The big story this time was supposed to have been Bruce Rind’s latest, a fantastic paper that came out a couple of months ago, based on German survey data. It is worth making a song and dance about, with a proper analysis and discussion of its contents.
But that will have to wait until another time. There is no urgency compared to a whole bunch of other stuff that needs a more immediate airing, some of which can be dealt with more briefly. I’ll be highlighting my own news in a moment but decency demands prior mention of the continuing plight in Ecuador of Dutch former MAP activist Marthijn Uittenbogaard and his partner Lesley. As I reported briefly in June in the Comment space, linking to a Dutch newspaper report, the pair have been given 10-year prison terms based on convictions there is good reason to believe are based on false testimony. There is little new to say at the moment except that an appeal is said to be underway, and that Newgon’s page on Marthijn is worth following as updates will likely appear there first.
So, what’s my exciting news then? I have been CANCELLED.
Yes, yes, I know. No big deal bearing in mind that MAPs are being wiped out on a daily basis from social media. But say the Pope invites you to a personal audience. You’re a good Catholic. You’re thrilled. It’s a huge honour. You rock up at the Vatican in your smart new Pope-meeting schmutter, glowing with pride as liveried flunkies usher you into His Holiness’ presence. But instead of being greeted warmly with a blessing, all you get is a blunt rebuff: “You, you ingleesha cunt, you’re fucking EX-a-COMMUNICATED as of righta NOW! So fucka you off, maximo pronto!”
The equivalent, for me, of the Pope on this occasion was a newish academic publishing house of growing repute (having published the work of several Nobel prize winners) who had accepted a chapter of mine back in February for inclusion in a forthcoming book, Ethics in Scientific Research: New Perspectives, being edited by a professor at the University of Belgrade. Publication as a hardback, at £79, was scheduled for late July. I felt this was a major triumph. I do not recall any other case in which an easily identifiable MAP such as myself, who favours sexual self-determination for children and writes under their own name, has been given a prestigious and highly visible platform on which to speak on an equal footing with career scientists.
My chapter was duly published online in March, ahead of the print edition. The title speaks for itself: “Where Angels Fear to Tread: Anxieties over Researching Child Sexuality Must Be Overcome”. I had submitted it at the invitation of the publishers, who cited my earlier paper, “Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal: Virtue Ethics and Child–Adult Sex”, as the reason for their interest. This paper, which appeared in 2018 in Sexuality & Culture, has been accessed 56k times – massive for an academic article.
The book’s editor, Miroslav Radenkovic, is a professor of pharmacology and bioethics expert at the University of Belgrade. After reading the submitted chapter, he “wholeheartedly” endorsed my approach, saying I had conducted a “very well prepared and executed analysis”. The chapter proposes ethical grounds for researching child sexuality more extensively and in new ways: instead of research targeted, as in the past, at identifying and eliminating “abnormal” child behaviour, I propose a new paradigm aimed at a more positive and inclusive approach to sexual health – one which would allow for a diversity of sexual and gender expression and (reading between the lines) would not rule out minors’ active interest in older partners.
So far so good. And my newly minted Open Access online chapter began to attract significant interest. The numbers are quite small as yet, but known readers include important figures in the field, including Jenny Walsh, a leading light of sexuality education in Australia, and Steven Angelides, author of The Fear of Child Sexuality. There has also been enthusiastic feedback from people I know personally in academic circles.

So, with all this positivity around, what could possibly go wrong? Bizarrely, I still do not know for sure, because publishers IntechOpen have refused to specify any particular grounds for withdrawing the chapter, a cancellation they announced in the middle of last month. They just left a notice on the chapter’s webpage. As well as announcing the retraction, this notice gives a link to the company’s general policy page on retractions and corrections, where all sorts of possible reasons for withdrawal are listed, such as fraud, plagiarism, etc., plus a catch-all clause covering any practice or act “considered potentially harmful to the scientific community”.
But we do not have to look far to see what probably kicked it all off. The very day before the Intech take-down, there was a pile-on against me on Sexnet. As many here will already be aware, this is primarily an expert forum for psychologists, endocrinologists, neuro-scientists, etc., in which most of the invitation-only subscribers are researchers and clinicians, although there has always been a smattering of odd bods – including “specimens” of sexual minorities, such as me, and a few journalists with a specialist interest. The pile-on was dominated not by researchers but by newer feminist members known more for their writing in papers such as the New York Times and the Guardian. They would dearly love to see me kicked off the forum, but support from the moderator, psychologist Prof. Mike Bailey, was very robust. So it seems they went for a softer target: IntechOpen.
Reassuringly, one professor emailed me privately saying “I am sure that the retraction has nothing to do with the quality or ethics of the article itself, but is merely based on some victimological activists contacting them to protest publishing anything written by you. The argument would be that no paedophile can be objective about child sexuality. By the same infernal logic, no victim of CSA can be objective about it, no woman can be objective about women’s issues, no black can be objective about black studies, no gay person can be objective about gay studies, etc.”
Quite. But never mind, there is a silver lining. The paper remains available for free download from ResearchGate, where online readings and downloads are now ticking up nicely. Interest, it seems, has been boosted not diminished by IntechOpen’s precipitate cancellation. In fact there has also been an upturn of interest in my “back catalogue” of academic articles listed at the site, and I am pleased to say I have other new ones in the pipeline.
On a lighter note, my Sexnet battle with the “feminazis”, reminds me that back in June I was approached by Róisín Michaux, a thuggish TERF who writes for a despicable smear sheet called Reduxx. She said she was thinking about starting a podcast and wanted to record a conversation with me on sex education, specifically as regards “the gender identity stuff”, which she felt was “was worrying for parents”.
Why me? Presumably because in an earlier email exchange with her there had been some common ground between us. Like her, and other TERFs, I do feel strongly that the more militant trans activists take their claims to “equality” too far, notably as regards their insistence that big, hairy, muscular “women” with penises should be allowed to compete in women’s athletics. This sort of “equal” rights creates anything but a level playing field. So Michaux was no doubt hoping she could get evidence that even paedos activists are anti-trans (which I am not).
Inspired by the impending Musk-Zuckerberg showdown, I replied saying I had a better idea than a podcast. How about a cage fight instead? I wrote: “As a young, fit, butch dyke (tell me you aren’t!) you’d have no trouble quickly destroying an old-timer like me and it would be far less painful than a conversation with you.”
“Seriously, though,” I added, “the idea of doing a recorded convo for a podcast or whatever is not hugely attractive bearing in mind you must be seeing my role as that of useful idiot. If you want to trying selling it to me somehow by all means give it a go, but it’s not as though I am short of things to do and my energy levels are not what they were.”
She did not “give it a go”. Nor did she reply in any way. No sense of humour, evidently. These attack bitches can dish it out but they can’t take it, can they?
LET’S MARCH TO THE 8 MARCH TUNE
Children do consent to sex, in fact, if not in law. You know that. It’s hardly news.
What is news, though, is that the United Nations has woken up to this simple truth in ways that have palpably begun to alarm conservatives this year and should bring cheer to our hearts – as well as renewed determination among us to assert the human rights principle that lies behind the great awakening in question.
Have you heard of “The 8 March Principles”?
This is a ground-breaking human rights approach to criminal law, the fruit of lengthy deliberations by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), put out in a document earlier this year on, you guessed it, 8 March. It is high-powered stuff, developed through a five-year consultative process involving the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) along with numerous relevant NGOs and legal experts.
Best of all is Principle 16. This is the one that has frightened the horses. Donald Trump’s Republican rival Senator Marco Rubio was quick to put out a statement that began by saying the UN had “sponsored a report that asserted underage minors can consent to sex with adults”. He reported that he had fired off a letter to the US ambassador to the UN demanding to know “whether the Biden Administration was aware of the report prior to its publication and expressing opposition to providing UN contributions to any initiatives that promote underage sex”.
Was Rubio exaggerating? Judge for yourself. Headed “Consensual sexual conduct”, here is Principle 16 in full:
Consensual sexual conduct, irrespective of the type of sexual activity, the sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression of the people involved or their marital status, may not be criminalized in any circumstances. Consensual same-sex, as well as consensual different-sex sexual relations, or consensual sexual relations with or between trans, non-binary and other gender-diverse people, or outside marriage – whether pre-marital or extramarital – may, therefore, never be criminalized.
With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage.
Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them. Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.
Consensual sex, we read, may not be criminalized in any circumstances. If they had meant to exclude children below any particular ages of consent they would have said so. Abolition of age of consent laws is not proposed but it is asserted that, despite what these laws stipulate, law enforcement should “reflect the rights and capacity” of minors “to make decisions about engaging in consensual conduct”. They do not say only if the conduct is solitary masturbation of oneself, or sex with another minor. There are no such caveats. There is nothing to invalidate a child’s decision to have sex with a consenting adult. And there is no specification that the child would lack the necessary “capacity” unless they had reached a certain age. Thus, much would depend on how “capacity” is interpreted, but I see nothing here to suggest that Rubio is fundamentally wrong.
Some MAP activists have already started running with this, and I hope there will be many more. Prominent among those taking up the challenge has been a new star (new to me at least) on the pro-MAP scene, Master Seaman Jessica Silva of the Royal Canadian Navy.
In connection with June’s Pride festivities, she reportedly commented on her social media page: “Pride is for everyone and every sexuality is valid and every experience is valid. MAP rights are human rights and MAP is a legitimate part of the queer community and culture.” When challenged with the view that children cannot consent, she shot back smartly by citing the 8 March Principles.
Jessica, I am sure I speak for all at HTOC in saying, “We salute you!”
And a notable contribution has reached me from activist Steve Carson, who describes himself as a MAP and an advocate for a more rational understanding of human sexuality. He has written a rather good essay on consent. It does not mention the 8 March Principles but could easily have been inspired by them, as it puts kids’ de facto ability to consent at the front and centre of his clearly presented argument. Encouraging signs!
WILL THERAPY SET YOU FREE?
As close followers of the Comments space will recollect, Heretic TOC has been approached by a team of researchers in Germany who are seeking participants for a MAP-focused online questionnaire they have put out.
Briefly, the questionnaire is for MAPs who have undergone “any kind of treatment or therapy” in connection with their sexual orientation and have dropped out of doing so for some reason. The stated aim is to explore why they have dropped out, in order to “identify approaches to tailor treatment services more closely to the needs of MAPs”. The researchers emphasise that “It is explicitly not our position that all MAPs need therapy or require treatment”.
Along with a link to the survey itself, the researchers furnished me with an introductory Letter to Participants and a more detailed formal statement, Rationale for the Proposed Study. I read these items and completed the survey myself, in order to get a full appreciation of the questions asked, and the experience of answering them. I published the relevant links and invited readers’ feedback, without making any recommendations as to whether I felt participation was a good idea or not.
Feedback was duly received. In my view, readers made a number of good points, with some support for the survey but also a lot of scepticism as to the value of therapy for MAPs even in any “improved” therapy style that research might lead to. My own feeling is broadly that it is hard to see therapy being of benefit to radical, self-confident MAPs who know how to stay out of trouble. But we are not all like that. Others may take a completely different view, and for their benefit I have decided to take this matter “above the line” i.e. to publicise the research in the main blog space rather than just the Comments.
All you need to do to take part in the survey is to go to the survey link. This starts with all the participation information you need, which may help you decide whether you want to take part.
The four-strong team of researchers are led by Dr Stephan Mühlig, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the University of Technology, Chemnitz.

It is perhaps worth adding that as part of my short email correspondence with team member Alina Göpel, I gave her a link to a paper of mine published years ago by ATSA, on the very subject the survey is investigating. Titled “What to do with the entrenched client: A paedophilic entrenched client’s view”, it details my own feelings about unsuccessful therapy undertaken while I was on a period of post-release licence after serving a prison sentence. The paper appeared in ATSA Forum and the full text is here.
Ms Göpel, a Master’s student, replied that she was “very interested” in reading about my experience. She said she had done an internship in a German prison. She had not observed such negative reactions as I reported, but she said, “I can understand your unhappiness regarding the attitude with which you were treated”. She also added, “Also in German programs, we have been confronted with a number of critical arguments regarding their form of treatment and about the intentions behind such programs.”
“We found your insights to be very educative,” she said, but she hoped I would “understand the point where we’re coming from as well”.
I hope I do understand where they are coming from; but it is where they are going to that is of more concern. I don’t mean this research team, who are simply fact finding. Rather, our concern should be over where therapy itself is heading. As will be widely understood here, treatment programs, especially those in forensic settings, tend to be grounded in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and run in an inflexible, authoritarian, “by the book” style. It is interesting to note that even in relatively benign settings aimed at addressing non-sexual problems, the downside of CBT appears at last to be coming into focus in public discourse. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but a recent piece in UnHerd (a lively place for spotting signs of the times) may be indicative. Titled “Why CBT won’t set you free: Therapy isn’t making us any happier”, it is by Nina Lyon, who writes on psychology and philosophy. Recommended.
WHEN IS A CHILD RAPIST NOT A CHILD RAPIST?
When he’s a drag artist protected by the warm embrace of the LGBT community it seems, aided and abetted by gay-friendly media, police forces keen to promote a pro-diversity image, nightclub owners unwilling to let go of a popular act, and event-space managers such as the prestigious Tate Britain, hosting Drag Queen Story Hour for nursery age kids.
Staggeringly, a man has just been convicted of a public order offence, described by a judge as “hate speech”, for protesting outside a Story Hour performance room at the Tate – not just against the performance itself but more significantly against the drag performer’s earlier support for another drag queen who had a conviction for child rape. The media and judicial sympathy in this case seemed to be not just for drag queens in general (OK, that’s great) but also for something far more dubious: they appeared to be hell-bent on silencing a protestor who, whatever we may think of him, was actually telling the truth about a matter of legitimate public interest.
Admittedly, one has to suspect that the “rape” may not have been a real one, but a consensual affair that could plausibly be seen as a gay relationship between roughly “equal” partners, given that the “rapist” and the “victim” had both been teenagers at the time, the younger of the two having been 14. Piecing things together from an old news report, it looks as though the older boy (Darren Sewell, who later changed his name to Darren Moore) could have been as young as 17, hence a minor himself. There had been four counts of “rape”, from which we can infer that this had not been a single violent assault, but more likely an ongoing relationship.

However, these mitigating circumstances are largely conjectural (I have been unable to find a report of the original rape case online) and would not have been known to most of the people who were so keen to deny the protestor’s freedom of speech. Instead, they were prepared to sweep under the carpet what might truly have been a horrible crime simply because it is unfashionable to hold trans people to account for their behaviour, no matter how bad that behaviour might have been.
That, in my old-fashioned view is wrong. Truth, and the freedom to express inconvenient truths, should trump the grubby expediency of identity politics any day, even when it favours MAPs. But I was never any good at politics, so I guess I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Anyway, that’s the downside, but it must be admitted that this single case provides compelling evidence for the extraordinary power of intersectional solidarity between a wide range of sexual minorities if they can plausibly present themselves as on the right side of the gender revolution. Some of us have taken it for granted that a “P” will never be added as a new ingredient to the LGBT+ alphabet soup, but this rallying of support for a “child rapist” reminds us that we can never say never with certainty.
The Tate Britain case is just the latest development in a more complex story with a very tragic side (the “child rapist” was murdered earlier this year, in an all too real “hate” crime) that need not be foregrounded here. However, the backstory shows in spectacular fashion just how improbably popular Darren Moore had become as drag artist Crystal Couture, despite his youthful labelling as a “nonce” offender. See, for instance, news stories: here and here. Also, The Spectator carried a comment piece along somewhat similar lines to my own, albeit from a more conservative position.
COMPLAINANT COULDN’T BEAR BARE BEAR
I see that star BBC presenter Stephen Nolan is in hot water. The Irish News reported this week that Nolan sent unsolicited sexual images of a potential guest to staff on his radio and television shows some years ago. According to a follow-up in The Guardian:
The guest was Stephen Bear, a Celebrity Big Brother winner wanted by Nolan for his TV show. “I want Bear!” Nolan wrote in one message, saying in another: “If I don’t get Bear tomorrow night, I’m sending more Bear photos.”
One recipient of the images, which showed Bear’s penis, said they were “beyond the pale” in an internal complaint to the BBC, according to the Irish News.
The Guardian solemnly adds that Nolan succeeded in landing Bear for his show in 2016, during which both men stripped to their underwear for “a segment on modelling”.

Whatever the excuse, the show must have been hilarious. See photo. Nolan is clearly “a bit of a lad”. With a body like his you need guts in every sense to run such an item, and indeed to risk the ire of humour-challenged colleagues and our equally po-faced modern media by sending the dick pick, even in the year just before #MeToo.
I always thought he was one of the BBC’s bravest. I don’t watch his shows but I know he was brave enough to invite me as a guest on his TV show some years ago. Talks with his researchers had gone well over the course of several weeks only for the item to be knocked on the head. The BBC’s top brass, I learned, had told Nolan they would not let him do it: too controversial. They felt the corporation should not give the MAP cause “the oxygen of publicity”.
DID HE JUMP OR WAS HE PUSHED?
Some heretics will have seen a post by “Scotusbaby” on Boychat reporting that Jacob Breslow has quit his job as an academic at the London School of Economics (LSE). Dr Breslow himself put out a press statement. I would just remind everyone of the Heretic TOC blog last year in which significant background to this latest development was given an airing.
Breslow said that he left because of harassment, which he understands to be “to be part of a broader movement against the field of gender studies, and against trans rights and dignity”.
Did he jump, or was he pushed officially? His statement mentions “LSE’s independent investigation exonerating me”. It is possible that despite this exoneration he was pushed gently; or, rather, encouraged to jump with the help of an undisclosed financial incentive to do so. It would be odd to abandon an attractive academic position, now styling himself an “Independent Scholar and Researcher”, without having won any means to support himself in such a career.
There was a follow-up report earlier this month in Times Higher Education. The article does not speculate or show sign of inquiry into any official pressure, but does give the following as context:
Dr Breslow has been on leave after his involvement with Mermaids, a transgender youth support charity, was highlighted by The Times in October, which also found he had attended a symposium organised by B4U-ACT, which promotes services and resources “for self-identified individuals…who are sexually attracted to children and desire such assistance”, according to its website.
Wanted to spotlight something I came across that I am so, so proud of, and hope you’ll all take a look over:
Newgon videos! Yes, you heard that right! I do not yet know who’s making them, but there’s a youtube channel and FST channel where you can find informative, concise videos which condense down the info from various Newgon pages into digestible form. Using the voice of David Attenborough and others, I think it’s great to see these brilliant attempts at alternative media content.
I particularly recommend the two personal profiles, both of which are based on pages made by me. Check out:
[I got emotional watching this one; I was so, so proud to see the research I did being summarized and making it into a video. Esp. considering this article contains independent research / connections made by myself, not just copy-pasting from Wikipedia etc.]
Definitely worth a look and hope you’ll find one you like 🙂
Just seen the Gill vid. Cool! 🙂 And largely down to you, Prue! Great stuff!
One argument often given in defense of age of consent laws is that they (supposedly) reduce the rates of teenage pregnancy, which is assumed to have negative/harmful effects.
A 2023 study published in the Demography journal failed to find evidence of a causal link between teen pregnancy and psychological problems in adulthood, concluding that “it seems increasingly likely that causal effects of young motherhood are small or nonexistent, or in some cases confined to relatively advantaged segments of the population who are unlikely to experience young motherhood in any case.” A professor of demographics commented thusly on the study:
There are numerous papers that found that children born to teenage mothers are more likely to have behavioral problems and lower intelligence. This recent study tested the causality of this finding by using polygenic scores (PGS) to control for the confounding effects of parental intelligence. After controlling for this confound, children born to teenage mothers were found to have higher IQ scores on average than children born to older mothers.
Here is a comment on this study by a statistician with a large following on Twitter:
Fascinating, but the Dropbox link is obscured by an overlay. From the bits that are visible, it looks as though this is the study referred to:
Estimating the parental age effect on intelligence with controlling for confounding effects from genotypic differences (2023)
Mingrui Wang
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112137
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886923000600
Oops, my bad! Overlay can be removed with a click. Must have been confused by the preview image file.
11 year old in Ohio could face prosecution after being dolicited for nude pics by guy in 30s…
glad they got their priorities right? psychopaths,, am i ok to share link? so you can read this horror story (of which is happening all over the land of the jail)
>11 year old in Ohio could face prosecution
Link to the story?
Video shows officer repeatedly discussed charging 11-year-old victim with child sexual abuse offense | AP News
There are laws in most states now that address this issue. Ohio seems to be late to the party.
>There are laws in most states now that address this issue.
You mean laws that prevent children being charged?
Anyway, thanks for posting link to this important story. While I’m at it, are you working on a guest blog or have you decided the format is not for you?
Yes, laws that prevent children from being charged.
I’m not working on anything at present, but I certainly want to. I’m just waiting for something to strike me. I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete yet. I want to have something done at some point before the end of the year.
>I want to have something done at some point before the end of the year.
It sounds as though you are giving a lot of thought to it rather than just dashing off the first thing that comes to mind. Good. Don’t overdo it, though, to the extent of preparing far more info and thoughts than you can use. Keep your eye on a 2,000-word target, not 3,000 or book length.
One possible topic might be to expand your comment of 30 Aug in reply to Strat, the one beginning “Sounds like nothing went wrong, other than the usual conservative bitching and bigotry.”
As a short, trenchant contribution, this was superb, which is why it comes to mind. I fundamentally disagree with you but didn’t have time to respond at the time. Could you, perhaps, change my mind by making your case persuasively, rather than assertively, given the opportunity to set out your rationale in depth in your own blog?
interesting that they deem the girl capable of producing it… but apparently its illegal as they are innocent? such hypocrisy and madness , but then usa is a bit of a country of lunatics…. am i allowed to say that? bit similar to the
protection
given to 17 year olds here by not letting them drink .. but will punish them for attempting to buy it? people have no right sayign any one on here abuses children when they make laws like this….Religion is one hell of a drug. People still believe in deterrence theory. People love the police. People love punishment and suffering. The United States, like all Anglospheric countries, is fundamentally conservative and puritanical.
I think the general idea is you post (Inc links) and Tom moderates.
Body Guilt and Shame.
https://www.google.com/search?q=body+guilt+and+shame&oq=body+guilt+and+shame&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i22i30l3j0i390i650l3.7626j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Sex Shame and Guilt.
https://www.google.com/search?q=sex+shame+and+guilt&oq=sex+shame+and+guilt&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i15i22i30j0i390i650l4.6778j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
‘Sex4All’ – a new universally popular movement with BIG slogan on all apparel and ad spaces Worldwide (small motto “antis need HELP!”)
(All rights reserved HappyHumpingPup, Sept 2023, all proceeds to HTOC.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=sport4all&oq=sport4all&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0i20i263i512j0i512l2j0i20i263i512j0i512j0i30j69i61.4540j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
>all proceeds to HTOC.
Great idea but I’ll believe it when I see it! 🙂
Quote two HOT Loli twins, “Mommy, Mommy, for our seXy siXth birthday we want some ‘Sex4All’ white knickers so we can flaSh them to your seXy new boyfriend who we both fancy now he gets HARD when we wriggle and giggle on his lap.”
LOL! What am I to do with you, HHP? You are incorrigible! 🙂
Good ask Boss, and what to do (but love) incorrigble AAMS based on lifelong ‘Love & Peace Generation’ positive seXperiences. Now demonised and moneytised by negative neo Victorian ‘War & Hate Generating’ antis – TOSSERS!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPuCssUhbBQ
Incorrigible 20th Century pro-active/affirmative AAMs.
Child Minder Bold MAP had to carry two HOT Lolis, 8 & 9, across a muddy winter park to the dry-tarmac play area. En route, the swaying gymnast leggy HOT Loli, 9, let her free hand swing down to repeatedly brush …
[MOD: CENSORED]
Kathleen Stock seems such a warm amd winning sort of girl-sausage otherwise but here the brazen presuppositions undergirding everything said render her entire article a largely superfluous indulgence, one that, for the millionth time, serves before anything else to verily sing of how utterly intrinsic the idea of paedophilia is to the ongoing generation, sustenance and maintenance of unconscious public desire…
https://unherd.com/2023/09/can-paedophilia-ever-be-a-thought-experiment/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3
Could you elaborate? Are you saying that paedophilia is intrinsic to today’s youth? I am not going to read the article as it will no doubt make me angry.
Perhaps “disavowed” would have been a better choice of word than “unconscious” desire. The kind of disavowal intrinsic to that whole cultural operation by which we see children as, among other things, sweet, innocent, vacant, smooth-skinned, spontaneous and mischievous – at the very same time constructing the desirable ideal as, among other things, sweet, innocent, vacant, smooth-skinned, spontaneous and mischievous. The obsession with paedophilia might be most simply characterised as the outraged sense that some bounder other than oneself has dared to cast his shadow over this very ideal, situated as it is at dead center of our entire cultural malaise..
I made a brief point in the Comments on this article:
It would seem that some deadly earnest tosser has flagged your comment already Tom, for scrolling through the whole damn lot of ’em just now it is nowhere to be found. Can only hope the mods have their heads still screwed on and restore it asap. My own comment at one of the Brand-related essays was thusly flagged, but pretty soon managed to pass Unherd muster (sic) …and why, even got some upvotes!
Nice to hear you got some upvotes, Mr T. As for my comment, you must have scrolled past it. I posted fairly late in the day and it still appears at the top of the Newest list.
A lot of the usual rhetoric in the article, as already pointed out. Trying to see the glass half full, the author does well to point out we should be allowing the academic freedoms Kershner was punished for using.
She writes:
Here she uses common victimological and sex-negative misconceptions and makes no attempt to be neutral. Not some children are precociously developed, but on the contrary, most children are artificially inhibited in their development by Puritan society. “Sex” is no different from studying mathematics and music. This is the same natural activity that develops and brings satisfaction.
It’s shifting to the negative side again. Ok, if she likes books, how about this.Voor een verloren soldaat – a Dutch autobiographical novel written by choreographer Rudi van Dantzig about his youth during World War II. In 1992, a film was made based on this story, also called “For the Lost Soldier.”
Both the book and the film are one of the positive examples, not being a fiction of the “perverted” mind of the writer, to which she could refer to in order to defend her negative point of view. The author described his own experience of positive inter-generational relationships
I would be glad if someone repeated this post in the comments under her article.
>It’s shifting to the negative side again.
I agree. I was in a hurry. Thought about recommending AN Wilson’s Dream Children but that too has its negative elements. So does For A Lost Soldier, actually. There’s a sophisticated discussion to be had, but not in a quick comment.
Ok, im not completely stupid, but could you simplify that post please? I know people have better vocabulary than me on here, but…
nope, still struggling… you mean, instead of looking, moving on to actual sex??
anyway, this whole image thing is a bit absurd… im not sure what you are equating to as a child, but by my book, (and science) its soemone before puberty..
i cant even look at my old page 3s from the 90s as they feature 16 yr olds and i am
abusing
them by looking at them…. yes they were legal then if anyone asks. (actually i dont even have any im just puttign that idea out there.)By such typically perverse Anglo anti-logic an AAM ogling an adult is either a self made ‘victim’, or an ‘offender’ victimising that adult?
Consent culture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_movement
Quote Bold MAP, “Always get affirmative consent. E.G. A mid-20th Century affirmative HOT Loli, 6, on a quiet grassy knoll learning of teens regularly copulating there, ‘Let’s DO it!’ Pulled her panties down and excitedly straddled an unprepared Bold MAP, but then said, ‘THAT’S no good. YOU get on top!’ Affirmative, or demanding to the point of abusive?”
Bold MAP, ‘Affirmative Consent’. Part Two of WAY too many to retell here.
WAY back Bold MAP, 14, with HOT Loli cousin, 11, quote, “I’ve got the keys to my friend’s house while she’s on holiday with her family…
[MOD: CENSORED]
The beginning of the end for Tim Ballard?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkaqvn/tim-ballards-departure-from-operation-underground-railroad-followed-sexual-misconduct-investigation
Unsubstantiated claims (in the latest “updates”) that Ballard is facing a probe for his maneuverings in Canoa.
https://www.newgon.net/wiki/Essay:The_Gruesome_Consequences_of_a_Hysterical_Witch_Hunt
>Unsubstantiated claims
Unsubstantiated, yes, but Ballard looks to be a busted flush, which can only be a hopeful sign:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkaqvn/tim-ballards-departure-from-operation-underground-railroad-followed-sexual-misconduct-investigation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-ESKtdWQg
Concerns this:
https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1702455118350713039
Officials can’t find the many victims. They must have been hidden in tunnels.
This looks good: government minister being publicly pressed for answers:
But how far will the probing go?
All if his virtue signalling and underhand tactics finally coming back around for him. In his case, I couldn’t care less if these allegations are unsubstantiated or otherwise. Throw him to the dogs, in the same manner he threw others.
New book has become available: “Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: Nature, Scope, and Solutions” (2023) The book features a chapter from Bruce Rhind “Sacred Values, Politics, and Moral Panic: A Potent Mix Biasing the Science behind Child Sexual Abuse and Related Phenomena” and also a chapter from Michael Bailey
Fillip’s post on BC
https://boychat.org/messages/1617342.htm
Well spotted. There are 33 chapters in this book of nearly 1k pages.
I have been given links to full text online version of several chapters. These include the first and last chapters. These are of particular interest as they together give an overview and point the way forward for the discipline.
Also, several chapters, including Rind’s, are by present or former Sexnetters (Bailey, Rind, Giudice, Peresky).
FIRST AND LAST
Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: An Introduction:
https://rdcu.be/dmC6g
Debiasing Psychology: What Is to Be Done?
https://rdcu.be/dmC6H
SEXNETTER
J. Michael Bailey:
Ideological Bias in Sex Research https://rdcu.be/dmCOC
Marco Del Giudice:
Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender
https://rdcu.be/dmCPp
Bruce Rind:
Sacred Values, Politics, and Moral Panic: A Potent Mix Biasing the Science behind Child Sexual Abuse and Related Phenomena
https://rdcu.be/dmCQG
Pamela Paresky & Bradley Campbell: Psychology’s Language and Free Speech Problem
https://rdcu.be/dmCON
I found out about this new chapter, looked up the book and came here to post about it, and someone’s beat me to it! :p
Happy days anyway, there seems to be lots of interesting chapters well worth thinking about and that, I’m sure, would generate discussion. I’m half way through Rind’s chapter…
Among a pro-MAP Holy Femme Trinty: Levine, Silva, Hewson.
Late great leading lawyer barrister Barbara Hewson was involved in controversy in 2013, after the Press Officer of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) strongly urged her to remove or reword an article she had written for the online magazine Spiked on 8 May entitled “Yewtree is Destroying the Rule of Law,” Hewson’s article criticised the role of the NSPCC (which she called a “moral crusader”) and the Metropolitan Police in treating complainants as “victims” in the wake of the Savile scandal, and the proliferation of prosecutions of elderly defendants. She had observed that the crimes of television presenter Stuart Hall (who had pleaded guilty to numerous charges of indecent assault on girls as young as 8) constituted ‘misdemeanor offences’, as opposed to crimes like rape and murder.
Hewson had proposed that there be a statute of limitations for criminal sex offences; that complainant anonymity be removed, and that the Age Of Consent, which was raised by the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1885 should be changed back to the previous age of thirteen.
In December 2019, Hewson was suspended from practising for two years for alleged ‘offensive’ social media comments responding to proven offensive attacks on her. However, Mr Justice Pepperall later reduced the suspension to one year but said it was based on “significant evidence of additional mitigating circumstances” in Hewson’s terminal cancer diagnosis which were not before the Bar tribunal. In this way, Hewson died with her bar privileges intact.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/13/remembering-barbara-hewson/
>Late great leading lawyer barrister Barbara Hewson
I agree. The linked article is well worth reading.
4 / 7:58
Barbara Hewson interview over her controversial child sex abuse comments (Channel 4 News, 8.7.13)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DR6EEl0H64
Like the death of Barbara Hewson, we’ve lost another sympathetic individual: French philosopher Rene Scherer. He died in February this year, aged 100.
As part of a tribute to Schérer after his death, his friend a former sexual partner Patrick Schindler gives a brief account of minor-iniated sexual activity, arguing that Schérer was not a pedophile or advocate for sexual activity between pre-pubescents and older people:
https://autonomies.org/2023/03/for-rene-scherer-1922-2023-an-anarchist-ic-life/
I have updated the page for him with more info about his thought, the latter of which focuses on the figure of the ‘immigrant’ or ‘stranger’, as well as his rejection of identity politics, including the injunction of victim culture to identity as a ‘victim’.
Yawn! Another ‘philosopher’ who nobody has heard of who may have had some sensibleish ideas decades ago, and even his pathetic friend has to state that he was not a pedophile or an advocate of such. Really is such dull stuff!
In fairness, he might be obscure to you, but for those who’re familiar w/ Michel Foucault, Beauvior etc., the French scene, he isn’t all that obscure. All it takes is Foucault, to Deleuze, and bam you’ll end up seeing the name Hocquenghem or Schérer somewhere along the line. They were contemporaries, taught and worked together, read each others books and were influenced by each other. Obscurity depends on what world you’re in and what your interests are.
Bruce Rind is not exactly well known either, outside certain segments of academia and interested individuals and groups. None of these are big time, current celebrities like say, Russell Brand, but they’ve had their moments in the spotlight w/ the Rind et al. controversy and the Coral Affair (Scherer) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_Coral
You may find it boring, but others do not. And, I think his friend was meaning that Scherer was not himself a pedophile, which may well be true.
Whether he was a pedophile we cannot know, but those who say that he did not advocate for sexual activity between pre-pubescents and older people, they clearly have never read a single page of “L’Emile Perverti” and “Co-ire”!
I have a bad feeling after this Russell Brand madness that the AOC might be risen due to people saying
16 year old schoolgirls cant consent to older guys
nah, the abuse is her being in school against her will, surely?I think you may be right. I’ve seen multiple news segments float the idea:
Here’s a recent one from the Right-wing aligned GB News: Russell Brand accuser calls for change in law to stop men in their 30s having sex with 16-year-olds. I remember this one and how the speakers frame legal change not as a case of preventing older males having legal sex w/ younger females, but as a case of changing the law so that 16YO’s can’t have sex w/ older males! I.e. the 16YO’s have to be stopped! ‘Child protection’ doesn’t even come in to the discussion; older/younger is just deemed ‘innapropriate’ and that’s apparently enough…
Here’s one from a more liberal outlet, where mainstream reporters speak about current affairs: Bringing down Russell Brand
[I can’t remember where exactly but either this vid or the next one does explicitly float the idea of raising the AOC].
The case of Russell Brand presents a great opportunity for media to home in on the seeming loophole of 16YO’s and above, in the UK, being in a legal grey area for age-gap sex contact [to my understanding?].
From my memory of school, a lot of young women I knew would have been very pissed off they couldn’t date all the seemingly interesting older guys outside of school. I think they’d have been a lot more unhappy, that’s for sure….
From where I stand, the happiest young people I know are those who started early and got on w/ work or school, and have a very relaxed attitude with very little sexual hangups, w/ sex just being a pleasant part of life. By contrast, the unhappy ones are those who are obsessed with age and psychologically crushed under the weight of age consciousness, virginal or lacking in sexual experience while being conscious of their age clock tick tick ticking. “I’m X years old and I still haven’t!” Etc.
As I get older, it is clearer and clearer to me that suddenly starting “real” life at 16 or 18 is far too late, and a childhood full of playing video games and not developing social and technical skills (computer skills, learning instruments, singing and speaking, cooking and domestic life) is not likely to give you a fighting chance of having a fallback or making something of yourself, even just having a meaningful life (unless you want to be a videogame streamer).
So yeah, media is pushing largely to the completely wrong direction IMO when it comes to people’s sense of freedom, their sense of being wanted, desired and needed (which apparently is only supposed to start when you’re 18 if it doesn’t come from family or peers), and their long-term mental health.
Don’t want to be depressing, bc I think ppl are getting very pissed off with the incessant age taboo and self-policing and nonsense ‘cancellations’ over nothing (i.e. losing your job over tweets). So I think that, the crazier it gets, the more the Antis reach and render ppl paranoid and miserable that they might, dear god the horror, find a 17YO attractive, all the while treating legal age gap relations as though they’re criminal – the more they create space for backlash.
WAY back 2014. Natch it’s all changed since then. It’s WAY worse/better, but the fakestream coverups are so much better/worse.
Radio KUER & BBC World Service October 15, 2014: ‘Why Kids Sext’ Describes Nude Photos As ‘Social Currency’ Among Teens.
In April, residents of Louisa County, Va., were shocked to learn of a sexting “ring” among the town’s teenagers. When Hanna Rosin asked teens from Louisa County High School how many people they knew who had sexted, a lot of them replied: “Everyone.” But what was originally characterized in the media as an organized criminal affair was soon revealed to be widespread teen behavior.
So they’ve moved from thinking this is sinister to realizing, within a few days, this is completely common.
That’s what’s amazing to me that this is so common given what we all know to be true about teenage awkwardness. The girls would actually get around this. I mean, some girls are just into it. They look great, they look like the pop stars they see, they’re proud to send their pictures.
People would get around this by taking pictures of parts of their body, like they might just do the upper part of their body, or they might take a picture in a dark room or at certain angles. People worked hard at these pictures — not the guys, they just take one kind of picture — but the girls worked pretty hard at these pictures to make them look like the pictures that they saw in other magazines.
On what the sexts mean to the boys who receive them
The sexts are just their currency. The girls described it to me as, “Oh, [it’s like] the guys are collecting baseball cards or Pokemon cards.” They don’t actually take them that seriously. They’re not a huge part of their sex life; it’s just something [the boys] collect. … It’s cool to have one that nobody else has. It’s kind of a social currency more than it is a springboard for fantasy, which is kind of surprising.
There’s so much free porn out there that these pictures serve a different role. These guys look at these pictures for five seconds; they’re just not that big of a deal to them. And so sending them along is kind of fun. … It seems like a prank.
https://www.kuer.org/2014-10-15/why-kids-sext-describes-nude-photos-as-social-currency-among-teens
Actually, the phenomenon does not only concern teenagers:
https://theweek.com/articles/478353/rape-tag-disgusting-new-schoolyard-game
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/meriden-police-say-more-children-are-sharing-child-pornography/2348383/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56085499.amp
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/18/childrens-sex-selfies-fuelling-rise-child-abuse-images/
One parent in the UK who we spoke to said her eight-year-old daughter was nearly coerced into sexual activity with an older man on the website.
She told the BBC: “My daughter had seen some videos go viral on TikTok about people being on this Omegle, so she explored this site and there’s no log-in or age restrictions or anything. These people were saying she was beautiful, hot, sexy. She told them she was only eight years old and they were OK with that. She witnessed a man masturbating and another man wanted to play truth or dare with her. He was asking her to shake her bum, take off her top and trousers, which she thankfully did not do.”
why kids sext? well, becasue they are horny? their God given right?? But no, thye are being repressed in the guise of
protection
..A news story worth thinking about: https://www.insideedition.com/idaho-dad-arrested-for-4-murders-says-he-snapped-after-teen-victim-exposed-himself-to-suspects?amp
A man killed an 18YO and the rest of the 18YO’s immediate family, after the 18YO had masturbated / exposed himself in front of the man’s kids and partner (an event for which he was already facing legal repercussions brought about by this man). Vowing to “do something” about this “pedophile”, in an argument with the 18YO’s family, he ends up shooting all 4 of them.
I think most ppl would see how obviously extreme it would be to kill someone, let alone 4 people including children, over masturbation or being naked. This man is clearly far more dangerous than a masturbator… But I can just hear the shrill apologists: “what if it was your child”?
For one, if my child got flashed etc, I’d react depending on how they felt. I’d ask the child about it, not just fester and stew in silent rage and assume it’s the worst thing that could have ever happened in a girl’s life (from the 1 woman I know who got flashed as a child, the fear of how her mother would react, and then the reality of her enraged mother, was what terrified her. In addition to school dramas and loneliness).
You know what I can say with a lot of confidence I would not do: kill someone over it. I might be horrified and pissed off if it was a particularly nasty person who flashed, or who seemed violent. But I still wouldn’t kill over it.
If you ever needed evidence that the symbol of the innocent child leads to real harm, it’s cases like these…
Several years ago, a mother told me about an episode her daughter had been confronted with while she was going for a walk in a park with the educators and the other children in her class (she was maybe 7-8 at the time), for they met an exhibitionist who showed himself naked to them.
They quickly returned to school, and while the educators called all the parents by phone, one by one, to tell them about the “terrible experience” their children had been through, the children, who stood aside, giggled and boasted to each other: “I saw him completely, you saw nothing!”.
Kids ain’t the angels they’re supposed to be. It’s systematic nonsense that says they should be. Centuries of dogmatic nonsense dressed up in the narratives of Ibrahimic Religions.
What utter nonsense!
It’s ENTIRELY the consequence of feminism, and all the pathetic attempts on this blog to say otherwise will get you nowhere. It’s as simple as this: girls and women don’t NEED sexual intimacy, only males are born with this curse, and females run the world and so combine their labor to prevent younger females from outcompeting them with men, so that they can live a parasitical existence off those men by way of marriage, alimony or abuse payments, in an accustomed manner their useless degrees in sociology, psychology, management and the soft humanities would never acquire for themselves. Me-gain Sharkle, anyone?
But yes, go on fighting the foaming at the mouth priests, the Moral Majority a la Handmaid’s Tale, because they are the ones with the power who are persecuting children by putting them on the sex offenders registry. Or accept the truth contained within the Abrahamic religions: women are indeed the seed of evil, which is why they need to be brought up well by their fathers, with a diet of sexual touching, of course, before their husbands take command.
Utter Anglophone/Anglobitch ‘dominant narrative’!
http://kshatriya-anglobitch.blogspot.com/
Meanwhile within or beyond the narrow, repressed Ibrahamic matriarchal phoney Anglophone, sexual needs are linked to individual libido FMLGBTQ.
And, early Islamic (not earlier Ibrahamic) cults first noted that Lolitots soon found the ‘curse’ of their HOT clits and became insatiable. Enter brutal male manufactured FGM to deter naturally promiscuous HOT Lolis, “Hotter than the male”.
Naturally undetered uncut HOT Lolis have always let all-age, often hapless, males do the chasing while they do the catching.
Quote, olde seaside postcard cartoon with Laddie boasting to Loli, “I’ve got one of these, you haven’t got one of these.” Loli: “No, but I’ve got one of these, and with one of these I can get as many of those as I want!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hln19l9RtWg
You are absolutely right. Victimology feminism has its roots in religious fundamentalism. And both work together to push punitive laws based on puritanical indoctrination!
all these xenophobias and taboos are invented and spread by ignorant adults under the guise of “morality”. Children just laugh and don’t pay much attention to it. Their innocence lies not in the absence of erotic desires and fantasies, but in the absence of sex-negative attitudes that society imposes on them.
>Nice point, very quotable!
I read about this a while back. I could be very wrong but I suspect the murderer saw this situation as an opportunity to virtue signal, signifying any such sex crime, or similar, as punishable by death with extreme prejudice. I blame the MSM with #metoo and feminazis for hyper sensitising the populous, some of whom are already unstable enough as it is.
How any reasonably minded person could ever think flashing / masturbating should be punished by death is testament to how polarised the world has become, pro violence / anti sex.
Make love, not war.
A guy not far from me was attacked by one of these not right in the head vigilantes…. he had exposed himsefl to adults… he had his penis cut off and died excruciatingly…. if this vile psycho wasnt jailed for life then i this country has no justice.. im to scraed to even read the articles..
From 25m.08s This week, in a new series called The Knock, we’ve heard the stories of two women whose lives were changed when they were told that a loved one had been arrested for sexual offences against children. Anita talks to Deborah Denis, Chief Executive of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, and Rachel Armitage, Professor of Criminology the University of Huddersfield about the impact of ‘the knock’ on the families and friends of men arrested for these crimes. They’ll discuss what support families need, and what they are calling for.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001qfml
I got the knock .. cos of what i wrote .. the robots (police) did a great job of traumatiasing me and my parents. one of who was undergoing cancer treatment. pure evil they are!
“Damn The Children When The Devil Must Be Found!’ I thought of those lines last Monday night, as I watched Panorama’s television account of the Orkney ‘Satanic abuse’ scandal. They come from W H Auden’s poem ‘Voltaire at Ferney’, which is about the defence of humanity against superstitious madness. Panorama played an audiotape: a six- year-old girl screaming tearful denials to three adult interrogators. ‘He did so put his dickie in your fanny’ they insisted. She screamed again.’ ”
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/damn-the-children-when-the-devil-must-be-found-1563398.html
ICJ March 8 Principle/Principle 16.
Facts, posi-checked by factcheck.org
Christine Stegling. UNAIDS deputy executive director for the policy, advocacy and knowledge branch. Email to FactCheck.org. 22 Apr 2023.
Di Fiore, Bettina.
“Fact Check Response: What does the UN-linked report actually say about children and consent?” Live Action. 21 Apr 2023.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/04/posts-misrepresent-u-n-panels-guidance-on-consensual-sex-between-adolescents/
Just to avoid any ambiguity, there is nothing in any of these links that contradicts the facts as reported by Heretic TOC.
Links positively confirm that AAAMs Amorous Adult Attracted Minors can in fact consent to shared, or solo, sex pleasure with any age partner(s). Though not in totalitarian Anglo-Victorian fake law now made Worldwide ‘Dominant Narrative’ propaganda. Perversely turning pleasure into so called ‘pain’, with pretentious pretext unfounded in any fact.
Check-mate, UK Grand Chess Master victim-MAP Brian Eley. In July 1991, Eley was arrested at his South Yorkshire home on suspicion of sexually abusing an underage male he had once coached. He was released on bail. Although not charged at the time, Eley jumped bail approximately one month after his arrest, and disappeared. He was subsequently charged with more than 30 offences of a similar nature and remained a fugitive, wanted by the British police and Interpol.
There were over the years numerous unconfirmed reports of sightings of Eley in various places, MOSTLY IN AMSTERDAM. According to reportage by Plaskett’s wife, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, which was published some months after his death, Eley had a “miserable time” as a FUGITIVE FROM BRITISH JUSTICE. After running out of the money he received from selling his house in the UK, he earned a living playing chess for small bets in cafés and doing computer work for a religious organization’s ashram. In 1992, he was identified in Amsterdam by UK Grandmaster Stuart Conquest and a Dutch chess player who NOTIFIED DUTCH POLICE BUT FOR UNKNOWN REASONS ELEY WAS NOT APPREHENDED. (HHP: Modern-EU Dutch cops still know pleasure from pain, fact from fiction? Pity that Anglo mass mind-RAPED Ecuador don’t – DOH!)
He had reportedly established a small circle of friends in the city to whom he claimed everything was about a “disagreement with the BCF/BritishChessFederation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eley
The anti-consent Antis love MAPS constantly bLogged down in ancient semantic swamps about who the fuck first defined so called ‘consent’.
Surely a subjective more than objective concept. E.G. Post-WW2 Boomers ‘Love Generation’ quote, “Whatever turns you on.” Or, olde Victorian Sunday skool quote, “Sex is fun, but sex is sin. Sins are forgiven, so get stuck in.”
While increasingly clean out of control-freaks’ control, modern Worldwide self-defined ‘Generation Sext’ mercilessly mocks Ancient & Victorian so called ‘Sex Laws’, and blasts, “My Mind My Body My Choice My MAP – Mind Yer Own!”
https://www.google.com/search?q=bbc+kids+global+sexting+out+of+control&sca_esv=557489608&sxsrf=AB5stBiOKY01LE8FeevigKO7p6U2as_XBA%3A1694370460115&ei=nAr-ZJfXBsaghbIPj-qZ-A0&ved=0ahUKEwiXlZLr1aCBAxVGUEEAHQ91Bt8Q4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=bbc+kids+global+sexting+out+of+control&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiJmJiYyBraWRzIGdsb2JhbCBzZXh0aW5nIG91dCBvZiBjb250cm9sSOIYUK4IWK4NcAF4AJABApgBvgWgAcITqgEFNS0zLjG4AQPIAQD4AQHiAwQYASBBiAYB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Since so called Original Sin/Carnal Knowledge, a Biblical Blind Faith concept first enforced, long since scrapped by self-assumed self-serving powers self-consenting to falsely define and enforce private and public consent. Now falsely assumed by self-serving, profiteering populist media….
[MOD: etc., etc., etc. etc. deleted. Quite long, largely incoherent.]
Was the Ancient Greek poetess and lesbian archetype Sappho a MAP? That’s not entirely clear from reading the English translation of her work. Although the word “girl” occurs regularly in her poems, no exact ages are given. In English, the word “girl” can also refer to young adult women. And while her explicit use of the word “child” in Gorgo and in The First Kiss is intriguing and suggests an openness to intergenerational romance, a metaphorical interpretation cannot be completely ruled out, although it seems unlikely.
It turns out that the answer to this question has been lost in translation, and that there is, in fact, linguistic evidence that Sappho was a MAP. In this paper by Sappho scholar André Lardinois, the author refutes Holt Parker’s claim that the subjects of Sappho’s poetry were adult women, explaining that Sappho used Greek words that specifically refer to girls aged 12–18, and calls out the tendency of modern scholars to omit this information from their works.
Here are some relevant quotes from Lardinois’ paper:
MODERATOR: Thanks for this interesting contribution. It went to Spam for some unknown reason. Just letting you know.
“The ancient writers who quote the poem, Plutarch and Pseudo-Longinus, treat the physical symptoms which Sappho describes so fully as a manifestation of her eros for the girl; so they are, in the sense that if she had not been in love with the girl she would not have experienced such symptoms” Greek Homosexuality, p. 179, https://books.google.de/books?redir_esc=y&hl=de&id=R8iGAAAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Sappho
“While the foregoing examples all concern sex among men, histories of women’s same-sex sex have also demonstrated instances of age asymmetry. Some scholars believe that Archaic Greek poet Sappho, perhaps the original lesbian, and certainly the reason for the name, had one significantly younger lover.” (https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/historical-reflections/46/1/hrrh460101.xml?ArticleBodyColorStyles=full-text Introduction to “Sex across the Ages: Restoring Intergenerational Dynamics to Queer History”)
Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age:
“And the first biographical entry on Sappho in the tenth-century A.D. lexicon known as the Suda simply states that “she was slanderously accused of shameful intimacy with certain of her female pupils. […] 6. Ovid Tristia 2.365, “Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?” though often cited as evidence for Sappho’s homosexuality, probably means that Sappho taught girls to love and belongs to a tradition, discussed by Dover (pp. 174-75), of Sappho as an instructor of girls. 7. Horace Odes 2.13.25 (querentem)lSappho puellis de popularibus, cited by Dover (p. 174) as a source for Sappho’s homosexuality, merely refers to Sappho’s plaintive verses about the girls of her native Lesbos and does not mention her sexual conduct as such. 8. A remark by the fourth century A.D. Greek rhetorician Themistius (p. xiii; p. 170 D), to the effect that Sappho lavished praise on herpaidika, may also deserve mention (this word is a standard Greek term for the youthful beloved in a male homosexual union). Yet as Themistius is only talking about verbal expressions of passion, his statement cannot truly be regarded as testimony to Sappho’s sexual habits. ”
Hallett, J. P. (1979). Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4(3), 447–464. doi:10.1086/493630
Ah yes, “taught girls to love” couldn’t possibly mean anything sexual/romantic. The popular phrase “To be a friend of Sappho” originiates from the often absurd mental gymanstics of historians to interprete everything as heteronormative (and teleionormative).
“In other lyrics, too, the speaker, presumably Sappho herself, is portrayed as sensually attracted and aroused by other women. Most notable of these is fragment 49 L-P, addressing a woman named Atthis. Its speaker states: “I adored you, once in the past, when you seemed to me to be a small, graceless child.” Fragment 96 L-P, which avows desire for Atthis, and fragment 1 L-P, the hymn to Aphrodite, merit note in this context as well” https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3199n81q;chunk.id=d0e7094;doc.view=print
“The relationship of desire and withholding, of presence and absence seems to move Sappho to write, to create in the elusive, illusive fragmentary net of words the absent one, the desired one. In fragment 105a, the poet’s gaze in the simile enacts the drama of desire and withholding, presence and absence. […] The distance, absence, of the sweet-apple are bound up with desire for the unattainable fruit. And the hyacinth [flower, symbol of boylove], once fallen from an imagined height, is destroyed. The fragments [105a and 2] suggest an aesthetic distance, of the beauty of the unreachable object of desire, suggest the superiority of the unattainable. Like the voice of the poet in other poems, yearning for a girl, for Aphrodite’s presence to help her win the girl, watching her beloved seated next to a man, remembering the girl Atthis loves, the voice in these fragments values the absent object of desire, regrets the fall of the sweet flower in the present, to the ground, to the realm of men, of daily work. The sweetness of the desired object is lost when it enters the realm of marriage, adulthood, consumption.” Sappho Is Burning, Page duBois, page 52
“The person most associated with lesbian love in Greece was Sappho, the 6th century poet from the island of Lesbos. Save one poem, only fragments of her work have come down to us. In her poetry Sappho wrote about the world of women, their daily loves, their marriages and their participation in religious ceremonies. She also praised the beauty of women and the love that they shared, and spoke of her own love for girls. We can surmise from her poetry that she kept a group of young women around her whom she sang verses. In all likelihood these girls had been entrusted to Sappho before their impending marriages and were being instructed by her in all manner of things.” Aldrich, Robert, ed. (2006). Gay Life and Culture: A World History, p. 47
“The last interpretation is supported by our knowledge that erotic attachments between older women and young girls were encouraged at Sparta. It is likely that in the female atmosphere of the girls’ choir lesbian relationships flourished. The most important factor, both at Sparta and at Lesbos, in fostering female homoerotic attachments was that women in both societies were highly valued. […] Women did not, as has been suggested, turn to other women in desperation, due to men’s disparagement of them. Rather, it appears that they could love other women in milieux where the entire society cherished women, educated them comparably to men of their class, and allowed them to carry over into maturity the attachments they had formed in the all-female social and educational context of youth.” Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, Sarah B. Pomeroy
“The boys’ lovers also shared with them in their honour or disgrace; and it is said that one of them was once fined by the magistrates because his favourite boy had let an ungenerous cry escape him while he was fighting. Moreover, though this sort of love was so approved among them that even the maidens found lovers in good and noble women, still, there was no jealous rivalry in it, but those who fixed their affections on the same boys made this rather a foundation for friendship with one another, and persevered in common efforts to make their loved one as noble as possible.”
http://www.greek-love.com/antiquity/pederasty-in-ancient-sparta#Plutarch.Life.of.Lykourgos
A new master’s thesis on “rape myths” supported by the CSA survivors themselves is quite important. Victimologists admitted that children may consider themselves consenting. Is there any difference between consenting and considering oneself consenting?
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/jj_etds/292/
> Is there any difference between consenting and considering oneself consenting?
Good question, Cyril.
I have downloaded this open access MA thesis. A quick glance shows it has a reasonable sample size and looks quite thorough. Could be worth reading carefully.
Alanis morrisette was covinced that she was consenting at 15 for many years until recently until she was brainwashed to think she hadnt… (AOC in canada was 14 not so long ago!)
You have to be incredibly careful with this particular argument. Because there absolutely is a difference between considering yourself consenting, and actually being consenting.
I grew up in a cult. I was groomed to think and behave and react certain ways. Religion and schools, btw- biggest grooming institutions of them all. I paid tithing to the church, “consensually”. As a child. I did and submitted to all sorts of things, as a child and adolescent, and even adult, that I would never in a million years subject myself to now, but I didn’t know any better, and there was no way for me to have known better. I didn’t know anything else. I never really got to make decisions for myself, and I never really got to know or explore what I actually wanted. I only was able to conceive of what I was told I should want, and want to do. Everything else was rebellious and sinful, and I would feel deep shame and guilt if I ever did those things or did what I wanted, but what I wanted I had been conditioned to view as temptation, rather than my own will. Though it’s definitely “your choice” when the time for punishment comes.
The truth was I was taken advantage of and defrauded. I was used and abused. Not by anyone in particular, but just generally. By other people who were similarly in thrall and being taken advantage of and defrauded. But collective delusions are as powerful and sustaining and self delusions.
Power differentials and abuse of authority are absolutely serious issues that need to be considered. This is why I say that consent is such a faulty framework. It is contract law, and amounts to agreement to your own abuse.
Autonomy is better. Autonomy is better because it has to do with the development and will of the person- their own will, as opposed to the will of parents, the will of partners, the will of priests, the will of community, of family, of society, of god, of the church. Consent, even informed consent, will always leave people lacking. But autonomy- where one is acting in their own capacity, and acting in their own capacity with the conscious recognition that they may indeed be being manipulated and or being taken advantage of, but still deciding for themselves anyway. While consent has theoretical limitations of duress- and duress doesn’t lose its applicability to autonomy either- consent often involves situations where manipulation and undue advantage and fraud aren’t even detected. It is one thing to be aware of the active potential that you are being manipulated, lied to, or taken advantage of, and proceeding anyway, versus not knowing that you are being manipulated, being lied to, and being taken advantage of, and not even recognizing that that might be the case.
Because I would have defended the church to the death, and insisted that I was doing it all of my own free will and volition- when I was in the midst of it. I now know that I was played for a fool, and I was being robbed of my agency and personhood in the process.
Any pretense of authority is innately dangerous to any promotion of laxer laws and norms regarding children’s sexuality.
I dont subscribe to the idea that people everyone over one day can consent but noone under that day cant… I know, there has to be a
line
.(apparently) . but the line is too thick.. we need to be more .. flexible…Awaiting an author? “Understanding & addressing child sexual attraction to adults”
Subtitle, “AAAMs Amorous Adult Attracted Minors”.
Rachel Hope Cleves, Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)
“One evening,” we read, “she [Viva King] and Douglas got onto the subject of whether sex should be taught in schools. “Norman was asked his opinion as to whether ten years old was too young for such knowledge. ‘Nonsense,’ he replied, ‘children can’t learn early enough what fun it is.’” (p. 238). As Cleves explains, “Douglas refused to disavow children’s entitlement to sexualized pleasure” (Ibid).
https://wapercyfoundation.org/?page_id=1056
(Sister Emmanuelle, Confessions of a Religious Woman, Flammarion editions)
“How and on what occasion did I start masturbating, I don’t remember.” I thought it was wrong since I did it secretly and willingly at school where I felt safer. But the mistress noticed and warned my mother. One day, my cheeks were on fire, I was shaking in class and suddenly I saw her staring at me intensely through the window door. She then explained to me that it was nasty for a little girl and I shouldn’t start again. But it had become a habit and I wasn’t very accustomed to obey. When the assault of desire attacked me, only some foreign presence had the power to stop me, otherwise I would confess powerless to the greed of pleasure.”
Early 20th Century honest reality of natural early sexual pleasure privately practised. Reality BLOCKED by backward Anglo-Victorian totalitarian tabloid hypocrisy. Perversely with daily sex-filled ‘Family’ media of near-nude adults role-models & sex-objects also naturally aMusing pre-teens & pre-tweens.
Now forcing so called ‘adults’ to face 21st Century reality of natural kids sexually aMused and PUBLICLY practising!
Check, UK top-sales SeX-Filled ‘FAMILY’ tabloid The SUN, Chief London Reporter Tom Wells: “Kids Aged 6 are Teacher Sex Abusers! Among a sharp rise in similar shocking cases, a six year old girl stood in front of a male teacher, lifted her skirt and massaged herself through her underwear.”
Plus, pre-tween guilt-free ‘sexting’ and self-made C.P. – totally out of neo-Victorian control-freaks’ control.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Thousands+of+children+sexting%2C+police+say+BBC.COM&oq=Thousands+of+children+sexting%2C+police+say+BBC.COM&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.42258447j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Supposed ‘Adult’ fairytales for curious studious humourous Gen-Sext/AAAMs Amorous Adult Attracted Minors to read, review. ridicule. On their forthcumming all-age blog MyMindMyBodyMyChoiceMyMAPMindYerOwn.cum.
v
v
https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-and-Addressing-Adult-Sexual-Attraction-to-Children-A-Study/Goode/p/book/9780415446266
Gagnon, John H. (1965). Sexuality and Sexual Learning in the Child. Psychiatry, 28(3), 212–228. doi:10.1080/00332747.1965.11023429
Sci hub link here: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1080/00332747.1965.11023429
A paper I’m currently looking at, written by one of Kinsey’s associates and one of the originators of social constructionism/symbolic interactionism. A big influence on Ken Plummer.
Interestingly, Gagnon predicts that the new “special” consciousness around children and childhood, which demands a special psychology distinct to those deemed children, will be the “dominant orientation of the future”.
A book that sounds pretty interesting, co edited by the based Trevor Hoppe, Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era
Quoting a review by the Percy Foundation https://wapercyfoundation.org/?p=1563
“Hoppe continues in this vein by recounting his experiences coming of age as a gay teenager in the 1990s […] Hoppe began his sexual career in adolescence, having sex with men he found on Craigslist”
The most interesting essay to me [Prue] seems to be this one:
Available as PDF here: http://library.lol/main/7E1D1BB242B42F22AA24D74D9F21F23B
Well this is …interestin’ – i guess! I had the thought recently that what typifies, meaning represents rather well somehow, bog standard conservative rhetoric (BSCR) is the expressed belief that homosexual men can only ever be pretending that anal experience of any kind is pleasurable, whereas it is in fact, believes BSCR, exceedingly painful, always. But descriptions such as this one do make me wonder! Double fist in one’s anus?? How is it even possible to relax such anatomy to the degree that this would actually become pleasurable? (The likes of “literal opening up” explains nothing for me). BSCR would answer without hesitation that the answer is dangerous drugs, and lots of them. My question then is something along the lines of how come we never hear much tell of such drug use today? Have ‘gay men’ attained over time extraordinary levels of physical dexterity that has made them Absolute Masters of the Sphincter, or what? It seems to me that there is a convergence/divergence along the axis of pleasure and pain within a human anus that requires the utmost in care and tenderness to even think of negotiating properly, yet the way in which so many gay testimonies are expressed you’d think anything but was the norm. But perhaps i am just thinking of BSGR?.Bog standard gay rhetoric?
Well anyhoo, as a ‘break’ from the frustating ‘dead-ends’ of so many MAP avenues of enquiry, this might be a novel opportunity for sharing some experiential curves?
As far as not seeing / hearing stories about drug use and double fisting gay sex in dark rooms: it may be a case of 1. Dark rooms and nightlife spaces in general becoming more watered down, along with people themselves becoming more sensitive to “consent”, I.e. asking beforehand, which impacts on people’s sense of, and ability to be, spontaneous and fun (I.e. to be outside of their comfort zone and discover they like / enjoy something they might not have previously enjoyed or assumed they wouldn’t).
And 2. I’m sure there are many such stories and examples, it just depends where and when you’re looking, and what online / IRL spaces you’re part of. Reddit will have such stories if they don’t get removed. On Fetlife (a kinky version of Facebook), I have seen some of the most extreme “pain slut” content that’s so far removed from mainstream porn. People with needles piercing their skin all across their hands, people stapled to a cross by the thin skin on their arms, and people who enjoy being punched in the face to the point of black eyes and spanked and whipped till their ass is a literal bloody mess.
Online censorship can be a problem here. I can remember one woman who complained that Fetlife would remove her content bc it was too “extreme”: I.e. too much blood. Likewise, and more relevant to the MAP sphere, I once saw a thread where someone spoke about their positive incest experience in youth, and the comment had been pinned and not removed by a moderator bc it was used as an example of what you’re NOT allowed to post(!).
Also, in general as regards to anal, drug use can and does make a huge difference, but I have met men who say they find anal distinctly pleasurable and feel no pain during. So… who knows maybe some ppl have more relaxed sphincters? Whether this applies to double fisting, I doubt it. And yes, I’m sure double anal fisting is possible, but best to be done with someone who’s very used to / experienced with anal, and with someone who’s willing to push past the “ahs”, the “it hurts”, etc. Nothwistanding the prevalence of women’s rape fantasies and eroticizing CNC (consensual non consent), I have seen how people very much want someone to “take control” and “have their way with them”. Sometimes ppl want other’s to decide for them… it’s a lot to put on individuals to always know a priori what they want and will or won’t like, and I don’t think it’s realistic. I think there’s a gap between what people say publicly and think privately, and you’ll see that gap on display in anonymous comments sections…
I can remember seeing a particularly submissive woman having her vagina double fisted, and although I wouldn’t actively go looking for it with men, I’m sure it’s possible and indeed pleasurable. (Even if pleasurable partly because it’s scary / worrying and you’re forced to let go.) Part of the attraction in some of these experiences is self-objectification, the lack of personhood and needing to keep up an identity. You just want to “let go”…
Thankyou for this Prue, i will work on what i hope to be an eventual reply. In service if this intent i very much wanted to share what you say here with that actor who first used the aforementioned expression “BSCR” with me, in hope of expanding ‘multipolar conversation’ on as many fronts as possible. But a weird technical thing is happening. If i try to copy your (credited) text, taking care to copy only your text, what happens when i paste upon the target venue is that the whole of the blog & commemts preceding yours get pasted! I’ve tried several times and it keeps happening. Anyone have any clue how to rectify (no rectum intended!) ?
It would be very unfortunate if a blog about MAP issues were to be mistakenly associated with dangerous sexual practices that I would not recommend for adults, never mind children. So please make sure your have sorted this out before you copy to any further venues, Mr T.
My suggestion: instead of copying directly to another venue, paste the clipboard content into a Notebook file (bundled with Word in the MS “Office” suite). Then “top and tail” what you can see, which will be text only, without any formatting i.e. delete everything above and below the target comment by Prue. When you copy the remainder, you will be copying only what you really want to copy.
No worries Tom it is only private correspondence i have in mind, i guess my use of “venue” there was somewhat misplaced. I’m also pretty sure the problem will not occur when i get back to my desktop. Phones are so much more susceptible to this sort of thing..
Thanks for this reassurance. Yes, you should find the desktop easier.
This can be called the concept of Continuous consent, which was discussed in an old blog-
The staircase has not one step but many
Consent is not a one-time indulgence, after which you can do anything. Any activity in which a person participates is constantly evaluated during the session. Pleasant actions prolong consent, unpleasant and painful actions stop consent permanently or temporarily.
When children are involving in physical activity, they have only a general idea of the difficulties and traumas. A positive reaction to success allows them to cope with difficulties and injuries. Failures lead to a stop or abandonment of the activity.
From an early age, children learn the rules of the road and ride a bicycle. Training begins with a tricycle. No one says that their psyche is not ready enough, no one forbids them to ride a bicycle until the age of 16-18, despite the risk of injury. From a very early age they are enrolled in gymnastics, hockey, equestrian sports. Every day they consent to something and refuse something.
[MOD ADDS: Had to rescue this one from Spam. Not sure why it went there. Leonerd, are you writing from a valid email address?]
A quick edit resulted in the message being marked as spam. Previously, this required three edits in a row, but this time it happened the first time.
Interesting. A glitch in the software then, or at least a limitation in it. Always best to write and edit offline, I reckon, then just cut and paste the whole thing in one go.
Theres a very dangerous mountain ridge near me.. there is no age limit. You can take 5 year olds up there. Baffling. But you need to be 18 to have a mild photo of your own body??
Just like to say thankyou for linking to this the painstaking work of our now somehow long lost Lensman (LSM), and to attach this screenshot of a tweet currently shared by the otherwise astute Mary Harrington no less, showing how passionately bone-headed these hundreds of people really are (might i coin “likespittles”?), when it comes to so much as any mention of children and sex in the same breath. In the words of the marvellously adroit James R Kincaid, how can they possibly not know that they are “wildly busy estranging pedophilia in order to guarantee its otherness and thus drench it with desire? In saying so loudly that pedophilia is monstrous, even impossible, aren’t we building up a chorus that sings of how the sexual attractiveness of children is indubitable and pedophilia is inevitable? What could be more normal than this monstrousness?”
>the otherwise astute Mary Harrington
Catholic, conservative Mary Harrington is one of the best writers around at the moment. Always worth reading even though we may rarely agree with her.
Am unsuitably intrigued, Tom! What pray tell is the manner then of this “worth” which somehow moves beyond what we can or cannot agree with? What can it even mean for something to be always “worth reading”? Surely one cannot know what is “worth reading” until a particular reading is done?
So far as i can see she is chiefly valuable for pointing up the cyborg-bound destiny of so many women following the advent of contraception. But do you read her just for some sort of titillation, for that which seems to promise far more than it can guarantee to actually deliver, such being all the more entertaining for just that .. or what?
And does the designation “Catholic, conservative” really account for all that she does and might ever one day say?
>And does the designation “Catholic, conservative” really account for all that she does and might ever one day say?
Of course not. Just a convenience label. As for the rest, I’m sure you can puzzle it out if you try.
I can indeed sir! And might we refer henceforth to yonder Mary as The (Highly) Readable One? But oh how her sharing of that thoughtless “diddle” tweet did irk! Lo, i have however more immediately pressing matters here – a response from eugyppius that rises in full to the great calling of argument if anything does… I need to know if it is okay with you to c&p that right here on the blog?
>But oh how her sharing of that thoughtless “diddle” tweet did irk!
Quite.
>I need to know if it is okay with you to c&p that right here on the blog?
OK if it is “on topic” as per our previous discussion and not too long.
It’s definitely on topic and is 530 words. Too long?
OK, go ahead.
Maywald’s theories about supervised child sexual play don’t rest on any robust body of evidence, OK? He cites nothing of note. Nor is Maywald a child psychologist. He has a Ph.D. in sociology and he claims to specialise in “children’s rights.” His scholarly publications are all of a legal nature and most of them don’t clearly support his sexual pedagogical agenda. His programme of child sexual socialisation is rooted in a variety of politicised social constructivist preconceptions, of which I take a very dim view (on the basis of actual empirical evidence, of the kind Maywald seems not to know). There’s no evidence anywhere that encouraging toddler masturbation in dedicated masturbation rooms or adult-supervised child sexual play yields better outcomes that traditional approaches to childcare. None at all. So perhaps you can appreciate how demanding an empirical, evidence-based engagement with this purely unscientific ideological programme is a bit silly.
It is in Maywald’s own pedagogical scheme that all of this supervised child sexual play leads to non-consensual sexual assault scenarios among children. You may think this is all about “catching problems in the bud,” but this not an argument that Maywald makes. Even in Maywald’s own imaginary, the sexual assaults about which he fantasises are a product of the extremely bizarre situations he proposes that childcare staff foster. These are much graver than “learning opportunities.” Parents of children who are sexually assaulted in Maywald’s “doctor games” could pursue legal or civil actions against the care centre or even against the offending child or his parents. Do you think it’s a good idea to foster scenarios which will have children investigated by the police and their parents sued in court? Why do you think Maywald, a self-styled legal expert, never considers this angle at all?
Perhaps there is a reason that adult human society discourages casual sexual play in public among acquaintances. I have never worked at an office or university, for example, with masturbation rooms or with mutual body exploration time. Were adults to engage in these activities, I have no doubt they’d increase by orders of magnitude the opportunities to transgress boundaries and offend each other in the most intimate and awkward of ways. Given that an important early function of childcare is the socialisation of young children, we have to ask why Maywald wants to socialise them according to a set of sexual norms that don’t obtain anywhere in adult society.
That children have sexual feelings and that some children act on them in inappropriate ways is of course natural. What’s also natural, is the general adult discouragement of children engaging in overtly sexualised play. The aversion to Maywald’s sexual pedagogical programme is also clearly natural. But whatever your views of childhood sexuality, I propose that allowing government bureaucrats and childcare staff to directly supervise young children in sexual play is an absurdly bad idea, and that people from all across the political spectrum have no trouble noticing this. These are non-relatives, whom the parents don’t even know all that well, who have very little direct investment in the children they’re supervising, and Maywald proposes we allow them to directly intervene in the sexuality of minors.
—
>I take a very dim view (on the basis of actual empirical evidence, of the kind Maywald seems not to know).
But where is all this “actual empirical evidence”? Not a word of it is cited in the entire article. Just blowhard opinion based on unsupported supposition.
Ok so that is a definite ‘gaping hole’ in what he says here for sure, but can you honestly say that it negates just like that the worth of everything else that is said? I myself Tom cannot really see that it does? I mean this is rather uncharted paedagogical territory wherever you happen to be coming from, n’est-ce pas? I’ll say no more right now but it seems to me his objections are valid ones somehow…
It doesn’t negate anything, it just reduces its authority, so it’s like some random MAGA idiot sounding off in a bar.
Oh dear methinks this is not good. Am i wrong in my estimation that such a comment is not like you? That is to say, that in reaching for the lowest hanging fruit – “like some random..” a great reluctance to actually argue the point is revealed? I am seriously confused, tbh! What is it about the motives of these schoolmarms Tom that you feel is beyond criticism somehow?
Truth to tell, Mr Turp, I cannot make this a priority at the moment. Too busy elsewhere. Sorry. Maybe someone else will take up the challenge.
She claims that morality distinguishes us from animals, but people appealed to the morality when they committed the most terrible deeds. Persecution and murder of people on the basis of religion, race, nationality, sexual orientation began because of the alleged “immorality” of scapegoats.
The bigots use the language of emotion and extremes as “arguments”. When it comes to positive or neutral experiences of mutual and voluntary relationships, they always take out a negatively colored victimological dictionary and remember about cannibalism and so on
This is a quasi-religion of the modern society, only instead of exorcising non-existent demons, they treat non-existent trauma. An important note, I’m not saying that a rape does not cause harm, but only that voluntary and mutual relationship are not the rape, which can be proven. But the antis ignore the facts.
I spoke to a young person of 19 in the pub the other night… he said he was interested in a girl but found out she was 16 and was suddenly not interested? now this isnt a 40 year old, but a 19 year old! this is worrying.. i said, but not much age gap?? but he says, but shes just left school! but whats that got to do with anything?? shes there against her will anyway.
If i was interested in someone and they were 16, i would be relieved as i wont be prosecuted! Just called named by the bullies.. which is most people, sadly.
What went wrong at the Open University? – ALICE SULLIVAN
Sounds like nothing went wrong, other than the usual conservative bitching and bigotry. People who can’t handle increasing nominal equality have no business in being platformed in any societal institution. You can free speech into the wind all you want, we’re not obligated to give you an institutionalized platform for it. We owe you no respect for your opinion. And if you can’t meet the requirements of a job- which entails teaching science (including social science), and treating people with basic respect and dignity- then you have no business having that job. You can have your bigoted opinions. Airing them on the clock at your job using your position of authority, in which you are supposed to serve the general public, is not your right.
Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement
by Mathew Thomson
Published: Oxford University Press 26 September 2013
Online ISBN: 9780191757006 Print ISBN: 9780199677481
Before the 1970s British children still had much more physical freedom than they do today.
The book explores why this situation has changed. It pays particular attention to the 1970s as a period of transition, and one which saw radical visions of child liberation but also anxieties about child protection escalating in response. This is strikingly demonstrated in the story of how the paedophile emerged as a figure of major public concern. The book argues that this crisis of concern over child freedom is indicative of some of the broader problems of the social settlement that had been forged out of the Second World War.
CHAPTER 6 Sexual Danger and the Age of the Paedophile
This chapter examines the threat of sexual molestation. It demonstrates that up until the 1970s this was a far less significant factor behind the segregation of children than was traffic. Indeed, the language of paedophilia and widespread alarm over sexual abuse of children only became commonplace after the mid-1970s.
Psychology initially tended to downplay danger, accepting the sexuality of the child, viewing criminal procedures as psychologically damaging, and casting suspicion on the reliability of the child voice.
The second half of the chapter looks at how this situation changed in the 1970s. It examines an extraordinary moment in which a paedophile rights lobby mistakenly saw an opportunity to publicize their cause. The resulting outcry was significant in helping to draw to a close a radical stream of thinking about child freedom that came to the fore in the early 1970s.
https://academic.oup.com/book/9885/chapter-abstract/157191825?redirectedFrom=fulltext
When I first noticed this book, and chapter, some time ago, I made a note which I think was probably based on the same chapter summary as HHP quotes here. I wrote: “This chapter looks all too accurate. Our only consolation in PIE is that we were not the only ones to make this mistake: our endeavours had many parallels around the globe.” I had in mind NAMBLA and other groups, mainly in continental Europe.
I then read all the pages of Chapter 6 that were available for preview on Google Books (nearly every page, I think). It includes some colourful material on PIE’s activities and my own contribution.
PDF here: https://library.lol/main/F2978C0CE62113114085C1490B545F75
Sounds like a good book / chapter 🙂
>Truth, and the freedom to express inconvenient truths, should trump the grubby expediency of identity politics any day, even when it favours MAPs.
Until, judging from the blogs, truth runs into conflict with at least feminist or LGBT identity politics, at which point concerns of useful idiocy and those (charitably) seeking to deny, by way of trivial hacks or not, the privileges of the few are trotted out.
For MAPs, outside of such identity politics and the cover it might extend to behaviors of all kinds, what benefit do you see of such a strategy?
>”what benefit do you see of such a strategy?”
What strategy do you have in mind, Nada? Your point is unclear to me. You do not challenge the value of truthfulness; instead the suggestion appears to be that truth (in my blogs) has been lost sight of when it runs into conflict with feminist or LGBT identity politics. If this is the claim, I believe it to be false.
The strategy of putting concerns of “useful idiocy” and some identity polititics over truth.
Examples would be the present blog, your comment to Michaux, and
https://heretictoc.com/2019/07/07/are-we-making-useful-idiots-of-ourselves/
for starters.
>Examples would be the present blog, your comment to Michaux
I would not have written these items had I thought they were open to the objection you raise. So, I need further enlightenment. Please cite the specific sentences you have in mind, saying how you feel identity politics is favoured (by me) over truth. As for idiocy, it would be strange indeed if I ever thought being truly idiotic was a good idea, although pretending to be not very smart can sometimes be an effective strategy, as per Columbo, the TV detective.
In the linked blog, you wrote:
>Once again, I have been a “useful idiot” doing the conservatives’ work for them.
If it is the case that truth trumps identity politics, no need to to spend posts bemoaning the possibility of truth (from pedophiles finding children attractive to them accepting the reality of biological sex) rolling back indentity politics.
>In the linked blog, you wrote
No, I did not write that. Your “quote” is actually a misleading paraphrase. My point was not that I thought I had been an idiot but that hostile journalists including Róisín Michaux might try to use me for their own purposes as though I were unaware of their intentions.
After this opening misguided salvo your following point, to the extent that it is coherent (it requires charitable interpretation to wring meaning out of it) again misrepresents my position. If this is deliberate, it looks like trolling. If not, one has to wonder who is the real idiot here.
>No, I did not write that.
Funny, as grepping the linked blog proves otherwise. If you don’t even bother checking the return value, no wonder my question of strategy confuses you.
>grepping the linked blog proves otherwise
According to Wikipedia, “grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression”.
Grepping may be very useful for some searches but there’s a much better utility available for this particular job: your eyes. It’s not as though we’re dealing with a Bible-length text here. It’s just a blog. If, just by reading it, you cannot find the passage where I wrote what you claim I wrote, a simple explanation is available: it isn’t there.
Nada, how many more times do you want to make a fool of yourself? Tell you what, I am going to save your from yourself on this one. Anything further from you on this matter is going straight to Trash.
ID politics is often subjective. E.G..A self-serving Fox falsely identifies as a chicken and wants to live in the chicken coup?
Though way back boy-girl Quentin Crisp rightly identified as more-girl-than-boy and bravely dressed and behaved accordingly.
So, self-id AAMS can rightly say, “My Mind, My Body, My Choice, My MAP – Mind Yer Own!”
Bravely? You have sympathy for LGBTQZ faggots like Crisp? You think he was pro-MAP? He was just another degenerate who was rightly mocked.
Cowardly degenerate MAC might learn that some of the bravest warriors have been ‘faggots’?
https://www.google.com/search?q=gay+warriors&oq=gay+warriors&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j0i512l3j0i22i30l3j0i15i22i30j0i22i30.4648j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
@Tom, if I were to write a guest blog, I’d need some direction, to narrow it down. An assignment, in a way. Is there anything in particular I’ve talked about you’d like me to do it on? Or a short list of potential (somewhat specific, not overlybroad) topics you’d want me to cover, that I could choose from?
You could start with the idea sketched in your reply of 2023/08/19 at 6:56 pm to Brian Dixon, on a better way of handling complaints of sexual transgression.
Your strength in this comment is in the ideas department. You show some interesting “blue sky thinking” e.g. re totally different jury composition to the present pattern. Further down from this, you write:
So to upgrade, as it were, to guest blog level, I’d like to see you bringing evidence of having thought your system through from beginning to end, rather than just throwing out ideas, however good those ideas might be. Consistency would be one issue, for instance. Would it be possible to have the sort of jury you describe without it being an element of a legal system, when you actually want something more “fluid” etc.?
Practicality would be another. Has the “fluid” approach ever actually being tried anywhere? Has it worked? This would obviously need some research. My blogs typically include lots of links, often to research intended to back up my points factually. I’d expect to see this in yours. Much of the fun in writing a blog is in finding out stuff you didn’t know before, just through desktop research that the internet makes so easy these days. It’s very time-consuming but I do really enjoy it.
In this case, I suggest you bone up on the more “fluid” approach that was set out in PIE’s legal proposals and in the reformed Dutch law introduced in place from 1990–2002, then run with how you think they could be improved, or take positives from whatever other experiments you might chance upon.
You probably won’t have much space (aim for 2,000 words) to get far into how these fluid proposals could be made into a politically viable offering in the current hostile climate, but you might at least acknowledge the problem and give some thought to it.
That will do for now, I think, except to say that the task can often seem dauntingly big (even to me, still, after plenty of experience) but don’t let that bother you. Just take your time. There is no deadline.
Firstly thankyou Tom for a highly informative blogpost!
Here’s the thing. I subscribe to a consistently fearless and insightful substack called A Plague Chronicle, written by a fully ‘renounced’ Deutsch academic who writes under the pseudonym ‘eugyppius’. He surprised me today by posting a report on certain activities gping on now at a couple of ;German childcare centers. This was for the most part simply quotes from the advisories (or whatever you call ’em) issued by same centers. The unrestrained orgy of disgust and horror that follows via his commentariat will be all too familiar to everyone here. What amazed me however, is that the whipsmart eugyppius himself responded completely level-headedly to my objection that handwringing minus any reasoned argument was not what i signed up for. He has asked simply “what reasoned argument is missing? ” i am so flat out surprised i cannot decide what to say exactly, and must consult you, Tom, for advice. IHave asked him for time to think carefully on this. Here is a link to the substack. Please tell me if you are unable to read the whole of it (being unsubscribed) and i will c & p the rest
https://open.substack.com/pub/eugyppius/p/two-german-childcare-centres-in-nordrhein?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3pkhw
>Firstly thankyou Tom for a highly informative blogpost!
Great! Glad you liked it Mr Turp.
As for “Eugyppius”, I have just this minute read his article and find I agree with you entirely. It is just quotes from that which he disapproves of, punctuated with expressions of his disapproval. You might try pointing out to him that an opinion is not an argument. Academic or not, he does not appear to know the difference, or is pretending not to.
He asked “What reasoned argument is missing?”, which neatly puts the onus on you to do the thinking he presumably felt was unnecessary because he expected his usual readers simply to agree with him.
You could simply point out that he has not said what is wrong with the “child sexuality manifestos” in question. He has not argued that these manifestos lack the benefits claimed for them, or that they are harmful in any way. And it follows from the fact that he has not presented any arguments that he has given no empirical support to back them up e.g. evidence demonstrating particular harms.
The closest he comes to an argument is when he says this:
“I am not an expert on childhood development, but all of this makes me extremely, profoundly uncomfortable, and I’m pretty sure it would’ve made me massively uncomfortable when I was a child too.”
The relevant part is that he thinks it would have made him “uncomfortable” AS A CHILD. The implication is that other children might also be made uncomfortable and that this would be a bad thing. Setting aside that taking people “out of their comfort zone” is widely considered to be usefully challenging in many situations, helping people realise their full potential, we should note that even if any discomfort were definitely bad for kids he fails to take his case beyond the level of very weak speculation, even about his own early self. The whole point of the very early body positivity promoted by these child care centres is that they influence children BEFORE socially-induced body shame has taken effect. Applied early enough, there is reason to believe his early self would NOT have been uncomfortable. I would ask him what makes him think he is so different to any other little kid that this would not have been true in HIS case.
Also, he says he is “not an expert on childhood development”. Quite. So why does he think his opinion should influence anyone? Readers may agree with him, or disagree. But what reasons (arguments) does he give for changing anyone’s mind?
Later, he points out a couple of contradictions in the manifestos he is criticising. Fair enough. That is a legitimate attack on THEIR authority, but it does not establish his own.
And towards the end he does introduce an implicit argument pretty much by accident when he is doing more of his quoting. He writes:
“Maywald’s book is a house of horrors. After outlining the rules for playing doctor, he turns to the problem of childhood sexual assault – that is to say, instances in which playing doctor goes wrong.”
The implicit argument here is that the child care in question is potentially harmful because it can lead to sexual assault. This would be a strong argument is he could demonstrate that the kids were not adequately supervised and that they were not taught good manners and respect for others’ feelings and wishes. But teaching of that sort is very much a major objective in such schemes: it is a learning opportunity because it catches problems in the bud. It is an opportunity to “civilise” kids who might otherwise grow up to become problematic adolescents and adults.
But he neither develops his argument nor presents any challenge to the possible counter-argument I have just presented. This is a specific “missing” element of his article with which you could challenge him.
Use this however you like, Mr T. I have dashed this off quickly and sadly have no time to refine it.
This is just terrific, Tom, it has put ny thought right back on firmest track. Thankyou, and i will get to work asap. There is always a period (for me) of being mentally ‘stunned’ by the effect of seeing such utter uniformity of non-thought present itself en masse yet again, via streams of comments that are surely a sort of. masturbation in their own right – ironically enough!
I have enormous respect for the intelligence otherwise of eugyppius, who as i rather clumsily noted before renounced his academic career entirely as direct result of what he beheld as the c*v*d fiasco unfolded. He now devotes himself 100% to personal research & substacking. From him have i learned more than i could’ve ever dreamed about viruses and immunology, everything from the Marek effect to the effects of what has been dubbed for decades now ‘original antigenic sin‘. If you have any thinking room spare to read these explorations of his sometime, i will gladly send them your way
>This is just terrific, Tom, it has put ny thought right back on firmest track.
Yo! 🙂
>streams of comments that are surely a sort of. masturbation in their own right – ironically enough!
Nicely observed.
>I have enormous respect for the intelligence otherwise of eugyppius
The Eugyppius from whom the name is presumably taken, I discover, was a theologian, and not noted as a biologist. Unlike his new counterpart? Was he an academic biologist? Or just a historian, or something, with an amateur interest?
>From him have i learned more than i could’ve ever dreamed about viruses and immunology, everything from the Marek effect to the effects of what has been dubbed for decades now ‘original antigenic sin‘.
OK, the Marek effect intrigued me, so I just looked it up and have just read a scientifically referenced article from 2015, i.e. before Covid 19, that looks authoritative to me and suggests the Marek effect is important but nothing to panic over. See here:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses
I do not want to be deluged with reading I don’t have time for. But, if you feel this article is wrong by all means just say why, as concisely as possible, in your own words.
In my excitement an errant thumb wiped out the whole of my initial response to you. With that weird ‘sobriety’ that usually then descends on one’s prose following such a shock, i’d just like to mentally salvage this much….first i cannot access the NG piece, it appears to be sub only, NG however being the last place i would look to get my learn on! (Their clinging to Darwinian evo-dogma at every step is the exact mirroring of the fundamentalism they doubtless imagine they’re eluding)
Now your apparently rather reflexive need to know here what ‘authority’ might legitimize the findings of eugyppius (his previous academic rôle remains an unknown) both puzzles and intrigues me somewhat, Tom. For do the events of the past three years – the utterly brazen manufacture of consensus in “the science” and concomitant suppression of any dissent, the very lifeblood of scientific purpose – not confirm for us once and for all that the scientific establishment is now as subject to pervasive corruption as any politcal body one cares to name?
If we follow that same compulsive authority-seeking logic, would we not then ask to see your own credentials as, say, pediatrician?
As I mentioned before, the NG article concludes that the Marek effect is nothing to panic over. If anyone thinks this is wrong they will need to persuade me their arguments are stronger and their facts more well grounded than in that article.
Scientific findings, as you say, are not holy writ. They are fallible for all sorts of reasons, including biased selection and presentation of data for commercial reasons. However, science tends to be self-correcting over time. False claims fall by the wayside because their falsity cannot be indefinitely hidden. Why not? Because, to take an example you seem to have in mind, if vaccines kill people the corpse count will soon become impossible to ignore. Holy writ itself, by contrast, appears to be immune from testing based on objective criteria.
On the question of authority, which airline would you rather fly with, one with qualified pilots or one with pilots who seemed to know a lot about flying based on what they had written on the internet?
That said, Mr Turp, it is time to note that the subject is somewhat off topic and I feel I have now given it as much attention as can reasonably be expected. Reply if you wish, but please do not expect a reply to the reply.
Several aspects of this that you write here with which i might contend, but first i must ask, what is “the topic” from which we have strayed?
>what is “the topic” from which we have strayed?
This blog’s primary remit is sexual morality, as per the opening sentences of the About page. I depart from that to the extent that I think other readers who come here for the main discussion will be interested.
I surely do not wish to irritate or anything by saying this, Tom, but wasn’t your paper for Sexuality & Culture guided throughout by its contesting the view that sex is an exceptional aspect of morality? And wouldn’t that by extension mean that our real “topic” here ‘when it comes down to it’ is plain morality, in all its awful glory?
What qualifies a person at any given moment in the ongoing human conversation? I think it a question well worth exploring, and not at all satisfied by your pilot suggestion (btw am a single engine/fixed-wing jockey myself – or was until i couldn’t keep up the cost of keeping my license current!)
It’s my conviction that the internet has shown one example after another of intelligence possessed by individuals who have, by the very liberty they possess to range far beyond the strictures/structure of a particular zone of expertise, brought much more to the table than those in positions of authority could ever have managed to do.
Again, i must play up (as play-fully as possible) the example of TO’C vs paediatrician…
>>What qualifies a person at any given moment in the ongoing human conversation? I think it a question well worth exploring
Of course it is. But not by me right now. Others are welcome to debate this with Mr Turp or simply note their agreement with him, if that is the case. All I will add is that you deftly shift gear here (or redirect your joystick!) from questions of morality, where you correctly invoke an underlying premise of my “innocence” article, to questions of epistemology/expertise, on which you took swift evasive action to avoid catching flak from my aeronautical challenge question.
Still begging for a place a the back of the scientific bus to sit with all the cool kids! Coronavirus was a scientific scam by Fauci/Gates and his Schwabist mates. I gave up on the ‘minor attracted’ community when they went along with lockdown and the dangerous jabs. That said, I also decided that I hated kids too because they never rebelled against it. I don’t even think that kids exist anymore. They are still beautiful but they act dull. Dull, conformist shitty little adult tyrants in the making. Now going back to Berge’s blog.
>Still begging for a place a[t] the back of the scientific bus to sit with all the cool kids!
Yeh, bit pathetic, isn’t it MAC? Gotta smile at your perspicacity 🙂
I’m not smiling over the rest of what you say though. I’m worried.
Not the Covid stuff, which has been discussed plenty here, including blogs of my own early on in the “scam”. We all have our own views on that by now, well informed or otherwise, but not easily shifted either way. But this is primarily a MAP blog, as long ago stated on the About page, and I don’t want to see it hijacked by off-topic issues. However, that is small potatoes compared to your next point.
I’m worried, as I say. Contempt and hatred in the incel world towards women has shown itself to be a mindset that attempts to justify rape. It is a dangerous attitude.
I do hope you are just trolling me here, MAC, or maybe just seeking attention at a time when, for whatever reason, you are feeling down and in need of talking. Well, if so, you have succeeded. You have my attention. Please, tell me more about yourself – your problems, hopes, fears, intentions. Tell me what a crap blog I am writing. Whatever. Email me privately if you prefer: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk
You can rest assured that I have no intention of raping or using violence against anyone, if that is what you picked up on. I am saying that tween and teen girls don’t have any spark of originality or natural transgressiveness and are very conformist. This will be different in other places, maybe. Basically robots fixated on tablets and whose conception of the world is derived from those tablets.
>You can rest assured that I have no intention of raping or using violence against anyone
I am pleased to hear it. Thank you for that reassurance.
As for teenagers being less rebellious than they used to be, you are certainly not alone in thinking this is the case, and you may be right. If so, why has it happened? You appear to be blaming the tech (“robots fixated on tablets and whose conception of the world is derived from those tablets”).
Again, you may be right, but I suspect it goes deeper, and that the conformism is a largely rational response to current economic realities. In my day we could afford to be rebellious (up to a point) because good, secure jobs were relatively easy to come by. It is all a lot more competitive and insecure now. I’d have thought that is bound to make people more cautious, hence less willing to be seen as different, or troublemakers.
Sixty years ago, children enjoyed much more freedom and autonomy than now; they could roam in the streets without adult supervision. Now, in a society dominated by fear, adults can’t imagine letting children be without constant supervision. And now, society has become heavily moralistic, non-conforming attitudes are less tolerated.
With your relevant criminal record, you’re hardly in a position to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude towards involuntary celibate men (GLs, in context). Should the GL mating strategies, following from the feminist oppression you fundamentally support, not be to your liking – though cookies!
Do tell us more of your mindset though, as it obviously enabled criminality and denigration of GL.
Nada, I have nothing against GLs as I am sure most people here understand. I am a GL myself – GL as well as BL. Nor do I have anything against anyone who is “involuntary celibate”, which certainly includes any MAP, whether BL or GL, who would like to have a consenting minor partner but is prevented by law from doing so.
What I think is wrong is the pro-rape attitude that has been promoted by some of those who campaign as incels.
As for my “criminal record”, what an irony you should seek to use this against me. I had no idea you were one of the “virtuous” crowd!
>Nada, I have nothing against GLs
Contradicted by e.g. attacking man/girl mating strategies and, now, even going after a new contributor for finding girls beautiful (and reading the “wrong” linked blog). Despite the trivially found hostility towards man/girl love within the feminist and homosexual world, never(!) have I seen you hold a BL, feminist or homosexual contributor here to an equivalent standard.
>What I think is wrong is the pro-rape attitude that has been promoted by some of those who campaign as incels.
Premised, thanks to feminist laws, on a distinction without a difference, and demanding far more “virtue”/virtue of incels than of praise-worthy activists (e.g. Tatchell), despite the fact, in times and places, homosexuality is at least as much a crime as man/girl love.
Searching yields examples of incels, defending man/girl love and pedophilia, daring to question the distribution of sex beyond their own interests – presumably the attitude you’re on about, as I doubt it’s found on feminist or homosexual forums!
Nada, I simply do not recognise any truth in what you are saying, or understand your POV, so help me out if you can. Who is this new contributor I have “gone after”? Where have I criticised anyone for finding girls beautiful? I find girls beautiful myself, so why should I say such a thing? I think you believe what you say and may be very intelligent in some ways (perhaps with numbers), but it seems to me you are very weak at ordinary reading comprehension, and that you simply misinterpret much of what you read.
>demanding far more “virtue”/virtue of incels than of praise-worthy activists (e.g. Tatchell)
It is ironic you should choose Tatchell as your example. As many heretics here will remember, he is one non-incel activist of whom I have been very critical. See this blog: https://heretictoc.com/2021/06/21/gilt-is-stripped-from-saint-peters-halo/
>Searching yields examples of incels, defending man/girl love and pedophilia
Good. Educate me. Please give specifics of these search results. Not links with acres of text but specific examples of a sentence or two, or a paragraph, to quote directly here in a comment (with linked source). As I said, it is rape culture I oppose, not incels. I would truly be happy for us all to hear about incels who both identify as incels and also say the good stuff you mention.
The updates about Marthijn will occasionally be posted here, and at Anton’s blog linked.
https://www.newgon.net/wiki/Essay:The_Gruesome_Consequences_of_a_Hysterical_Witch_Hunt
In Love & Wars over 4-centuries ongoing on five continents. Opinionated Anglo psychos RULE the World?
14m:30s “A lot of the criticism of Psychiatry is based on suspicion of the DSM/The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual drawn up by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s a manual of categories of mental disorders, critics argue it leads to prejudice and subjective decision making.”
“Well yes, but we are not Americans and we don’t neccessarily use the DSM. The rest of the World uses the ICD11 which is the International Classification of Diseases which is published by The World Health Organisation, and the ICD11 doesn’t refer only to psychiatric conditions it is exactly what is says it is, an international classification of diseases including mental health, mental illnesses.”
“But many would say that the DSM has impacted the way psychiatrists work?”
“You are right in saying that. So, the American system relies much more on the menu, a kind of recipe approach, where you are ticking boxes and that has, I think, adversely influenced the clinicians approach to patients. So if you think of the ICD11 and you think of how psychiatry is developing in other parts of the World there’s a tremendous, a fierce interest in psycho-patholgy which requires attentive listening, it requires a degree of interest in the person in front of you. So that you listen properly to what they are saying to you, and that you’re not preoccupied with looking for minor items that you can tick-off a box. So you are right in saying that because of the economic and political power of The United States, whatever developes there, even though the rest of us aren’t necessarily benighted to them, but we are influenced by their culture and their current culture, their current psychiatric culture tends to make people want to just listen to little bits of information rather than to have a comprehensive approach to attending to the patient’s concerns.”
“Professor Mary Boyle offers another perspective on diagnosis. Mary is an eminent clinical psychologist. In her view while psychiatrists tend to deal with symptoms, often with medication, psychologists focus more on causes. She and a group of practitioners have profound questions over the way psychiatry uses diagnosis. They’re encouraging a move to think differently about mental distress. Rather than asking ‘What is wrong with you?’ instead they suggest asking, ‘What has happened to you?’.
“…Professor Boyle also suggests the social norms of the time influence diagnosis. So, Homosexuality was once classed as a disorder, does this temporal and temporary aspect of diagnosis worry you?”
“Yes it does, and this aspect of diagnostic practice for me is the ‘Achilles Heel’ of the use of diagnosis in medical practice. So that we know and can give an example, an extreme example, of the fact that enslaved Africans in the United States of America who ran away from their vicious masters. The doctors in the United States of the time gave a diagnosis of ‘kleptomania’ to the these people and that is outrageous! So I agree totally that it is open to risk if we were to use, only use, solely use, behaviours which are thought to be ‘abnormal’, the behaviours which are out with what people normally expect in the culture as the sole basis for making a diagnosis.”
“Social norms and attitudes around diagnoses are changing fast…”
“It’s a criticism of the whole idea of diagnosis as a medical procedure being applied to peoples’ emotions, their behaviour. The main difficulties I think that raises are first of all the diagnostic categories that psychiatry uses are based on very subjective criteria which are always based on social norms and that raises quite lot of difficulties as well.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001hp48
HHP’s post & link refer to a programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning called “Is Psychiatry Working?”
I agree this was an interesting programme, worth quoting. I just happened to have tuned in to the actual broadcast. Most of what is quoted looks accurate but the reference to “kleptomania” is off the mark. The word in the broadcast was actually “Drapetomania”. Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Thanx for the correction Tom. Slavery seen as the ‘norm’? A bit like ye olde fake leading-question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”
Recalls 1980S non-PC alt comedian Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown in a Cleveland nightclub during the fake ‘Satanic Panics’, “Eee thars a goodly crowd in here tonight. I thought you’d all be home fucking yer kids.”
https://unherd.com/2021/06/britains-most-offensive-comedian/
>I thought you’d all be home fucking yer kids.”
Now that’s properly edgy! 🙂
No doubt Tom knows. Post-Anglo Reformation (of convenience not conviction) the kept dumb Anglowbrows (today’s tabloid trash) were sold useful demons/scapegoats. First Catholics witchunted and into the New World, of Salem, 1692. Never far from their village idiot/lynch mob rule minds easily spooked. Their bad taste for Dark Ages Gothic Horror fairytales transferred from Olde World ‘Hansel & Gretel’ ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ bedtime myths, to 1980s ‘Satanic Panics’ SRA/Satanic Ritual Abuse. Fuelled by 1970s HollyWeird cheap fiction of kids ‘possessed’, “The Omen” & “The Excorcist”. Plus aptly ‘Victoria’, B.C. fake-psycho Pazder’s bestseller “Michelle Remembers”. False memories swept the Anglophone from the L.A. McMartin, pre-school panic, through to Protestant Ulster, remote Orkney, bustling Nottingham, and ‘edgy’ Chubby’s underclass Cleveland, UK.
“And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses Itching to boil their children. Only his verses Perhaps could stop them” I THOUGHT of those lines last Monday night, as I watched Panorama’s television account of the Orkney ‘Satanic abuse’ scandal. They come from W H Auden’s poem ‘Voltaire at Ferney’, which is about the defence of humanity against superstitious madness. Panorama played an audiotape: a six- year-old girl screaming tearful denials to three adult interrogators. ‘He did so put his dickie in your fanny’ they insisted. She screamed again.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/damn-the-children-when-the-devil-must-be-found-1563398.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
The 1980s medieval Anglo Gothic Victorian psycho ‘Satanic Panics’ SRA/Satanic Ritual Abuse.
Ghoulishly exhumed by Century 21 medieval conspiracy craZed anti-Christ undead Anglo clowns QAnon.
False memories swept the Anglophone from the L.A. McMartin, pre-school panic, across the USA, through to Protestant Ulster, remote Orkney, bustling Nottingham, and ‘edgy’ Chubby’s underclass Cleveland, UK – all ‘fucking their kids’?
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997559036/americas-satanic-panic-returns-this-time-through-qanon
Cartwright invented a second disease affecting slaves: “dysaesthesia aethiopica,” whose symptoms were insensitivity to the whip, “hebetude” and “laziness,” not wanting to work hard. See his article here:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3106t.html
Have any serious scholars ever addressed two basic points in plain-sight?
1) For a century ongoing in the Anglosphere, since the 1920s very first mass-media adult ‘Idols’ Valentino, thru Sinatra, Presley, Beatles, et al. Millions of largely low-income sexually amused-not-abused underage fans have pro-actively chased, grabbed, groped, groomed, layed adult idols also receiving massed fan-mail compliments, few complaints; and no court cases until some recent ‘MeToo’ gold-diggers. Point proven in Tom’s/Carl Toms’ 2010 “Michael Jackson – Dangerous Liasons”.
2) While, for centuries high-income Anglosphere brutal boarding schools serially multiple-abused students from age-8. Somehow creating not life-scarred victims needing lifelong help and large payouts, but trauma-free, sneering high achievers including National and World leaders. Then sending their own young children from age-8 to the same brutal boarding schools to sustain their perverse cycle of the brutally amused-not-abused? All endorsed for their kept-dumb shallow ignorant masses by the elite Anglo sadist abusive mantra, “Spare the rod spoil the child.”
A scholarly broadcast-TV/YT channel now interacting with self-declared ‘non victims’ and self-styled ‘victim-survivors’. Might shock today’s fakestream-groomed, dumbed-down shallow ignorant masses into finally distinguishing the few seriously abused, from the many underage sexually amused and mercilessly mocking Anglo Victorian so called ‘Consent Laws’ by increasingly unstoppable Worldwide guilt-free sexting and self-made C.P.
With bold AAM slogan on-screen, and for Tee-Hee Shirts BIG Sales, World copyright 2023, TOC & HHP, “My Mind, My Body, My Choice, My MAP – Mind Yer Own!”
As for Fat-Nappie Nolan, on any anti-MAP issue his first port-ly of call has always been his close ulcer, er, Ulster CEOP bent-Cop Fat Gamble.
CEOP and its Chief Executive, Jim Gamble, were accused of using vague terms which do not have a recognised meaning within either child protection or law enforcement when they defended the operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore
>his first port-ly of call has always been his close ulcer, er, Ulster CEOP bent-Cop Fat Gamble
I didn’t know that. But I wouldn’t have been expecting an easy ride from Nolan.
ah, cEOP. (Otherwise known as the teen repression agency). yes i had some trouble off them… took all my stuff… traumatised my parents.. and for what? and no, teens arent children, but adolescents.. robots.
>a new star (new to me at least) on the pro-MAP scene, Master Seaman Jessica Silva of the Royal Canadian Navy<
Surely, “Ms Seaperson”?
Meanwhile, still no scholarly recognition for MILLIONS of ‘AAMS’ in plain-sight?
[MOD: REMAINDER DELETED. (Near) repetition of previous anecdote. Good point about “Seaperson” though.]
“As a young, fit, butch dyke (tell me you aren’t!) you’d have no trouble quickly destroying an old-timer like me and it would be far less painful than a conversation with you.”
Love it. Great blog Tom, nice to see a comprehensive reminder there are so many inconvenient truths the system is so terribly afraid of.
🙂 Cheers, Ed!
I admit that the fat diapered fella looks rather hot…
>…the fat diapered fella looks rather hot…
LOL! Not to me he doesn’t, but he might be good company in a bar for an hour or two, especially if he has the opportunity to hold forth to an audience. I suspect he would have quite a few raucous non-PC anecdotes in his repertoire.
Hopefully!
Are the 8 March principles a big deal? They claim minors aged less than 18 to be able to consent, but many countries would have AoC 16 before these principles, and adult-child sex would be still forbidden. Do the 8 March principles make any difference?
No big deal, as Christian already pointed out in the comment below.
We should rather make our own principles…
The ICJ 8 March document was mentioned by Warbling JT and Happy HP in the comments to your March article on the Dutch duo; then I gave then a link to it (now dead). Beside sexual consent (Principle 16), Principle 17 about sex work calls for decriminalising paid sexual services between consenting adults, and Principle 20 states that “Criminal law may not proscribe drug use or the possession, purchase or cultivation of drugs for personal use, including by anyone under the age of 18 or while pregnant.” This too infuriated Senator Rubio, who calls that “condemning laws, such as those in the United States, that prohibit socially deleterious industries and behaviors, including prostitution and narcotics use.”
The UNO has responded to the backlash against Principle 16, see the “UNAIDS Report” in https://press.un.org/en/2023/db230418.doc.htm
Gadzooks! Should we call that a walk-back, a flip-flop, a U-turn, a backflip or all four at once? I mean, does it not explicitly contradict what Tom quotes from “Principle 16”?
>…does it not explicitly contradict what Tom quotes from “Principle 16”?
Yes, I had read this screeching hand-brake U-turn of a statement before publishing my blog and I expected it to come up in the Comments here. It looks like a panic reaction to Rubio’s interpretation.
I would just ask everyone to remember that unlike Rubio I quoted Principle 16 IN ITS ENTIRETY and invited everyone to make up their own minds as to its meaning. So if what I said was “malicious misreporting” they must have maliciously misreported themselves when they published their own statement [Added later: Or, rather, when they published Principle 16.]
So… In the end it was only about the gay/lesbian stuff, and nothing about the MAP/AAP stuff. It took them “lengthy deliberations” and a “five-year consultative process” to come to the conclusion that consent laws should not be discriminatory with regards to homosexual vs heterosexual relationships. Well… This already illustrates at what stage international organisations are.
I was wondering if there is any set of Principles that reflect ‘our views’ regarding consent/autonomy laws. In another comment I mentioned about specific age intervals, but I acknowledge that the more specific you are in your statements, the fewer supporters you will get. On the other side, being too generic is not very useful. So, a well-thought set of Principles to which individuals and organisations can adhere would be nice. I’m thinking about something around the lines of “Consent laws must distinguish between sexuality and sensuality“, “Consent laws must distinguish between infancy, pre-pubery, post-puberty, and adulthood“, “Consent laws must establish sexual intercourse between post-puberty children and adults legal under certain circumstances“, and things of that tone. Perhaps there should also be a principle around the freedom of expression regarding opinions on consent laws (sometimes obvious things need to be highlighted…). Pornography is another aspect that could be addressed as well (self-generated, AI-generated, artistic, etc.).
Maybe this has already been done. In your video https://youtu.be/H-0OewKRGPo there is a mention about a law proposal by PIE, but I have been unable to find the document. I also checked the PNVD, which could be inspirational.
PIE certainly had what I consider to be “a well-thought set of Principles” on consent laws. I elaborated on the PIE reform proposals in my 1980 book, fleshing out the principles with a full philosophical basis.
PIE’s reforms (not written by me) had much in common with the actual liberalising reform introduced in the Netherlands in 1990. The latter were short-lived, unfortunately, swept away in 2002 not because they worked badly (they didn’t) but because they could not stand against the new tide of radical gender-based victimology that swept out across the globe from the Anglophone countries.
PIE’s proposals were perhaps a little more complex and lawyerly than strictly necessary but they are still worth studying by serious thinkers on these matters. See here for full text:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2vh8ybxfi54s9da/PIE%20-%20Evidence%20to%20Home%20Office%20Criminal%20Law%20Revision%20Committee.pdf?dl=0
The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were passed in 1863-1865. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. But as Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged in reference to that very proclamation, racism still exists 100 years later. In the Declaration of Human Rights, sexual freedom is in embryo, as René Guyon wrote in his Manifesto. People remained and still partially remain disadvantaged on the basis of his gender, race and sexual orientation. It takes a very long time for societies and organizations to reconsider the old prejudices and taboo on which they have been raised.
If I remember correctly, Tom, you were canceled much the same way in 2001, when your speech “Is Pedophilia Violent?”, that was scheduled for the World Congress of Sexology in Paris, was withdrawn at the last minute. And again if I remember correctly, the feminists were the architects of the censorship.
The sex offender registry in the US is a rather authoritarian measure, but damn if you guys in Britain don’t go hog wild with it. You guys will put just about anyone on it, even kids. Not even California is that bad. Good grief, what the hell is wrong with Britain? You all seem to have gone utterly and insanely mad. I think losing the empire really did a number on you guys. You’ve been ever so increasingly weird since WWII. And Brexit seems to have just made it all worse. But I digress.
As for CBT, I don’t like CBT. It is condescending to the max. It’s selling point is that it’s “evidence based”, but unless you are just a complete social and emotional illiterate, it is basically useless. And more than a tad coercive- a sort of attempted brainwashing through repetition that would make Pavlov blush. That’s all just my subjective experience of it though.
I don’t know what to make of the UN report. Other than clearly the West is losing it’s ability to just force everyone to bow to Anglo-American puritanism. Which is just another sign of the decline of the Anglo-American hegemony.
As for your article, I had no idea you were such an established and respected scholar. I’m rather surprised at how much, tolerance, if not respect, you have in academic circles. I would have thought you would have been blackballed entirely.
What a charged post. Sounds like the antis never are on holidays…
Regarding Steve Carson’s consent essay, when he says that the “children can’t consent” statement is a legal and moral one, I would add that it is also a political statement. And I feel we lack a concise political counter-proposal regarding consent laws. Actually… I think that the statement holds true: children can’t consent… in exactly the same way as adults do (i.e. fully autonomously). I mean, the rules regarding consent among adults do not have the be the same as the ones between a child and an adult, or even among children. For example, if it is the teenager who takes explicit initiative to ask for sex to an adult, this should be considered a strong indication of consensual activity. In prepubescent ages, maybe parental consent or supervision by a third party adult should be required. Maybe we can establish stages of consent based on age intervals, rather than a single age of consent. The idea is that, for every age interval, consent laws should establish criteria about HOW consent must be articulated to be considered valid, rather than with WHO you can or you cannot get laid. Let’s be creative. Under such stringent conditions, sex between a minor and an adult becomes even more consensual than among two minors. Thoughts?
I think the framing of consent is a faulty one. Consent is a legal fiction. A construct born of contract law and property law. Much like laws which once allowed someone to sell themselves (or their family) to slavery or indentured servitude. Consent amounts to little more than agreement to your, or another’s, exploitation. Which makes sense in a society born of Christian dogma, puritanical zeal, and patriarchal dominance, which all but makes sex an innately exploitative act. Just consider even the language and manner which we talk about sex. Penetrative. Fuck. Fucked. Servicing. Wifely duties. Husbandly prerogative. Making yourself available. A kept wife. Marriage is in essence glorified prostitution born of an imperative to preserve a patriarchal order’s property and wealth. First beginning with the man/father’s consent to obtain sex from his daughter. Rape being originally a crime against the father, or husband, not the woman. And even after consent being extended to women, it is still a situation where consent is being given- a contract for exploitation, similar to submitting to an employer, a bureaucrat, a corporation, or obtaining authorization from the crown/government to go forth and exploit a resource, turn a profit, etc. Giving/obtaining this legal, propertied fiction of consent is almost a doomed project from the outset. Because the system of thinking from which it is derived is exploitative in its very nature.
And then add in the element of informed consent- which is nothing more than a CYA (cover-your-ass) move. Which is, whether we want to admit it or not (but is very evident when dealing with formal, written contracts), trying to get immunity from being prosecuted should something go wrong. To protect yourself, or your organization, from accountability. Not to mention, information is often withheld, or just simply not known. People don’t have crystal balls with which they can read the future. Informed consent can only ever be relative. But then, if you’re the wronged party- which is almost always the disadvantaged party- the onus is on you to prove that you were wronged, which is incredibly difficult to do. Because the legal stakes- on account of the system in its very nature being exploitative from the getgo- are always high. Which makes the process even more arduous, rigorous, excruciating for both parties, and perilous for both parties. It necessarily becomes this way. And the more we try to “fix” it, the more we tend to up the stakes, and thus aggravate the situation further. It’s not about finding and dealing with the truth, and making good faith attempts to right wrongs. It’s instead a game of cat and mouse- of sheep and wolves. It makes exploiters and victims of everyone.
Autonomy is a better construct, as it deals with natural reality and actual ability- namely that to simply say yes or no, full stop, no other qualifiers. Autonomy isn’t bound by information or ignorance. Autonomy doesn’t extend to authority or control over others. Autonomy is in its very nature accountable and liable for the (natural) consequences of its own actions. Autonomy is the ability to assert one’s self. Aggression and manipulation- violations of autonomy- are what are the identified problem, and are a simple matter of assertion. But even inadvertent wrongs can be addressed. But the stakes aren’t as high, in either case. Nothing more is required than the harmed party saying “You hurt me”, even if the hurt wasn’t seen or perceived at the time, and the other party being willing to hear them out and make amends. It relies more on the good will and nature of people, rather than hounding people for their bad natures, and bad behavior born of an exploitative ideological/economical system. The punitive aspect only kicks in if the harming party demonstrates unwillingness to negotiate and demonstrates a lack of respect of the autonomy of another. But the stakes are much lower, at least initially. And we can acknowledge that people may know better now than they did then, can more easily flow with the changes of the times and social norms. It becomes more a matter of negotiation and consideration of and between equals, rather than overextension of self through property, or a matter of superior and subordinate, of exploiter and victim. Things become more forgiveable and reconcilable, and work-out-able than they are under a system that has to invent such a concept as consent.
People conflate consent and autonomy, and I think it’s confounding the conversation.
If I understand you correctly, that system would be very dangerous. All it would take for anyone at any time to humiliate and exploit a former lover would be the three little words “You hurt me.” Those three words could be anybody’s golden ticket to opportunistic “amends” under threat of a “punitive aspect”. Ironically, you call this the non-exploitative alternative.
That is, if I understand you correctly. If not, please clarify.
You guys are approaching this from a way too legalistic perspective. Legalism and laws are something to move away from, not toward. Not a bolstered police state, but a weakened police state. The point is to move towards a system based more on mediation, negotiation, and judgment (as in exercising judgment, rather than “judging” or condemnation), rather than laws, codification, bureaucracy, and legislation. Away from mandates. Away from incarceration. Lower the stakes, not increase them. Away from punishment and more towards reconciliation or at least, making amends. Which our present, punitive, adversarial system, does not. The point isn’t to make a set legal standard, but rather to allow for creativity and community engagement. A system where the death penalty and incarceration are not the go to, if they are even still an option at all.
Unless the traumatic nature of the current system suits you just fine. In which case, you undermine your own cause. The rigidity of legal codes, and the high stakes involved, necessarily make the process traumatic, and exacerbate the situation. It makes wrongdoers have to fight harder, and it makes victims have to be run through the wringer- especially if they’re children. Which will just reinforce people’s instinct to not grant children any sort of personhood.
You want to have a system that is soft enough that child can make their own case, as it were, and that people who did some wrong or bad can feel both comfortable that they can make amends, that it won’t be the functional end of their lives, but that the problem still gets resolved. And, unlike our current system, which posits incarceration as “justice”- as though that makes anyone whole again, that it somehow helps anybody, it would allow for the accused to actually make direct amends to the person wronged, and allow the person to decide what justice looks like for themselves- what it would it would take to make it up to them, that isn’t violence or sequestration and isolation. That would be more substantive justice than the cold, purportedly “rational” legal system.
All the worries and concerns you bring up, already exist, mightily I might add, in the current system. Indeed, I would argue are exacerbated by the current system. By having a legal/punitive framework to begin with. And the present system is far more vengeful in its nature and effect than what I propose could ever be. What I propose is more in line with how people actually work, how people actually function. The legal system is so unnatural and contorts people into a sort of hamstrung, psychological torture- making them far more vengeful, anxious, and frustrated than they otherwise would be.
Questions: Let’s suppose that the accused thinks—perhaps rightly—that the person saying “You hurt me” is a whining, opportunistic gold digger who deserves no amends or compensation whatsoever. Who decides whether the “punitive aspect” needs to kick in because “the [alleged] harming party demonstrates unwillingness to negotiate and demonstrates a lack of respect of the autonomy of another“? On what basis is this decision made? Given the undeniable existence of whining, opportunistic gold diggers both young and old, both male and female, both rich and poor, how would we stop your system from being abused?
You can’t stop any system from being abused. However, mediators and juries of peers, so, say, you had someone who was a teenager making a complaint against you, you’d have a jury of lets say 10 people, half of whom would be teenagers and half of whom would be adults of similar age range to you. Could be other demographic factors that’d have to be represented, that are relevant to the situation, but for simplicity sake, we’ll just keep it to age for now.
Mediators and juries would have the ability to do whatever investigating and inquiries they need to ascertain the truth and make a decision, and also determine what is fair.
As far as preventing abuse, no system can prevent abuse or miscarriage of justice. However, the ability to get to the truth, and the limited stakes involved- so that you’re not working with the binary (or rigid scales) of current legal systems- where you’re found guilty or not guilty, where you’re either incarcerated or set free (or some form of probation/parole), where you pay maximum penalty or no penalty- there can be middle ground found. Intentions can be taken into account. Character can be taken into account. Not in some bureaucratic point system. Not in some mandated scale. But in a way that allows it be more in line with peoples sense of justice. A sense of justice that doesn’t have incarceration, death, or injury, or lengthy sentences in its purview.
A fluid system than can also reconsider itself and alleviate conditions, and say “it’s enough”, “it was a long time ago”, and “time to move on” at some point. That is much more likely, over time and experience, to produce better outcomes, than the cumbersome, binary, and rigid systems of law ever could.
Again, the fears and concerns you have over this system, already exist in the current system. And the “safeguards” of the current system just make it worse. They just exacerbate it. They up the stakes, up the costs, and make it harder to do anything in any direction. Because it’s only tools are, and can only ever be due to their institutional & bureaucratic nature, incarceration, massive fines, death, injury/maiming, and heavy surveillance. And the process to change laws is so arduous, so biased, and so slanted towards money.
The point of a system is to make a calculation of likely, aggregate outcomes. Not to prevent any and all abuse, which is impossible (hence why we have justice system at all, even though they too are susceptible). The question is, which is more likely to do an overall better job, more often? The legal system, along with its binaries, high stakes, rigid calculations, blunt and violent penalties, lethargy, psychological toll, prohibitive financial costs, and intransigence against change? Or a fluid system, more naturalistic, malleable system, that doesn’t have violent options on the table, that isn’t high stakes, that well within anyone’s means to pursue, that isn’t life-ending for either participant, that is less procedural, more likely to ascertain the truth because the penalties for finding the truth aren’t so life-consuming, thereby not needing endless protections against state aggression, and done by a more calculated representation of peers in juries according to relevant points of the case or complaint, and that can find middle ground where needed?
What’s so great about the current system, that this sort of system wouldn’t be worth at least being presented as an option for people to use instead of the conventional system?
Or to put it more succinctly, the TL;DR version of my previous comment- children will never be able to consent because consent is a legal fiction, and is whatever the law says it is. It is circular and by definition correct. Furthermore, consent is a legal fiction born of an abusive system, where consent means to agree to one’s abuse, sex is considered innately abusive and bad (even if only latently), and thus, people will never want that legal fiction to be (re)extended to children or adolescents.
Consent is a dead end concept. Autonomy is what needs to be discussed instead of consent.
Laws exist because people do bad stuff sometimes, and that’s how our civilization has decided to deal with such unfair situations. If you say that laws should talk about autonomy rather than consent because it relies more on “good will of people”, for me this tries to defeat the whole purpose of the laws.
Yes! And as a fiction, we can (we should!) mould it in alignment with our political standpoint. Instead of ignoring or avoiding the laws, we should own them and take leadership.
When someone asks me if I want sex and I say ‘yes’, am I consenting to be abused? Nah.
Don’t take me wrong. I do like your ‘autonomy’ concept because it calls for an active role by everybody in sexual interactions, rather than just a passive one. However, it does not fully reflect the nature of sexual relationships, in which my own autonomy must be conjugated with other people’s own autonomy. Oversimplifying, there is typically a moment when someone eventually asks someone else to have sex, right? This interaction is asymmetrical (one asks, and the other replies), and this is precisely what the concept of consent tries to reflect.
Anyway… This sounds to me like a semantic debate, and not a very productive one. Call it whatever you want… consentonomy, or whatever. I would happily embrace a consent law that allows children to have sex with adults, than an autonomy law that forbids it. To be honest, I care way more about the content.
I think it’s easier than it seems.
It is enough to simply limit anal / vaginal intercourse until the age of 12. But such harmless things as friendship, mentorship, romantic, hugs, kisses, masturbation need NOT be regulated by law. This is the task of proper sex education. Let’s take the statistics of the cases of the “earliest” pregnancy and this will be the starting point to which proper sexual education should begin. Pregnancy comes, not because minors had “early” sex, but because sex education is belated and incompetent.
Consenting to erotic activities is no different than consenting to any other everyday activities. All people who claim that minors cannot give consent must then recognize themselves as abusers ) Minors purposefully engage in masturbation, sexting, watching porn at will. What kind of inability to give informed consent are the antis talking about ? )
I like the suggestion of distinguishing between sensuality and sexuality, as it aligns with the idea of having more autonomy, progressively, as children grow older.
Do you refer to self masturbation, or to masturbation to the partner? Masturbation to the partner is more sex than sensuality. Self masturbation does not imply interaction with others and therefore consent does not apply. Also, what about oral sex?
From 13 to 18 years old they should have more autonomy than below 13, but I don’t think they can be treated exactly as adults either. In those ages, the criteria for a valid consent when having sex with an adult should be different than among adults. Also, between 9 and 12 they should be able to have sex with adults, with prior parental consent. Some people already have sexual interactions around 10 and 11. We should not forbid them or establish with who they can have sex. Instead, consent criteria should be more stringent so as to ensure that it is genuine.
Pregnancy implies intercourse (sex), and sex education is ineffective and unless the laws unambiguously make it clear that children can have sex (sorry, but we have again the consent debate back in the scenes…). If they can’t consent, the only sex education you can give is: “DO NOT HAVE SEX. PERIOD.”
But yes, I actively advocate for sexual education whenever I have the opportunity, not only for the wellness and sexual health of the youth, but also because it is strategic: It makes it explicit that children can have sex, and it obliges adults to debate about child sexuality. So I love it!!!!
Not sure if I understood well. Erotic activities imply privacy and intimacy, while consenting to sign a job contract doesn’t. Also, watching porn does not involve a (live) interaction between two people (and therefore consent does not apply at all).
There is not much difference in consenting to play video games with a friend or to wank together. It depends on the degree of trust and closeness between friends.
therefore, before 12 they can kiss, jerk, suck, and after 12 the possibility of vaginal/anal intercourse is added.
Sex education should explain that they must be vigilant and autonomous enough to determine who they can trust. Starting from online safety and ending with offline communication.
“Let’s be creative,” you say? Actually, no, let’s not exercise creativity of the legalistic sort you’re recommending. Your suggestions could easily make it necessary to consult a lawyer before fooling around with somebody. One’s sex life could easily become a Kafkaesque nightmare.
You ask for “a concise political counter-proposal regarding consent laws“. It seems to me that Carson already has an implied counterproposal far more concise than yours.
“The brain does not fully mature until the mid-to late-20s,” says Steve Carson, seemingly in agreement with this false notion. Since the MAP dignity movement and the youth rights movement appear destined to ride each other’s coattails, I refer you all to “The Myth of the Teen Brain”, an excellent debunking by psychology professor Robert Epstein.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain-2007-06/
Like you, Brian, I was impressed by Epstein’s article, which I appear to have read in 2014 as that is the “last modified” date on my annotated PDF copy. Looking again, I am reminded that the piece first appeared in 2007.
I have known Carson for some years and do not think he would be casual with the factual basis for his assertions, so I think he would be able to cite an academic source if called upon to do so, which would more than likely have been published since 2007.
Also, my reading of Carson’s point is somewhat different to yours. He seems to me to be airing claims about the teenage brain (which conservatives have leapt upon to draw dubious conclusions about the inability of adolescents to consent) in order to suggest that no good case has been made based upon them. Here is the fuller context:
We do not need to agree with the assertion that the “brain does not fully mature until the mid- to late-20s” in order to agree with Carson’s deeper point.
Incidentally, one thing that alarmed me in Epstein’s article was where he says this:
I would have been 69 when I read this, so the message was very personal! And the implication is even more devastating now I am 78! I do not have Alzheimer’s, though, and feel as though my brain is still functioning pretty well. Perhaps this tells us that brain volume and brain functionality have only a very loose relationship; or else we are underestimating the cognitive ability of three-year-olds.
Reading that paragraph from Carson again, I suppose he is not necessarily endorsing that popular notion of brain development after all. I should have made clear in my comment above that, in either case, Carson’s argument strengthens the case for youth rights by direct implication.
Most importantly of all, it should warn us against invoking questionable neuroscience to justify ageism, whether of the anti-youth or the anti-elder variety.
Here’s some encouragement for you, Tom: Despite his presumably shrunken brain, 97-year-old Dick Van Dyke has just taken up the ukulele. Let’s hope his musical performance gets better than his English accent in Mary Poppins.
https://people.com/dick-van-dyke-learns-ukulele-in-video-7724734
Amazing! It looks like there’s plenty of life left in him and he’s old enough to be my dad!
How about this
“scientists research man missing 90% of his brain who leads a normal life”
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3679117/scientists-research-man-missing-90-of-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125
Should this man not be allowed to have sex ? Does that mean he is incapable of giving consent ? Is his wife a sex offender ? Of course not.
As it was discussed in the Newgon chat recently, the brain does not fully mature until the mid-40s—does it mean milfs cannot consent too?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/481772
Good point, Cyril, although my research tells me the brain doesn’t reach full maturity until age 78, which is my age. Obviously, this means no one 77 or under should have any sex unless it’s with me, in which case the partner can be any age I choose.
Hi Tom. I didn’t reply to your email because I forgot all about it. Just popping in to point out that you defend sex segregation in sports in one sentence and then challenge a woman to a cage fight in the next. That’s gas. Also, you’ve misunderstood my position. I don’t want to bait you into trans bashing at all. As I probably explained to you in previous correspondence, I am talking to paedos because my fellow TERFs are convinced you guys are the root and branch of transgenderism as it is an ideology that involves talking to children endlessly about sex and sexuality. I dispute this. I think paedos are certainly making hay from the gender identity ideology takeover but I don’t think you’re the instigators of it. I want to get to the origins of it. That’s all. Róisín
Dear Roisin,
What’s your current view / thoughts on the origins of gender identity ideology (as you put it)? I imagine it’s pretty hard to track down, though some gender scholar academics have likely tried to. You might find something fruitful if you look through google scholar…
I think most would point to Simone de Beauvoir, who I’ve included quotes about here. But of course, she must’ve had influences too, which would date further back?… Someone else who’s famous for Westerners, that I’ve made a page for, is John Money. He’s influential, but the origin? I’m not so sure…
Equally, it’s clear that earlier thinkers like these two were not ‘pro trans’ and ‘pro paedo’ as a person would currently be. The term transgender did not exist and was not a popular one during their respective influential writings / time periods. ‘Paedophilia’ was a marginal psychiatric term which only came to public awareness towards the end of the 1970s (Basannavar, 2019), and then attracted a negative connotation of rape, murder and violence in the conservative backlash era of the 1980s and beyond (see Breland, 2019; Angelides, 2019; Jenkins, 1998).
Looking to different cultures, there are traditions such as ‘two-spirit’ peoples, or the ‘third sex’ Hijras of India, which closely resemble modern transness but are, of course, expressed, understood, and culturally legitimized through different justifying ideologies / thought patterns, traditions, everyday practices, etc. (Ideas about spirituality and religion for example, which would feel alien to many of us in the modern, secular West). Here’s a short, interesting article about gender variance in non-western cultures from 1987, from a scholar [profiled here] whose work was influential for American academics who were interested in non-normative gender and sexual practices. Every culture has ever-changing social / sexual taboos, and you can prob find examples where acceptance of gender variance and age-gap sex expression crossover. But, that’s usually because of a lack of discourse, or problematization, of either gender variance or age-gap sex contact. See the passage here by William Davenport, which illustrates the lack of psychological maladjustment because X or Y behavior wasn’t considered a big deal or was considered ‘normal’. Other scholars have compared past panic around children’s masturbation with CSA, and on that note I highly recommend Malon’s 2010 article, and feminist writers Egan and Hawkes (2012).
In my years of research into MAP history and scholarship, I’ve not come across masses of evidence linking gender variance and pedophilia / paedophilia. However, researchers like Allyn Walker who are willing to ask for MAP participants’ gender identification, may increasingly find MAPs who self-identify in a way that would make them trans by definition. Although, it should be said, Walker’s 2019 article on MAPs and ‘Queer-spectrum identities’ found mixed results.
I will just add that MAPs and MAP liberation groups in the past (e.g. Tom O’Carroll and PIE), typically express a desire for young people to express their wishes and desires; to have their voice heard, taken seriously, and not be shamed for doing so. That approach, however, does have its limits. Many, like O’Carroll in his 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, take a stand against penetrative sex with pre-pubescents (for example). Likewise, many MAPs will feel that medical intervention and especially sex reassignment surgery of any kind, when relating to children and young people, should be approached with caution.
If you look closely at early MAP history (which begins in the 50s-70s if talking about ‘paedophilia’; before then the term barely existed and ‘pederasty’ was the hot topic), you’ll find that Roger Moody, the 1st British person to self-identify as a ‘paedophile’ in print (1975), argued for a separation between sex and gender in a 1986 book chapter. He was himself influenced by Feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin who, at one time (1976), was supportive of children’s sexual expression with post-pubescent individuals; something she felt would emerge in an future ‘androgynous society’.
You can find relevant quotes and info about this in the links to Newgon provided. These are some interesting tid bits I’ve found, but I’m doubtful that any one individual can be pin-pointed as the originator of social constructionist theories of gender, and definitely not modern trans politics. There are countless people involved, developing ideas, theories, and living their lives in whatever normative/non-normative ways they choose (whether good consequences or bad). They all have wildly varying levels of influence…
I’ve written too much but I hope at least some of that’s interesting if you have the time to read over any of it. I am very suspicious of you I’m not gonna lie, but I believe in sharing or, in this case, spotlighting knowledge.
Róisín, you wrote:
>Just popping in to point out that you defend sex segregation in sports in one sentence and then challenge a woman to a cage fight in the next.
You’re welcome to pop in any time, Róisín. I happily accept comments from people of all opinions as long as they are coherent and polite (which admittedly my blog was not, but neither are your Reduxx articles or Twitter output).
Your first point here would make some sense if I was serious about the cage fight, which of course I was not.
As for the rest of what you say, it makes much more sense. You forgot to reply to me; I forgot the rationale for your enquiry, which I believe you had indeed stated earlier. Hope we can call it quits on that.
Which still leaves the question as to whether talking to you presents an interesting media opportunity, or just an opportunity for you to use me, as I said, as a “useful idiot” (of some sort). I invited you to be persuasive on the matter, but I am not yet hearing anything that would change my mind. If you already had a well-established podcast with a goodly following, and if I could take my input well beyond the narrow topic in question, it might be worth while. But that is not the case.
Even on the narrow question you have in mind, I am not sure whether it would be worth having a say. If TERFS want to believe MAPs are the source of transgender mischief, why should I help put them right? Although I certainly have a general commitment to encouraging truth over falsehood, for me to take what could be seen (wrongly) as a high-profile anti-trans stance by even moderately agreeing with any TERF-held views, would hardly help the MAP cause. It would serve only to drive a wedge between MAPs and trans people.
Maybe other heretics here can see some benefit in a public conversation with you, Róisín. If so, please speak up. But the case for doing so eludes me at the moment.
>I want to get to the origins of it.
In truth, I have no first-hand knowledge of trans activism, and certainly not of activist extremism. I do not move in trans circles. The psychology experts on Sexnet (some of whom do have real expertise IMO) talk a lot about the sexual aspect of trans-ness (especially as regards autogynephilia), as opposed to the would-be desexualised gender ID aspect, but they do not appear to feel paedophilia is a significant part of the motivational mix. I have no reason to disagree with them.
My theory, FWIW, is that those who promote Drag Queen Story Hour and the like simply see a need for children to experience greater positivity from an early age towards a broad spectrum of gender expressions and, yes, sexualities. The latter is important because even in these relatively enlightened times for LGBT (but not P), kids can be very badly impacted from early childhood onwards when they encounter shaming towards their “wrong” gender inclinations and performances. There is a common pretence that these minority forms of gender development in pre- adolescent childhood have no connection with gay sexuality (kids being supposedly “innocent” of sexual feelings). But if kids are going to grow up being comfortable with their gayness (if that is their destiny), they need assurance that it is OK. That is why sex needs to be heard about from very early on, as well as gender.
I imagine Story Hour (I have never seen one) is intended to legitimise diversity in kids’ minds so that the most “diverse” kids feel better about themselves, and the others get the message that diversity is cool, not something you bully and shame people out of. I say this is my “theory” but I have an idea (probably read it somewhere*) it is also pretty much what the activist groups say when promoting their shows etc to parents and others. So I suppose it is just a matter of taking such explanations at face value rather than expecting to find any deeper or more sinister explanation.
Nothing wrong with going deeper though: check out Prue’s erudite response to your post if you haven’t already.
*I have just checked the Wiikpedia article on Drag Queen Story Hour, which supports my hunch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_Queen_Story_Hour
Hi Tom. The reason I asked for a conversation is because I am busy and I can’t find time to talk, transcribe, edit and publish. No gotchas. No public platform or following to speak of, either, as you say. Just a search for the truth. In terms of the origins, I should clarify: I want to know how it got into law and policy. As you say, the purported value of DQSH is to expose kids to diverse sexualities. Fair enough. The question for me is: who wants to expose them to this diversity? It’s not enough to say: the pharma industry, the patriarchy, neoliberalism, paedophiles… I want to know what boring policy rationale has led us to this moment. In which meeting was it conceived and decided? Who chaired the meeting? Who typed up the minutes? Who paid for the room rental? I am getting close to the answer, and it’s boring.
>In which meeting was it conceived and decided? Who chaired the meeting?
It is of course no secret that Stonewall has been big in all this for a long time where I am, in the UK, but we generally tend to import our craziest fads from the US, and I suspect this is no exception. In a country where private medicine prevails, there are big $$$$ to be made from counselling, puberty-blocking and cross-sex hormone therapy, and trans surgery.
But this takes us into ultimate causes rather than the proximate ones that are your focus – presumably because your urgent need is to have someone to blame, someone to hate, someone you can blast the ass off, thereby winning fans among your rabid readers.
You say “I am getting close to the answer, and it’s boring.”
Do tell. I don’t think we would be bored, although the ultimate causes look far more interesting to me. But picking those apart would require a granular-level investigation of the gender landscape that looks more like a job for the careful social historian than anything to be discovered on a busy journalist’s timescale.