Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die,
They just fade away.
The earliest version of this song is said to date back to the First World War. I don’t go back that far, but at 77 I am getting on a bit, and after Heretic TOC arrived at its 10th anniversary earlier this week, the time has come to take a serious look at what the future holds.
Mercifully, I feel in remarkably good nick for my age, both physically and mentally. So, who knows, I might go on fading so slowly you’d hardly notice for another decade, or even two. Or not. None of us knows when our luck will run out, and when the odds start turning against us it makes sense to plan for change.
I’ll come back to that. But first, let’s celebrate that birthday. Ten years is a long survival time for any personal blog, especially one that faces constant threats to its existence from hostile forces, and is never going to attract corporate sponsorship or other easy monetisation to cover expenses.
Yet over this time Heretic TOC has not just survived, but thrived, steadily increasing its readership throughout. Today’s blog is the 270th. Just let that sink in: hundreds of chunky essays. As a student, in the laid-back 1960s, I was just as bone idle as many of my friends, preferring to booze and party my way through uni, rather than do any actual studying. Essays were a dreaded imposition, not something to be tackled voluntarily. So it is still weird to me that I ever became an enthusiastic writer.
As a newspaper journalist, which was the trade I turned to after MAP issues terminated my short teaching career, I found it satisfying to see my work in print, especially after turning from news reporting to feature writing, which offered more scope for personal expression. But the strongest motivation to write, I find, comes from reader engagement, which Heretic TOC readers have given in spades. This is what gives a blog its life, its sense of purpose.
The extent of this engagement may be judged from the fact that there have been well over a million and a half words of readers’ comment, in over 17,000 published reader contributions, a great many of which have been well argued and exceedingly well informed: I learn a lot from your posts. Overwhelmingly, they have also been courteous and good-humoured, putting to shame the abysmal “hellscape” that prevails elsewhere in the social media. Look, Elon Musk, and learn!
The readership has also been the source of many excellent guest blogs, most of them coming from regular commentators. Nearly all of these have been thoroughgoing heretics like me, albeit sometimes coming from very different angles, offering fresh perspectives. Non-heretics, notably VirPed, have also been given a platform. Rather than keeping this as a “safe space” where we block our ears against the hateful slanders spat constantly our way, we do well to debate with anyone who has a halfway coherent argument and reasonably good manners. It can be unpleasant to have our views and good faith challenged by those we feel should be on our side, but it keeps us real.
Another key aspect of Heretic TOC’s resilience over the years has been that it does not stand alone. I may appear to be just one guy voicing a personal opinion, one of the last men standing, as it were, following the collapse of organised radical MAP groups around the world under pressure from hostile surveillance and policing over the course of several decades. But things have moved on in more positive ways as well. Rather than being choked off into silence, a tremendous diversity of MAP voices are beginning to find expression through an increasingly rich ecology of online social media output, with young contributors bringing great messaging skills to bear, in which graphics, animations, podcasts, etc., are reaching out to a much wider audience than I could hope to find with my clunky slabs of text.
Discerning MAPs, though, still have an appetite for formal argument backed by substantial scholarship. Heretic’s TOC’s place in the free market of ideas is bound to be confined to a rather nerdy minority of a minority, a slim niche within a niche; but within these constraints the stats for page hits have always been healthy and have seen a marked upward trend this year, since becoming well established on an independent hosting platform. Hits were up by a third in October from just three months earlier, and now stand at over 20,000 per month.
This could not have happened without support from the MAP community at two critical points in the history of Heretic TOC. One was seven years ago at a very trying time – literally so, when I faced a trial and likely prison sentence in an “historic” case on which I reported. Financial pledges from Heretic TOC readers and generous leading figures in the wider community were absolutely vital in making sure I could cope with legal costs when it looked as though I would be unable to get state legal aid. Hotel bills and travel expenses necessarily incurred to attend numerous hearings at courts far from home were also taken care of, enabling me and my legal team to focus on (successfully) dodging the bullet. That is solidarity. That is community in action. I will be forever in the debt of those who stood with me.
The second crisis came a couple of years ago when Heretic TOC was kicked off the wordpress.com blogging platform following hostile media coverage. This time key figures in the community rallied round not only financially but also with extensive technical help and advice, thereby securing a new host, a handsome makeover of the blog’s appearance, and enhanced functionality, so no more comment threads getting ever narrower with each new comment! Remember that? 🙂 Again, my heartfelt thanks to all concerned.
Turning now to the future, Heretic TOC will need to become far less dependent on me. Rather than just go on blogging until I drop, or until heretics start finding better places to hang out, I see the focus of my energies shifting towards more academic work in such years of writing as remain to me – that and “putting my affairs in order”, a phrase which usually means rich people deciding who gets the money when they go, but in my impecunious case means something more like sorting the wheat from the chaff of my ye olde parchments from the last century, noting what might be of some interest to MAP chroniclers.
I do not intend to disappear suddenly from the fray, like a soldier shot on the battlefield. I hope to find time for more blogs, but they will be less frequent. There may be something of the old soldier fading away but I hope the change will seem more like the intensely busy CEO who steps up into a less energetic oversight role in later years, when they move up to become chairman of the board.
So what I hope to see is more guest bloggers to continue the mission set out in Heretic TOC’s About page i.e. presenting a “discourse of resistance” to “the dominant narrative” of sexual morality. Individual bloggers will have their own styles. I do not expect and would not want a clone of myself, but I hope they will continue the tradition of “humour and cheerfulness” along with “reason and research”. I see my role on the site, going forward, as primarily that of editor and resource developer, building the website as a multi-page reference resource, in which, among much else, the back catalogue of blogs is properly indexed and made attractively visible.
One specific offsite project I have in mind is bring out a paperback book next year featuring maybe 20-30 of what I feel are the best blogs of the last ten years, including some of the best comments and discussion threads. Combined with an original introduction written by me, outlining the purpose and history of the blog, I hope those readers who still have bookshelves in this digital age will be attracted to the idea of a souvenir edition gracing their home – or disgracing it, perhaps, in the eyes of the many shockable friends, relatives, LEA, carpet fitters, etc., who might see it. Fortunately, the expectation is not that this will be a best seller. The idea, rather, is to lay down something in a relatively permanent format, which would find a place in the British Library. So this would be for posterity, if you will. It is entirely likely that posterity will take no interest whatever, but one can live in hope!
Before the book, though, in the remainder of this year, it looks unlikely that I will be able to blog again. That is because I have been invited to make a substantial contribution to a book in the field of ethics, and I need to focus on that between now and Christmas. Sorry about that. But, hey, guest bloggers, here’s your cue: time to get scribbling!
HISTORIAN OF PEDERASTY BILL PERCY DIES
Word has reached me that historian William Armstrong Percy III, best known to MAPs, and more specifically BLs, for his book Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, died late last month at the age of 88.
His passing is particularly sad for me for several reasons. I must have read his pederasty book not long after its publication in 1996, when I was struck by its refreshing lack of moralising against boy-love in the ancient world, including Crete, where he theorised that institutionalised pederasty originated, and in classical Athens, Sparta and other Greek city states. I was even more impressed when I heard him fearlessly defend the Greeks’ enthusiasm for boys in a radio interview. It was almost as though he couldn’t care less that he was saying anything “scandalous”, or even relished the potential controversy.
So when I needed scholarly reviewers to give pre-publication endorsements for my book Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons, he came to mind as one of the few people brave enough for such a task. Luckily for me, he read the book, said he loved it, and gave me a great review snippet that went on the end-page, along with his title: professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston. And on the strength of his keenness on my work, he soon after recruited me in a writing and research capacity on several of his projects. He paid handsomely, and our collaboration lasted for a number of years before age and infirmity put an end to his historical writing.
I never met Bill, but we must have spent dozens of hours on the phone talking about history, politics, and much else, in transatlantic conversations that went on long after the paid work dried up. We had become friends, in other words, and I would have taken up his offer to stay at his place in Boston but for the knowledge that I would never be allowed to enter the United States these days.
Bill was a larger than life character who was always a joy to talk with. His conversation was provocative, lively, and often outrageously politically incorrect. In the earlier part of his career he had fallen foul of anti-gay prejudice, when he had posts at universities in the Deep South, but survived to become a prominent gay activist in more liberal Boston. A significant landmark in that regard was his joint editorship, with Warren Johansson, of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.
From a wealthy family, he had substantial personal assets of his own which enabled him late in life to establish the William A. Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies, of which classicist Professor Thomas Hubbard is now the director – Tom himself has been outspoken in his honest scholarship on pederasty, as you may recall from his eventually embattled position at the University of Texas, which I blogged about at the time. Another part of Bill’s legacy is a personal website, still extant as I write, which includes biographical notes on gay and BL activists and much else of interest.
An official announcement of Bill’s death has been made here. I am sure obituaries and tributes in the gay press and elsewhere will be appearing soon.
JIMMY CARR DESTROYS BROADCASTING STANDARDS
Did anybody see Jimmy Carr Destroys Art? This was a Channel 4 TV show with reviews ranging all the way from “moronic” to “pathetic”. But that was the MSM view, so could it actually have been rather good, like the widely panned Brass Eye special on paedophilia, now regarded as a classic?
Comedian Jimmy Carr, more famous as a notorious tax dodger than for making people laugh, didn’t have me doubled up with mirth, but that was not the point on this occasion. This was meant to be a provocation, an incitement to serious thought, or downright outrage, depending on your taste and values.
At this level it could hardly have failed because the provocation in question was massively controversial: original art, acquired at considerable expense by the programme makers, with work by some seriously famous figures, including Picasso, stood to be destroyed during the show, after a short debate, if the audience decided to “cancel” the artist based on disapproval of their private lives.
No surprise, then, that works by nonce artists Rolf Harris and Eric Gill were up for shredding, or burning. So far so tacky. There’s no way these dodgy dudes can survive the audience’s wrath, is there? So isn’t it just shooting fish in a barrel? Well, no. The admittedly rather clever if vile bit is that these two wrong’uns are pitted against each other in a sort of gladiatorial sword fight between two pervy penises.
Guess who wins! Will it be Rolph, who had a bit of a thing for teenage girls (no big deal) and was once a national treasure but whose art, to put it charitably, is undistinguished? Or will it be Eric, hailed as the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century, but who had sex with his prepubertal daughters and shagged the family dog for good measure?
Well, it’s a no brainer, isn’t it? No brains in the studio audience, that is, or nothing in their heads to deter them from cultural vandalism: obviously, Gill had to go! Sadly, it seems this bunch of clowns had failed to read and learn from my defence of Gill back in January. That came after a hammer-wielding philistine attacked his Prospero and Ariel, the best known of the artist’s sculptured group of figures that graces the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London. See Heretic TOC downpage item Why didn’t they shoot this philistine?
What a terrible disaster for broadcasting standards! However could the programme commissioners possibly have judged that the destruction of real works of art could be justified in the name of vulgar entertainment? – even if it was quite thought provoking, albeit more so on the subject of art than of minor attraction.
NEWGON NEEDS MORE EDITORS
Apart from an unexplained reference to Newgon as an autogenerated baby name, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the Home page of NewgonWiki, or the About page, that says how this marvellous resource of MAP-related information got its name.
So this looks like an opportunity for anyone who knows the origin story to edit the site by adding a sentence or two about it. Or if you fancy adding a whole page about something of MAP interest that isn’t already covered, you can do that too. Using similar software to Wikipedia, Newgon volunteer editors can simply write their stuff and add it themselves. But there is a huge difference to Wikipedia, where anyone these days trying to add well-sourced information on child sexuality or attraction to minors will invariably find their work censored if there is the slightest suspicion that it comes from a MAP or MAP-friendly editor – including neutrally-presented research data that could be thought to favour MAP claims.
By sharp contrast, the Newgon Organization, and its support team who maintain the NewgonWiki site, are MAP-friendly and welcome good information from MAP editors about MAP issues. That’s what they are for. That’s the mission.
Take a look around the NewgonWiki site, if you haven’t already, and you will discover a treasure trove of goodies. But it needs more volunteer editors, to strengthen what is already there and to keep the site growing, so it will become as indispensable to MAPs as Wikipedia now is on most subjects.
Unlike Wikipedia, which pretends to welcome all editors but in practice freezes out those who stray too far from orthodox input on controversial issues, NewgonWiki is upfront in having a recruitment policy. All applicants to do editing go through an initial vetting process. I have not (yet) done editing there myself, so I cannot describe the process in detail, but I imagine there will be a warm welcome for anyone with a bona fide interest who has the necessary skills, or could develop them with a bit of guidance, such as you will find on the editing portal and in the working standards and technical advice.
All you need to do to get started is email strategist@yesmap.net with basic information about the areas in which you think you will be able to contribute, and the skill level you can bring to the work in relevant tasks – notably researching (digging out interesting material to write about), writing, and editing.
120 DAYS OF HELL FOR NORBERT DE JONGE
Unlike the Marquis de Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom, in which violence escalates into torture and slaughter and was written while the author was in prison, the four months of Norbert de Jonge’s recent incarceration did not end in carnage, but they were pretty terrifying and grim – hence, no doubt, the title he has given to a brief account of his experiences circulated to me and others a few days ago: The 120 Days of Norbert.
Heretics here may remember that I have blogged repeatedly about the increasingly hard line taken against MAPs in the Netherlands in recent times, notably in Repression in Netherlands rivals Russia’s. Norbert was one of several activists tried for attempting to revive a banned pro-MAP organisation. He was convicted in March this year and given a sentence of four months, a prison term that began somewhat later, in late June, and ended late last month.
In the UK he would probably have been assessed immediately on arrival as a vulnerable prisoner, on account of the hostility and violence to which inmates are routinely subjected if they are thought to be “paedos”. As such, he would have been put on a segregated wing for his own protection along with fellow MAPs and others likely to be given a hard time.
Not in the Netherlands, or not in Norbert’s case at least. Left to sink or swim among the main prison population, he soon came under suspicion. Some three weeks of rising tension and threats against him led to a crisis in which Norbert could stand no more, so he deliberately smashed the fluorescent lighting in the toilet area of his shared cell, an offence which saw him put into bleak but safe solitary confinement. Nearly two weeks later he was finally given a single cell on a separate floor for vulnerable prisoners, which is obviously where he should have been all along. Except, of course, that he should never have been jailed in the first place.
Just wondered if ppl had seen Fox News attacking David Finkelhor of all people? https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-hampshire-professor-dont-presume-pedophilic-acts-start-with-a-predatory-or-criminally-inclined-adult
Very ironic. Fox News are so on the lookout for any hint of sympathy with MAPs that they pillory the Arch Anti himself.
The official phrase in the business is “courtesy stigma”, itself an ironic term!
But you see how this proves the conservative idea of the slippery slope, though. To conservatives, if no one else. And I do think they are correct about it.
Acknowledging any sexual contact between fully grown adults and adolescents or children, or between adolescents and children, or older adolescents and younger adolescents, or older children and younger children, being initiated by the younger partner, inevitably opens the can of worms for the facade to come down and the conversation to be had, even if the person who points it out is opposed to the idea themselves. Humanizing MAPs in any regard cannot happen lest it open the door for total reexamination, if only bit by bit. And acknowledging anything more than masturbatory or so called “innocent” or “curious” sexuality in children is basically anathema- indeed, to the point that even acknowledging that gives both conservatives and progressive puritans alike heartburn.
And this is why queer people are so dangerous- even if they themselves are anti-MAP/pedo, anti-contact, and make a point of excluding MAPs from the alphabet mafia- it forces a conversation about child and adolescent sexuality. Conservatives will fight it tooth and nail, and progressives will deny it all the day long and claim conservatives are tilting at windmills- but the fact is that both sides are forcing the issue, and it cannot be ignored for much longer.
It is very apparent to me that we are rapidly heading towards this conversation. I’ve been wrong about the culture wars being over: they won’t stop until they reach their final conclusion. It really is the final frontier for the culture wars, even if neither side wants it or wants to admit it.
It also appears that it’s about trying to convince people of their victimhood- he’s basically saying we have to understand why people don’t believe they’re victims if we want to show them that they are. But, even that, still begs the question, and opens the door for reexamination. And certainly sounds manipulative enough that people will eventually start asking if it indeed is manipulative.
And opens the door for “victims” to offer a different perspective on their “victimhood”, or rather, their lack thereof. Which will start to change the conversation as well, given enough time and publicity.
Much more intelligent and nuanced, half hour interview with Landon Starbuck for PragerU:
https://www.prageru.com/video/what-can-parents-do-about-the-sexualization-of-children-by-schools-and-media
I was impressed by this interview for its grasp of the issues around child sexualisation. What I learned from it is that there is an element of societal inevitability in today’s world about the process of early child sexualisation, and even these last remaining bastions, the conservative pockets in the US around the Bible Belt etc, are ironically being targeted massively with all-ages drag shows.
There was talk of how social media is of course a key dynamic in driving this sexualisation, and indeed there is peer pressure on children to not be the “weirdo” who isn’t on social media. I have noticed myself that younger children, say in a 4-8 age bracket, have parent run accounts but there is obviously close involvement and coordination between parent and child. Landon says parents should step up and take difficult decisions but it is impossible to deny that this is from a deeply conservative and minority perspective, and that the mainstream parent is quite happy to have legions of men like her seven year old daughter’s attractive and mildly titillating posts. That is just the way of the world now.
I don’t feel opposed to Landon even though we are clearly on different sides of the argument; I agree with her on the error of trying to encourage gender dysphoria in schools. However I feel that the societal (or even, at root, civilisational) concerns about child sexualisation are merely the cause célèbre of a diminishing conservative resistance, and as Landon points out, the Overton Window is continually shifting in the social left’s favour anyway. I feel that the mainstream parent and for that matter the Western citizen are becoming increasingly sanguine about “early child sexualisation” or the increased knowledge and awareness of children.
The risks of a major conservative backlash always remain, but the process of liberalisation and infiltration of permissive ideas is perhaps by now too endemic.
Made the page for Eric Gill who’s a fascinating guy with a fascinating life and a religious perspective which is far more permissive and inclusive that we usually think catholic christianity to be. Still under construction with lots we could add. He supposedly supported Left-wing causes; a line or two about that could be useful. More important perhaps for Newgon, we need info on his alleged intergen experiences, particularly his daughters and sisters and hopefully some reliable indication of their thoughts on the matter.
See https://www.newgon.net/wiki/Eric_Gill
Another splendid Newgon page, Prue. Well done! You wrote:
>He [Eric Gill] supposedly supported Left-wing causes; a line or two about that could be useful.
There is quite a bit on this in MacCarthy’s book, including the first indexed mention of his politics, which refers to him having a “thoroughgoing communistic phase” in the 1930s. It is the index entry on his “sexual interests” that catches the eye, though:
bestiality, 123, 239-41
casual liaisons, 46, 47, 58, 98, 126, 278
droit de siegneurism, 75, 120, 157-65, 205, 235, 281-2, 291
homosexuality, 135, 191
incest, 17, 104—5, 155-7, 204, 239, 282
menages a trois, 76, 108, 190-1, 235
New Women, attraction to, 75-6, 205-8, 232-6
phallic fixation, 20, 46, 102, 162-3, 205, 259
pubescent girls, attraction to, 20, 156, 282
uxoriousness, 58, 155, 200, 221
voyeurism, 52, 104, 195, 204—5
women in uniform, attraction to. 238, 259, 282
I have the book on my shelves. When I can find a bit of time I will dig out what I judge to be the most interesting material on intergen and other points.
I wrote a thing: https://www.freespeechtube.org/v/19cj
Only read it quickly, so far, but clearly good stuff! Well done, Prue!
I’ve been noticing the problems with “consent logic” for a while now. I’m becoming more and more fond of autonomy over consent and the normative conformity it entails.
The innate sex negativity of our current society places far too high a stakes in the game of sex. It’s why I sometimes talk about sex needing to be “desexualized” some- we place far too much emphasis on it, far too much value on it, and are accordingly making it neurotic and traumatic- and checking the terms and conditions box (which is the contractual, capitalist framework that consent amounts to) doesn’t cut it. Furthermore, consent really is just agreeing to being exploited- that’s the framework consent evolves from. It’s a framework we need to move past.
Sex needs to be brought down from on high, and we need to be able to have open and honest dialogue about it, rather than from a place of shame, disgust, and fear that our society conditions. You are very right about consent being largely from a sex-negative angle.
I agree with your stance in this piece, Prue. Consent is not the most important thing. Having a good experience instead of a bad one is. A related point is that the criminal law is too blunt and instrument to deal with these matters, especially since in many cases, the relevant facts cannot be established with the required certainty. The use of the law is best confined to cases of clear cut assault.
But how is the good experience had? As the very muchly missed LSM once clearly demonstrated, what actually makes for a “good experience” rather than a “bad experience” is precisely that sequence or cascade of “micro-consents” by which any achievement of genuinely mutual intimacy can only proceed toward its ‘goal’, however terminally “fuck-minded’ that may or may not be.
At what point such a subtle unfoldment might be said to amount to Consent – with a capital C? – seems rather beside the point?
Exactly. You seem to be in agreement with me.
Antis claim that we are trivialize sex and sexualize minors, but if you look at human history, then people have always complicated seemingly obvious things. Instead of living in equality and respect, people complicated relationships by looking for differences (racism,antisemitism, homophobia, etc.). Under the guise of morality, they invented restrictions and scapegoats. They used the same morality to justify the murders.
People also complicate the sexual activities and consent. It would seem that it would be enough to simply find the appropriate moment to offer friend to engage in sexual activity and if person expresses unwillingness, then you can simply find another moment or another partner who will express willingness. But so many complexities society has built around this. Embarrassment, shame, sacralization, victimisation, ageism.
Yes I think the consent is simple like a tea, but it’s not a final Yes/No. Any activity is a process that continues over time. When someone give consent to drink tea, this does not mean that he agrees to have tea poured into his mouth, especially if it is hot. And of course you can burn yourself with tea only when you are drinking it, not years later.
Minors are able to express consent as soon as they begin to meaningfully speak and express their thoughts. The problem is that society and legal language sexualizes the term consent and desexualizes minors.
How many people do you think wrote in the comments to a YouTube skydiving videos with minors that they cannot or are not informed enough to consent to dangerous skydiving ? Nobody.
Read the other night. Good read! I don’t have an account on FST so I’m glad you mentioned it here.
“Sex remains a dense site of meaning and the more we invest social meaning into our erotic experiences, the more the social weight of those experiences – their percieved and ever shifting implications – taboo, non-normative etc, the more we’ll be influenced psychologically by them.”
and
“So, as much as i like academic work and writings about sex and sexuality, I do on some level want sex to be less special, less exceptional: more everyday, omnipresent. Nudity, sensuality, love, affection and interpersonal contact to be relaxed and ordinary, barely noticeable enough to draw comment.”
The world would be a better place if we could all just agree to KISS! (har har)
Seriously though, these are my musings as well. It’s good to be thoughtful and considerate of our actions, but it can definitely be overdone to the point of needless (and harmful) complexification. While there are of course significant dimensions to sex, a lot of it’s heaviness is because we insist on adding weight to it. Why must it be so? Akin to head-in-clouds philosophers with too much time on their hands, we get caught up in elaborate theory and discourse over what often times is actually pretty basic.
Yes, I appreciate the irony in thinking about how we think too much, so I’ll try not to overdo it…
I think when MAPs get too involved with intellectualizing MAPness and related issues, it creates greater distance between ourselves and children. What should be a relatively simple shared experience between two humans instead turns into an almost ‘political’ act or exercise of some sort on the part of the adult, if that makes sense. I’m glad we have articulate and intelligent forces on our side, but what kid is gonna read “A Radical Case”, and wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to produce such work in the first place? But then again, we’re living in the historical moment we are, so “wouldn’t it be nice?” isn’t of much value I suppose.
>I think when MAPs get too involved with intellectualizing MAPness and related issues, it creates greater distance between ourselves and children.
Really? You think giving the issues too much thought is the problem, as opposed to the profound impact of half a century in which victim culture has been relentless promoted, with “power inequalities” targeted as the primary source of villainy? And in which first women, then children, were identified as the logical victims of such inequalities?
You may be right up to a point, though. I guess all this pondering can be seen as a displacement activity in lieu of being able to solve the problem. After all, what MAP wouldn’t want less “distance between ourselves and children”? It’s perfectly possible to achieve this without being overly intellectual, of course. All you need do is go off and hang around kids’ playgrounds. But it’s also possible to get into deep water that way.
I love the idea that it “should be a relatively simple shared experience between two humans” but I’d also love you to tell us how can we achieve this without even thinking about it.
To quote Prue’s article:
I totally agree with all of that – including, unfortunately, the last sentence.
I hope I am reading you correctly and apologize if my response misses the points you are making.
There is value in deep reflection and consideration of these issues and examining our own beliefs as well as those of others, especially as it pertains to critique of victim culture, power dynamics, and all other strains of thought which are used to justify persecution of the minor attracted. Offering up reasoned alternatives can serve to sway folk to more enlightened takes, and I don’t mean to suggest we should discourage this.
When I speak of how intellectualism can create greater distance between MAPs and youth, I refer to the introduction and inclusion of an ‘adults only’ element into interactions which cannot be enjoyed by all. When an adult brings to a major-minor moment a highminded intellectual aspect (internalized in their mindset, not as in “Hey kiddo, wanna talk about the risks of sociogenic harm that arise from engaging in intergen relationships?” or whatever), this is something which can’t be shared with the child and they are ‘left out’ from this extra cerebral dimension and thus it further differentiates the experience between the two parties, and I’m instinctively rubbed the wrong way about it. You are then on two different pages. One is on The Playground and the other is in The University. Kinds and kids both can enjoy The Playground, but The University isn’t particularly welcoming to the latter. Also, I worry that keeping all these academic concepts in mind could warp how one relates to the other, ex/ like how someone devoted to Critical Race Theory loses their ability to see humans as humans and instead uses their ‘lens’ to shape and evaluate their every encounter based on the skin colors of those involved. Maybe “humans as humans” is too basic for some and smacks of historical ignorance, but in my opinion CRT is an example of how a scholarly process ostensibly meant to improve relations actually leads to a worsening. What the exact MAP equivalent is I don’t know.
I’m not sure that one side ‘getting more’ out of an exchange is *necessarily* a bad thing, and there exist differences between individuals which will mean the shared experience is fundamentally inequal for participants in other ways anyway, but I still feel like adding brainweight is an act of exclusion in a way. Like the child is being deprived a level of appreciation. Does that make any sense?? (I’m not even sure I 100% know what I’m trying to say, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t, ha..)
Notice I selectively omitted Prue’s “But this is unrealistic outside of a commune or extremely non-Western context.” when I quoted him, but also gave my own tweaked final sentence in the form of “But then again, we’re living in the historical moment we are, so “wouldn’t it be nice?” isn’t of much value I suppose.”
Ummmmmmmmmmmm. Uhhhh… I’ll have to think about it.
Hopefully I’ve communicated my point that it does us well to be informed and smart, but it’s also wise not to get too caught up in theory. “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them”, and I’d hate to be unwittingly cultivating confusion and extraneous psychological complexity in youth through adopting Grownup-speak/thought. If high-IQ discussion and elaborate exploration is required for our advancement, perhaps best to reserve these talks for the Old Dogs while simultaneously making a conscious effort to refrain from infecting new generations with Discourse to this degree.
You might find this interesting Tom…Dr John Campbell was the go to guy on Youtube who would go through all the medical papers methodically, and it highlights the journey he goes through since 2020. He is also from your neck of the woods, north Yorkshire if I remember correctly. Somewhere up north anyway!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT6tLCVXeg4
The link has been “cancelled”!
Well that does not surprise me with all the censorship. It was a breakdown of Dr John Campbells work:https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching
Was listening to TALK TV earlier, and the presenter read out a TEXT on minor attraction where the guy explained how not all pedos ‘offend’….Not that I agree with the VIRPED line but just for that message to get through was a surprise to me. Heaven forbid I ever mention a Homosexual in a crime tarnishing all Homosexuals. If more acceptance on language is all the VIRPEDS can achieve then that would be a start I guess.
MAPs: We’re exist, have sexuality and equal rights.
Antis: You’re rapists, have mental illness and have no rights.
MAPs: frienship, mentorship, relationship.
Antis: grooming, offending, abuse, rape.
MAPs: Minors can choose and consent.
Antis: Minors are innocent and pure.
MAPs: Why then do minors have criminal responsibility age 11 and are recorded in the sex offender registery ?
Antis: Because they’re dumb immature bastards.
MAPs: How about drawed pornography and sex dolls ?
Antis: This leads to child abuse.
MAPs: Why BDSM stuff is sold freely and doesn’t lead to people tortures ?
Antis: ??? You’re disgusting. I don’t want to talk to you
Self-proclaimed “warrior for children” and prominent children’s rights activist Landon Starbuck very recently did a fascinating hour long interview on YouTube. Now if she actually focused on genuine child exploitation and cruelty, that would be commendable, but instead she attacks the cultural norms of society.
1) She claims that the “rise in the normalisation of paedophilia” in recent years is due to many of the elites and wealthy leaders of society, who are in many cases real Satanists and want to sow as much harm into society as possible. Now this is fringe right wing absurdity and we need to carefully examine why she thinks finding the beauty in children is at its root “Satanic”. As a Christian I am not so much offended as completely incredulous at the absurdity of her argument. She thinks fancying children is somehow a monstrous and spiritually evil condition when in truth it is a fairly innocent admiration of the grace and spiritual beauty of children themselves.
2) This brings me onto another claim – “paedophilia” is the most morally depraved thing in existence. Again a staple of the right and so obviously false, insulting and stupid. There is nothing morally wrong in admiring children.
3) Then – suggested by the interviewer – wealthy billionaires on super yachts keep child sex slaves and sail out to international waters where their crimes cannot be indicted. Perhaps one of the most unhinged claims I have ever heard and really brings into doubt their whole project of child activism.
4) Finally – this is part of an overall spiritual war in which the forces of evil try to corrupt the minds of the population by “normalising paedophilia”. Now as a Christian I believe in the concept of spiritual war but I think seeing beauty in children and admiring them for it is actually a God-given thing and part of the very grace of being, a wonderful unalloyed good to spread joy and happiness.
So basically she believes evil elites are pushing paedophilia from the top down. Now I like Landon and she seems a pleasant person but her worldview is so incredibly unhinged. To link minor attraction to “Satanism” is utterly abhorrent and misguided when the true innocent joy at a child’s beauty is so clearly God-given. Or that is my view anyway.
That’s because conservative Christians are always going to be the enemy. To everyone. There is not a human being on this earth that their ideology doesn’t hate- because it hates the very soul and essence of humanity, and wishes to subject it to some arbitrary divine will because they are so disgusted with themselves, their minds, their bodies, and all that goes with it- and project it on to everyone else.
I agree with everything you say, however, the left in the US is just as bad but in other ways.
It’s because secular people are still under the sway of the society and its regimens that it has in place. Even after you stop believing in religion, the conditioning is still there- much like how holidays and their traditions continue on long after the original meaning has been forgotten, because family and togetherness and stuff like that. Christmas would not come into being on its own today, but continues under the weight of its own momentum, such that even non-Christians celebrate it or take more obscure holidays from their own heritage and pump them up to match. Secular people are very much under the sway of puritanism and Christianity, by virtue of living in societies and ideologies that were birthed by Christian civilizations.
In short, the deconstruction of Puritanism, Victorian morality, and Christianity, hasn’t yet occurred to the point where people have deconstructed their ideas of childhood and child sexuality, or lack thereof. And it’s so old and entrenched that people do not yet question it- though we’re slowly chipping away at it. We’ll eventually get there, as we now live in a post-modern age of total deconstruction (much to both conservative and liberal chagrins), so we’ll keep tearing down our social framework until we figure out what’s actually real versus what is socially manufactured only.
I think there likely are elite pedophiles who do engage in dark rituals and hold Satanic beliefs, but I don’t think it’s *everywhere*, in fact I – obviously – know it’s not. But it isn’t impossible to reasonably propose that at least some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet might be into evil shit. However, the typical ‘Luciferian Pedo truth’er type turns everything into Satanic Panic. When these anti’s froth at the mouth over everything even tangentially to pedophilia and link it back to Satanism as though minor attraction and ‘devil worship’ are one and the same, they ironically put people off from seriously considering any cultish claims that might *actually* have merit to them. I don’t think each and every criminal investigation into SRA turns up *nothing*. And while false memories can be created, I don’t think it makes sense to reflexively deny any testimony asserting evil acts just because it sounds like “hysterical church lady” talk and we don’t wish to aid the anti’s in their crusade. But if someone simply cannot believe in the possibility/plausibility of Satanic abuse as a thing, surely they can at least acknowledge high level child sex trafficking? Can we agree this is bad?
The Balenciaga Campaign had a wealth of occult symbolism woven into its photographs, and deliberately included court documents pertaining to CP as well as featured books in the background by creators who explore pedophilia and other touchy subjects. While this isn’t some smoking gun “videotape of Democrats eating baby at orgy” or whatever, there’s at least some there there with the Balenciaga thing. But because many of the same folk who clamor on about it are also those who see literally *anything* with a pizza on it as “pedo code”, it’s easy to write off the possibility of sus behaviour altogether.
Anyway, point is, even if there were an evil deep state super hush hush pedo cabal at play (let’s just say there is), what does that have to do with MAPness as such? If there are devil worshipping pedophiles, those are two things, not a redundant one. It’s “devil worshipper” + “pedophile”, not “pedophile (and thus devil worshipper)”. I think anti’s are turning people away by overly connecting pedophilia to Satanism. Like, I think even the normiest of Normies would struggle to treat internet randos leaving thirsty remarks and emojis on LG’s IG’s as PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING AS kidnapping and sexually torturing a child in a blood sacrifice ritual or whatever. The acceptance of pedophilia normalized? Not yet. The myriad stereotypes about pedos normalized? Yes. How likely is it really that “Creepy Uncle”, “Groomer Teacher”, “Hollywood Producer”, “That Friend Who Makes Suggestive Remarks About Minors” and all the other Pedos We Know are aaaaallllllll devotees of the Prince of Darkness? (Maybe I should have left Hollywood off that list…)
Not as fun to LARP as Child Saviours if your opponent isn’t made out to be an Absolute Monster though. It’s just ‘funny’ to see people lose their shit over The Diabolical Mr. Epsteinville Snuff Club!!! one minute and then have to act equally as morally enraged and disgusted by like, drag queen story hour or some dude getting busted with risque cartoons on his hard drive or whatever. Like, if TikTokers who type “girl you sexy” to preteens are the best in purely malevolent, morally and sexually depraved, supernaturally sadistic Hellions Satan can conjur, dude’s slipping…
I like the nuanced nature of this post. However…
>Anyway, point is, even if there were an evil deep state super hush hush pedo cabal at play (let’s just say there is)
How about, in the absence of even the tiniest hint of evidence, plus the difficulty of being “super hush hush” in a media environment conducive to easy leaking, let’s just say there isn’t?
What would count as incontrovertible evidence? Damaging pornographic kompromat? Would you suggest, for example, that *if* Epstein indeed had his properties wired for video blackmail purposes and there *did* exist red-handed ‘insurance’ footage of elites engaged in these acts, we would have seen it by now as it would be easy enough to leak over these past several years? That since none of us here can definitively point to Exhibit A of “Politician X” doing the dirty, we should default to innocent until proven guilty? Okay. Fair enough, I suppose. I can’t claim with *certainty* anyone is guilty of what they’ve been accused of… but at the same time I don’t think it’s unreasonable to entertain and seriously speculate in this case, or that I’m being duped by tinfoil hatters just because I believe there likely *is* evidence out there corroborating at least *some* of these claims.
I get it’s easy to dismiss the “Lack of evidence *is* the evidence, maaaan!” take, but if the charge is that deep state intelligence operatives coordinate to suppress the truth of wrongdoing in high level government, maybe they haven’t been found guilty because they’re, ya know, coordinating to suppress the truth of wrongdoing in high level government?
I’m not sure why I wouldn’t be highly “Hmmmmm” toward, say, the C.I.A given the history of MKUltra. Even if I wrote off every other damning accusation made against the agency (like that they’re responsible for quashing investigations when folk get too close to exposing their involvement), the reality of this single not-a-theory conspiracy alone is enough that I wouldn’t put anything past the organization.
If media moguls are up to no good, they’re not going to produce content incriminating themselves, are they? Marshalling their monopolistic meme machines to tarnish their detractors, however? Yeah, I can see that. (But only “Q-Tards” believe in such fairytales, yeah? That’s what The Newspaper said, and I don’t want to be a Q-Tard! [setting aside the possibility/probability of QAnon being a psyop in itself])
I know I’ve veered away from the Satanic angle in particular and that individual claims / theories should be looked at one at a time, but I’m curious about what would you all would consider 100% smoking gun proof of ‘hush hush elite child trafficking network’.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and it’s on me to show that a cabal is at work, not on you to demonstrate there isn’t. Okay. Again, I don’t rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. I’m not privy to the private acts these people get up to and so of course can’t say I have “proof” of anything. BUT…
a) As far as I understand it, there have been many instances where investigators and would-be whistleblowers have wound up dead under suspicious circumstances. Doesn’t sound like an environment conducive to leaking to me.
b) There are many government / police / celebrity whistleblowers who haven’t conveniently suicided and *have* been naming names and describing events. Even if we could outright dismiss the majority of these claims as kooky for whatever reason, maybe there’s merit to at least some? Mass confabulation and/or malicious and deliberate spreading of misinformation across nations over decades isn’t *impossible* (I mean, three letter agencies do this), but is it foolish to hear out the self-styled ‘white hats’ and testimonies of those who claim to have been trafficked? What would they need to show you to convince you they were telling the truth? I’m definitely not a “Listen and Believe” type, but if it comes down to ‘The Top of The Pyramid’-said vs. ‘A Whole Bunch of People Who Have Little To Gain’-said (not that there aren’t grifters and liars, but *all*??), I’d be more inclined to side with David rather than Goliath.
c) Baby breeding farms, clandestine trafficking, longstanding occult traditions, institutions, and practices such as ritualistic sacrifice, the high rate of sociopathy among the ultra-wealthy, and so on and so forth… Am I making this up? Are these things all wacky constructions of Alex Jones? No? Even the mainstream acknowledges? If we can “prove” the dots exist, what’s so far-fetched about connecting them? No, I have nothing *conclusive* to offer, but surely such a detective endeavour is an exercise more logical than mere paranoid apophenic indulgence?
All this together, in my view, constitutes a collection of hints which are a smidge more voluminous than “tiny”, though I suspect many will never be satisfied until we see pics/videos (or it didn’t happen). With deepfakes now a thing, plausible deniability is enough to invalidate such evidence.
I have a vested interest in all of this being hyperbolic hysteria, which is why I’m keen to at least investigate. If it turns out the fringe finger-pointers are correct, I can’t think of anything more important to a childlover than working toward awareness and doing all one can to stop it.
Let’s say there is or isn’t a cabal? At the end of the day, well, I don’t know.
HeyYou, you wrote:
>individual claims / theories should be looked at one at a time
>“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
>At the end of the day, well, I don’t know.
Clearly, there is a rationalist in you, struggling to get out. This is promising.
You observe:
>there have been many instances where investigators and would-be whistleblowers have wound up dead under suspicious circumstances. Doesn’t sound like an environment conducive to leaking to me.
Dead right, so to speak. But, on this basis, which would appear to be the environment least conducive to leaking? Not the US. Not the UK. If you’re really looking for a convincing body count of deaths in suspicious circumstances it surely has to be Russia, doesn’t it? Or, more accurately, the wider world of the those Russians who have dared to speak out against Putin, especially his high-level enemies, the former oligarchs. It started with dramatic poisonings with exotic toxins that could only have been used by a state actor. In recent weeks a remarkable number of these guys have been carelessly falling out of their hotel windows.
So there are real corpses, lots of them. By comparison, where are the US and UK corpses? Where is the evidence of suspicious goings on? There is no shortage of fanciful stories generated by the like of Alex Jones, enthusiastically re-tweeted and embellished by the believe-anything-if-it’s-against-the-elite types, but that’s about it.
On the other side of the equation, what about the evidence for western leaks being abundant? It is overwhelming. In the UK a few weaks ago and months ago, at a particularly unstable time, disgruntled ministers were leaking information to discredit each other on an almost daily basis. Civil servants were likewise exposing scandals in their own departments. Prime minister Boris Johnson fell from power thanks largely to leaks about internal breaches of Covid regulations. And when there are really serious leaks, such as the Wikileaks release of military scandals, those responsible, notably Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, ended up in deep legal trouble but they were not quietly assassinated by government agents or anyone else.
You are right that assessing these things is not easy and that we do not always need cast iron evidence in order to make reasonable deductions. But the clue to good judgement, in my view, is in that word “reasonable”. Leaping to conclusions based on rumours from proven liars such as Alex Jones is unreasonable.
“Julian Assange not quietly assassinated by government agents”
No but there was a conspiracy under Trump administration to ‘bump him off’ if you remember. Or what about the strange death of Dr David Kelley….George Galloway did a documentary on that but not seen it yet. How did tower 7 go down when it wasn’t hit on 911?
There have been many critics of lockdowns\vaccines who conveniently died, yes maybe all natural but it does make you wonder. Brandy Vaughan was a Pharmaceutical Rep, activist and vaccine critic. They claim under autopsy she died of a blood clot at 44 years old.
There were some African leaders, one was the President of Tanzania who was very critical of the PCR test and covid measures. Maybe this is all a coincidence. I can’t say one way or another but too often people don’t want to look too deeply into things. My parents generation were always trusting of the government and thought they had their best interests at heart, it could push some people over the edge to consider that the opposite may be true.
I got a book called WALL STREET AND THE RISE OF HITLER — The astonishing true story of the American financiers who bankrolled the Nazis. I offered it to a mother’s friend and she said I’d rather not read it!
There is also News of the old JFK assassination with more speculation of CIA involvement. At the end of the day, maybe some of us would like to ‘stick it to the elites’ but without theories, there would be no ‘cold murder cases’…because they’re all a bunch conspiracy theorists.
Let me reiterate what I said to Hey You:
>You are right that assessing these things is not easy and that we do not always need cast-iron evidence in order to make reasonable deductions. But the clue to good judgement, in my view, is in that word “reasonable”. What we count as reasonable is always going to depend on our experience and judgement.
It reminds me of the Knights Templar being burned at the stake for “sodomising, and worshipping Baphomet”. In reality it was a cynical ploy to confiscate the order’s vast wealth.
Satanism is linked to paedophilia as devil worship was linked to homosexuality in the Middle Ages.
There is nothing of substance here, but feverish and baseless conspiracy theories, based on the poor education and stupidity of many right wing people.
I am convinced that to show due respect and love for a child, whether through the power of eros (which Empedocles said is the binding force of the universe), or else conventionally through parental affection, is a high and noble thing. In other words, MAPs who respect children are moral and upstanding citizens.
I mostly agree but to dismiss a cabal of elites that run America is naive. Look at Epstein Island for a start. not sure about paedophilia but you know how the media can’t or won’t differentiate between the two. There are powerful groups in Wall Street that have huge lobbying power that you can never vote out. Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring were all grass roots movements for populism over feudalism. At least the latter got results. The corporate media was successful is focusing attention on race over class, that’s why Occupy Wall Street fell into nothing. There is circumstantial evidence that CIA played a part in the psyop of Covid Lockdowns but that is another discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx2gycZSdB8
>Look at Epstein Island for a start.
But how do we know about Epstein? Because he got busted. Despite the cabal that’s supposed to be able to fix things, he is not “running America” now, is he? Not that he ever was. He was just one rich guy in a country with thousands of them jockeying for influence. He was in effect king of a tiny Caribbean island, which is impressive in a Bond villain way. But it was never the US.
Good point, but he had a list with names on a flight list, ‘Lolita Express’…Bill Gates is known do be one of his visitors but not mentioned in the media. Maybe some people are just too high up. We also know Gates has donated tens of millions to big media corporations and universities, that can buy a lot of silence.
Also MSM is no longer made of proper journalists, that’s why people like Julian Assange is rotting in Belmarsh.
Nah, we know about him because he forgot his place and started trying to throw his weight around with the wrong people, forgetting that he was merely their brothel keep and nothing more. Was getting too big for his britches, so to speak.
Just as the establishment used homosexuality to keep people in line with blackmail once, so they do with pedophilia now- arguably the last real vice they have to hold over people’s heads. But enough elites don’t like it, and so, while sure, there is a cabal, though I think of it more as a grand global country club, there are factions within it and factions within factions. I have no doubt that the MeToo business was a sort of internal purge or coup, at least in the Hollywood branch.
And just like whatever factions within the country club were able to bring the queer movement into the mainstream, so too some faction within them is going to try and soften the stance toward MAPs, with the eventual goal of being able to do away with the blackmail that other factions hold over others.
>[Epstein] forgot his place and started trying to throw his weight around with the wrong people
Good. This begins to move to a somewhat less unrealistic model. The original assertion, widely proclaimed by people who have never been inside even a down-market country club, never mind on a billionaire’s yacht, is that there is a deep state in which a global elite runs America and the world (except perhaps for China, Russia, and all the other places that don’t get on well with America). The elite in this Entry Level Model (M 1.01) is just one entity, with everyone from Hillary “Pizzagate” Clinton to Epstein himself in one huge, satanic conspiracy to abuse the good ol’ ordinary folks and rape their kids.
Now this has been challenged you have shifted ground and tweaked the model to M 1.02, in which the conspiratorial elite do not really have it all sewn up because they can and do fall out with each other.
I look forward to seeing further shifts ( M 1.03, etc.), leading to a point of enlightenment at which it finally dawns that the conspiracy model is essentially just a rhetorical devise. It works extremely well as a way in which the have nots can express (justifiable) resentment against the haves; but it doesn’t amount to a viable social, political, or economic analysis. Which is why we need something more along the lines of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century than Trumpian “drain the swamp” bollocks.
Can I just briefly answer some of your points because this opens a whole can of worms. Do you deny there was a push towards a New World Order since the end of WW2. Calling it a conspiracy theory just doesn’t wash. We have books, World leaders, people like Kissinger, David Rockefeller calling for a World Order. Just like the Great Reset, it is real, people like King Charles and others at Davos calling for it. What is this build back Better than so many parrot to the media?
I like listening to James Dellingpole, like yourself Tom, he has a good humorous style of writing. He is also a conspiracy theorist that believes there is a satanic cult. I see no evidence for that but I do agree that there is a powerful Elite who use their financial clout to nudge policies from places like the World Economic Forum, Bildrberg Group, a think tank started by Rockefeller (and another) for dialogue between the US and Europe. All well and good apart from the meetings are behind closed doors to the Public.
You mentioned China….Kissinger played a part in the one child policy, and Rockefeller invested there with Chinese cheap labour. We also know people like Justin Trudeau and Klaus Schwab admire the Chinese totalitarian regime. Just look how Trudeau treated his Truckers protesting the mandates last year. Closing their bank Accounts for just supporting a protest that he disagrees with. The way he branded all these protesters as Nazis etc was laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. If I lived in Canada, I would not trust him with a Chinese style social credit system.
Obviously one has to be wary about personal infractions upon one’s freedom, but as a strong Catholic and believer in the spiritual barque of the Church, I have faith in our institutions: in King Charles, and Pope Francis. I’m aware of attempts to streamline, liberalise and technologically innovate the West, but my faith in both the Papacy and the Monarchy preclude any serious grounds for concern. I have a good life, I have enough money to live well, I am content. What more can one ask for?
I don’t know enough about Schwab to comment, so I have a studied neutrality with regards to him. But I don’t spend my time worrying about the “New World Order” or “Great Reset”. I think conspiracy theorists spend too much time getting lost in abstractions, and not enough on trying to improve their individual lives.
Life has never been so kind to the average man, in the history of the world. We have luxuries that kings of the past could not have dreamt of. So relax 🙂
I particularly loath King Charles with his ‘Green Agenda” and his speech at Davos in saying…”we have a narrow window of opportunity to Reset etc”…..If you think the Reset (Agenda 2030) is a conspiracy then fine, you should go and talk to Dutch farmers, German, New Zealand farmers if they think it’s all a conspiracy. The pseudo pandemic was an opportunity to accelerate in this new global order. Megan & Harry are just two spoiled leftists who love lecturing the rest of us on Woke clap trap. Charles, however, is far more dangerous.
World Economic forum — “You will own nothing and be happy”…..”It is 2030, I have no privacy, everything I own is rented and delivered by Drone, life has never been better.
From years of reading this site, I hear the same warm fluffy language that was so often talked about by the ‘Abuse industry’, and we should apply the same cynicism.
In the words of the King himself, dear oh dear! I am a big fan of Charles and his green agenda.
LOL! You make it sound like an accusation, Pat, but for many of us at the end of the 1980s and into the 90s a New World Order sounded very attractive. The best of it was what was called “the peace dividend”. With the Cold War over, it became possible for the first time to start reducing the nuclear arms stockpiles in the hands of the great powers (i.e. American nukes as well as Russian ones). It incentivised an end to nuclear proliferation among the next tier of powers. And all around the world it meant a greater proportion of national wealth could be spent on health, education, etc, as opposed to military spending.
George Bush senior made a big speech about the New World Order in 1990, but that does not mean the idea was the sole property of the Right. Gordon Brown, the UK finance minister who played a major role in averting the total meltdown of the world financial system in 2007-10, also used the expression (as did Kissinger) when he advocated a much needed reform of the global financial system.
This peace dividend was actually a reality for a dozen of more years, until we all woke up on 9/11 to the new threat of militant Islamism.
For me, and perhaps for others on the Left, the more sinister side of the New World Order was never really felt in earnest until (thanks to 9/11) the Neo Cons suddenly found the political winds blowing hard in their favour. Hence the invasion of Afghanistan, for which there was a strong case, and Iraq, which was a disastrous mistake by George Bush junior – I was among the million who marched in London against that war, but Tony Blair (leader of a left-leaning party, not a Neo Con one) was in no mood to listen.
As for Davos and the World Economic Forum, yes, of course these people constitute a genuinely powerful elite, and elites tend to act in their own interests. But they are not all of one mind, which is what you need for a conspiracy. There is a wide range of opinion on how to tackle global warming, for instance: billionaires heavily invested in oil, may take a less urgent and more hi-tech approach to dealing with the problem than others who agree with radical environmentalists that life-style changes should be a priority (hence a willingness to listen to the likes of Greta Thunberg).
And I see no reason why some of the Davos regulars should not be regarded as genuinely well intentioned philanthropists, such as the much maligned George Soros. I would like to see greater wealth equality, but simply being rich does not make anyone evil. Same goes for Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Good people. I just wish more billionaires were like them.
>You mentioned China….Kissinger played a part in the one child policy, and Rockefeller invested there with Chinese cheap labour.
Doesn’t Apple have a big factory in China? And many other big western concerns? Why single out Rockefeller? Is that just anti-semitism talking? As for the one child policy, I think most of us in the West thought that was a good idea at the time, when world population seemed to be heading for a nightmare Malthusian explosion. It is now clearer than it used to be that once people reach a certain level of prosperity and education they tend to have smaller families of their own accord. Not all, of course: Elon Musk has a big tribe. But enough to make a critical difference.
>We also know people like Justin Trudeau and Klaus Schwab admire the Chinese totalitarian regime.
I have not checked their on-the-record statements. But there has indeed been much to admire in China’s success story. The rapid rise of the Chinese economy under state direction has been phenomenal. That does not mean we should support their system, which of course has a very dark downside in its treatment of religious minorities and political dissidents – and recently showed itself willing to use barbaric enforcement of its zero-Covid policy.
Anyone wielding as much power and wealth as these people do should be regarded as the enemy of all humanity. No one should have that much power or wealth. It doesn’t matter how good a person they are.
Not to mention they’re responsible for climate change. Flying around in private jets while placing taxes on people for driving to work. Utter hypocrites who should be lined up for the next guillotine.
We produce more than enough food to feed everyone already. But we don’t, why? Because if they don’t get their profits, then they’re content with people dying. Not a good bone in any of their bodies. We live in a world run by sociopaths.
>It doesn’t matter how good a person they are.
>Not a good bone in any of their bodies.
“The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.” – Shakespeare. The Tempest.
>We live in a world run by sociopaths.
Can you guarantee that if you had a lot of money you would behave any better? The world needs a more equitable distribution of wealth, for sure; it would be fairer. If we value fairness, should that not extend to fairness in the judgements we make about others? Should it not be based on what they actually contribute rather than empty, self-righteous, moral indignation?
If I had as much wealth or power, I should be one of them. The people who rule us contribute nothing but sorrow and misery to the world.
>If I had as much wealth or power, I should be one of them.
Well, that’s a disarmingly candid response, so good for you! As for your obvious anger, that can be a good thing if it is a spur to constructive action. But I see the role of this forum as a more contemplative one, as a place to think things through in a calmer mode. That said, I prefer to see indignant anger of the kind you express, against the powerful, than against the weak — the latter seems to be the specialty of right-wing violence against oppressed minorities.
I agree with your last point about the Zero Covid lunacy. People like Jeremy Hunt were salivating over doing the same in this country. There are YT videos of him talking on a podcast about it in 2020. A dangerous man indeed.
As for anti semitism claim, I’m sure some people are, but apart from David Rockefeller I’m not sure who is and who is not a jew. That accusation was made at Nigel farage recently when he called the ousting of Liz Truss a globalist coupe d’etat. He quite rightly responded by saying, ‘I will not be silenced by this slur’….Some Globalists do use this as a way of closing down discussion.
just like racism, conspiracy theorist, anti vax and indeed a paedophile.
As for Gates…I see him as the ultimate bad egg. BMGF has plenty of controversy including HPV and malaria vaccine in Africa, also his involvement in Indian Agriculture has caused mass protests there. There is a high rate of suicides with Indian seed farmers.
Make no mistake, the common people, as in the socially conservative working class, are the main enemy of minor attraction. Elites have consistently demonstrated an effort towards orchestrating a wider acceptance. Now I know many people hate the World Economic Forum and attack it as insidious, and I also believe the old Rothschild banking dynasty had a large part to play in Europe behind the scenes. But elites are not the enemy – I have faith in our structures and institutions, and despise radical change. I do dearly hope there is wider acceptance of adult attraction for children, but this is precisely what is currently being driven by Big Tech, the Democratic Party and elite agendas in general. So I have no complaints about top down power.
Then you are more trusting than me. I’m with you re minor attraction, but it will always be a good tool to demonise us. I am very suspicious of the WEF and the WHO treaty that would have sovereign power over to people in the pocket of the CCP with endless vaccines, lockdowns and erosion of Western freedoms. central bank digital currency with a Chinese style social credit system are a real threat.
Just because they happen to align on this one thing (and they might not actually), doesn’t make them your friend, necessarily.
What I want to know is, why did Balenciaga do what they did…..Makes no difference to me but with the CP documents on the table clearly put there for a reason, what is the reason? were they trolling?
do they want to cause a ruckus for some unknown reason?
or do they see CP legislation as bad like most of us on this site?
Well, two things (probably both)- someone, somewhere along the way, probably thought it was funny, and was playing a joke. But also, probably, they were doing subliminal conditioning, while simultaneously seeing if anybody would notice, and to see how people reacted- a sort of a psychological test on the public, both to just see, and also to see what works and doesn’t work.
So, for some of the uninitiated, as it were, they were just trolling, but for the initiated, it was a little more than just trolling (though they no doubt got a kick out it as well).
Re Balenciaga. The photographer has a history of incorporating dark themes like satanism (nothing exceptional about that if you’re into the goth/emo aesthetic; your classic edgy boy if you ask me), and he’d also conducted similar photography in the past w/ children around the world, photographing them with all their toys spread out in front of them. Quite impactful if you ask me, seeing a poor black child with their rather simple, modest toys, contrasted by a Western industrialized counterpart with extravagant, comparatively high-tech toys. There’s an interesting video on youtube about it I’d recommend, from a channel I consider conspiracy baiting, but provides useful information if you can look past other people’s framing. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDzfaOL0ISg
The photo of court docs was taken by a different artist than the teddy bears guy, and the two photos have been falsely connected by conspiracy theorists pining for links that aren’t there. There is no elite conspiracy to “normalize pedophilia” (if that term is used accurately), and there never has been. Why people seem to think there would be, despite the unpopularity of taking such a stance – the massive push-back, censorship, doxxing, threats to one’s life and everyday living a job security – I think betrays some oddly unspoken feeling that, secretly, we all know that intergen sexual experiences aren’t inherantly harmful… We all remember ourselves growing up sexually… All the boys I know had longings for their adult female teachers, and the girls much the same… Otherwise, what would they have to fear? How could they possibly believe there’s mass desire to normalize pedophilia?
There are academics and interested individuals who communicate about such issues and would probably like a kinder, more liberal, easy-going and less punitive society, but that’s as far as it goes. Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile but in being called so, the word has lost even more utility than it may have once had as a psychiatric term. Truly, the sodomite became the homosexual, became the pedophile… Sensationalist child abuse journalism and American hysteria has been left largely unchallenged and, as consequence, we are all forced to hear about seemingly endless non-scandals (i am thinking of the movie “Cuties” – a movie that critiques sexualization and does nothing to support MAPs or young people); scandals that would’ve garnered virtually no comment if it weren’t for popular right-wing media personalities looking for easy attacks on what they see as liberal-lefties “transing” (grooming) the children.
There was a popular video by shoeonhead about Balenciaga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0GeDNP_2mw, which led to her falling out with other Left-identifying youtubers who felt she’s playing into a right-wing panic (dubbed the “gay groomer” discourse), e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBiOzs0nHZ8
There’s also a video about “Epstein’s List” (i.e. his purported black phone book), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR6jPkglYsA
This is the human tendency to endow incomprehensible things with the meaning of a conspiracy. Especially when the sexuality can influence career of politics and artists. It was the same with homosexuals who were credited with a gay conspiracy and the so-called “Homintern”.
I would say that it criticizes puberty. People have sexuality no matter what clothes they wear and what dances they dance. The scandal was raised not only from the right side, but from the left. As someone said in BC – “it’s two cheeks of the same arse.”
No, it is the majority of the “elite” that promotes and implements the persecution of “bad” sex. In France, the sexually repressive laws of recent years, criminalisation of customers of prostitutes, automatic assumption of rape (without need of proof) in case of sex between an adult and an underage (and increased prison terms for culprits), stronger repression of viewing or sharing forbidden images, … all this was voted by overwhelming majorities in Parliament, after scare campaigns in the media, involving film stars, writers, official “feminists”, conservative anti-porn and anti-prostitution organisations, “child protection” societies, etc. But nowhere was there a mobilisation of ordinary working people (workers, employees, farmers, craftsmen, …) on these topics, they were rather fighting for their living standards.
Maybe a minority of the elite is more enlightened and more liberal on sexual matters, but this does not change the general trend.
That’s an interesting perspective, but of course your point is geographically restricted to France. On the continent, the general public are much more sympathetic to child sexuality, although as you mention, some elite writers and feminists have steered legislation in an appalling way over there.
But just read your local newspaper, on a story about how some hapless ordinary guy is caught with CSAM, and read the user comments: “hang the nonce”, “castrate him”, “bring back capital punishment”, etc. In the Anglosphere the British (and American) public have a visceral and sharp hatred of anyone who fancies children. Read comments like: ‘they can’t be cured, lock them up forever” and you get the gist. Now some MPs and members of Congress are heavily into “child protection” (in many cases oh how ironic) and draconian measures against crimes like CSAM. But on the soft non-criminal edge of child sexual issues, like their portrayal in social media, Big Tech is actually facilitating the increasingly risqué presentation of children. Additionally, government is encouraging very radical sex ed, which gives children an “age inappropriate” (lol) broad knowledge of sexual matters at incredibly young ages, and US government supports the radical trans agenda with regards to children.
Admittedly parts of US society have allowed “child friendly drag” to flourish, but the average man on the street still thinks “nonces” should be tortured to death. Contrast this with many elites and the upper middle class who are thoroughly dispassionate on the issue and are more likely to encourage their children in socially and sexually liberal ways.
>the average man on the street still thinks “nonces” should be tortured to death.
Or that’s the impression that social media blowhards and prison yard bullies like to give. More genuinely revealing might be this anecdote from the experience of a waitress:
https://www.businessinsider.co.za/i-wear-pigtails-server-to-get-more-tips-from-men-2022-11
I wear pigtails to my waitressing job because men tip better when I do.
Fortesa Latifi, Business Insider, 22 Nov 2022
Comments on Internet are often made by trolls, they are not a balanced sample of the population, and reading any such comment, you cannot deduce the social class of the author.
“Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face” and all that…
Sure, some are trolls out strictly “for the lulz” and to get a rise, but when it comes to violent remarks toward MAPs, I take these online posters at their word. I don’t think blowhards and bullies are exaggerating the negativity of public attitudes when I can see for myself the wealth of highly signal-boosted anti- sentiments. Hell, “kill em all” type posts are given digital thumbs up by people using their *real* names and details all the time. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc… abound with such rhetoric supported by legit accounts, not just a small band of randos hiding behind anime avatars.
Yes, but wouldn’t it also be true to say that those who post these extremely hostile messages amount to only a small proportion of all people (or even of all social media users)?
I’d love to think that the average man in the UK or US is not hostile to minor attraction, but there is obviously a gradation of behaviours from 1) physical violence to 2) verbal violence to 3) a grudging resentment to 4) indifference to 5) positivity. Most people I’d say are (2) or (3), a minority perhaps (4). (1) and (5) are outliers.
This seems about right. However, it would be easy to exaggerate the level of hostility against MAPs. In a blog post from some time ago (https://heretictoc.com/2013/07/19/tromovitch-sets-a-poser-on-prevalence/), Tom mentioned a telling statistic cited by sexologist Philip Tromovitch: “89% of community males exhibited some sexual arousal while viewing slides of female children”. With that degree of prevalence, it’s hard not to suspect that a significant number are sympathetic, but too afraid to voice their feelings. One complication, however, is that in many cases, the level of attraction is probably rather slight, allowing the person concerned to harbour hostility to those who are predominantly attracted to children. Still, I believe we have more potential allies than we sometimes think.
Perhaps some are also highly aroused but swallowed the dogma and, as a result, hate themselves and those that have had contact with kids. A type of cognitive dissonance.
That would be why they have their own special wing in Prisons, for their own protection.
Christian considers the laws, not media clippings! When the chips are down, Western elites support extreme anti-pedophilia (including indoctrination of children). Such support goes hand in hand with support for drag or trans, as indicated by blogs here, and against your thesis.
>Make no mistake, the common people, as in the socially conservative working class, are the main enemy of minor attraction.
Anti-pedophilia forced on the working class from above indicates otherwise, as does man/girl and man/boy relationships in the working class.
>Elites have consistently demonstrated an effort towards orchestrating a wider acceptance.
Laughable, given their non-zero support for feminist anti-pedophilia, the abolition of free speech and further censorship by Big Tech.
>Laughable
1) Big tech allowing sexualised children on their algorithms
2) Democrats teaching sex ed to kindergarten age
3) Establishment figures loving Epstein even after a 2008 child prostitution conviction
4) Tacit Democrat approval of “child friendly” sexualised drag for kids
5) Teaching “body positivity” including encouraging young children to masturbate as part of curricula
6) Netflix and Cuties, silence of the Obamas, the Sussexes, etc
7) Disney “groomers”
8) Since when were feminists at the heart of elite institutions?
9) “Child protection” NGOs and children’s commissioners have to beg government to implement their shambolic policies – there is little interest in high level government for their agenda
10) The President of the United States is a non-offending paedophile.
>The President of the United States is a non-offending paedophile.
How can you be sure he is non-offending? 🙂
Haha you stole my thunder!
1: Big Tech censorship is well documented, including by Zuckerberg and the recently released Twitter files. Compared to the uncensored Internet of the early 1990s, what Big Tech social media offers is not only paltry, but comes at the prize of security and privacy!
2,4, 5: Since when is such indoctrination of children free of anti-pedophilia, much less promoting adult/child relationships, from incest to marriage?
3: Indicates at most an elite double standard, and more probably fear of Epstein’s information.
8: We’re to believe, at a time when men of this class couldn’t vote, the socially conservative working class, as opposed to elites acting in the interest of the upper class, controlled elite institutions?
9: is blantantly contradicted by the abolition of free speech, as well as byy the fact such NGOs are often funded by the government and act to implement its policies outside of the jurisdiction of said government.
such NGOs are often funded by the government and act to implement its policies outside of the jurisdiction of said government.
Exactly. The “N” in the acronym is nothing but an euphemism.
Does anyone know what Norbert’s plans are for the future? It appears his personal website is down. Does Norbert intend to retire from activism? If so, that would be a shame and a major loss. I know Ad is looking into more possibilities for activism on a European level. I sincerely hope Norbert is a part of that or finds some opportunity to continue to speak up.
I was looking through your old blogs, Tom, which I missed and came across your interesting comment:
https://heretictoc.com/2017/01/25/jimmy-the-screamer-caught-in-vice-racket/#comments
In my amateur opinion, the opposite is true. Bisexuals are significantly more represented in society, but suppress their homosexual side for social acceptability reasons, and may even identify themselves as heterosexual because their hetero side may be more pronounced and encouraged that allows them stay within the normative matrix and not feel left out. I believe that bisexuality is not balanced and has varying degrees of dominant preference.
>I believe that bisexuality is not balanced and has varying degrees of dominant preference.
OK but, as you say, this is your belief, or theory. Do you also believe that your theory must be correct simply because you believe it? Is there any sort of investigation that might make you change your mind? Mike Bailey used to believe the same as you do but changed his mind based on actual research.
I would glad to read some studies, but it is not clear how to reliably prove that a person mistakenly identified themselves as heterosexual, being in reality a latent bisexual. Although Wikipedia says that “during one experiment, Kurt Freund found that 17% of heterosexuals or homosexuals were able to pretend to be the other sexual orientation during the test.” but I don’t trust how Wiki authors interprets the data.
It has been shown that most heterosexuals have up to 10% attraction to the same sex without it being significant enough for them to want to act on it or desire to engage in physical acts.
I feel a 5-10% attraction to the same sex but the thought of gay sex grosses me out. It has to pass a certain threshold for any physical act to seem appealing.
Similarly most adults may feel a slight attraction to children which doesn’t cross a material threshold. Even with MAPs, the repressions and taboos of society impact on them and make them far more reticent about their true sexual feelings.
I’m probably 50% girls, 35% young women, 10% older women, 5% males lol.
In reality, I’m very happy to die a virgin.
>In reality, I’m very happy to die a virgin.
In that case, I’d say you are pretty much asexual. Which may be a blessing.
Lol fantasy, autoeroticism, Pornhub (adults), Instagram, etc suggest I have a very fulfilled sexual dimension to my life on my own private and introversive terms.
I recent got propositioned by a pretty woman in her 20s on social media for her to come round to my house and “have her all night” in exchange for money. I wasn’t really tempted.
Updated the newgon page for Tony Duvert, a French open MAP before the term ‘paedophile’ became a bludgeon used to insult and attack your enemies. The pages includes links (where possible) to freely available archives of Duvert’s now many English-language (translated) books, as well as English-language scholarship about him. See https://www.newgon.net/wiki/Tony_Duvert
I can recommend Duvert’s When Jonathan Died. It is about an English artist (if I remember correctly) living in France who falls in love with a boy of five or thereabouts. It follows the affair as the boy grows up. It packs a big emotional punch. On the other hand, it is VERY explicit, so check the laws in your country before being in possession of it.
I’m glad Norbert de Jonge is out of prison again and hope he has a good time now.
On the ground, using a selective but representative and empirical method, I’m noticing a sea change in general attitude, mostly through an analysis of Twitter and Instagram.
1) The loud and brazen “anti-paedo” accounts on Twitter. There is a massive cottage industry of these accounts. The rhetoric has hardened, probably demonstrating weakness. MAPs are practically being called “degenerate child raping paedophile perverts” (ok I embellish very slightly). Prominent examples are An Open Secret, Cernovich and Landon Starbuck. They have abandoned reason and embraced total emotionally driven irrationality. This suggests a late stage to the MAP hatred phenomenon. I suspect right wingers are clinging to their visceral sense of disgust, like they once did about gays, or blacks, whilst the culture is embracing the open sexual psychological space of the child through actual government backed policy.
2) On Instagram, the “child administrated by mum account” is obviously flourishing. And I was told at one point that these mums angrily react to men following them. That has not been my observation. These “mum” accounts (let’s call them) can have large proportions of adult male followers, often numbering in the thousands. This suggests minor attraction is far from a fringe condition. This was obvious even in the early days when family YouTube videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and became such an embarrassing problem that YT had to disable the video recommend function. But IG mums in my experience are very liberal, and the point is to demonstrate the beauty and desirability of their progeny. This has for several years now introduced and cemented into our popular culture the ostentation of the public and desirable child.
In conclusion, mainstream culture is demonstrably embracing an increased liberalisation of the child, and the right wingers are hunkering down in their bunkers and employing increasingly extreme rhetoric in their growing impotence. I’m not at all suggesting there will be any kind of change to the legal code, as the law is the very last domino to fall, but we are witnessing important material change in our favour at a surprising velocity. From the Insta mum to the elementary teacher, to the drag artist who has become so emblematic of child liberalisation, it looks as though society is indeed shifting in a significant way.
I gave up on Twitter long ago when I was kicked off the platform for do worse offence than politely raising unpopular points, giving rise to venomous outrage, often expressed in abusive terms that should have been a breach of T&Cs. But it was the rule keeper, not the rule breakers, who was shown the red card.
Not convinced by your thesis at this point, ZT, but it could be worth a guest blog if backed by detailed info — empirical data, since you use the term.
Tom – alas, empirical data is not my A game, I’m afraid. I’m best at anecdotal and intuitive observations with broad brush strokes. I can intuitively spot a trend but am not a number cruncher. In other words, I was an arts major.
If I am to write a guest blog it will only be if I feel deeply inspired by something, because I want to produce my best.
That’s fine, whatever you’re comfortable with. Empirical research can be qualitative as well as quantitative, BTW. The difference between “mere anecdote” and structured, rigorous investigation is not as clear-cut as commonly assumed.
For some funny dance videos with pubescents, not only the recommendation are disabled, but it cannot be found through a YouTube search and available only via link, despite a million views and thousands likes. It is not clear whether this was done by the author or YouTube moderators.
The high views and likes do show that a lot of people find minors cute and attractive and YouTube had to disable comments, apparently because it’s much easier, than moderate a lot of provocative compliments. Positive videos about MAPs are simply deleted. All this to hide the uncomfortable reality.
Minors are very carefully curated on social media. A year ago TikTok excluded minors entirely from its core algorithm (the “for you page”, fyp). I barely use TikTok but logged in a month or two ago: now they featured minors in the fyp in some limited and stultified form. This is all deliberate design, as with YouTube.
Instagram reels has a much better algorithm for minors than TikTok although one is always at the mercy of the programmers and their constant tweaking.
Social media programmers are no doubt influenced by false pretexts such as on child safety (even on family run accounts), especially when pressure is exerted externally eg from NGOs. The comments debacle on YouTube caused an existential angst because it became clear that large swathes of men found children cute – on one level or another. It became an inconvenient truth for wider society so had to be hidden away. And since there is a very broad application of the taboo of “paedophilia” – equated with terrorism – on social media any MAP positive statement is immediately censored.
I do think you’re a bit overly-sanguine and misreading the tea-leaves. This is not a MAP-friendly development, nor a child-friendly development. While the potential capacity for minors to self-express is increased by the internet, the trend you’re noticing isn’t self-expression, but rather, as you’ve noted (in contradiction to your assertions of the “liberalization of the child”) it is a carefully curated presence which is curated and managed by the adults. And the child is only an object, which brings me back to the problems of the objectification of children I’ve brought up before. The child is still the property of parents and society. And that is not going to be good or sustainable for anyone. It is reconsidering our objectification that needs to occur- which is why I point to trans kids in all this- as it challenges the notion of parental and societal ownership and objectification (and puritanization) of children. Yet you claim to support parental ownership and objectification alike. Which undermines your own position. So long as objectification persists, and children as property, as wards, persists, then both the child will be oppressed and consumed like candy, MAPs will be a part of this deranged arrangement, and MAPs will be the whipping boy for society’s own sins.
This reply addresses both posts.
Ok so you seem to claim the family unit is a bad thing, and parental guidance and guardianship represses children. Which I think is nonsense as one’s parents are the greatest friends one will ever have, the truest advocates of one’s cause and being, and co-partners in life’s turmoil, especially in the early stages when we lack the wisdom of learned experience. Parents are a universal good, and I would not want any child to be without such guidance.
Having said that, the child is not the “property” of the parents but has independent rights. He/she should be given greater freedom and autonomy. But I in no way oppose the basic family structure.
You express a distaste for “puritanism” shared by the right and progressives alike. In some ways you are right as traditional societies have always been sexually conservative. However this is if anything a very advanced, late stage and decadent society. Now for some reason the sexual being of the child is suppressed and denied, which I cannot fully fathom, and it seems to be the last shoe to drop, even after all the craziness of gender dysphoria. Maybe you are confusing the basic structure of society as being a repressive force on the child, but the truth is the suppression of child sexuality has been historically conditioned in comparatively recent history, and further back traditional societies were not nearly so pernickety about children. We are living in a period of cultural aberration with regard to children. So don’t tear down the healthy structures of society because that is a culturally disastrous approach.
You seem to equate parental responsibilities and guardianship with “reinforcement of abuse and victimisation”. This is, dare I say it, an abuse of language. Parents offer a loving, caring and nurturing environment and I want that kind of love and security for every child. I envision a future where children can further explore their sexuality, maybe eventually with adults, within the strictures and responsibilities of a liberal (very liberal by today’s standards) parental oversight.
Finally, you mention the “objectification” of the child as a great evil. Yet we objectify what we revere. On a basic psychological level we form external concepts and ideas of just about everything; that is how the brain works. Yet maybe you mean we need to establish a deeper interpersonal connection with the child, which I certainly agree with. Yet this is already present in the parental bond, where children are loved, cherished and allowed to flourish. I envision a more socially liberal future where MAPs are allowed to interact with children within the strictures of parental oversight. Social attitudes will change dramatically with succeeding generations, that much is practically guaranteed. I do not foresee a dystopia where children are collectively owned by an overbearing State.
As a disclaimer, I approach this issue in some ways from the right, although I like to pick and choose my social policies from across the political spectrum. But my voting intentions are always Conservative / Republican. This does not affect my basic, albeit undisclosed, identity as a man who is attracted to girls.
In other words you just want to back to the good old days when girls were property, only the feminists hadn’t come along to ruin your access to younger girls with age of consent laws, but otherwise, are fine with the patriarchy, fine with capitalism, and fine with the exploitation of women and children, because at least you get yours as a cishet male? Is that what I’m getting? Because that’s an awful lot what it sounds like.
Sounds like you’re saying fuck all them queers, fuck women, and fuck the kids- as long as I get to fuck, everyone else can suck it up and deal with me and my colleagues being on top of the heap, as God intended. Which is basically saying you’re a fascist, just with a lower age of consent than the present crop of puritans. A puritan in every way- Biblical law and all, because at least God didn’t put AOC’s in the Bible. An attitude I’ve noticed among many MAPs- which is truly reprehensible, as far as I’m concerned. The same puritanical, oppressive bullshit just with a few tweaks.
MAPs who like girls pining for the pre-feminist days when girls were considered women at menstruation and the property of their fathers and husbands, and MAPs who like boys pining for the patriarchies and pederasty of Rome and Greece, with no pesky women or girls getting in the way. If that is truly your idea of what needs to happen, then you rightfully deserve to lose. Liberation for me, and screw everyone else, isn’t liberation, it’s just more of the same oppressive bullshit. Only you want to be at the top of the pyramid scheme.
Whoa! Cool it, Perplexed.
I understand and share your rejection of the patriarchal entitlement you are talking about here but I also feel it is unfair to project such values onto ZT, who seems more inclined to set kids up on a pedestal than abuse them as chattels.
The “pedestal” view, to be sure, has a long history within patriarchy; but there have always been true romantics along with real abusers.
Feel free, ZT, to reject my characterisation of you as a “pedestalist”!
Maybe my issue is that I am quite right wing and conservative, and I am sorry if that causes offence to some of your readers, Tom.
I love children and believe in their fulfilment and human flourishing. Yes I put girls on a pedestal because I revere them as being so cute and beautiful. I don’t believe in feminism but still think think women and girls should be given high respect in society. I of course support LGBT rights.
Again, if most MAPs are left wing, that is entirely extrinsic to their identity as MAPs. I cannot change who I am.
Actually, Zen, you don’t appear to me to be that right wing. Can you identify a view of yours that you would describe as right wing or Conservative?
Stephen, as I said, I have always voted for the Conservative Party. I believe in Centrist economics. I am a strong advocate of free speech and also believe in religious rights. I am skeptical of some developments with the surge in gender dysphoria, but I support trans people. I am very pro-immigration and believe in rehabilitative justice, not punitive justice. I dislike abortion. I support several children’s charities and believe in the rights of the child. I do not oppose increasingly explicit sex ed or child friendly drag, but I wonder if that might be for selfish reasons because I want children to be more sexually emancipated. I am a strong advocate of the Catholic Church and believe every life is sacred, to treat others with respect and compassion. Finally I love cultural tradition, and strongly believe in a preservation of and broad awareness of historical culture.
Make of all that what you will 🙂
I believe in centrist economics
This obviously makes you a centrist about economics, not a right winger.
I am a strong advocate of free speech and also believe in religious rights.
Although you’d think otherwise these days, belief in free speech is traditionally a left-wing position.
I am skeptical of some developments with the surge in gender dysphoria, but I support trans people.
Overall, that only makes you slightly conservative on this issue.
I am very pro-immigration and believe in rehabilitative justice, not punitive justice.
That’s left wing, not right wing.
I dislike abortion.
Well, I would doubt that very few people positively like it. But if you mean that you would criminalise it, yes, that is conservative.
I support several children’s charities and believe in the rights of the child.
Supporting charity is politically neutral. Being in support of the rights of children seems vaguely left wing. (In general, left wingers favour rights.)
I do not oppose increasingly explicit sex ed or child friendly drag, but I wonder if that might be for selfish reasons because I want children to be more sexually emancipated.
Leaving aside your caveat, this is liberal, hence socially left wing.
I am a strong advocate of the Catholic Church and believe every life is sacred, to treat others with respect and compassion.
Not necessarily right wing, especially from the “and’ onwards. As for the first part, I presume you do not want special rights and privileges for the Catholic Church. If you do, that does make you very right wing on that particular issue.
Finally I love cultural tradition, and strongly believe in a preservation of and broad awareness of historical culture.
Slightly conservative perhaps, but not in a big way.
Overall, I’d say you’re not as right wing as you think you are!
This position is changing and departing from tradition. Left wokeism and cancel culture have opposite goals. Real free speech does not bother them, they want the privilege of free judgment, condemn and complaint using the victim label. If the classical marxists relied on the working class, then the modern leftists uses race/sexual minorities and feminists.
Probably a better way to summarise all this would be to say that you are temperamentally a traditionalist but politically not very conservative.
Yes, that’s an accurate summary of my beliefs.
It doesn’t matter if I’m offended or not- my offense is irrelevant. It is the substance of what you’re saying, the implications of it- all things I’m trying to point out to you in hopes that you understand what I’m getting at and where you’re going awry and undermining yourself. Offense is cheap, easy, and totally beside the point. Dealing with the substance of the matter- that’s what I’d rather we did.
> It is the substance of what you’re saying
No. If he says X, you insist it was the non-equal claim Y. By starting from such a false premise, you can derive anything.
No doubt this trend runs deep within feminism (e.g. the Patriarchy, or men being women).
The pedestal and chattel come from the same place- the most recent pedestal which Zen espouses being a form of the Cult of Domesticity. You see this in Hispanic societies with the Madonna-Whore Complex. It’s the same sort of thing, the same social structure. It’s just two sides of the same coin- one side assuages the uneasy conscience of the oppressor about the other side of the coin, while they compartmentalize their thinking so they become blind to the fact that it is the same coin. You cannot place on a pedestal without consigning to the status of chattel simultaneously- that your focus is on the one doesn’t change the fact that you are also imposing the other at the same time. Pedestal or chattel, it matters not- it is the same. It is a denial of the autonomy and freedom of another human being, and a subjugation of them to your rule, to your expectations, to your will.
In the exchange between John and Abigail Adams, wherein Abigail admonishes John to “Remember the ladies”, John replies with “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight.”
It’s the same bullshit. And it is bullshit. No sense in beating around the bush. It is an undercurrent in MAP circles that must be addressed. I can only apologize for not taking the time to be more thorough in my explanation, so as to not be so abrasively blunt, and be able to take into account the misguided well-meaningness behind the nonsense. But no matter how well-meaning, it is patently wrong nonetheless.
Ok I don’t quite see how putting a woman or girl above you, as in the Medieval chivalric ideal, is simultaneously degrading them? It’s the exact opposite. It gives great pleasure to both sides and is the usual way a man courts a woman/girl. If you mean by treating them with reverence and gentleness you are objectifying them and treating them too much as an “Other”, and call this “nonsense”, I would say you are rejecting not just the vast majority of Western historical culture but probably global culture too. It shatters the spiritual relation between romantic partners to treat each other as though we were blokes down the pub. I’m trying hard to think how placing oneself at the service of a girl you find beautiful would make her “chattel”, I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of human relations.
>You cannot place on a pedestal without consigning to the status of chattel simultaneously
False. Neither a plant or a little girl placed on pedestal entail the status of chattel. But perhaps feminists never play with little girls, admiring them standing on a pedestal.
That you treat girls like chattel I can very well believe, but not everyone is degenerate enough to accept such feminist nonsense.
No rejection of the feminist entitlement (to deny girls what modicum of freedom and equality with women they enjoyed)? Odd.
Not odd, just insufficiently explicit. I agree with you on this one!
I don’t mean to anger you or cause offence, Perplexed. If you feel so strongly about left wing politics, that is entirely separate from a discussion about minor attraction. As I said to Tom, I can’t change who I am.
No, it is inextricably linked. We are talking about worldviews- which come comprehensively. It intersects and informs the various particulars which it encompasses. It is not separate, but integral in how you approach the matter. No matter how good you may be at compartmentalizing it, the fact is that you are a whole human person- and the whole must be examined in addition to specific parts- because the specific parts of one’s heart and mind do not exist in a vacuum or in isolation. They are interconnected. Furthermore- any movement of children’s rights or MAP rights or any other such thing is a social and political project- and it’s stupid to try and deny that it is the case. Therefore, the politics and social construct of it all are inextricably linked to the conversation.
I accept this point actually, it is holistic. But you can’t claim I have to be radically left wing in order to be a MAP – my sexuality is entirely incidental to my politics. We can establish a common cause in that children should be more emancipated, without having to have identical political backgrounds. At least, that is how a church or a corporation operates.
Since you abhor actual man/boy and man/girl relationships, favor denying freedom to girls (as per feminism), demand anti-pedophile indoctrination of children and special treatment of “queers”, “liberation” for the few is all you favor.
Why pretend otherwise, hypocrite?
You were doing very well, Nada, until your last word. Without that final accusation, you’d have stood a better chance of your thoughts being pondered rationally.
Even in the realm of queer spaces, it is still catered to the adult and the adolescent and child are told that eventually they will get freedom to be who they are and express themselves. Oh sure, they may be allowed to hold hands and dress how they want, but nothing else is permitted to them. With drag shows and pride it is centered around the expression of adults, and children are just there for the ride, it isn’t exactly a matter of an autonomous child being able to express themselves. The right fears that it is, but it is not.
Progressives are very much under the spell of puritanism still, just as much as the right is. It is an internal contradiction they’re going to have to face up to eventually. Progressives won’t be able to hide behind MAPs for much longer, because the Right is rightly seeing where what they’re pushing leads, even if progressives are in denial about it. Queer adults may plead they’re not pedos- that it’s a red herring and whatnot- but they won’t be able to maintain the white(rainbow?)washing of their own history for much longer- conservatives remember, and are also digging around to re-remember- MAPs and kids both (in some shape or form) have been present and part of the movement since the Stonewall riots. Their cherished heroes were sexually active kids or were sexually active with kids. They’ll passively, tacitly acknowledge this once in a while, saying “different times”, but they forget the philosophical underpinnings of the queer movement, and forget that queer theory is much broader than the Alphabet Mafia approach we adopted in order to better appease and combat the conservatives and neutralize their objections to gay marriage- which was always a compromise position with conservatives, and isn’t really all that progressive.
No, if queer people are going to maintain their rights in face of the conservative backlash, it’s going to require them to reengage with the left-side of the project- the undoing of the family institution and the state- which entails giving children their autonomy, relationships being chosen, not mandated or dictated by blood, and the allowance for the self expression of each individual with no normative imposition on that. The right is already there, and is unwittingly forcing the issue- they’ll only be able to cry wolf (pedophile, groomer) so many times before people start to realize that there really is no big bad wolf to be afraid of. That is where the trend is actually headed. But this particular trend you’re seeing- that’s just a reinforcement of the abuse and victimization and will work counter to your cause, and is not the same as what I’ve described.
The right is going to force the issue and force queer people and progressives in general to pick a side- only the right thinks it’s going to be pro-pedo or anti-pedo, when in fact progressives are going to eventually see it’s us vs them, and the rights of the child vs the oppression of the child. People aren’t ever going to get on board with “adults need access to children” but they will eventually have to reckon with “children need access to adults”.
I wanted to say thank you to Prue for this excellent find, which he posted on FST.
https://www.freespeechtube.org/v/193s
I agree. It’s brilliant. Thanks, Ed (and Prue, and video star Kwechi)!
Tom, I just wanted to say thank you for all you’ve done—not just for the MAP community, but also for what you’ve done to influence global change.
Without your efforts, the world would not have had the chance to examine itself carefully in order to determine what love truly means to the human race as a whole.
These issues have existed since before humans began to form societies, but I am so grateful to live in a time when people like you were courageous enough to continue the discussion for many years. Our bondage is not the MAP’s alone, for the world is also in chains regarding the questions of love, but we have you who have helped loosen those chains so that one day all mankind can truly be free.
PS,
As I have told you via e-Mail a few months ago, you still look younger than me and I am in my 40’s , So stay young and do share your secrets of staying young in your upcoming books 🙂
Much Love,
-sL-
Thanks so much, “-sL-“, although your tribute is far too generous. We all do our bit, including your own very important contribution.
>you still look younger than me and I am in my 40’s
I’d love to believe I could still pass for being under 50 but to my mind this stretches credulity a bit too far. Thanks for the sentiment though. Bless you! 🙂
>I am so grateful to live in a time when people like you were courageous enough to continue the discussion for many years.
Considering your fondness for proclaiming MAPs monsters, nick linking and speaking ill of the dead, to say nothing of the banning of dissidents, such praise has a very hollow ring to it. Are ethical principles an utterly foreign concept to you, as indicated by the criticism on BC?
https://annabelleigh.net/messages/742285.htm
https://boychat.org/messages/1603980.htm
The challenge on this forum is to think things through and express ourselves in civil terms. The stronger our feelings are, the greater the potential benefit of calming down and having an exchange in which both parties might experience something other than ever deeper hatred.
Checking out the links, I see the word “monster” does indeed appear with reference to the late Nathan Larson and the considerably later Adolph Hitler. Not a bad call in either case, I would say, although the closer we get to our own time and place the more restraint we need in our language and the more openness we need to the perceptions of others, especially when they are participants on the same forum.
For a good example of the destructive negativity of blind hatred in public discourse we probably need look no further than seeing the aggressive Right shooting itself in the foot in the US Congress in the last few days.
Oops, my bad! The most important reference was to “Tate”, presumably a reference to Andrew Tate, of whom I know little, although Wikipedia says he is a “self-described misogynist” who was recently charged with “human trafficking and forming an organized crime group”.
>The challenge on this forum is to think things through and express ourselves in civil terms.
In this context, the latter only influences the signal/noise ratio, hence can be ignored.
>Not a bad call in either case, I would say
Really? You favor an obviously hostile actor compromising the security and anonymity of MAPs, on the basis of their possible skepticism of liberalism/feminism/LEAs or activism? At best, this is an attempt to create controlled opposition.
As for the US Congress, I heard reports of Republicans, seeking minor concessions (including more time to read proposals, and a cut of military support for Ukraine) from the would-be speaker in exchange for their support.
Nada appears to be saying that expressing ourselves in civil terms “only influences the signal/noise ratio, hence can be ignored”.
My view is that too much “noise” (emotionally and abusively expressed opinion) tends to distort the signal or even completely obliterate it. It hugely increases the risk of misunderstanding and “getting hold of the wrong end of the stick”.
Hence the ratio will not be ignored here.
As for the other opinions Nada expresses, I do not share them; and I judge that further discussion is unlikely to lead to agreement. Not that it matters much. What is more important is to be kept alert to the fact that opinion within our community is remarkably diverse.
>Nada appears to be saying that expressing ourselves in civil terms “only influences the signal/noise ratio, hence can be ignored”.
*In* the context of compromizing the security and anonymity of MAPs, the part you apparently continue to ignore in favor of accepting the OP naive claims as gospel and not sparing a thought as to the consequences for MAPs of his actions, instead chosing to focus on the (alleged) lack of civility of his critics.
>not sparing a thought as to the consequences for MAPs of his actions
Actually, I have no idea what you are talking about. Could you please spell it out, please?
You have no idea of the consequences for MAPs of having their identities linked and mapped to a real-world identity? I was under the impression pseudonyms were employed even within PIE on occasion, and that you even respected the choice of MAPs to either stay anonymous or seek anonymity again in response a more hostile climate.
>consequences for MAPs of having their identities linked and mapped to a real-world identity
Who? Have any MAPs have been outed by the person in question? All we have to go on so far, it seems, is your vague accusation, with no credible details. Even the Witch-Finder General had to present some sort of details and story to support his claims, however ridiculous they might have been. All we have from you so far is you pointing your finger, screaming “Witch”! Why should we believe you?
Binary question: Have you followed the linked posts to a sufficient depth, and found no evidence of linking identities and mapping any such identity to a real-world identity?
Alternatively, at what depth is such evidence found?
What I’m saying is “Show me the evidence.” What you appear to be saying is “Go look for the evidence yourself.” If a prosecutor said that to a judge or jury do you think they would be impressed?
No, you dispute the existence of ANY evidence, despite the fact it’s easily found following the first linked post, without any need to appeal to authority.
Judicial theater is not relevant to the output of such a search.
>Judicial theater is not relevant to the output of such a search.
In the “theatre” of this blog, this forum, actually it is very relevant. Readers should easily be able to see what is alleged. Show me (and us) the evidence and I will respond. But you have shown us absolutely nothing, rien, nada… At least you are living up to your online name, LOL!
Bottom line: you are getting repetitious and boring. Unless you show the evidence, this conversation is over.
I forgot to mention in my prev post about Ken Plummer, that he gave an interview for Paidika. Might be of some interest.
Thanks very much, Prue, for giving us so many interesting and important links following Ken’s sad departure. You wrote:
>Ken linked to another scholar who wrote about being a student under Ken, even friendly enough to have Ken, his professor, stay with him, a graduate…
Ken was a very hospitable guy. I was once his house guest at his home in Wivenhoe, a delightful little town near the University of Essex, where he was a professor for many years.
I’ve just discovered that Ken Plummer, pioneer of modern humanistic sociology in the UK at Essex University, has died. Ken felt safe to declare as late as 2010 that we live in “a moral panic over paedophilia” (but that such panic “shows no signs of abating any time soon” [from his review of Sarah Goode).
As many here will know, Plummer joined PIE as a member in order to interview paedophiles, and his writings about them aren’t sensationalist or hostile. He attempted to construct “a sociological baseline” for research on the topic, and reviewed many relevant publications such as Wilson & Cox’s “Childlovers” study, and [with Vern Bullough] reviewed Brongersma’s magnum opus on Boy-Love.
Unfortunately, his early work on paedophiles is difficult to access. I’ve not been able to find an archived version of his 2 1980’s book chapters. However, “Images of Paedophilia”, written in 1979, can be found as a chapter here: http://library.lol/main/5B2523267D7AF0C8EDC638DA72372F56
One of his lasting legacies will surely be the scholarly journal “sexualities”, of which he was founder and editor-in-chief.
His most readily available and thought provoking piece, I think, would be “Understanding Childhood Sexualities” (1999), where he gives a social constructionist account of childhood sexuality in a very simple and understandable way, that I think on reflection deserves more attention: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J082v20n01_14
You can hear Ken speaking in short clips on youtube, when he was interviewed in 2015 about such topics as the Kinsey institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BUdOPKYI3g , and how he self-censored his own interviews with paedophiles, sadomasochist, and other “sexual variations” which have never been published in full https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r4OtcYX6aY
Tributes to Ken are here: https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2022/11/07/tributes-to-professor-ken-plummer
The last post Ken made on his personal website was to signpost reflections on the radical happenings at Essex university in the 1970’s: https://greggblachford.com/portfolio/1977-78-a-year-at-the-university-of-essex/ Ken linked to another scholar who wrote about being a student under Ken, even friendly enough to have Ken, his professor, stay with him, a graduate, which he notes “might be seen somewhat differently today but, at that time, we saw it as new friends helping each other out.”
The elephant in the room is Ken’s post in 2014: https://kenplummer.com/2014/07/27/child-abuse-and-paedophilia-an-open-letter/
On his paedophilia research, he wrote:
“These early papers from the 1970’s are of some historical interest, but given the changes in the wider world, I believe their conclusions are no longer tenable. I am saddened to think they might have been used to justify child abuse.”
Note what’s not said: he doesn’t disavow his child sexuality writings, his book reviews, his use of moral panic to frame the discussion of paedophilia. He just says “I believe their conclusions are no longer tenable” without telling us why. Does he mean they’re unpopular because of “changes in the modern world”? Probably more accurate. I will mention that this post comes after Ken had retired due to liver damage, and it may be he was feeling vulnerable. Who knows, he could have received personal threats that troubled him… Either way, I like his apology for how much it leaves out :p
I don’t know why you trashed my previous comment when you believe in free speech etc. Discussing Balenciaga, I only went slightly off topic to explain my view on celebrity culture.
This is a mystery to me, Pat. Try posting again. Could be a system glitch. I didn’t trash anything from you. Can’t find anything in the Spam folder or accidentally sent to Trash folder.
Sorry you’ve had a problem. I would be interested to hear your discussion of Balenciaga.
Apologies for jumping to conclusions then. As for Balenciaga, I was just saying how, on the one hand, films like ‘Cuties’ are welcome (I watched that before cancelling my Netflix, I never watched it that much and when a mate would come and sometimes watch a film, it would show what I previously watched and didn’t like the sound of that)!
But I don’t like some of the other implicit manipulation by celebs and the music industry. Cannibalism, fake meat, insect food, etc.
Another point I was pondering was the ‘Incest Taboo’ put forward by LSM (is he still around) and how ‘The Great Reset’ that aims to change the structures of society (which I am against, I don’t believe they have our best interests at heart, more like, control and wealth transfer, I digress) But maybe he could reevaluate his position. On another note, Frank Furedi doesn’t think the ‘Reset’ will happen. I can send a link where he discussed this on a panel of guests if you are interested.
>On another note, Frank Furedi doesn’t think the ‘Reset’ will happen. I can send a link where he discussed this on a panel of guests if you are interested.
Please do. As for LSM, I have not heard from him in a long time. Has anyone else?
OK here it is:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGRJZeeGr1w
Thanks!
I think in the general confusion of this cultural moment we are in danger of overlooking something quite incredible – indeed which would have been mocked as a possibility only 2-3 years ago – child sexuality has become a mainstream topic of debate in (US dominated) Western society.
We’re familiar with old stories like the movie Cuties and the “Disney Groomer” debate. Well the frequency of stories surrounding child sexuality and “sexualisation” are increasing dramatically in velocity and mainstream cultural impact. Only very recently we had the Balenciaga furore ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-63779620 ) which has blown up on social media, with the hashtag – predictably enough – #BalenciagaGroomers
Then there has been the more recent Washington Post article ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/11/23/downstate-bruce-norris-pedophiles/ ) praising a theatrical production sympathetic to child sex offenders, which upon reading doesn’t strike me as particularly controversial, but which has caused more chaos and furore around the idea of the normalisation of paedophilia.
Then there is the Online Safety Bill (restricted geographically to the UK of course) which aims to police children online but which is perhaps in large measure unenforceable. The pace of child “sexualisation” (admittedly I hate that term) or better child innate self-discovery on social media has been incredible. I am talking about wholly legal social media characterisations and self-fashioning by children which are frankly surprising to me – the level to which children have imbibed the adult sexual norms of our society and converted it into their own subculture.
So yes, it is actually happening, child sexuality is now a mainstream battleground the way trans ideology has been. The trend may be in its early stages, and let me tell you the opponents of child sexuality are rabidly vicious in their pushback – Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh are just the very tip of the iceberg – but this is now becoming a major cultural battleground: something which was unthinkable when I first began contributing to this blog about three years ago.
This is an incredible moment for MAPs too, and we need to consider how we respond to these cultural developments and this dramatic foment of new emerging perspectives and ideas in popular culture regarding children.
I think we need to be ready with a radical perspective. A VP approach will seem old hat in the face of growing awareness that children are sexual beings.
Usually such bills is hide behind by “child safety”, with the aim of limit freespeech on the Internet.
This coincides with their fears of child sexuality. The rise of social media has allowed youths to express themselves and they fear it will get out of their desexual control.
Academic groups are gradually realizing that minor attraction is natural sexuality that cannot be chosen and changed.
MAP needs to build community, write a modern YouthLove/MAP declaration, in which it is necessary to recall that according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all people have equal rights, protection from discrimination, freedom of opinions and peaceful associations.
>The rise of social media has allowed youths to express themselves
Yes, and each ensuing decade, of the music industry for example, has been increasingly sexual, and kids soak up these influences like a sponge, for better or worse. But it is deeply hypocritical for anti-MAP commentators to lament child sexuality when mainstream society brought about the precise conditions for a burgeoning and robust child sexuality to flourish. Imagine if we’d kept the social and cultural values of the 50s lol, none of this would have ever happened. The “mainstreamers” have been well and truly hoisted by their own petard.
“Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens…The irony is, when it came to Lockdowns and vaccine mandates, I am on the same side as them, the side of freedom and individuality, not some collectivist hell hold that always leads to mass murder. I was naive in thinking that technology will free man, now it looks like a real threat. Just look at China. But yes, always when this subject comes up, we part company.
I was in a Jeep with a mate who, for a short time, worked with convicts doing landscape gardening etc. He left because many were MAPs. Not that I’m physically scared of him, I know the reaction I would get and it was just not worth it if you knew the character of this guy, who I still consider, on subjects other than MAP related, a mate.
Now time driving through town, we passed a young girl wearing tight revealing clothes, he mentioned about his experiences with Prisoners saying how easily manipulated young girls are and should wear more clothes. I just said something like, we’re not in Saudi Arabia and tried to change the conversation.
Another time in the vehicle, on there BBC R4 a conversation about “online abuse” came up. Maybe he suspects me, he mentioned paedophilia and said, “what do you think of it”…Frustratingly I had to avoid taking the bait and just said, well I can never understand how people can find underdeveloped breasts attractive and moved to conversation on to the real Trojan horse that is online censorship being ushered in in the name of “protecting the kiddies”…..I discovered this site in 2013 not long after getting into the research on MAPs and child sexuality. It was actually an anti-pedo blog that was a good source of information ‘Evil Unveiled’…That’s when I first read about Norbert.
Yeah don’t reveal sexual orientation to friends.
It’s a private matter
As Tom said to that undercover guy (somewhere on holiday, I been reading H-Toc from the start but can’t remember everything) when asked what sort of sex are you into…”I’m as straight as they come”
Delighted to hear you have been tackling HTOC so methodically, Pat.
Just for clarity, I should say the “undercover guy” cannot have been an undercover cop because I have never said anything to the police along the lines you suggest.
So I think you must be referring to “the Fake Sheikh”, who was an undercover reporter for the tabloid press (the now disgraced and defunct News of the World). The story is in this blog:
https://heretictoc.com/2014/07/23/when-heretic-toc-met-the-fake-sheikh/
I did not say I was straight. I simply denied having “vices”. Here is the key part of what I wrote:
The “fake Sheikh” who was an undercover reporter. That was the one.
Norbert de Jonge was not convicted because he tried to renew a banned organisation. No, only quoting Rind or saying you want a lower age of consent is what Martijn Association did, so that alone is getting you in jail. You would be locked up for having this blog if you were Dutch. In the 1980s though, they locked you up for corrupting minds?
Hello “Hello”,
In the UK in the 1980s there was a law against “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”; this law has been little heard of since, but it has never been abolished as far as I am aware, so it could be revived at any time.
We in the UK had high hopes of better things from the once “tolerant” Netherlands though. So the regression towards intolerance is very disappointing. Last year, I wrote about the Dutch situation here:
https://heretictoc.com/2021/09/15/where-prejudice-legally-trumps-truth/
My story was written after consulting Norbert and others. Those who were being prosecuted appeared to be satisfied as to the accuracy of my account. But please feel free to comment further.
A public discourse can be called a debate only if there are (at least) two publicly visible opposing sides whose voice is being heard and (at least) taken into account.
And, as long as sexuality of children is considered, the only side that has access to media (including large Web platforms), annd thus the only one that is heard by the general public, is the one that denies the child sexuality even exists, and condemns any dicplay of it, as well as is constantly on a witch-hunt mode, seeking to attack adults they consider to be guilty of the “sexualisation of children”.
Or, Zen, you know someone with a different perspective? Someone beyond MAPs and MAP allies, I mean – the latter are so miniscule in number, and are so far to the social fringe, that their voice is all but nonexistent in the ears (and minds) of the general populace.
Explorer, there are several things to say here. Firstly, the “other side of the debate” is being rhetorically manufactured by the Right. Very vocal and influential right wing cultural commentators are framing companies such as Balenciaga and Disney as being “pro-child sexualisation”, and the American Right labels these “groomers”, which although perhaps a figment of their imagination, still creates a vibrant discourse around the issue. Teachers are labelled “groomers” simply for teaching K-12 sex ed. Drag queens are of course the ultimate “groomer” enemy. While none of these rhetorical targets actually explicitly support a radical position on child sexuality, the debate is being framed that way.
Secondly, it is now impossible to maintain that a degree of child sexuality doesn’t exist, and only the ignorant, the extremely insulated, or a left wing denier (whose base of human conduct is very liberal) hold such a view. The evidence of social media, especially the recent phenomenon of short form video, has broadcast to the general public, or all who care to see, precocious and daring self-presentation by children. Of course as stated, the Left say this is normal and that it is the eye of the beholder which is sexualising it. Meanwhile the Right fulminate and impotently rage. But children’s self-fashioning (often with full support or even encouragement from parents) has become increasingly glamourised, and of course the currency of glamour and self-worth in our narcissistic postmodern Western culture is frequently a sexual one.
Finally, although MAPs and MAP allies are still fringe, there is (arguably) a stealth takeover occurring culturally whereby MAP ideas, packaged differently, are increasingly being found to be palatable, especially around children’s sexual self-identity.
It seems online censorship is worsening in the UK:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/experts-condemn-uk-online-safety-bill-harmful-privacy-and-encryption
Tom (and others), what do you think about it? Is there a possibility that this censorship initiative will endanger online (pro-)MAP and Child Liberation communities?
It’s a worrying bill, for sure, but see here for a report that foregrounds the government’s declared intention:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/online-safety-bill-criminalise-encouraging-223000990.html
Online Safety Bill to criminalise encouraging self-harm
Hasn’t there been backlash against the “legal but harmful” aspect of this bill?
Yes, and rightly so. But that doesn’t mean we should be happy about the present state of the social media. This is a very difficult policy area to get right.
Well, it is still better than in Russia, where any positive mention of any “deviant” sexuality – including the mainstream-in-the-West adult homosexuality – was just effectively banned everywhere…
I agree, actually, although I would say “less bad” than in Russia, rather than better.
Inveterate sinner against MAPs Tucker Carlson tonight launched an astonishing attack on the “left wing media” for the “sexualisation of children”. In his impassioned speech Carlson noted with a voracious despotic aplomb that the wrong half of the US were hell bent on sexualising kids and “legitimising kiddie porn” (sic). The damning evidence: a fashion house released an advertising campaign today of young children holding teddies, and the teddies were dressed in BDSM gear. Tucker’s weird pal Chris Rufo affirmed the dire state of affairs, and “the left” were deflecting any criticism by calling such critique “anti-LGBTQ”. Elsewhere on the internet the advertising campaign was branded “demonic” by right wing firebrands. What most offended this spectator, though, was the cringeworthy moral panic flamed by this clear societal drift towards the attempt to set free the totemistic child and all its associated taboos.
Conservatives will always be thus. Especially in the US where religion is still so damn strong (but in the early stages of falling off the map). As less people and less people are religious, the hangups that religion bequeathed us will begin to fall away. The US currently exercises cultural imperialism upon it’s fellow members of the Empire™- making them more puritanical than they would otherwise be. Once our own puritanism begins to fade, the puritanism we and Britain have imposed on the rest of the world will start to be undone quickly.
I think religion is a false flag. Look at France, a strongly Catholic country, and famous intellectuals there tried to petition for child sexual liberalisation (in the 70s I think). Evangelical Protestantism in the US is slightly different, in that many of these are “off the chart” nutters – Young Earth Creationists, for example. It’s no coincidence that Catholic European countries have some of the most relaxed attitudes to child sexuality – for example, the age of consent in Spain is only thirteen. France, Spain, and Italy have much more relaxed attitudes than the US and UK, and the political and cultural hegemony of the Anglosphere has really damaged and set back child liberation. Oh, and in Latin America, Brazil, also strongly Catholic, has some of the most progressive attitudes towards children in the world. So I think your argument is with a certain strain of Puritanical Protestantism (common in the Anglosphere), not Catholicism 🙂
As for mass secularisation improving society, I doubt it.
No, a few years ago, under the PP (conservative) government, the AoC was raised to 15 in Spain.
France is not very religious, but ever more puritanical. Customers of prostitutes are penalised (as in Sweden), and for youth, the AoC of 15, which meant before that sex is OK above that age, is also made in reverse the age under which sex with someone older by more than 5 years will be assumed to be rape, without need of a proof of non-consent.
I would put it that it is, again, largely under the pressure exerted by the United States government, and the global surveillance state it heads, rather than any increase of puritanism organically among the French.
Age of consent isn’t everything. A middle aged man finding even eighteen year olds desirable is considered deeply problematic and inappropriate in our society. There are laws and there are cultural norms, and laws simply follow the mood music of the zeitgeist and the tyranny of the majority. I don’t have an issue with ages of consent, because the girls I am most attracted to are in a band of four to eight years old, which would never be sanctioned by law anyway. There are many ways to give pleasure to a girl and engage in fantasy fulfillment which don’t have to be sexual. The power of the imagination is vast and massively expands the range and possibilities of interpersonal transaction between an adult and a child. Perhaps my ultimate fantasy is one of sexually gratifying a child orally, but I never expect this to be a tangible reality and nor does it ever have to be, because the power of the idea itself is so great, that it takes on a life of its own. Finding any way to give a child simple pleasure, through a smile or act of kindness, is enough of a substitute gratification for me (psychology 101!), because the feelings and desires are so highly charged that the slightest social transaction can be deeply meaningful. Demanding full on sex with children is an absurdity and a failure of imagination; also probably impractical, certainly almost universally held in the highest detestation by non-MAPs, and unlikely to succeed in our lifetimes. But the power of the idea of a subtle child sexuality and an intermingling of all these cross-currents in the societal coexistence of adult and child (massively amplified also by social media), creates a very interesting dynamic. There is nothing that gives me greater personal fulfillment than seeing a child happy. People must be as dull as a clod of earth and lack all sensitivity to think that the only way they can gain true fulfillment is by having full on sex. That is simply not true. Life has infinite depths and exploring these depths in a playful, loving and responsible way is enough for a lifetime of true fulfillment. Age of consent is bunk. What MAPs should be focusing on is giving children the space to explore their own personal sexuality, and the erotic potential of subtle interrelationships between adult and child, which are inevitable because we live in such an interconnected world. It is therefore an abject failure of the imagination which sees the only solution, or the only mark of success, as being the legitimation of full on sex between adults and children. That is a gross underselling of the power of heart and mind and the depth of interrelationship. So much of what we can do and explore, and have the potential to do, is already legal. It is not a failure of legal codes to be sufficiently progressive but a failure of the human imagination to conceive of deeply erotic legal interrelationships between adult and child. It requires skill, it requires subtlety, a light touch (metaphorically speaking) – something that can scarcely be imagined in our solidified age.
People are really stupid. A friend or a lover (most often) does not pursue the goal of satisfying himself. These desires are mutual and cross. Any person first of all wants to please/satisfy his friend/partner and that brings mutual satisfaction. People use this all the time, but think that MAP is different. Thinking MAPs are grooming and using minors is like saying that gays are grooming and using each other to satisfy their perverted desires. This is absurd. Among the gays there are sadists and murderers.
People need a clear concept. Like the laws on the age of consent in the Netherlands 90s. Unfortunately the MAPs still separate into GL/BL and cannot unite to form a full-fledged community with a common flag and a charter.
I 100% agree about the mutual satisfaction of pleasing the other person. That is at the heart of any relationship: family bond, friendship or romance.
A non-sexual social transaction with a child is infinitely fulfilling to a MAP – whether eros is the basis of his motivation or simply compassion (yes, MAPs have tremendous compassion for children!)
Now that perplexes me- the infighting and haggling among MAPs. It’s as, if not more, baffling to me than the infighting I hear of in LGBTQ+ circles (though I’ve never experienced it myself. All the queer people I know are generally supportive of each other, and inclusive).
And the only thing I can gather is that it’s a split between, as with so many things, right and left. Those under some patriarchal, anti-feminist, anti-queer, quasi-fascist, alt-right conservatism, and those of a more progressive bent.
It is strange to me at how ununified, or rather, unallied MAPs are with one another. To bring the right/left split more clarity- it, from what I can tell, a split between MAPs who are basically under a traditionalist viewpoint- who basically want society as is, plus them (which is akin to how some queer people seem to just want heteronormativity and the same puritanical bullshit plus them married), and those who aren’t just looking to carve out an exemption to themselves, otherwise preserving the status quo, or retreating to the past. I do find that MAPs of the traditionalist bent off-putting, as they sound just like religious conservatives and the like. Misogynistic, queerphobic, xenophobic, transphobic, paternalistic, etc.
The fight between sexual liberationists vs the sexual traditionalists, which rather ironically (at least I think most people would find it ironic if they knew) gets waged between MAPs. I would say it’s almost a more fundamental split than that between NOMAPs and whatever pro-contact MAPs are called.
So far, you haven’t given the slightest indication of even being able to tell the Left apart from those obsessing about identity politcs, defending the “rights” of the select few (e.g. feminists vs girls, LGBTs vs straights), and raving about the failure of the working class to be sufficiently PC and act against their interest.
The trouble is that the escalating pedo panic increasingly puts obstacles and suspicion in the way of even non-erotic contacts. This will only get worse until the attitudes about child sexuality start to shift back the other way.
There is great suspicion, wherever children are involved. And even murderers and rapists abhor minor attraction, so there is something deeply endemic to the contemporary moral conscience against attraction to kids.
And this is an ethical puzzle to me, because I am a good person, and yet even a murderer holds me in moral disdain. Is this attitude objectively justified? I reflect on it carefully, and conclude that it is not that fancying a child is morally improper, but that there is a mass neurosis in society about this issue, at this particular point in history. The myth of sacred innocence is a cultish religion, a totem pole around which many people like to dance. It is a primitive, deeply rooted, automatic response. But this has been historically conditioned, and was not true of all times and places.
The primitive part of the brain feels under attack at the sexuality of children; feels deeply insecure, exposed. And this response has driven modern law in parliaments and legislatures, since the nineteenth century. And we cannot realistically expect it to change anytime soon, even though society is thrusting in our faces the overt reality of the sexuality of kids. People say: “they have been unnaturally sexualised”, because that is their only defence against the overwhelming evidence. And yet, it is not an easy thing to uproot such a deeply conditioned response.
Some time ago, France seemed to oppose American puritanism. French films openly showed child sexuality and wasn’t afraid of naked and kiss scenes.
“Tom et Lola” (1990) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0098488
veeery strange film with fully naked kids.
“De wereld van Ludovic” (1993) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0134208
Popular french love story of boy and girl with kisses and nudity.
Le surdoué (1997) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0183841
love story of boy and girl with kisses and a little bit nudity.
Clément (2001) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0284970
simple love story of young teen boy and woman with passionate kisses and light nudity.
These links are all to IMDB, which has never been a legally controversial website to the best of my knowledge. Before deciding whether to see the films themselves, though, readers are advised to check whether they have been certified as legal to distribute/view in the jurisdiction where you live.
Please note that I am allowing this post through moderation as Leonerd has gone to the trouble of coming up with these links. It would be bad policy, though, to allow links of this kind to proliferate. I will not allow HTOC comments to become an exchange point for this type of information.
Dear Tom, I wouldn’t be upset if you deleted my post, if this is important for this blog. Even though these are ordinary films that just show French culture was quite tolerant and not so puritanical. Until recently, fragments of these films could be found on YouTube. Sorry.
That’s OK, Leonerd. Thanks for being reasonable. Also, you posted in the context of a legitimate discussion.
No religion is your friend. All of them have their taboos and their patriarchal control of sex. No, good sir, there is not a religion on the planet that is a friend to humanity.
Not every religion is as hostile towards adult/child relationships as the feminist faith, as evidenced by the lower AoCs and far greater tolerance found within Christianity and Islam. This remains true even under the fictional patriarchy, when compared to feminist laws.
The historical low AoCs found in the US (7,10 and 12) and Spain (12) shows a possibly conservative and traditionally religious society need not be hostile to adult/child relationships, whereas Sweden’s high (15) AoC and hunting of pedophile and/or straight men (like Assange) worldwide shows the result of decades of “progress” (including anti-pedophile indoctrination of children and the abolition of free speech).
If a multipolar world can rise, despite the efforts of Western elites to counter it at virtually any cost to their own populations, such “progress” may be contained to an increasingly degenerate and irrelevant West.
Bingo
Sometimes It seems to me Tucker’s systematic interest in MAP is something more personal.
Don’t show Mr. Tucker this old defiant аd. 🙂 https://youtu.be/YX33RTR6_Ec
Conservatives are perhaps a bit repressed, and this warps their psyches and gives them strange obsessions. I’m reminded of the old male neighbour in American Dream who hates gays and then tries to kiss Kevin Spacey.
Realizing that the forum capacity here is limited:
What would you all like to see? If you could have 3 specific things change (whether specific to your country or locale or more broadly)- what would those be? 3 policies and/or social norms.
Me, in relation to these sorts of things, I’d want the following changes:
Voting age to 14 is likely too low honestly, however I’d support a voting age of 16. I am in full agreement with you on the bodily autonomy and the comprehensive sex education. I’d also like to see the ridiculous “age of consent” laws repealed …. there is plenty of law covering rape, and sexual assault. A young person who is in control of their bodily autonomy can certainly file a complaint of rape or sexual assault when it is warranted, rather than the legal system taking that ability and choice away from the young person.
Repealing age of consent law: good, voting age to 14: too low? Feels rather contradictory to me. And not only contradictory but very askew in which is more serious in the “too low” department.
You would make minors legally sexually accessible to adults, but not allow them to have a say in society? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Seems almost self-serving to believe in one but not the other.
Even if the thought of (young) proles reproducing sickens you to the core, democracy is not a precondition for sexual reproduction – 7-year-old girls and men of the working class could legally have sex before they could vote!
What right to control the lives of such girls and men do you imagine yourself to have (absolute, as well as relative to the tolerant religions/societies you rail against)?
The voting age could go even lower than 14. In fact, does there really need to be a minimum age? I don’t think you’d find many toddlers queuing up to vote, if there wasn’t one. On the other hand, bodily autonomy probably does need a minimum age, as parents need to be able to make overriding decisions about the physical well-being of their very young children.
14 is just, as the previous comment demonstrates- a number that people wouldn’t be willing to go lower on in granting the right to vote.
I choose 14 based off three things: based on personal observation, and based on classical age categorization, and biology.
In my personal observation, 14/15 is about the time youth stop hanging around with the younger kids, and begin to seek out more adult or older adolescent company- they no longer find playing childhood games fun. I noticed this in my aunts and uncles as a child (they’d be less interested in me as a playmate about that age) and in myself (I found the same with my cousins) and I’ve noticed it with my siblings and other of my cousins as well- as well in neighbor kids and friends and friends of siblings. And it’s all unbidden by any overt social pressure or by any social mandate- it seems to happen naturally. A 13 year old would more likely prefer the company of an 11 year old to a 16 year old, where a 14 year old seems to prefer the company of an 18 year old to a 13 year old.
14 is part of the classical 7 year stage cycle found in so many ancient, particularly Indo-European civilizations and tribes, though it’s also not too different from other civilizations and tribes- where about 7 is considered to be age of reason- where a child is considered old enough to know right from wrong, understand the rules, and be able to receive a proper education (and in most society- a differentiated education- where boys and girls received different educations, where before they’d been grouped together), and about 14 the end of childhood and the beginning of the transition to adulthood, and where 21 is considered the age of full maturity and majority. Not hard and fast, but as a general guideline in classical societies.
And biologically- 14 is about the time they’re really getting into their adolescence, and even late bloomers are on their way. They’re becoming adults, and begin thinking about the world and their place in it more seriously- and I think should have a say in shaping that world, in a way that children aren’t really all that conscious or aware of. And they’re more likely to be thinking independently of their parents, in a way that children aren’t. Again, in my observation, people’s political consciousness has generally begun about that time, if they indeed go onto become politically active or opinionated.
I wouldn’t be opposed to letting children vote as well, just I think that if you go much lower it’s not an expression of the child’s will, but rather just giving parents an extra vote to throw around.
I agree that 14 is the optimal voting age. But in combination with optimal age of consent (12) and current criminal responsibility age (11 in USA), it’s a bit unbalanced.
The United States is a hodge podge of bad laws. But the entirety of our society is all wonky, as is everyone on earth. There is not a well-constituted society anywhere on this planet.
Exceptionally bright young children may well want to vote. The only question then is whether there are any dangers in letting them do so. One is the possibility you mentioned at the end of your response: that parents will persuade or cajole their children to vote a certain way, But having a secret ballot considerably mitigates this danger. That children may be influenced by their parents in casting their vote is certainly true. But is that necessarily a problem? Such influence is just a part of life in a democracy.
As I said, I’m not opposed to children being allowed to vote. I’d be willing to drop it to age 7- when they biologically can think concretely and exit the magical thinking stage. I just think it’d be enough of a hurdle getting people to lower the voting age at all- whether to 16, or 14, or anything under 18, really.
I would not be okay with dropping it below 7, on account of said magical thinking- which would be just giving parents an extra vote to throw around, regardless of how brilliant the child.
Observations may in fact vary, and greatly so. Myself being childless, I have a large friend circle in that nearly everyone but me is married, and have children, and / or nephews / nieces, and / or younger siblings, so I can notice and analyze behaviour of many children and adolescents.
And, based on my own observations, as well reports of observations of other people I know, I can say that you draw a line waaay too high: for modern kids, full-blown adolescent behaviour came much earlier – roughly at 12-13, if not earlier.
In my own case, my own childhood was fully over before I turned 13. And it was even relatively late, my friends grew up psychologically even faster than me, for them the turning point of “childhood’s end” came a pair of years earlier, about 11. Being compared to them, I was quite childish.
In seems, the pace of psychological development
a) very largely depends on a social environment,
and
b) generally tends to accelerate as history passes.
In the anarchic environment of the 1990s Russia, when kids were largely unsupervised and left to explore the life by their own (which they enthusiastically did), adolescence came very quickly, even somewhat quicker than it apparently does now.
But, it is hard to say, since children quickly learn to keep significant parts of their activity hidden from adults – especially the parts they know adults may disapprove of. So, maybe the development pace remains more-or-less as it was two decades ago.
And – such children’s tendency to hide potentially disapprovable-by-adults aspects of their lives from the elder members of their social circles lead the latter to perceive the kids as psychologically younger than they are. So, adults’ observation of children and adolescents tend to err on the side of infantilisation.
And, BTW, there is evidently no neat numerical “cycles” in development, this ages-old idea is just a persistent prejudice. Actual growing up is quite irregualr and knows no numerically harmonic rhythm, as well as vary significantly from individual to individual.
You make some good points here, Explorer, especially as regards “development”. The word suggests the inevitable, sequential playing out of a pre-ordained script in each growing individual. But research in recent years has been discovering that culture influences individual biology and behaviour throughout life, including childhood: social “learning” is expressed through altered body chemistry as well as mental attitudes.
Bodily autonomy is tricky. Because you have a discrepancy between human development, and human society.
I fall back on the 7 year cycle model because it has precedent and a good deal of observable biology behind it.
7 is when the brain has developed to where it can reason concretely, and exits the magical stage of thinking (hence the most common age to stop believing in Santa, with no one in particular telling you is about 7: This is the age that kids stop believing in Santa (todaysparent.com)) They possess the capacity to question what they’re told and make concrete observations about their world and experience, and have a clearer eye with which to see it, and are able to take in and account for the perspectives of others, where a year ago they can only see their own perspective, and don’t have the ability to realize that others may see something else.
And I think most people would agree that 7 (school age) is when the apron strings need to be loosened- and bodily autonomy respected. They’re past the stage where parents would even want to dress them, they’re potty trained, they’re not in the constant care and tending stage anymore.
So I would probably say 7 is when bodily autonomy needs to be formally granted in at least some measure, and before then, still totally under the say of the parent.
However, developmentally, the time when children actually deal with autonomy (vs. shame and doubt) is actually around 3-4. This is when children are wired to want to exert themselves, and make their own decisions- like what to wear, what to eat, and if people do not let them, they learn instead to become doubtful, hesitant, and ashamed of themselves and what they want. They learn they’re bad, at this age, for wanting to do something contrary to the will of mommy and daddy. Bad and wrong for putting their shoes on the wrong feet, or wanting to wear dresses, or nail polish, or whatever. And so, biologically- bodily autonomy actually kicks in sooner, however, the legal ramifications of that are not something people would be willing to hazard. They’d have a hard time enough hazarding any formal autonomy for 7 year olds, and 14 year olds, let alone 3 year olds.
Thank you Tom for all your work. Being arguably the most prominent representative of the MAP community, you have tackled the most taboo of all topics with aplomb, dignity and considerable intellect. I hope we’ll see a few blogs from you on a reasonably regular basis. I’ve not been posting much, but have always looked forward to your new publications, and the discussion it generates. Hoping you reach 100 not out.
Cheers, Ed. Lovely to hear these encouraging remarks from you. I do hope you are able to feel similar positivity about your own life now. All best!
I think I would be interested in contributing a few blogs, if I could figure out anything to say. I would probably have to make up a relatively anonymous email account to send it to you, to feel comfortable doing so (you may have noticed I’ve never put a proper email when making my comments).
I must say, my opinion of you as was greatly improved after reading an article in an old magazine I was able to find archived somewhere (I don’t remember if it was from a link in one of your blogs or if I’d found it searching elsewhere in the dusty corners of the internet), where a feminist talked about you and vouched for you, and what you were getting at- this was an article from the late 70s or early 80s. It was an article about childhood and adolescent sexual experiences that spoke very personally to me.
My opinion of you has also grown with engagement here. You do not strike me as some raving lunatic or monster, and while the current climate would never paint you as anything but, direct interaction shows very much the contrary. I’m surprised at how conservative you are in many respects, and find you quite sentimental (in a charming way). There is unfinished business in our society when it comes to MAPs and children and their sexuality. I don’t know where the road leads in the end, but the status quo isn’t working, and is plainly deficient, if not outright wrong.
It’s a shame that more people aren’t ready to have such frank discussions about these things, but it’s nice to know that blogs like yours exist, and that people like you have the courage (yes, I will say courage) to keep speaking despite the demonization you have faced for it, whether rightly or wrongly. I certainly could not handle that myself, or place my own reputation so publicly on the line like you have.
If you have any suggestions for essay topics or research to do and come back with a blog entry on, I would certainly be open to suggestions, and if I get around to it, I will certainly make the effort to submit something I think would be worthwhile.
Very pleased to hear that the longer you stay the more you like it, Perplexed, although I guess if the starting point was possibly a “raving lunatic or monster” the only way to go was up! 🙂
Definitely interested in blogs from you. Thanks!
“I must say, my opinion of you as was greatly improved after reading an article in an old magazine I was able to find archived somewhere (I don’t remember if it was from a link in one of your blogs or if I’d found it searching elsewhere in the dusty corners of the internet), where a feminist talked about you and vouched for you, and what you were getting at- this was an article from the late 70s or early 80s. It was an article about childhood and adolescent sexual experiences that spoke very personally to me.”
> Do you have any inkling as to who this feminist author might be? It could be Nettie Pollard, a pro-sex feminist who helped to create bidges between the gay left via the GLF (Gay Liberation Front) and other radical groups (in this case PIE). I can imagine she would have spoken up for the civil liberties of any minority group seeking social acceptance for non-harmful activity, including for Tom et al. to campaign and write books and articles.
“I think I would be interested in contributing a few blogs, if I could figure out anything to say. I would probably have to make up a relatively anonymous email account” […] “I’m surprised at how conservative you are in many respects”
> If you want to be really anonymous, use Tutanota over TOR. As anonymous as you could hope to get if you’re worried about your reputation when discussing sensitive issues. https://tutanota.com
> You could write about MAPs and feminism? I wonder if this post by Anon Lover would be thought provoking for you? “Why We Never Slipped Down The Slippery Slope: A Girl’s Love Perspective” <https://www.freespeechtube.org/v/181w>
You might consider contrasting Tom’s position of legalization via legal change in an existing state, to those who take an anarchist position (see for example Comrade Abigor https://www.freespeechtube.org/v/1703). In point of fact, if you’ve read Tom’s 1980 book you might recall he mentions intergen eroticism in communes, so Tom does acknowledge the existence of self-organized communities even if he does not advocate for them at the expense of country-wide legal change. (Rightly, in my view, as groups trying to set up their own communities tend to face massive opposition from police and other state operatives; the biggest problem of actually existing anarchism outlined even by advocates like Peter Gelderloos in his “Anarchy Works” book).
I found this example of Irish direct action very inspiring, and then shocked by the insanely overkill government reaction to it (see from 15:19 for gov response) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSL453gVHAg
Here’s some other ideas:
Hi Prue,
The links for the ‘slippery slope’ video and the video about Hikari appear to be broken.
I watched the one about Irish housing activism and found it very interesting. I wish, however, that groups like this wouldn’t couch their views in the language of ‘revolution’. It’s bad PR, as it gives the false impression that it’s all about violent change. I hope, for the same reason, that no-one is going to start calling for a ‘paedophile revolution’!
Stephen
> The links for the ‘slippery slope’ video and the video about Hikari appear to be broken.
Remove the “>” at the end of the link
Yes, that works, thank you.
I’ve given some suggestions but as Tom says below:
“So there is a big opportunity but there is no rush. I don’t want anyone to be writing just to fill a gap. I want blogs coming in from people who are bursting to say things that have not been said here before, or who are keen to bring new perspectives to core topics. I want everyone to bring their “A game”.”
It would be a while before I’d be able to throw together an adequately academic essay, that wasn’t just me going on a rant and purely editorial.
I can give some preliminary commentary on some of the suggestions, which could certainly be expanded for a full article:
Can silence be a winning strategy? Unless you expect the impending collapse of civilization- no. It cannot be. It’s going to take people speaking up and humanizing themselves- just as the LGBTQ+ movement did- that MAPs are family members, friends, neighbors, and even kids. To demand humane treatment if nothing further than that. The use of labels is only temporary. With the trend and trajectory society is on heteronormativity and the need for labels at all is going to disappear before the end of the century, save perhaps in regards to gender (that’s gonna be up in the air for at least a couple more decades I think, whether or not the baseline binary will hold or not). But the use of labels, while temporary in the long arc, will be necessary- being able to name and identify what you’re talking about is important to have conversations, especially when trying to change society.
I will no doubt write about feminism, queer theory, the LGBTQ+ movement, trans-youth, and economic leftism (for lack of a better term)- as they all interlink heavily with this arena- and are points of correspondence, rather than the opposition it can feel like, a felt opposition that has made many an alt-right MAP. But an alliance with the right in any form or fashion will be a dead end for MAPs in gaining human treatment, let alone bearing out any wishes for intergen relationships to be “acceptable”. The medievally based conservative of now over 200 years ago doesn’t exist, and wouldn’t be an ally in today’s context either on account of Christianity’s innate hostility toward the sexual human, regardless of orientation. Living in centuries and millennia past is not a pathway forward. Pleading medieval ages of consent, child marriages, and ancient civilizations’ pederasty (Greece, Rome, Gaul, Persia, etc.) is not going to go anywhere. It’s too far distant, and unrelated to the present context in which we live. Ancients would find our context as unintelligible as people now would find medieval and ancient contexts and thinking.
I will absolutely write about youth liberation. There is no question in my mind that youth and children are oppressed and treated like property, regardless of what one thinks about MAPs.
And consent is a woefully inadequate social and legal framework to engage with alone and simply leave it there, and many in queer and feminist circles people are coming to realize this. Consent is not enough, consent is too convoluted I would say, and consent is too relegated to the realm of adults- and is applied to children hazardously. It’s too binary of a concept. It has to be engaged with, but the conversation has to broaden beyond it. And it touches not just sex, but all aspects of life- school, medicine, work, money, recreation, and more. Consent is not the be all end all it’s been made out to be, there is a wider range of experiences and nuance than current ideas about consent, and the legal heritage of consent, can account for. Which also lays bare the inadequacy of relying on law, legislation, and codified rules to govern us more generally.
And I do not know whose article it was, or who it was that was talking. I’d have to scrounge around the internet to find it again.
Tom, I’m sad to hear that you’re winding down your activity on this blog, but it’s completely understandable. You’re a credit to the MAP community: kind, intelligent and undoubtedly more ethical than your detractors. If you ever want me to write another guest blog, I would be delighted to do so.
Thanks, ZT. You have contributed a great deal here, so you opinion means a lot to me.
>If you ever want me to write another guest blog, I would be delighted to do so.
Well, I have already made the call for more guest blogging, so I will now add “and that includes from ZT”, just in case you thought the message was intended for everyone but you! 🙂
So there is a big opportunity but there is no rush. I don’t want anyone to be writing just to fill a gap. I want blogs coming in from people who are bursting to say things that have not been said here before, or who are keen to bring new perspectives to core topics. I want everyone to bring their “A game”.
“So there is a big opportunity but there is no rush. I don’t want anyone to be writing just to fill a gap. I want blogs coming in from people who are bursting to say things that have not been said here before, or who are keen to bring new perspectives to core topics. I want everyone to bring their “A game”.
> Beautiful sentiment.
Thanks for all your great ideas, Prue!
Hi Tom, congratulations on your 10 year anniversary. Although I have only known you in person since 2016 it was you who was there at a difficult time in my life which I think deserves a pint of real ale when next we meet.
On another note, did you see the dailymail regarding a sex accuser changing her story ? link below
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11358525/Italian-model-Harvey-Weinsteins-LA-rape-trial-accused-changing-story.html
see you in a couple weeks
David
Cheers, David!
>…which I think deserves a pint of real ale when next we meet.
You’re a generous guy, David, so I reckon I can twist your arm for more than just the one pint! 🙂
>…did you see the dailymail regarding a sex accuser changing her story?
She’s probably lying, but what about the weird defence story? She could not have put his testicles in her mouth, as claimed, because “Weinstein’s testicles had been surgically relocated to his thighs”.
What utter bollocks! Surely nobody could possibly believe such a far-fetched cock and balls story!
But, hey, it looks like I’m wrong on that. According to the NHS website, this relocation procedure is a routine way to treat boys with undescended testicles. It is even officially considered a “simple” operation. See here:
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/undescended-testicles/treatment
Happy Anniversary Tom!
Glad to see that you’re still kicking!
Cheers, Baldur! Good to hear from such a respected voice in our wider community.
“…how this marvellous resource of MAP-related information got its name.”
The original owner of Newgon was, like me, a blogspot blogger. Their blog was named “Game On”. When the 2006 MAP blog purge happened, he [Jim] invited a number of us banished to unite and join him. His new website/blog was ‘New Game On”. It quickly got shortened to Newgon [New-G-On], presumably for brevity.
Thank you for all you have done, Tom. You are truly loved, by those who know and genuinely understand you.
Thank you so much, Steve. I salute you as a long-running contributor to our community.
Excuse me, indeed, if I lift from your website, Our Love Frontier, the sad news that Aaron Carter has died at the age of 34. It looks like the classic tragedy of child star hits drugs. But, reading between the lines of early reports, there could be much more to it than that. If anyone has the time to check out all the tributes and read a book about Aaron that was already in preparation and is due out in a few days from now, a guest blog on their findings would be appreciated. Aaron’s brother Nick will need to feature strongly, and what Aaron says about his relationship with Michael Jackson will obviously be of interest.
The book is:
(My Father’s Son): Aaron Carter: An Incomplete Story Of An Incomplete Life by Andy Symonds. Ballast. 15 Nov 2022.
Also, thanks, Steve, for your interesting Newgon origin account.
Earlier, I wrote:
>If anyone has the time to check out all the tributes and read a book about Aaron that was already in preparation and is due out in a few days from now, a guest blog on their findings would be appreciated.
Actually, there is bound to be plenty of media coverage reviewing this book, and we may be sure it will focus on any revelations about his private life, which is what I guess will most interest heretics here. So there is no need to read the book unless you’re a fan who can’t wait for detailed stuff on Aaron’s music, etc., including, I would think, a sorry saga about drugs, rehab, and so on.
“Also, thanks, Steve, for your interesting Newgon origin account.”
Certainly! 🙂
Re: Aaron: I was a bit late to it, myself. Very sad, yes. You are welcome to lift anything off of my blog, which you find of interest or useful, Tom…and that goes for anyone who shares my general ethics on MAPs in society.
Interestingly, Aaron came out as bisexual [I believe, as opposed to simply gay] a few years back. Fertile ground for contemplation.
>You are welcome to lift anything off of my blog
Thanks, Steve. And you from mine.
That is essentially accurate, but the concept was very much Daniel’s (the initial blogger, now largely inactive) and Jillium (a north-American activist who is currently absent), who footed most of the administrative burden back then. I (Jim) was not publicly named and offered some hosting and financial support (occasionally content) once we found someone who would keep it online. I advised on the Wikipedia campaign, which was the major outgoing initiative of activists affiliated with the Newgon private forum (now archived for viewing by trusted individuals).
When admins left for varying reasons, I kept the site online for a few years and arranged for private archiving after the host terminated us.
At that point, a prominent BL (who rarely conducts public-facing work) stepped in and hosted a public archive in 2014 at newgon.net.
In 2021, I verified myself to this BL and took over some of the content/organizational side, also buying Yesmap.net and another domain to expand with new ventures. We spoke at some point then, as I believe you were also helping in some way you may or may not wish to discuss here.
See: https://www.newgon.net/wiki/Newgon
And if things can’t get any more confusing, just this year, the Web Archive delisted Newgon.com.
Thank you, Strat!
I’m aging and my memory is getting fuzzy on the details.
You are right, it was Daniel in the very beginning.
“We spoke at some point then, as I believe you were also helping in some way you may or may not wish to discuss here.”
I created and owned the Newgon.net domain name. My actual hands on association with Newgon ended shortly after the discussion boards were shut down. The Newgon.com domain expired, and some other business entity snatched it up. The original owner was missing, and hence did not renew. Newgon was literally in an archived state, during my latter association with it.
Newgon is much to valuable, for it not to be easily accessible.
Curiously, the actual host told me at the time, they considered me to be the owner of the Newgon website, because I was the only person putting anything [money] into it…I was really just a torch barer, though.
Re: Web Archive
Yeah…They’re not so great. 🙁
I usually stay quiet about archived MAP websites on their server, at least until I can grab a copy for personal archival [which I don’t do that much, these days].
I have a little bit of personal history, being targeted at Archive.org, after publishing a few things there. They’re as bad as anybody gets.
Dear Tom. I join in the congratulations. This blog is a great place ever.
It’s so sad that such brave and cheeky people as William Percy leaves us. But I’m sure there will be new figures who will continue enlightenment activity despite political obstacles.
Happy anniversary, Tom! These were interesting years, for sure.
Unfortunately, I was largely inactive lately, here as well as elsewhere on the Web. Maybe that’s because I feel too emotionally exhausted and intellectually withered due to all the repression that I, along with the rest of the world, had to endure since the bleak spring of 2020, with the further increase of ugliness since the gloomy winter of 2022, when the rulers of my country dragged it into a bloody debacle that no one knows how to escape now… Maybe it is also due to my work and private life – nowadays, I sadly have notably less time and energy for writing than I had just some years ago.
Well, the comment section is active still, one way or another, with or without me. Maybe it was even somewhat… quieter in my absence. Understandable: being informed about, and interested in, the widest (and wildest) possible range of controversies scientific, philosophical, social and political, and unwilling to keep my mouth shut in order neither to upset nor to enrage anyone, I have a tendency to cause emotional overdoses in some readers of my comments, no matter what online platform I choose for my writings… Even if I never intend to offend anyone at all, just sharing controversial knowledge and my positions regarding it, with the ones are willing to study them. Here as well as everywhere else, I unintentionally enraged and upsetted quite a few people – the author of the blog included – with my fully well-intentioned knowledge-and-worldview-sharing attempts.
But, Tom, you were, overall, a comparatively more controversy-welcoming host than many others – my gratitude to you for that. Even if sometimes even you dissatisfied me a bit with some slight shades of censoriousness left even in your, remarkably open, wide and deep mind (concerning, say, one controversial recent illness and even more controversial measures supposedly initiated to fight it)… but, well, no one is perfect, including myself. Such openness to challenge and debate, furthermore combined with a width of intellectual outreach and a depth of comprehension, is hardly seen in our Era of Righteous Outrage!
Maybe this is because your most formative years, as well as mine, were the rare periods of freedom among the predominantly repressive history of the human society: the rebellious West of 1960s – 1970s in your case, the anarchic Russia of 1990s in mine… But, even many people who also lived their youth in such liberated times, turned their back on freedom as soon as it went out of fashion – but we two didn’t, did we? Such are our Wills and our Spirits, I suppose.
So, once again, Tom – thanks for all that was, and looking forward to all that will be.
And let what will be, to be as we will it to be!
Thanks, Explorer, you are always welcome here.
>I unintentionally enraged and upsetted quite a few people – the author of the blog included
I can’t remember the details, but I think “exasperated” would be closer to the mark than “enraged” or “upset”. I don’t think it was ever about censoring opinion on Covid or anything else. I think it was more about repetition and staying reasonably on topic for this forum. It’s good to stray off-topic occasionally into broader philosophical and political concerns when these arise naturally out of on-topic issues (MAP concerns, child sexuality, children’s rights and place in society), but also good to maintain the overall focus of the blog.
Congratulations on this anniversary! In many fields, from scientific research to political activism, an important responsibility of leaders is to prepare the new generation that will replace the older one when it dies or fades away.
Thanks, Christian. Particularly good to have congratulations from you, as you are one of the longest-standing followers of Heretic TOC, and also an active contributor to the MAP community in your own right.
I have been invited to make a substantial contribution to a book in the field of ethics
I’m intrigued. Can you tell us more?
>I’m intrigued. Can you tell us more?
Best kept under wraps at this stage to avoid the sort of pre-publication hassles I had with my Jackson book. But thanks for your interest.
>so no more comment threads getting ever narrower with each new comment! Remember that?
LOL! Yes I remember that!!
>One specific offsite project I have in mind is bring out a paperback book next year featuring maybe 20-30 of what I feel are the best blogs of the last ten years
Definitely would be interested in buying a book like that.
Congratulations on your invitation!
Rest in power William A. Percy. I did not know him personally but I enjoyed reading his website and have a personal offline copy of it.
I hope that Norbert will stay as safe as he possibly can in prison.
And Newgon is a pretty cool baby name.
Thanks, Tom, for mentioning NewgonWiki. I will tend to give editorial membership out based on references, or just watching somebody I know in chat. That can be from this blog, or anywhere – I just need to be confident about that person, and of course there are non-admin accounts available to start with.
The future likelihood of this blog eventually moving to a team format, was something I was imagining the other day, as many people have approached me asking for a WordPress installation, but none have been willing to maintain and moderate it. Hopefully, you can put together an editorial team who also have moderator control over the comments, and the higher frequency of posting will keep those conversations flowing. Running blogs off a team is actually something MAPs did occasionally towards the end of the 00s, including the predecessor to Newgon.net. The originator of Newgon.net, I believe, had two personal blogs named and operated on a game on/game off basis, i.e. constructive arguments vs answers to trolls and antis. Thus, when Google destroyed his archives, he was looking for a short domain name, and Newgon.com was available, which then evolved to Newgon.net when it entered a phase of archiving.
By the way – the offer is always open from me to help moderate the comments (unfortunately, not in line with any regular schedule). Should your ability to keep this site running in any way be impeded, I will be happy to host it and keep it running with the same team, editorial controls, for as long as there are people behind it. Or otherwise maintain the archive and new comments if it cannot sustain itself.
Some very interesting thoughts here, Strat, and what a great offer you have made. That is highly reassuring and encouraging! I’ll bear all this in mind as we see how things develop in the coming months.
Congradulations, Tom. As a last hope for MAPs, you should not fade away. Be healthy and productive, thank you for your activity, wish you good luck with your book and the other your projects.
Thanks, Cyril. You have made your own very big contributions to the cause, and I hope you stay busy as well! 🙂