in your two posts today and nothing leaps at me as something I need respond to; others may of course feel very differently.
It’s an honor to be back here talking to you guys, Tom 🙂
Wow! Happy to accept the super accolade, Dissy! Honoured to have you back!
>>Non-organized systems of spirituality
I have real difficulty in understanding any meaning for this. How can any system operate without organization of some kind? Tempted to even ask if it is a “system” because it is “spiritual” or “spiritual” because it is a “system”? The whole world needs to know, Dissy!
The sign “spiritual”,. To what does it refer, by itself? I mean to say, what is NOT spiritual in human experience and affairs? Mimesis is spiritual, envy is spiritual, jealousy is spiritual, hatred is spiritual – love is spiritual but so is its equally morally productive ‘shadow’ resentment!
Capitalism – or what i think of more simply as the market model of society – generates the most ‘spiritual’ of cultures because all of the above and more are most relentlessly and unquenchably active in it..
>>Non-organized systems of spirituality
I have real difficulty in understanding any meaning for this. How can any system operate without organization of some kind?
Simple. When said system of faith does not have a Holy Book that all adherents are expected to adhere to, i.e., a set of highly political rules rather than a simple oath of not to harm others. When it does not have a specially designated and empowered clergy who makes all the decisions and pronouncements of the faith that everyone are expected to follow without question. When it lacks the equivalent of an official clergy who are more like bureaucrats than spiritual leaders, and does not have anything akin to Sharia law that is intended to function like a set of punitive laws meted out by the government.
Tempted to even ask if it is a “system” because it is “spiritual” or “spiritual” because it is a “system”? The whole world needs to know, Dissy!
I’m explaining this for the benefit of everyone on this board except for you, Warbling, as no sooner to I return than you start attacking me. I don’t like you either, but I try to stay away from your posts as much as possible, but your habit of constantly attacking my posts make it a pleasure to slap you back every time you do. And no, I am not “imagining” this, nor do I have a “persecution complex” or being “unfair” to someone giving fair and honest disagreements, because you do this frequently and consistently.
I’ll define “spiritual” as I see it quickly and concisely to spare Tom any heavy moderating, including another lengthy go-round between you and me:
I think spiritual is a sense of appreciation for the unseen aspects of the cosmos that are on a higher plane of consciousness yet entirely accepting and inclusive, adapting itself on a personal level. A major part of that is a heavy degree of appreciation for ethical behavior, and the idea that it builds our moral character and connection with these unseen forces with a positive outcome. It is very different than obeying laws because you are ordered to do so by some cloaked human authority figure, or else you will get thrown into a material jail and/or told you will be cast into an otherworldly realm of punishment for all eternity after you kick the bucket.
[MODERATOR: You wrote: “to spare Tom any heavy moderating…” Your definition of “spiritual” does not present a moderation problem, Dissy, but personal animosity does. Not saying you started it. You obviously feel you didn’t. But better to leave some cooling down time before writing.]
I cannot say otherwise. I remain mystified by the use of these words “attacking my posts”. To the very very best of my knowledge I am taking the *words* of a commenter called Dissident seriously and finding what s/he says worthy of engagement.
I do not know this person and have no idea if i would like them or dislike them. As i have said before i have in fact any amount of great admiration for the lucidity of those words, most especially when they fearlessly (heh..) attack so very well and thoroughly the hysterical irrationality driving most all of current worldly discourse on children and sexuality.
When those mighty words (i repeat, those words, not the traits of some personality somewhere i am not liking!!) overlap into certain other areas of interest however, i find them challenging. For as often as not they say things that touch directly on concerns that the thinker in me finds greatly arousing. In a word, i find them irrestistible.
It escapes me completely why the author of those words would find my obviously heartfelt response to them so hugely objectionable and indeed, as some sort of attack on his person. If he could explain somehow why he feels them to be attacks on his person, i should he most grateful. But please Dissident, not quite so much heat needed?
Now as for your definition of “spiritual” as “appreciation for the unseen aspects of the cosmos”, to which you wish it seems to ascribe some “higher consciousness”, such talk is quite beyond me. I have yet to meet the person whose spirit is at all moved by such. The kind of intellectual discipline required by one who could truly ‘appreciate’ the nature of such hidden aspects, the likes of a cosmologist or astrophysicist perhaps, is hardly possessed by many. But then, if your words are anything to go by, these sorts of fellows would be but more “cloaked human authority figure(s)” ?
But i fear i may be unable to avoid this point-of-contention moving ever deeper into the polemical..
I’m a generative anthropologist. I believe to my bones that what makes us human/spiritual is the (linguistic) sign. ‘The word’. That in the beginning the sacred & significant were identical, inseparable, coeval, and that it was never possible to generate or evolve the one without the other – and that this remains so to this day in an infinitude of forever diverging and converging ways we call *language* – at whose ultimate root and centre is the originary signified ‘God’
Let us see if I can keep my response concise and be fair without losing my temper. I think I can manage both after having taken the cooling off period that Tom suggested.
It just seems to me, Warbling, that no sooner do I make a post then I get a response from you that, by its tone, sounds far more antagonistic than a sincere attempt to engage. What got me particularly “heated” this time was that no sooner did I return from a hiatus than you are on my arse about all the usual stuff. When someone has a personal problem with someone else, they tend to sift through their posts looking for things to find fault with. And frankly, the more you do that, the more you make it difficult for me to keep my cool and respond to your points from an emotional distance. When you slap someone, metaphorically speaking, then they are going to smack you back. That is just common sense.
Also, let us face it: there are some things we are never going to agree on. One of them is the egalitarianism vs. ethnocentrism thing. You know by now that I am never going to be a fan of Israel and Zionism due to my strong opposition to any form of ethnocentrism and tribalism, I am a proud champion of egalitarianism and cooperation… and I am going to stand firm on that point. You certainly do not have to agree with that, but if you keep “engaging” me on it with the tone that you have, then it is also common sense that the resulting exchanges are going to get “heated.”
I am not a fan of letting personal animosity with someone get the better of me when posting, and I try not to let that happen here out of respect for Tom and the many fellow posters that I respect too. But I am human and I admittedly do not take kindly to being frequently slapped by someone. While I do apologize for any error of judgment I may make, both in the past and in the future, I make no such apologies for refusing to be an easy target for anyone’s antagonism.
>It just seems to me, Warbling, that no sooner do I make a post then I get a response from you that, by its tone, sounds far more antagonistic than a sincere attempt to engage.
I have to say, Dissy, that any such pattern has flown well under my radar. We all get frustrated when people have opinions we do not like, and keep returning to them until it is annoying. In the interests of free debate, though, I think we just have to suck it up, with as much good grace as possible.
Humour often helps. Sarcasm is allowed! But sarcasm or any other rhetorical tactics should be aimed at exposing the weakness (as you think) of the other guy’s arguments, not their character.
I have to say, Dissy, that any such pattern has flown well under my radar.
In all honestly, Tom, I think it has flown under your radar because you have no problem with Warbling’s style due to the fact that his antagonism is never directed at you personally, or at anyone that you do not personally have petty little issues with. In my case, however, you have been annoyed with me for various things in the past, including my difficulty with brevity and expressed it to me in no uncertain terms, when I have never seen you complain to Warbling about his typically rambling, very lengthy posts which have rivaled me on my worst. In other words, it seems to me that you favor him simply because his style never gets under your skin whereas sometimes mine does.
Which is why you have breached your neutrality on this volatile issue. I find that very insulting and I feel that Warbling is being given a free pass on certain types of behavior that you complain to me about if I do it. You know I greatly respect you and all you have done for the community, and that will never change, but enough is enough on your biased treatment towards me compared to others whenever a dispute arises.
Humour often helps. Sarcasm is allowed! But sarcasm or any other rhetorical tactics should be aimed at exposing the weakness (as you think) of the other guy’s arguments, not their character.
Geez louise, Tom. Do you see what I mean now? All I did was, in a moment of heated anger which is in no way typical of me, reveal to Warbling that I dislike him for what I believe to be his antagonism, but in no way did I call him any names and I do not think that admonishing someone simply for their behavior towards me constitutes anywhere near the type of character assassination you’re making it out to be. Yet, you’re treating it like I came out and called a beloved younger sibling of yours a ponce over a holiday dinner for absolutely no reason at all. My response to him was in no way nasty, but simply blunt while, I believe, respectfully maintaining my cool. Would you have reacted this way if I responded thusly to Ethan for doing the exact same thing? I doubt it, because you have no sentimental loyalty to him due to the fact that you are among the people he has antagonized.
Further, if I responded sarcastically to Warbling, you would probably complain about that too. Nevertheless, as the moderator here, you will always be right be default, and I have to accept that.
Hence, I will personally be bidding your board adieu for a very long time, or I may make responses on GC and simply post the link here. If anyone wants to talk to me about any topic, look for me on GC or communicate with me on my new Protonmail address. You are free to do the same, Tom, but I am not going to lie to you and say there is no bad blood between us. You know how much I love and respect your blog, but this has gone too far now.
Dissy, your politics and beliefs are much closer to mine than Mr Turp’s. But lively debate is best secured when all views are permitted, including those we do not agree with.
If you can’t stand the heat then, yes, it probably is best to leave the kitchen.
But I’ll be sorry to see you go. The welcome I gave you on your return after a long absence was sincere and heartfelt. Leftwing opinion (of a kind that is not mired in divisive identity politics) is presently underrepresented at HTOC, in my view, and your presence helps redress the balance.
So I very much hope you will reconsider your position and decide to put up with Mr Turp. Bear in mind that it works both ways: anyone here who does not like your input will have to put up with you!
Whatever you decide, my best wishes are with you.
To be clear:
Dissy, your politics and beliefs are much closer to mine than Mr Turp’s. But lively debate is best secured when all views are permitted, including those we do not agree with.
Where, exactly, did I say I had a problem with Mr. Turp (which you now call him) expressing his opinions? The issue is the antagonistic way he constantly does so with me, and the fact that he does it so often, along with the additional issue with how you give him free rein to be as aggressive and lengthy as he wants in the process while you seem to feel the need to rein me in on both counts if I do the same. This was misrepresenting the point of my complaint, and I think you know that.
If you can’t stand the heat then, yes, it probably is best to leave the kitchen.
You know from years of knowing me, Tom, that I can take a lot of heat. I have never had to take the super-nova level of heat you have courageously taken and survived over the course of many decades, granted, but you have nevertheless seen me take a lot of opposition without complaining. The problem is when I have to take more of it than other posters do because of petty little personal issues you have with me that you do not have with them. If I have to deal with a form of moderating based on personal issues rather than a set of rules of conduct that everyone has to abide by equally, then yes, I will leave. Let’s not move the goal post here.
But I’ll be sorry to see you go. The welcome I gave you on your return after a long absence was sincere and heartfelt. Leftwing opinion (of a kind that is not mired in divisive identity politics) is presently underrepresented at HTOC, in my view, and your presence helps redress the balance.
I know and fully believe you, based on years of reading and enjoying your posts, when you say that your political beliefs are closer to mine than to Mr. Turp’s. That isn’t the issue, tho, as I tried to explain. It’s these personal issues that you have with me that are the problem, that makes you single me out for a harsh reprimand whenever a disagreement arises between me and another poster that you lack these issues with.
So I very much hope you will reconsider your position and decide to put up with Mr Turp.
Again, how was that ever the issue, Tom? You have drastically shifted the goal post. The issue is with me having to put up with his behavior (not simply his presence and disagreements) while he does not have to deal with the same from me in return.
Bear in mind that it works both ways: anyone here who does not like your input will have to put up with you!
That, actually, was my main point all along: Mr. Turp only has to put up with me so long as I tolerate his level of antagonism, which is not out of a desire for mutual engagement. I, however, have to tolerate his attitude because overall, his quirks irritate you not at all, whereas mine unfortunately do. If you are saying my main infraction here was openly admitting that I dislike him personally, whereas he simply makes his attitude towards me obvious without outright saying he dislikes me personally, than fine, I will do the same in return. Let us see if you allow him to take what he gives out as long as I keep my personal opinion of his behavior to myself. I never expected to have to take less than others; I simply expect you, as the moderator, to hold the same standard to everyone.
Finally, please note this: My personal issues with Mr. Turp do not stem from his opposing views, but from his approach and attitude when he jumps on me about this viewpoint opposition. Keep in mind that I personally like and respect Peter (from New Zealand, I believe?) despite having the exact same difference of opinion with him over Israel and Zionism that I do with Mr. Turp. Recall how I have engaged Peter without ire because his approach makes it clear that it’s nothing personal on his part and because, unlike Mr. Turp, Peter also engages with me over topics we can agree on instead of just constantly jumping on me about the things we do not agree with. I suppose that flew under your radar too? It must have conveniently done so if you seriously believe those accusations you leveled against me (i.e., a simple and petty inability to tolerate disagreements of opinion).
To the contrary, I do not recall a single instance of Mr. Turp ever having a respectful attitude or openly agreeing with me about anything; it’s always about the opposition and his antagonistic approach. And you claim this went under your radar, when you are the moderator here? Perhaps you should address my actual issue instead of trying to push a distracting accusation on me that everyone who has known me for years–or at least should know me better than that, in your case–would know is way out of character for me.
>Where, exactly, did I say I had a problem with Mr. Turp (which you now call him) expressing his opinions? The issue is the antagonistic way he constantly does so with me
I am struggling here. This looks like a distinction without a difference, or not an easily discernible one.
>This was misrepresenting the point of my complaint, and I think you know that.
No, nothing deliberate, I assure you. Assuming bad faith in those we disagree with is a very common error.
>you have… seen me take a lot of opposition without complaining.
True.
>It’s these personal issues that you have with me that are the problem
Nothing personal based on any sort of hostility. I wouldn’t give anyone here a hard time just for fun. I’m not mean like that. It’s just not in me. Yes, I’ve pulled you up a number of times over long posts that could have been more effective if edited to be more concise. That’s not picking on you, it’s an effort to be helpful, both to you and your readers.
>The issue is with me having to put up with his [Mr Turp’s] behavior
Again, I am struggling. What behaviour exactly? Can you give me an example of unwarranted provocation?
>he simply makes his attitude towards me obvious
Not obvious to me. Again, can you give an example?
>Recall how I have engaged Peter without ire because his approach makes it clear that it’s nothing personal on his part
Peter is certainly a very courteous guy, exceptionally emollient really. Shame we don’t hear from him more often. It’s nearly Xmas. I really must drop him an email.
I am struggling here. This looks like a distinction without a difference, or not an easily discernible one.
How someone says things, and the tone they exhibit when doing so, is distinct from what they say and tells a lot about someone’s motives for engaging another. It makes quite a bit of difference as to how the person being engaged is likely to react–especially over the long haul–and I think it’s quite easily discernible, especially when done as blatantly as Mr. Turp. Equally important is what Mr. Turp very often doesn’t say–i.e., never engages with me except in an oppositional way. I mentioned Peter’s approach to contrast that.
Assuming bad faith in those we disagree with is a very common error.
It is indeed… until you engage with that person over a long period of time, and clearly discernible patterns begin to emerge.
Nothing personal based on any sort of hostility. I wouldn’t give anyone here a hard time just for fun. I’m not mean like that. It’s just not in me.
Just like I believe it’s simply not in me to cry foul or develop a personal dislike with someone simply because they disagree with me, and no other. I’m not petty or, dare I say, tyrannical like that.
Yes, I’ve pulled you up a number of times over long posts that could have been more effective if edited to be more concise. That’s not picking on you, it’s an effort to be helpful, both to you and your readers.
And you have gotten quite nasty about it at times, and I have never seen you express the same pulling up on Mr. Turp despite his very frequent uber-lengthy, rambling posts. Hence, my suspicions that the issue with me has a strong personal element to it.
Again, I am struggling. What behaviour exactly? Can you give me an example of unwarranted provocation?
Yes. Virtually every post he has ever made to me, along with the total absence of any posts where he mentions any type of agreement with me or an expression of camaraderie or friendliness. It’s very obvious, and is under no one’s radar unless they push it there deliberately. It’s not like you to miss things like that, considering the one time I admitted a personal dislike for someone set your radar alarm off.
Peter is certainly a very courteous guy, exceptionally emollient really. Shame we don’t hear from him more often. It’s nearly Xmas. I really must drop him an email.
I am pleased this unpleasant exchange at the very least resulted in a reminder to check in on Peter, however inadvertent.
I’ve been given to understand you avoid GC, and an email is only useful when known. I hope you’ll reconsider your decision, as it’s both hasty and uncharacteristeric.
Hi, Nada.
I’ve been given to understand you avoid GC,
The reason I have not been on GC over the past few years nearly as much as I used to be for many, many years prior is only partly the result of deliberate avoidance. I have avoided it upon returning there a few times over the past few years since I did not like some of the changes I have seen there during that time, including the type of behavior towards me by people I once considered close friends and allies. The other reason (which I attempted to explain there more than once, and will again) is that my personal and professional life over the past few years is very different from how it was prior, thus not affording me the time to be as active on all the MAP boards simultaneously as I once was.
I am planning to pop in there again soon, however. It’s still always going to be home to me.
and an email is only useful when known.
My apologies. I thought everyone had access to it on this blog under every post I made. My current email is: dissident57@protonmail.com
I hope you’ll reconsider your decision, as it’s both hasty and uncharacteristeric.
I know, but I felt I was pushed far enough on this issue. Thank you for expressing support and letting me know that you value my presence here, it was much appreciated. I likewise value all of you peeps.
But most people understand ‘capitalism’ to refer to a system which has, as an essential component, ‘wage slavery’. You can have a market without having wage slaves (e.g., when your traders are sole traders or worker cooperatives). I don’t think we owe any ‘spirituality’ to wage slavery — unless it is the kind of spirituality which some claim emerges from struggle against adversity.
One should remember that the prejudice against intergenerational sexuality is THE most powerful and deeply entrenched one of our era, so it requires an exceptionally critical and open mind to assess it without being overwhelmed with an emotional overdose. So it is very common for a person capable of a (relatively) objective analysis of most other controversial topics to fail intellectually when encountering this one. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first here; unfortunately, she won’t be the last for sure.
And it is also worth remembering that a very few people are capable of objectivity when assessing this ultimately-controversial topic may be devoid of it when dealing with other ones – say, Covid-19(84) and the highly questionable (to put it mildly), yet brutally violent power actors’ measures supposedly directed against it.
In general, as my long experience of dealing with various controversies taught me, objectivity is actually the very last quality one could expect from such a fundamentally subjective creature as a human being. The same goes for the institutions created by human beings: contrary to some expectations, collectivity brings no objectivity whatsoever; it only accumulates and intensifies the subjectivities of the human beings participating in them, and adds some specifically collective twists to the mix.
Yes, and as Vaclav Havel writes in his famous work “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), ideology creates a stifling power structure where citizens are expected to live a lie. Havel’s ideas in this essay can be readily applied to MAPs. One is forced to engage in society’s empty rituals, emphasising one’s conformity to the status quo. Through fear one earns a relatively peaceful life through living a lie and demonstrating one’s loyalty to power. Dissidents are controlled by this collective “slavery” to the rituals of the State, i.e. emphasising convention and norms to earn society’s protection.
Re: Christian’s point, psychedelics should obviously be legal and mass incarceration is one of the most glaring acts of State-sponsored malfeasance of our Age.
It’s grifters all the way down, on both left or right. As soon as someone comes out against the pedos, you know you can ignore them. If they’re vehemently against pedophiles, expect to see them arrested for misuse of donations.
And I’d rather be called a bush dodger than a MAP. At least it’s funny and doesn’t imply non-consent.
I also don’t like being associated with transgenders or anyone else’s campaign for accommodation. Transgenders have very high rates of comorbid mental disorder, left-handedness and other signs of developmental disturbance. Pedos on the other hand, at least according to Fritz Bernard, are no different apart from marginally higher introversion. This is supported by police complaining that there’s no profile for a pedophile. If they had any sense they’d see it as an indicator that there is no abnormality in attraction to children.
Tom
Maybe you should share your experiences with the rest of the class
>Good luck with getting anyone else to pay attention. Ain’t easy, is it?
Powerful. I know all about existential battles of good and evil, I’m a Christian who believes in fighting the prevailing materialistic and soulless aspects of our society. Let me tell you that defending a minority sexual orientation (pseudonymously) isn’t a natural position for me, but nevertheless I feel compelled to intellectually reject the hatred and bigotry encountered in general society. And I dream of a society where one can be more open about one’s sexuality.
I’m not sure that “highly-respected” is quite the epithet I would apply to Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I tend to concur with Christian’s suggestion below that she is one of the ideological warriors of liberal imperialism. Certainly she seems to be more highly respected among neoconservatives and Islamphobes than among the people whose interests she claims to represent – namely Muslim women.
But I think it’s unfair to be disappointed in her: even self-professed ‘free speech fundamentalists’ do not really believe in unrestricted free speech. And if the whole point of free speech is (as the liberal position would generally have it) to arrive at some objective truth, then positions that are self-evidently untruthful may be drummed out of court. Thus free-speech warriors can refuse to entertain positions that do not meet the minimum standard to be taken seriously. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has decided that paedophilia and polygamy fail the test. No doubt most of her readers would agree with her.
This is one of the main problems with appeals to free speech: because nobody believes in unlimited free-speech, the self-professed high-priests of free speech get to decide what its limits are. Moreover, appeals to free speech are not innocent: they are implicated in other ideological battles (in Hirsi Ali’s case, they serve the ends of secularism, Westernisation, and modernity – all things of questionable benefit to MAPs in my opinion).
Self-professed free-speech fundamentalists are usually really free-speech instrumentalists with very clear ideas about what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ free speech is. For Hirsi Ali, free speech means the freedom to call the Prophet of Islam a paedophile (as she has done, on numerous occasions). It does not entail the freedom to entertain the idea that paedophilia might not always and everywhere be entirely and unreservedly a bad thing.
Well said. Put even simpler: most free speech advocates continue to personally define free speech as either anything they strongly agree with, or things they disagree with but not too strongly. Any topic they strongly disagree with should not be protected by free speech.
>>Certainly she seems to be more highly respected among neoconservatives and Islamphobes than among the people whose interests she claims to represent – namely Muslim women.
Do you really believe there exist true neo-conservatives anymore? Those who still believe that every last country on earth can ultimately be remade in America’s image? Do you really believe that “Islamophobe” is anything more than a maximally crude device to rule out of court as pathology any critical thought whatsoever concerning the inroads made by Islamism?
I would be very interested to know where you get your understanding that Hirsi Ali is not respected much by the women she claims to represent? Might you supply some English-language sources for this, perhaps?
>Self-professed free-speech fundamentalists are usually really free-speech instrumentalists
Those who have defended academic freedom since the Enlightenment, buttressed by JS Mill’s On Liberty, in which he held that no opinion should be suppressed, have tended on the whole to be entirely sincere in their support for the principle, I suggest. Quite apart from the case advanced by Voltaire, Mill, and others being persuasive on its own account, real freedom of thought and expression is massively in the interests of all manner of scholars, whether scientists, theologians, or whatever. You make a point about free speech serving secularism, but that does not make it anti-religious: the First Amendment was created, remember, in order to preserve freedom of religious expression.
Incidentally, you might like Mill more than you think. He was against “unmeasured vituperation” (which is a mode of expression, not an opinion per se) as it deters those it is aimed against from expressing their views. So he would not have liked what we call “hate speech” one bit. He would have sided with the “snowflakes”, and so would I, which is why I do not permit personal abuse on HTOC.
But he would not have approved (and neither do I) of cancel culture, characterised as it is by closing down supposedly offensive and “harmful” opinion, often by methods far more thuggish, intimidating, and palpably harmful than anything said by the so-called offenders. For a superb demonstration of this see last week’s superb Channel 4 documentary Cancelled:
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/cancelled
I seem to have reached my free article limit with the Telegraph, so would you or Mr Turps mind giving a brief summary?
You should be able to see this report, yes?
https://x99news.com/2021/11/24/tiktok-craze-sees-teachers-mistakenly-called-pedophiles-staff-quit-jobs-uk-news/
Thanks!
I saved the Telegraph article on the Wayback Machine, where it becomes visible:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211125103918/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/24/pupils-targeted-tiktok-paedophile-craze-now-cant-go-back-school/?s=09
Thank you
Allyn Walker has just announced resignation from ODU. See section just added to blog for details of this fresh news.
Fucking awful. Their research is framed around prevention efforts. Clearly many people care more about their disgust and moral indignation than they do about “protecting the children.” Danny Whittaker, bless his heart, at least had the balls to admit it…
While I think we can all agree that child sexual abuse is something that should indeed be opposed, too many researchers, including Walker, avoid the issues of how broadly CSA is defined. Too many people in Western culture seem to be disturbingly tolerant of the trauma and fatal harm that the status quo we live under imposes upon massive numbers of children worldwide via war, imperialist sanctions, poverty, and even the very schooling system itself. It seems that if it doesn’t involve “exploitation” due to sexual activity, our society does little to combat these issues because doing so would circumvent the status quo they seem to feel obligated to defend. Hence, I find the popular research focus on “preventing sexual abuse” to lack moral credibility. It seems to be both a form of virtue signalling and “playing it safe” to avoid taking research into areas which may ask important questions that social scientists interested in keeping their jobs fear to tread.
Note that Walker studiously avoided begging any sort of hard questions and was dogmatic with her views on intergenerational sexual contact…and they still lost their job.
>her views on intergenerational sexual contact
Allyn Walker is FtM trans. Hence “their views”, although “his” might be more logical.
Jeez louse again, Tom. I know that you know I was using the “their” and “them” pronouns throughout my references to Dr. Walker, and simply made an error here due to not paying attention as much as I should have because of the late hour I was typing. I think both should be obvious. But I’ll take this last little potshot from you as I depart your board.
It is very hard to get these things right. Does anyone else here feel I have mishandled things with this pronoun comment, or with moderating Dissy’s ire with Mr Turp?
I feel that this last comment about the pronouns was perhaps unnecessary, given that Dissy has been otherwise scrupulous in his observance of correct protocol in this matter. I can understand his irritation in this case.
More generally though, I feel that Dissy is overreacting. I am disinclined to go back over past blog posts to determine whether the pattern which he alleges of personal animosity towards him from Warbling is in fact correct, but I feel that just on the basis of Warbling’s comments on this blog post, his remarks, though somewhat hyperbolic in places, do not reach the level of personal abuse. That is my opinion, and, as a fellow-leftist especially, I hope Dissy reconsiders his decision.
>I feel that this last comment about the pronouns was perhaps unnecessary
Yes, I can see with hindsight that it was a mistake. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that Dissy would take offence over this. It was not meant as a dig at him. When I saw the “her”, I thought he had made the error of thinking Allyn had gone from male to female, in which case Dissy’s previous use of neutral pronouns would have been irrelevant. Although the photo shows Allyn with short hair, their appearance remains quite androgynous, in my view; also, their chosen name has an unfamiliar spelling, not strongly associated with either sex. The point of making the comment was to clarify the matter so that Dissy and others would get it right in the event of the name coming up again, as it probably will.
>At its heart, they are just saying that if people stay within the law they should not be pilloried as though they were brutal criminals
If so, there would have no need to moralize over the differences (according to Walker) between queers and MAPs with regard to relationships and stigmatization, as done.
As the Daily Mail seems to have been more than fair to Walker, and had a fairly good coverage of the Stock affair, mendacious is a rather curious word choice. Should a newspaper be held to standard of rigor far greater than an academic, whose claims rests on denying relevant science (such as Rind et al) and the existence of other societies, past and present, where the relative rights or stigmatization of MAPs and queers vary?
Again, we see here how official “LGBT” organisations become ever more reactionary. I will repeat, from my comment on your June 21 article about Peter Thatchell, the quote I gave of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë:
“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him; they crush those beneath them.”
This is similar to Zionists, who use the Nazi Holocaust as pretext for refusing to abide with any other rules than their own, flouting international law, oppressing and robbing the Palestinian people in the name of Jewish rights, then calling “anti-Semite” anyone who dares to oppose their behaviour.
The Jezebel article says that Walker located the start of the campaign against ‘they’ in an article by the “feminist” site 4W. Looking at its home page, it appears as just an anti-trans and anti-paedophile hate site under a “feminist” disguise, full of articles at the same level as the worst tabloids. The Prostasia Foundation is one of their regular targets, in particular for its opposition to the censorship of adult porn or erotic art, including art and fiction portraying sex with minors. I noticed 4W’s anger at an article by a Prostasia person explaining how the police is the biggest threat to underage sex workers:
https://newrepublic.com/article/128028/child-sex-workers-biggest-threat-police
I already knew that several adult sex workers had accused the police to be the main source of violence against them. But now we see “feminists” who joined conservatives in the Meese Commission to claim that porn is violence against women, then who support the police and call for more cops. They have forgotten how the respectable suffragettes of the late 19th century intentionally clashed with the male police in order to publicise their struggle!
The Prostasia Foundation has defended artists and legal child nude images, in particular it opposed the censorship of the website Pigtails in Paint.
>The Prostasia Foundation has defended artists and legal child nude images, in particular it opposed the censorship of the website Pigtails in Paint.
Good for Prostasia. I did not know about their defence of PIP.
The website pigtails in paint is fascinating btw; thanks Christian for mentioning it.
Also yes Prostasia has written many important and interesting articles apropos lolicon and shotacon and have secured a research team led by Dr. Gilian Tenbergen to conduct research on the topic. Can’t find the exact post but it was on Gilian’s facebook page not too long ago. There’s a post here discussing the project https://prostasia.org/event/atsa-2021/
Regarding anti-pedophilia, what’s the significant difference between 4W and the feminist site Jezebel, which saw fit to publish Walkers claims without supporting evidence?
The call for stricter laws and cops is nothing new: Feminists attacked the rights of girls already in the 19th century (marriage and age of consent reforms).
The New Republic article makes a good point about the appalling treatment of sex-workers by the police, including underage sex-workers. It’s a good example of how moralistic laws can end up causing a brutalization which is the opposite of their declared intent.
There is some evidence that Walker’s views may be more radical than they appear. This is from a comment on the Washington Post website:
‘…in justifying that MAPs are similar to LGBs, Walker writes: “This argument [that healthy LGB relationships between adults are possible but not between MAPs and children] additionally makes a blanket assumption that no minors are capable of consenting to sex which we will explore later on.” Sorry, hard pass.’
The commenter, Arturo23, provides the below link to the article, though so far, I’ve been unable to get past its paywall. Maybe some other heretics could manage it!
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=ZFM3Ks8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=ZFM3Ks8AAAAJ:Tyk-4Ss8FVUC
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-016-9342-7
Avail. at Sci-Hub
Thanks, Art! I went to sci-hub but never thought to use the DOI!
Minor Attraction: A Queer Criminological Issue, Critical Criminology volume 25, pages 37–53 (2017). Indeed, he writes p. 42:
Then pp. 42-43:
p. 46, he excludes consent for pre-pubertal children, but hints that it could be different for teenagers:
To be both fair and firm with Dr. Walker: I believe they are clearly struggling with the issue. They know how conceptions of childhood have changed through the course of the previous century, and acknowledges this. But at the same time, they realize the danger of going any further against the powerful public sentiment that insists pre-pubescents, at least, should be held to the expectation of innocence and necessarily low cognitive ability to make decisions (and without taking into account the enforced ignorance imposed upon them). Walker appears to know that they are already treading on dangerous ground, so why trek any further into the minefield? Why beg the obvious questions even further than they are already doing?
We cannot say that Walker is wrong to be cautious, because look at what they are now going through for even taking these modest steps into the violation of sacred ground. However, by ignoring research that refutes their absolutist statement about pre-pubescents, it would have been more honest of Walker to simply remain ambiguous on the issue.
Nevertheless, I do think Walker is commendable for taking even these limited steps forward and being willing to pay the price, even if such steps are nothing like the ones that will likely (and hopefully) be taken by researchers 40 years from now. Can we, and should we, hold Walker and other researchers of this era up to the standards expected of those that will follow them in the coming generations? I think that may be the important question to ask and consider.
>There is some evidence that Walker’s views may be more radical than they appear.
The excerpt suggests otherwise.
https://boychat.org/messages/1582058.htm
Great article. “Folks are idiots” as someone once said. Those who drink shallowly of the Pierian Spring, which is the majority of men, are apt to formulate the most ludicrous hatreds and biases. Even Virped is trashed, as you say. But the attitude of the common man is ultimately inconsequential. Change will filter down from the top. And this anti-humanistic hatred of people based on an intrinsic and fixed identity trait will gradually be seen as nothing more than the virulent prejudice it is.
For a left wing student body mad about inclusivity and fighting all prejudice, especially on gender, sexuality and race, they are of course Pharisaical, hollow hypocrites. It seems some visceral irrational hatreds are still acceptable, and so how can we not laugh in their faces when they denounce statues of historic figures? They are truly pathetic, and are as two faced as Janus. They deserve zero respect, the left are the ultimate Pharisees, and when I look at the right I at least see a measure of authenticity, whether we happen to agree or not.
Some of the left, Zen, are Pharisees. There are more thoughtful, heterodox representatives of that tendency, though even amongst these, I’ll admit, sympathy for MAPs is rare.
I sort of agree that there is a kind of authenticity to the right, though of an unenviable kind. The ‘right’, it seems to me, has on the whole very bad principles that it applies thoroughly and indiscriminately (the Daily Mail is just such an epitome of universal wrong-headedness), whereas the ‘left’ has generally good and worthy principles that it applies quite arbitrarily and with no consistency whatsoever. It is not hard to see how this could be interpreted as bad faith on the part of the left, though I don’t think it is exactly that.
The problem with the reactions to Allyn Walker is not that they represent an “anti-humanistic hatred of people based on an intrinsic identity trait” – it might feel like that from the receiving end, but I don’t really think that is what is going on. The problem is that Walker’s critics don’t really think that there is a class of persons here at all. The paedophile (or the MAP, or what you will) just doesn’t exist as a thinkable subject position, any more than the trans-man existed as a thinkable subject-position in the 1950s.
There is no person here – there is merely an assemblage of pernicious, victimising and offensive acts. One simply cannot imagine being a paedophile – or even that the paedophile exists beyond the category of the sex-offender. I generally have no time at all for Walker and don’t particularly care what happens to them, but they does (ugh!) provide an intriguing anthropology of paedo-denial among otherwise intelligent people. These folks are not exactly idiots, whatever else they might be.
In short, I’d suggest that the problem is not hypocrisy or irrational hatred but a much more mundane and deadly sin – a failure of imagination. Walker does at least attempt to make a gesture in the direction of imaginative sympathy, albeit timidly and constrained by the monstrous assemblage of evils that towers over the insignificant figure of the human subject, like the long dark shadow on the stupid cover of their lousy book.
If ‘the left’ were true to its own principles (and I think they are not at all bad ones), kiddy-perverts would be acknowledged as authorities on their own experience, in much the same way that less-unpopular sexual minorities are. But such subjects are just not imaginable – and, of course, the fact that paedophiles are (mostly) invisible and silent in the public sphere means that the paedophile subject remains unimagined.
I prefer the right, that’s just my personality and character. It also accords more with my spiritual beliefs. I like elements of the left, notably its greater humanitarianism and compassion for the marginalised. In fact I find that my beliefs are most closely aligned with Catholic Social Teaching, which is a mish-mash of left and right.
The “failure of imagination” to give MAPs an adequate and legitimate conceptualisation is an interesting idea. I think there is some degree of truth to this. Indeed being forced into a self-preserving silence is the fate of almost all MAPs, and so (as you say) there is a notable lack of authentic public discourse. Whenever someone attempts to introduce authentic discourse they are mobbed and shouted down. So it is self-defeating. But I am glad for the opportunity to discuss these things on Heretic TOC.
Zen, if you don’t mind, I’ll put a question your way, as I haven’t managed to get an answer to it elsewhere. And I mean this as a genuine question rather than a thinly veiled criticism: what’s it got to do with the political left and right? My impression is that the culture war is more about social conservatives versus social liberals. An additional impression of mine is that the culture war is at least partly manufactured by the media for commercial gain, viewing figures, etc., that media outlets have political and social biases, and that they are happy to conflate the political left with social liberalism (for example) because this allows them to tar lefties and social liberals with the same brush when pandering to their target audience. I’ve seen figures like Jordan Peterson make a spurious case for the justifiability of such conflation and bandy around terms like ‘postmodernism’ ad hominem-style, but ultimately such claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. The conflation of the political left and right with socially liberal views and socially conservative views respectively seems to be particularly entrenched in the USA (compared to the UK, for instance).
Whilst on the topic, I’d like to offer an alternative view. A lot of the more radical social liberals are, in my view, not social liberals at all but social conservatives. It’s just that their dogma differs from that of previous generations of social conservatives.
Of course, glad to discuss this. The “culture war” between social left and right is quite spurious and manufactured at times, but then it does represent real moral issues. Abortion, euthanasia, drug legalisation, punitive justice vs rehabilitative justice, etc are all real and tangible issues, although it is far too simplistic to say everyone is uniformly left and right on all these issues. For example, most US conservatives are both “pro-life” and “anti-migrant” whereas the socially conservative Catholic Church is “pro-life” and “pro-migrant”. US liberals tend to be “pro-choice” and “pro-migrant”. Again, US conservatives are strongly “pro-gun” but this is a foreign concept to most European conservatives. However, at times the Church outflanks the American right, for example in their prohibition on masturbation. At the same time the Church is economically liberal. And just about everyone, from the most entrenched Marxist to a Ron Paul libertarian, is anti-MAP, although this could conceivably change.
There is rarely universal agreement in these matters. Just about every combination of the economic and the social axes of political thought are possible. For example, just because I support the recognition of a MAP sexuality, does not mean I have to be extremely liberal on all social issues – that is far from the case – and even less so on economic issues.
So to answer your question, the culture war is complex, multifaceted and indeed to some extent manufactured, but currently (and I can only deal with the present situation) the libertarian right, the religious right, the Marxist left, and the soft liberal left are all united in opposing any formal recognition of MAP issues, apart from small groups and scattered individuals on the margins of social thought. The key question is, will this change in the future? I think it will, and indeed “the right” is already paranoid that “the left” are beginning to allow MAP recognition. The reality on the ground however seems to be far from the case at present.
A far more detailed and enlightening response than I was hoping for, so thank you for that, Zen. Indeed, the use of ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ does seem habitually simplistic and often sloppy. So when a tabloid newspaper runs a story about Walker’s book and characterises it as a new low for the left, would you say the newspaper is using the term ‘left’ more as a trigger word to get its readership frothing at the mouth than in any accurate sense?
Yes, I would say generally that conservatives use “the left” as a pejorative. They want their viewers to believe that the MAP agenda is a genuine left-wing threat, probably to stir them up. However in truth even the most radical leftists seem to be avoiding this agenda, there are only a few lone voices in support.
Tom, you really undermine and underappreciate yourself by refusing to call yourself a “proper” researcher: being a researcher is an activity, a practice; it requires no formal social status or standing whatsoever.
One can easily conduct a proper – informative, reliable and useful – research without any formal degree-providing education whatsoever; conversely, one could be a culturally indoctrinated pulpiteer, an economically intrested shill or a politically motivated pundit while being a high-standing fully-tenured Oxbridge / Ivy League PhD. The former category of unofficial-yet-productive researchers is the one that includes you, Tom; and your rank there, determined by your actual works and by formal degrees and affilations, is reasonably high. This genuine rank makes you higher than many who use their vacuous academic status – “presitgeous” university degrees and faculty positions – to impress the gullible and peddle sciency-sounding garbage.
Said this, I understand your reasons for not putting your signature under that letter – and agree with you on this.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, E!
On Sexnet, fortunately, the “proper professor” who is the moderator appears to value my contribution. He respects strong academic credentials but does not make a fetish of them.
>[The Daily Mail] dropped another blockbuster titled “Fury as Old Dominion university REFUSES to fire trans professor who said pedophiles can’t help their urges and should be given child sex dolls”. Walker actually said more or less the opposite: most paedophiles can control their “urges” and their behaviour but, like everyone else, they have no choice as to their sexual orientation. But, hey, that’s the mendacious Mail for you!
Mendacity indeed, largely achieved by some cunning verbal manipulation. On a standard reading, ‘can’t help their urges’ surely means that they cannot decide what urges they have. This is both obviously true and apparently the view of Allyn Walker. But the careless reader is likely to confuse this with ‘can’t control their urges’ (in other words, can’t stop themselves doing what their urges are pushing them to do), which, as you say, is not what Walker wants to to say about pedophiles, though I guess the Mail really would like to leave us the impression that it is.
Take it easy, Stephen: If you take The Daily Mail seriously, you are more stupid than the average Brit…
[MODERATOR: My advice: Take it slowly, sugarboy, and draft more diplomatically. I feel sure you do not think Stephen is actually stupid at all. But it does rather come across that way.]
I was only taking the Mail seriously in a ‘meta’ way, by thinking about how it manipulates its readers.
I am confident that, despite these news, universities will be the pivotal point where society will realise that we should look at any topic with a sense of constructive criticism and analysis, rather than irrational gut feelings. Eventually. I hope.
I recommend taking a look at the Chicago Principles on the freedom of expression and the site https://freeexpression.uchicago.edu. Many universities have supported it.