I am pleased to introduce a new young guest blogger. “Max Woolf” is an independent researcher, anarchist, and BL (AoA roughly 12-17) whose work has been used by individuals and organisations. He aims eventually to archive his developing thoughts on MAP issues, political philosophy, literary criticism, etc., in a forthcoming personal blog on which he is “busily procrastinating” (!). Today, Max deconstructs the concepts of “paedophile” and “victim”, and maintains that the increasing visibility of MAPs will expose CSA dogma for what it is. Like the biblical prophesy of the lion and lamb who will lie down together in peace, he presents an inspirational vision that challenges the language of predator and prey.
Living Under the Shadow of Victims
Discrimination against MAPs bears many similarities to that of other oppressed groups throughout history. However, the struggle for MAP rights and dignity is unique in that MAPs are forced to contend with a powerful cultural image of victimhood attributed directly to their sexuality. Although minority groups have been blamed for all sorts of hardships in society, from crime to war to disease, the marginalisation of MAPs is justified on the grounds that it is said to derive from the actual suffering of individual people (rather than abstractions such as “the nation” or “the race”). This has ensured that attempts made by MAPs to resist their dehumanisation will be automatically interpreted as the heartless taunting of the already traumatised.
Unsurprisingly, increasing the acceptance of MAPs in society has been a difficult challenge. Despite efforts to destigmatise them by focusing on their mental health needs rather than their dangerousness, these efforts have often been met with ridicule [1]. Supporters of MAPs have faced personal and political consequences as their work is seen as undermining efforts to prevent “child sexual abuse” (CSA)[2]. This antagonism is unique in that it not only consists of the generic bigotry applied to sexual minorities (disgusting, perverted, sinful), but has the added rationale of protecting the emotional health of victims [3].
It is necessary, therefore, to challenge the dominant narrative of the CSA victim and expose the ways it is weaponised for the purposes of keeping MAPs in a subordinated position within society. This does not require that the personal experiences of self-identified CSA victims must be held with doubt, disdain, or disregard. However, MAPs and MAP-allies cannot hope to make any meaningful change while leaving undisturbed the social construction of CSA as the only possible interpretation of adult-minor sex (AMS) – intervening merely to distinguish between those who commit such “atrocities,” and those who merely desire to.
Rather, what is needed is the examination of the socio-political processes through which all AMS came to be conceptualised as a profoundly harmful act, specifically via the framing of MAP sexuality as innately pathological and exploitative. In this way, one may trace the developing image of the CSA victim in society and culture as both informing, and being informed by, a vision of sinister sexual degeneracy.
In simpler terms: MAPs are inhuman monsters because they commit CSA, and CSA is a violating and destructive act because it’s committed by MAPs. Only by understanding the evolution of CSA and MAPs in relation to one another, can MAPs and MAP-allies counteract attempts to delegitimise them through the deployment of victim imagery, while remaining sympathetic to individuals’ unique experiences of pain.
To Make a Predator
CSA has no fixed definition. The World Health Organisation (1999, 2006) has gone so far as to state that CSA encompasses any involvement of a minor in a sexual activity that “violates the laws and social taboos of society” [4]. Studies have shown that the “effects” of CSA depend largely on the definition used [5], and that when recruiting participants from the general population and adjusting for minors’ personal perceptions of willingness (in addition to other factors), reactions to experiences labeled “child sexual abuse” are incredibly varied and very often positive [6]. It is generally acknowledged, even among researchers who work within the dominant, preventative framework, that CSA is a moral concept, inappropriately tacked on to social science methodologies which strive for clarity in cause and effect [7].
It does not seem clear, then, why AMS should be universally deplored in society, so much so that the United States Congress, in an unprecedented move, passed a resolution to condemn a peer-reviewed scientific paper on the sole basis that it challenged the view that AMS is “anything but abusive [and] destructive” [8]. Such a militant approach on this point appears even more odd when remembering that before the 1980s, there was no scientific consensus on the effects of AMS, and many clinicians believed that in most cases it had little impact on a young person’s later psychological outcomes [9].
To understand this shift, it is necessary to return to the modern origins of the concept of CSA, beginning in the 1970s with the feminist movement’s war against incest. Combining psychoanalytical theories of latent sexual trauma [10], the new pediatric diagnosis of child battery [11], and feminist interpretations of rape [12], feminists opposed the view that small girls were in a position to refuse sex from older men who wielded power over them. Feminists’ claims as to the frequency of incest were especially scandalising as they amounted to a direct challenge to the nuclear family and the unquestioned access men had to the bodies of women and children who were considered their “property” [13].
Feminist readings of incest as a product, not of a rare sexual disorder, but of male privilege guaranteed to them by a patriarchal society, was (strangely enough) not taken very well by many male commentators, and caused an enormous backlash against what was perceived as an anti-male conspiracy [14]. However, by that point, too many women had come forward with their experiences of childhood molestation for the issue to just “go away.” So, in order to relegitimise the role of masculinity and family in society, the solution was to portray the perpetrators of CSA as a unique type of deviant existing outside of the natural social order [15].
It should come as no surprise that around this time, police orchestrated highly publicised raids against communities of boy-lovers [16], and the gay community began facing intense pressure to rescind its earlier support for consensual AMS [17]. Homosexualising the attraction to minors worked wonders in garnering public support for aggressive policing and profoundly harsher sentencing for age of consent violations, and this trend continued long after the dominant LGB organisations washed their hands of cross-generational love and said to MAPs “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” [18].
Eventually, between the late 80s to the early 00s, the cultural figure of the “paedophile” emerged. Through novels by Andrew Vachss, films such as Sleepers (1996), television series such as To Catch a Predator (2004-2007), and the work of celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, a lurid and titillating image of the minor-attracted person was produced. Psychiatrists suddenly “discovered” that the attraction to minors is a psychological deformity, claiming that such people lack the ability to connect with adults and that they compensate by dominating the weak and vulnerable [19]. Professionals maintained that the thought processes of MAPs cannot be comprehended by ordinary humans, and that, while many MAPs have mastered the ability to present as normal individuals, this is only their attempt to deceive and manipulate the people around them while they violate the purity of innocents.
Victims Needed – Apply Within
While many feminists were still – at least ostensibly – attempting to keep the focus on the patriarchal family and related systems of power [20], it soon became clear that they couldn’t very well declare war on their fathers. And perhaps, at the end of the day, few of them even wanted to in the first place – incest or not. So feminists settled by joining the choir of other concerned citizens, demanding that the police protect their families from the “pedophile next door,” dropping their radical critiques almost entirely. While originally a Marxian-like interrogation of the “everyday” and its hidden injustices, the discourse of CSA soon became a validation of normal society, now tasked with hunting down and expelling the sexual “other.”
Once the issue of CSA no longer threatened the status quo, it was quickly professionalised and coopted by the state. By the time this transformation was complete, it was universally acknowledged as a global emergency. As Lancaster (2017) argues, entire “victim industries” sprung up in response [21]. This includes recovery movements, books on healing, advocacy groups, and new therapeutic techniques that promised a cure for all of the problems “associated” with CSA, from asthma to poor dental hygiene [22]. Law firms, mental health practitioners, law enforcement agencies, academics, activists, news outlets, TV writers, and moral entrepreneurs of all stripes capitalised on this new frontier of social problem claims-making.
The only thing needed now was victims, and lots of them. Numerous scholars have already covered the ways in which academic research on CSA has been designed to generate as many victims as possible and to portray their suffering in the bleakest ways. Such methods run the gamut from sample bias to failure to adjust for third factors to inconsistent definitions of CSA [23]. However, this does not explain how the public image of AMS, outside of the research community, became invariably conceptualised as a horrifically traumatising experience nearly without parallel.
The enormous diversity of AMS had become simplified into the singular narrative of “child sexual abuse,” through the use of what I call “testimonial filters.” By testimonial filters, I mean how some specific stories (and specific ways of telling stories) are embraced, highlighted, and privileged over others, in order to develop a highly scripted narrative that nevertheless appears to have sprung up naturally without top-down guidance [24]. The recovered memory debacle alone contributed greatly to the skyrocketing number of people on TV “courageously” relaying their gut-wrenching ordeals to millions of viewers on the edge of their seats with mouth agape (experiences which in fact never occurred).
That aside, it is important to pay attention to some of the other mechanisms producing victim subjectivities. As has been argued, the status of the victim has become a stable source of political identity in a chaotic and fragmented world [25]. With such romanticised depictions of the CSA victim (now survivor) and the apparent solidarity amongst its communities’ members, it is controversial, though not out of bounds, to consider the reasons why people with even banal or mildly unpleasant sexual experiences as minors may later adopt the victim label, if only to gain some small reprieve in a world that demands constant fortitude of mind and soul [26].
What’s still more interesting than this, even, is the ways in which the voices of minors who self-identify as consenting subjects are structurally invalidated. As the definition of CSA expanded in the public mind to drastically inflate the number of people who fell into the victim category, professionals soon had to contend with the fact that these “victims” themselves so commonly departed from the script they were supposed to follow. The solution was to systematically discount all such testimonies as false consciousness, hiding deep and intensive trauma [27].
Therapists and police investigators have often described the slow and difficult (yet critically important) process of cajoling young people to accept the official view of themselves as victims [28]. Many professionals even consider the high rates of positive experiences as a problem in itself, on the grounds that (a), it reduces rates of disclosure [29], and (b) positive reactions indicate that minors are “learning from their abusers” that such experiences are healthy and enjoyable [30]. For reasons that should be clear, people with positive memories of AMS in their youth have few platforms to share their experiences, and even fewer incentives.
The Centre Cannot Hold
Originally, the MAP was needed to explain the presence of victims in society. Eventually, though, victims were needed to perpetuate the image of the MAP as a morally defective aberration, in need of constant surveillance, control, and cognitive restructuring. The entire typology of “cognitive distortions” of MAPs in sex offender treatment programs – such as the belief that minors can legitimately desire sex with an adult, and refuse sex when they don’t – demands the mass disqualification of youth subjectivities which might, inadvertently, make MAPs feel less ashamed of their sexuality.
Of course, there are many people who can legitimately recall negative sexual experiences with adults as minors. Often, this is the result of abusive behaviour on the part of the adult, or the leveraging of a close/familial relationship. On other occasions it might be due to societal condemnation, or simply to the inherent emotional pitfalls of intimate relationships at every age. In any case, people who have experienced abusive, coercive, or otherwise unpleasant sexual encounters should be heard and validated, obviously.
However, this does not prevent inquiry into broader mechanisms designed to allow only a few acceptable narratives of AMS to enter public view, while silencing or doctoring the rest. As already noted by numerous scholars, the way we think about pain cannot be disassociated from its political function in reinforcing certain hierarchies, sexual hierarchies included .
There is a reason why recent efforts by professionals to humanise MAPs in society – even while incessantly maintaining that their support for MAPs is largely for the purposes of helping them remain “offence free” – has been met with such hostility, with many MAP advocates told their activism constitutes a “slap in the face” to CSA victims. It is because the social construction of CSA as a heinous and violating act (irrespective of “small details” such as the minor’s consent) is fundamentally rooted in the conceptualisation of MAPs as nonpersons; to be represented only through TV crime drama, psychiatric textbooks, and mugshots.
The emergence of a MAP identity/movement, even one that is non-contact and committed to upholding the moral standards of society, is a transgressive and radical development. It is also one that the established discourse on CSA cannot tolerate, because the visibility of MAPs as living, breathing individuals rather than phantasmagoric abstractions of wickedness will inevitably demystify CSA and permit the excavation of the countless expressions of sexual diversity that have been stuffed within that single term used to silence all dissent.
[Further blog items continue below, after the notes.]
Notes
[1] Naudé, A. (2022). A Case Study via Sociolinguistic Analysis of Covert Pro-Paedophilia Organisation Registered as a Child Protection Charity and its links to Paedophilia Enablers in Academia and Academic Propaganda. British Journal of Philosophy, Sociology and History, 2(1), 35-59; Farmer, C., Salter, M., & Woodlock, D. (2024). A Review of Academic Use of the Term “Minor Attracted Persons”. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 0(0).
[2] Some notable examples of professionals facing severe secondary stigma for their support for MAPs include Allyn Walker, Jacob Breslow, and Miranda Galbreath.
[3] Nematy, A., Flynn, S., & McCarthy-Jones, S. (2024). YouTube Commenters’ Discourse of Paedophilia: A Qualitative Social Media Analysis. Sexuality & Culture, 28(1), 71-95. p. 82. See also https://www.pennlive.com/news/2022/08/prison-sex-therapist-defends-pedophiles-as-minor-attracted-persons-outraging-victim-advocates.html; and https://www.adamhorowitzlaw.com/blog/2022/05/minor-attracted-persons-a-troubling-phrase/
[4] Cited in Mathews, B., & Collin-Vézina, D. (2019). Child sexual abuse: Toward a conceptual model and definition. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 20(2), 131-148. p. 136.
[5] Haugaard, J., & Emory, R. (1989). Methodological issues in child sexual abuse research. Child Abuse and Neglect, 13, 89-100.
[6] Kilpatrick, A. C. (1992). Long-range effects of child and adolescent sexual experiences: Myths, mores, and menaces. Routledge; Rind, B., Tromovitch, P., & Bauserman, R. (1998). A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. Psychological bulletin, 124(1), 22; Okami, P. (1991). Self-reports of “positive” childhood and adolescent sexual contacts with older persons: An exploratory study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 20, 437-457.
[7] Seto, M. (2008). Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. pp. vii-viii, footnote; Jahnke, S., Schmidt, A. F., & Hoyer, J. (2023). Pedohebephilia and perceived non-coercive childhood sexual experiences: Two non-matched case-control studies. Sexual Abuse, 35(3), 340-374.
[8] Mirkin, H. (2000). Sex, science, and sin: The Rind report, sexual politics, and American scholarship. Sexuality & Culture, 4(2), 82-82.
[9] Finkelhor, D. (1979). Sexually victimized children. The Free Press; Malón, A. (2011). The “participating victim” in the study of erotic experiences between children and adults: An historical analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40, 169-188; Clancy, S. (2009). The trauma myth: The truth about the sexual abuse of children – And its aftermath. Basic Books.
[10] Bates, V. (2012). ‘Misery Loves Company’: Sexual Trauma, Psychoanalysis and the Market for Misery. Journal of Medical Humanities, 33, 61-81.
[11] Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Harvard University Review. pp. 138-39.
[12] Jenkins, P. (1998). Moral panic: Changing concepts of the child molester in modern America. Yale University Press.
[13] Worrell, M. L. (2001). The discursive construction of child sexual abuse. Open University (United Kingdom).
[14] Angelides, S. (2005). The emergence of the paedophile in the late twentieth century. Historical Studies, 36(126), 272-295.
[15] ibid; Chenier, E. (2012). The natural order of disorder: Pedophilia, stranger danger and the normalising family. Sexuality & Culture, 16, 172-186.
[16] Angelides, S. (2009). The homosexualization of pedophilia. In Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space, 63-82; De Orio, S. (2017). Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights (Doctoral dissertation).
[17] Gamson, J. (1997). Messages of exclusion: Gender, movements, and symbolic boundaries. Gender & Society, 11(2), 178-199; Paternotte, D. (2014). The International (Lesbian and) Gay Association and the question of pedophilia: Tracking the demise of gay liberation ideals. Sexualities, 17(1-2), 121-138.
[18] Matthew 7:23. New International Version.
[19] ATSA. (2005). Facts About Adult Sex Offenders. https://ccoso.org/sites/default/files/import/ATSAfacts.htm; Sonenschein, D. (1998). Pedophiles on parade; Hunter, J. (2008). The political use and abuse of the “pedophile”. Journal of homosexuality, 55(3), 350-387.
[20] Gordon, L. (1988). The politics of child sexual abuse: Notes from American history. Feminist Review, 28(1), 56-64.
[21] Lancaster, R. N. (2017). The new pariahs: Sex, crime, and punishment in America. In The war on sex, 65-125.
[22] Levine, J. (2002). Harmful to minors: The perils of protecting children from sex. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 27.
[23] Okami, P. (1990). Sociopolitical biases in the contemporary scientific literature on adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents. In Pedophilia: Biosocial dimensions (pp. 91-121). New York, NY: Springer; Kilpatrick, A. C. (1987). Childhood sexual experiences: Problems and issues in studying long‐range effects. Journal of Sex Research, 23(2), 173-196.
[24] I am drawing here from the “propaganda model” of communication developed by Herman and Chomsky (1988) in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.
[25] See, for example, Best, J. (1997). Victimization and the victim industry. Society, 34(4), 9-17; Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton University Press; Bumiller, K. (1992). The civil rights society: The social construction of victims. JHU Press.
[26] Davis, O., & Dean, T. (2022). Hatred of sex. U of Nebraska Press. pp. 95, 120.
[27] Angelides, S. (2019). The fear of child sexuality: Young people, sex, and agency. University of Chicago Press; Yuill, R. A. (2004). Male age-discrepant intergenerational sexualities and relationships (Doctoral dissertation, University of Glasgow); Grondin, A. M. (2011). Thinking outside specious boxes: Constructionist and post-structuralist readings of ‘child sexual abuse’. Sex Education, 11(3), 243-254.
[28] For numerous statements to this effect, see the Newgon page: List of conflicting statements by victimologists.
[29] Lahtinen, H. M., Laitila, A., Korkman, J., & Ellonen, N. (2018). Children’s disclosures of sexual abuse in a population-based sample. Child abuse & neglect, 76, 84-94.
[30] Haaken, J., & Lamb, S. (2000). The politics of child sexual abuse research. Society Vol. 37 No. 4; p. 7-14. http://www.just-well.dk/abusepol2.pdf
*******
Your host resumes:
FREE PLUG FOR KARL’S “CUTE BOYS” BOOK
Being featured in a sex-negative, transphobic, feminist attack-bitch online magazine may not be the ideal free plug for a MAP’s new book, but a lengthy recent article (well over 1100 words, with four photos, no less) in Reduxx is a tribute of sorts to Karl Andersson’s Impossibly Cute Boys: The Healing Power of Shota Comics in Japan.
Such an extensive, detailed, treatment inevitably conveys the message that this is an important work, even though the Reduxx writer’s obvious intention is a scandal-mongering take-down. Not that obvious, though: the style is quite restrained, with a faux sophistication that could come from a credible review, including a few actual passages and quotes of which the author himself might almost approve.
Shota, for instance, is helpfully explained as “a shortened version of shōtarō complex”, which “refers to comics, cartoons, and other forms of visual media which focus on young boys in erotic and sexualised situations.” So far, so good. We might argue with “sexualised” rather than “sexual”, but the next bit goes more carelessly wonky: “The boys are primarily depicted as prepubescent, often having hairless bodies and very small features.”
Small features? Really? One of the most distinctive aspects of “cute” depictions is that they exaggerate, not reduce, the size of the child’s eyes and head, making them look babylike – as may be seen on the cover illustration of Karl’s book. I suppose the writer might have button noses in mind but not little cocks. I doubt the book shows any of the latter (it wouldn’t be available through Amazon in that case), and any stiff boy dicks shown in illicit shota are surely never going to be depicted smaller than life-size.
That said, a peculiar feature of classical art (Greek and Roman) is that statues of naked young males, while they invariably look athletic and quite muscular when depicting teens or older figures, tend to be given tiny genitalia. How weird is that? The only males shown as well endowed (and with an erection) are the mythical satyrs, who were comically ugly and always horny as hell. But I digress.
Even where Reduxx insinuates that Karl is hiding something, they struggle to land a glove because he has always been strikingly (scandalously!) candid. Describing his promotional YouTube vid for the book, Reduxx claims he “neglects to mention” that Manchester University launched an inquiry into the circumstances of his PhD research. But this is fake news! Towards the end of the video he announces that his book includes an entire “bonus chapter” focused on the Manchester debacle.
More positively, Karl also tells us his is the first book on shota in English, which not only goes into the history of the art but also expands into a “theory of play”, a “philosophy of boy worship”, and even a “theory of how humans work”. Sounds fascinating.
The only reason I haven’t already read Impossibly Cute Boys myself is because I first want to clarify my own thoughts on “cuteness” independently, as far as I can, without being overly influenced by Karl’s undoubted expertise. I am working on it.
STRIPPING VICAR WAS A NIPPER
A child drag artist was featured on Heretic TOC a few years ago. Now I can report on a 10-year-old boy’s wildly risqué strip act. On ice, no less, which suggests frostbite might compete for the biggest risk involved, along with Mum and Dad being referred to Social Services.
But, hey, this was a while ago, when folks were more relaxed about the antics a sexy kid might get up to. This was back in the early 1990s, when the young ice-skate dancer in question came up with his imaginative “stripping vicar” act. He started the routine in a clerical cassock. When this came off, his “vicar” was wearing only black stockings and lacey underwear.
How many of these items were also whipped off and tossed into a whooping and hollering crowd was not laid bare, alas, when the act came to my attention last month thanks to straight-laced BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
By this time the little vicar had gone on to fame and fortune not as a raunchy performer but as a prolific playwright. For this was James Graham, who gave us a string of politically-themed plays and is more recently known for Dear England and the mega-hit Sherwood TV series.
As the celebrity guest on the venerable DID show, Graham refused to put a label on his sexuality, but did reveal his lovers had been both females and males. Had his vicar act given him a sexual buzz? Unsurprisingly, that question was kept firmly under wraps.
WHY ARE NIPPERS CALLED NIPPERS?
The word “nipper” in my previous cross-head has a nice ring in connection with “stripper”, which is why I used it. But I had my doubts. When we talk about nippers, don’t we usually mean toddlers rather than 10-year-olds? Isn’t it another word, like “rug rats” or “ankle biters”, best applied to ground-level little animals, who might gnaw or nip at below adult knee height?
Well, no. I checked it out, and the word turns out to have a historically revealing origin, one that reminds us of a bygone era when kids – not toddlers, but small kids nevertheless – were taken seriously enough to be given a responsible job.
It’s a seafaring term. It’s all to do with the surprisingly (for land-lubbers like me) complicated business of weighing anchor manually, using a capstan. Here’s the key bit of an online description.
The anchor cable was lashed to the messenger cable with bits of rope called nippers… As a nipper reached the cable hatch a small boy (called a Nipper) would untie the lashing and run up to the forward bulkhead to tie it onto the cable that was just coming through the hawse hole.
So the Nipper’s job was to “nip” a sailing ship’s anchor cable to the endless belt turned by the capstan when the anchor was being weighed. Now you know.
But the more interesting bit for most of us is that small boys (as young as eight or so) were taken on as sailors and entrusted with this crucially important task.
What’s more, in the Royal Navy in the 18th century, “young gentlemen” could even achieve the officer rank of midshipman as young as 13, as will be understood by the many BL fans who saw Max Pirkis play just such an early teenager in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), a film based on the nautically accurate novel by Patrick O’Brian – a role in which Pirkis was praised for making us believe he could lead sailors into battle despite his young age.
Updated the page for https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Gary_Dowsett
Discovered his book Practising Desire (1996), which is incredibly thoughtful, sympathetic and reasonable, particularly in the section ‘Understanding the Sexuality of Boys and Young Men’. Would highly recommend it to anyone, as the book is sympathetic to pederasty / age-gap sex, and shows very clearly to contemporary eyes how homosexuals were the MAPs of the past. Arrest, beatings, alienation from friends, hysterical parents, and even feeling distressed enough to seek therapy; that’s how bad it was for the homosexuals and it’s not long ago! Incredibly eye-opening and sobering, for the modern reader.
Any further reduction/elimination of the Anglo AOC is likely to cum from pro-contact Gay AAMs/ex-AAMs recalling their FUN SeX with GayMAPs in or out of Anglo elite brutal boarding schools??
Recalls SeXy 70s UniSeX ‘Love Magnet’ BoldMAP suddenly CROTCH-GROPED at a family-meal restaurant by a grinning pro-contact 8 yo GayBiAAM HOT Lad causing SHOCK to all adults – ‘cept SeXperienced Bold MAP natch.
In 1994 UK Conservative MP Edwina Currie introduced an amendment to lower the age of consent for homosexual acts, from 21 to 16 in line with that for heterosexual acts. Moving the amendment on 21 February 1994, Mrs Currie declared: ‘It is the first time in over a quarter of a century that the age of consent for homosexuals has been discussed by the House of Commons. The taboo of silence that has denied the sexuality of young gay men has been decisively broken.’ During this debate, Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, said: ‘a society that has learned, over time, racial and sexual equality can surely come to terms with equality of sexuality. That is the moral case for change tonight’. However, Edwina Currie’s amendment was defeated and the gay male age of consent was instead lowered to 18. The compromise did little to placate the thousands of angry gay rights demonstrators who had gathered outside Parliament. But, as Edwina Currie pointed out when looking back at this, ‘the atmosphere had been altered forever’.
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/equality-of-sexuality-the-age-of-consent/
https://www.thepinknews.com/2014/02/21/edwina-currie-campaigned-change-age-consent/
https://highlandsexualhealth.co.uk/services/sex-and-law
someone said
i cant be a bigot im gay
and proceeded to say i was disgusting !Sounds a bit like saying “I can’t be a sinner, I’m a Christian”!
Anyone can be a bigoted / hold bigoted views.
SeX AAMs Rock n Roll.
(Millions of pro-contact AAMs for unRockin Esther Rancid to innerview before and after dark?)
Proby shows me a cutting from the News Of The World circa 1965. In it he is pictured with a group of girls, none of whom are more than ten years old. “I also had my nymph-petits,” he boasts, “they were mine. My ‘special brew’.” But surely he wasn’t doing anything to these innocents?
“I wasn’t doing a damn thing! But you’d be surprised what they were doing. I’d go to bed at night on my own, then one by one they’d pitter patter up till there was four on each side of me and I’d have to put a pillow over my head to keep from laughing. They’d be playing, saying ‘Go on touch his thing. I dare you.’ Then you’d hear ‘Look it stretches!’ I was a human experiment for them…These were 6—8 year olds.”
Proby claims that young girls stayed overnight with their parents’ consent. He elaborates on triangles involving mothers and daughters. He says the woman he was living with at the time liked little girls too.
He’s unrepentant about this grotesque exploitation, playing up the image further still with the sleeve of his most recent single on which he’s photographed with a girl he describes as his ‘baby-wife’.
https://www.alamy.com/pjproby-american-singer-and-songwriter-in-the-portobello-market-london-in-1965-photo-tony-gale-image486746978.html?/
https://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/pjhot.html
Now republiloons are in, theres gonna be one hell of a lot of suffering for maps. or anyone… even teens .. they havent got a clue… i feel sick !
Speaking of not having a clue, but in a recent post on here it has been suggested that Maps should form an alliance with Zoophiles and possible incels, speaking of Zoophiles I was wondering if there was any evidence of sexual preferences like Pedophilia and homosexuality actually exist in say cat or dogs?
I once did a post about this on the now defunct Freespeechtube. A book I was reading had some discussion and sources. The short answer is yes.
There’s TONS more pro-choice literature relating to age-gap sex contact among humans, but there’s also been occasional pro-zoo scholarship published.
See my review of Foucault, Feminism and Sex Crimes for these sources.
One that stands out to me is LGBTQ…Z?, by Kathy Rudy.
Most recently, see the open-access article Bensto, F. (2023). Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible. Journal of Controversial Ideas, 3(2), 5. Noted in the page I made for Peter Singer.
That should help your search :p
I am an incel… life really is cruel… not zoo though. but if people are that way inclined i wont judge. um i cant help you on that one… but people do say homosexuality exist in animals.. so thats one way they say it normal. But animals go with whoever is capable of reproducing.. if i say that about humans im evil??
I am also not a zoophile, however like you I am an incel, and I believe that many maps out there are also incels (due to the laws that stop us from having non coercive relationships with the age groups of our choice in a legal way) I also can’t have relationships with women of my own age either due to the fact that in the past I have openly come forward with my sexuality, its like they just completely reject you even if we don’t break any laws.
>I am an incel… life really is cruel… not zoo though
Misread this post and typed a reply super quick. You were asking about pedophilia / homosexuality in cats and dogs…
Well, not sure about those animals specifically, but a good starting point would be here https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Research:_Intergenerational_Sexual_Behaviors_in_Animals
In short, yes both pedophilic and homosexual sexual behavior has been observed in non-human animals, including monkeys.
For the record, the reason various sexual activities are rendered illegal or stigmatized is because it upsets and disgusts people, not because it’s “unnatural.” Anything possible in the material world and not imaginary, is provided by “nature” and thus “natural.” The argument from nature was never a good argument in general…
Pedophilic sexual activity is “unnatural” like homosexual sexual activity, heterosexual sexual activity during non-fertile periods, and using an umbrella on rainy days. “Natural” is eating, sleeping, breathing, emptying the bowels and very little more – everything else is culture.
Voluntary and mutual sex between humans is natural, the division of sex into socially acceptable and unacceptable is a culture that can change.
MAP feelings are trapped in the (adult) body, just as Transgender feelings are trapped in the (other gender) body. MAPs are rejected by society in the same way that homosexuals were in the past. Due to social rejection, MAPs are unable to express these feelings, just like Incels. So yes, these groups are able to understand our feelings and become allies. But homosexuals have assimilated into the culture of “normativity” and, unfortunately, no longer remember their and our common history.
That’s right… in the USA, it’s going to be even more absolutely severe for any man who does not worship middle aged or older women. We’ll see what effect this causes on the rest of the world. It might be short-lived though as the US gets drawn into more wars it will lose.
Long election post incoming: :p
Well, the Left aren’t edgy enough, entertaining enough, and populist enough to offer a meaningful opposition. They also have far less corporate and big money backing, and tend to be more sectarian and divided amongst themselves.
We’d need an army of edgy debate bros like Vaush from 4 years ago (back when he had a sense of humor); people who’d push out daily content responding and even debating people in real time, utterly crushing and humiliating them for the world to see. And that’s just a start!
The Right have got the media ecosystem down: the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Lisbsofticktok, Tucker Carlson, and so on, making constant uploads every day. They don’t play fair or nice; it’s always scapegoating the newest Other – attacking people for their appearance – the nose rings and blue hair, etc.
The Left tries to play with decency and appeal to people’s brains with fully costed manifestos (in the UK) and actionable plans, but don’t have the populist rhetoric or enough support from their own party and certainly not the billionaire owned media, to get elected. The only time Leftist governments tend to get elected is in times of dire crisis, when the powers that be have pushed wealth inequality so far that people are poorer than ever and react against the established order. It’s a rare occurrence, and they’re not often popular. The new government is left to inherit the mess of their predecessors, making them easy targets for their opponents and the media.
The Left has given the Right the easiest go-to: Trans children. Think of the children. They can’t say gay men are pedos anymore, but trans… well, that’s new and scary and icky. Blue hair? Pronouns in bio. OK Groomer…
The Left shot themselves in the foot on Trans issues; why after all, can a child consent to puberty blockers and serious medical treatment, but not to sexual contact? If people believe that under 18s are “children”, and children are vulnerable, asexual, easily manipulated idiots, it’s a hard sell to start making exceptions with the case of gender identity.
And lo and behold, Trump’s already talking about banning queer education, using language like “sexualization” adopted from Liberals! They’ll use the child protection discourse to roll back as many rights as possible: “protecting” the unborn children by banning abortion, “protecting” children from seeing porn by instituting ID verification and ending privacy, “protecting” children from being “prematurely sexualized” by seeing drag artists and Trans people; “protecting” children from engaging with “predators” by banning them from social media (as Australia is planning to do).
I think most people agree that *some* level of protection / concern is reasonable, but a lot of popular rhetoric is OTT fear mongering.
The Left, if they want to get over their aversion to winning, need to turn to economic populism. Just hide your power level like the Right do; communes, automation, new publicly-owned infrastructure companies, legalizing sex work and making public spaces available Amsterdam-style: not every policy has to be said out loud. You can do your own Project 2025 and wait until after you’re in power :p
———‐——–
FYI: I thought Harris would win. Not because I like her or her party – they’re pathetic liberal PC cowards – I just can’t see how you’d vote for the alternative. But, I do acknowledge, that depending on what media you consume, what narratives you adopt, you’ll be living in a different reality to your fellow Americans. You see the same things as fundamentally different.
It’s tough, there are always winners and losers in politics and society. For some it’s life and death. The affordable care act being repealed could kill many… For some it’ll be best to work on leaving the U.S.
But, on the bright side, the next 4 years will bring entertaining TV and drama for all. There’ll be lots of tough decisions for those of you who want or need abortions, and a whole host of other things. I hope you’re ready for a brave new world!
Frankly, I’m excited to see just how crazy things can get! Truly, there’s never a dull moment!
The implications of the US election outcome are so huge for all aspects of everyone’s lives, including those of children and MAPs, that a full blog is needed to explore the topic. If I’d known you were going to write this (excellent) comment, Prue, I’d have asked you to tackle it as a guest blog.
However, I might be putting my own thoughts out there after some further (perhaps too ponderous!) cogitations in due course, so I will simply thank you for your contribution today. I will just add that I heartily agree with most of what you say, but my eventual slant looks like being slightly more philosophical than political, with a note of caution to offer on the gender front.
After a rousing teaser like that, I should say don’t get too excited y’all, now will ya? 🙂
Meanwhile, everyone should feel free to discuss Prue’s thoughts. Try to keep political comments relevant to HTOC’s subject area, but I don’t want to cramp anyone’s style too much at this pivotal moment in history.
Always respect true, not fake, victims. Include millions of true victims of fake media.
Still awaiting ANY counter from Esther Rancid fake media-mugs and all negative victims, plus no-contact A thru Z thinkers. .
Any counter to decades of positive, proactive aMused not aBused non-victims MILLIONS of AAMs. Young fans (often underage) fancying, chasing, grabbing, groping, GROOMING, fucking adult stars? Many fans now grinning grannies recall their aMused not aBused illegal FUN SeX with adult stars.
Cum ohn counter cunts IF ya can? Your DEAFENING silence SPEAKS VOLUMES!!
Quote SeXy ’70s ‘Love Magnet’ (no star) Bold MAP’s two AAM HOT Lolis, 9 & 10, “We think of you at night in bed – all having kisses & cuddles!!” (No-contact natch.. WTF?!)
Childhood Sexual Abuse by Women of Boys Who Go On to Sexually Offend: Review and Critical Analysis (2024)
Maybe the ‘abuse’ label isn’t warranted then??
Is there a clearer example of the complete feminist attack against men? First they say this stuff seriously, to pretend like men and women have the same sexual desires and the laws are equal, while the overwhelming majority of victims of statutory sex laws are men for the obvious reason that heterosexual men desire young barely pubescent girls.
Then they finish with an attack on men, with a focus on trying to figure out the motivation for male “sexual offenders” who are criminalized by the very same feminist laws. They blame social conditioning instead of normal biology because men aren’t interested in 81 year old swimsuit models.
They say it’s perverted for men to desire young girls, but good for men to desire menopausal women who look like The Crypt Keeper. Literally.
What could possibly be their motivation, hmmmm?? Could it be jealous old women, could it be manipulative teen girls, could it be abuse industry tyrants want money and power, could it be simps backstabbing each other for approval from women to get laid?
Example: Let’s make a law saying it’s child sexual abuse to wear a push up bra in front of a “child” (under 18), then write articles pretending this law has nothing to do with gender – Men who offended against children under this law typically use no force during the abuse, and are unlikely to be prosecuted. Girls who men have sexually abused under this law are unlikely to report it, perhaps due to social conditioning designed to minimize such abuse. The intersection of these unique features may help understand the role of child sexual abuse perpetrated by men who wear push up bras in front of children in subsequent sexual abuse by adult women who wear push up bras in front of children.
Oh and by the way, 99.9% OF OFFENDERS ARE WOMEN FOR REASONS WE CAN’T UNDERSTAND LOL ANYWAY LET’S PLAY WITH TIKTOK!!!!!111
and, maybe the boys themselves just want this and they like it ? This is the essence of sexual pleasure.
Reputational crisis at a Chilean University, resulting from a post on social media X (Twitter) about the controversial theses in the School of Philosophy and Humanities (2024), in Frontiers in Education.
Dry and repetitive read imo, but cites Rind et al. 1998 and discusses two controversial thesis from Chile on paedophilia, which made national headlines in foreign press during 2023. I noted this event on Newgon’s MAPocalypse page, but didn’t realize quite how big a controversy it was until seeing this article. The image on page 6 gives a chronology…
Here’s Newgon’s summary:
In March 2023, two students associated with the University of Chile (Leonardo Arce Vidal and ”’Mauricio Quiroz Muñoz”’) whose respective MA and BA theses problematized the figure of the pedophile and the notion of intrinsic harm in relation to age-disparate sex, were (along with their supervisors) subject to university investigation. The familiar right-wing twitter storm had preceded and provoked these investigations, also leading to condemnation by university officials and organizations which speak on behalf of minors/youth. The university both condemned the works and pointed out the works were “purely theoretical nature, which do not report intervention on human populations, and which, even taking into account how debatable their content turns out to be, met the requirements of the academic evaluation process“.
The fallout from the MA thesis is the focus of the 2024 article. The student’s 2016 thesis was called Pedophiles and infants: folds and folds of desire. I made a page on the author and his supervisor here: https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Leonardo_Arce_Vidal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16W7R8fwYc0&pp=ygUcY2xpdmUgc3RhZmZvcmQgc21pdGggZ3Jlc2hhbQ%3D%3D
Nice to watch or listen to in the background. Clive Stafford Smith, to me at least, is a refreshing and inspirational figure to listen to amongst the currently burgeoning sea of far-right populism sweeping many nations. No fearmongering over “degeneracy,” no talk of apparently imminent civilizational collapse, no hate-preaching and talk of killing already demonized minorities. By contrast, working as an attorney he defends the persecuted, works to save inmates from being executed and, in the case of Guantanamo bay, tortured. What a cool guy.
In this video, at 12 mins he speaks about “criminals,” and at 13:10 speaks briefly about “paedophiles.” He even says that when he worked in New Orleans, upon receiving mandatory postcards notifying the neighborhood that a sex crime convict has moved there, he and his wife went round and offered them legal aid should they need it.
Not all heroes wear capes :p
I’ve not watched this yet, but will do so. Mr Stafford-Smith has long been an object of my utmost admiration for his work co-founding Reprieve “whose stated goal is to “fight for the victims of extreme human rights abuses with legal action and public education”. Their main focus is on the death penalty, indefinite detention without trial (such as in Guantanamo), extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial killing” (Wikipedia). He ranks with Julian Assange as a defender of justice.
Thanks for your comment. He is a based lad indeed 🙂
Holy shit! A new article by Bruce just dropped! What a way to mark halloween; scare some Antis with a dose of reality!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384936602_Older_Gay_Men's_Sexual_Experiences_as_Boys_with_Men_An_Empirical_and_Narrative_Analysis
From F.B.
Sex is said to be, next to eating and drinking, the strongest drive for all life on Earth.
Pornography for humans has been popular since men could draw on cave walls.
The Greeks gave it the title it bears today “porno” forbidden, and “grafia” drawings.
The uncontrolled Capitalist USA, has been appropriately named the ‘Pornhub of the World’.
We could make a serious splash if we were allowed to TALK !! is there anywhere??
Danny Whittaker MOWE/My Own Worst Enemy/Renegade Ape – 3h:22m:54s interview with a Pedophile (Tom O’Carroll) 14 Apr 2018. 3.37K subscribers 54,713 views. 14 Apr 2018:- 3h:22m:54s.
Tom O’Carroll is a self-confessed pedophile, pro-pedophilia advocate, and writer. In today’s episode we delve in to Tom’s early life, the experience of first realizing his sexual attraction to children, his failed attempts to lead a normal life, and his pro-pedophile advocacy efforts. We debate the nature of consent, whether or not adult-child sexual relationships are always harmful, if childhood sexual trauma is caused by the sexual acts themselves or subsequent societal judgement, and the likelihood of pro-pedophile advocacy ever resulting in a society which accepts adult-child sexual relationships.
With transcript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBM-yXULc&t=9759s
Australian Stinson Hunter 2m.7s. interview with Tom O’Carroll – Founder of Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) 64.2K subscribers 44K views 9 years ago: 2m.7s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UcOMDT9hx0
“A Decent Life. The Dissenting Narrative of Tom O’Carroll”.. Playlist•10 videos•2,061 views.- 1 unavailable video is hidden
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Tom+O+Carroll+a+decent+life
“After Dark” currently unavailable online? Broadcast early-hours ‘live’ with no scheduled end time, the series, inspired by an Austrian programme called Club 2, “After Dark” March 2003 BBCTV debate with Tom O’Carroll, plus high profile child protection campaigner Esther Rantzen, lawyer Helena Kennedy QC, a former abuse victim, a criminologist, a solicitor, and two academics. Since its formation, the PIE organisation has called for the open discussion of paedophilia and the abolition of laws against consensual sexual acts between children and adults. And the “boy lover” – as he calls himself – has addressed international conferences across the globe and written a book justifying the behaviour of those who prey on children. Mr O’Carroll and five other members of the exchange were convicted for “conspiring to corrupt public morals” in the 1980s by publishing a magazine advocating sex with children. He joined the ‘After Dark’ panel for a discussion on paedophilia and child protection.
The BBC defended the decision to give a platform to Mr O’Carroll, saying he was invited on as part of a legitimate discussion about a topical issue. “Paedophilia, its policing and how society deals with it is one of the most important issues today,” said a spokeswoman for the corporation; The BBC feels it was a legitimate discussion to have. We should point out that Mr O’Carroll’s views were strenuously and repeatedly challenged by the participants throughout the discussion.” After Dark, which was relaunched earlier this year, was axed by Channel 4 in the early 1990s.During its tenure it became a hub of discussion for the chattering classes, frequently attracting controversy with its topics and format.The show was famously taken off air after a showdown between a drunken Oliver Reed and feminist Kate Millett. (Congratulations on being one of our top readers globally – you’ve read 73 articles in the last year)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/mar/04/digitaltv.broadcasting
>“After Dark” currently unavailable online?
It is not available AFAIK. I’m sure I must have seen a recording of the episode in question because the discussion was analysed by a professional media/PR guy at one of the IPCE conferences, who was giving media performance tips for how to “stay on message” etc.
Not that I managed to do so very well on that occasion. I had naively hoped for a civilised discussion based on After Dark‘s good previous record. But I reckoned without the poisonous presence of Esther Rantzen and a screaming “victim” she brought with her.
Very hard to think straight and speak calmly when someone is blasting curses in your face with the implied threat of imminent physical attack. Tempting to shout back, but the last thing I wanted was to come across as a stereotypical male bully and victim silencer. Not that I could have talked over this woman: she could have drowned out a ghetto blaster!
>Very hard to think straight and speak calmly when someone is blasting curses in your face with the implied threat of imminent physical attack. Tempting to shout back, but the last thing I wanted was to come across as a stereotypical male bully and victim silencer. Not that I could have talked over this woman: she could have drowned out a ghetto blaster!
2003 pre-Selfie Sexting proactively aMused not aBused from Age 4. Still, the polite Twin-Whammy Truth Nuke ATTACK would have calmly BLASTED ghetto-blasters back to the stone age from which they can never recover.
1) Centuries of Anglo elite high fees BRUTAL boarding schools ritually, serially abusing boys from age 8 creating NOT life-scarred low-income VICTIM-SURVIVORS needing lifelong HELP and BIG Cash Compo, but sneering trauma-FREE aMused not aBused high achievers. Including National & World Leaders then paying high-fees for their own young boys from age 8 sent to Anglo elite BRUTAL boarding schools to sustain their sneering cycle of the serially aMused not aBused. Esther Rancid’s ghetto blasters pleeze seXplain? Answer the question! Answer the Goddam question!!
2) Decades of Anglo/US/UK/Global MILLIONS of young fans (often underage) fancy, chase, grab, grope, GROOM, fuck, ADULT Pop-Rock Stars. Many fans now grinning grannies recall their ILLEGAL SeX FUN with ADULT Stars. Esther Rancid’s ghetto blasters pleeze seXplain? Answer the question! Answer the Goddam question!!
Two-counts – and out – antis OUT!!
Always respect true, not fake, victims. Include millions of true victims of fake media.
Translation into Russian:
Danny Whittaker MOWE/My Own Worst Enemy/Renegade Ape – 3h:22m:54s interview with a Pedophile (Tom O’Carroll) 14 Apr 2018.
https://fstube.net/w/hzSP3nrmGHw7nbvVZYUTYX
“A Decent Life. The Dissenting Narrative of Tom O’Carroll” 1 video – 1h:09m:14s
https://fstube.net/w/5QC6AY8M2HSNEQUDqz33ty
AGE RESTRICTED???? SERIOUSLY whoever runs you tube are dictators.
It never used to be. So i have watched it. Renegade ape? i only know of savannah ape and hes still there amazingly
MAPophilia breakin’ BIG?
https://kindpeoplemykindapeople.site/heyllo/
Past the Dark Field, by Sheila van den Heuvel Collins (2019) – A collection of short fiction about non-offending, anti-contact minor-attracted persons (MAPs).
Book I’d never heard of before. May be of interest to some. Seems to be liked by Prostasia types, as they reviewed the book on Amazon.
Book discovered via a MAP blog: https://kindpeoplemykindapeople.site/past-the-dark-field-a-thought-provoking-collection-of-stories/
Important to be aware of this development.
Born circa 1984, Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins is a Canadian author and tutor living in Mississauga, Ontario, who believes whole-heartedly in the adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword”. .
Interview transcript: https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/www.prostasia.info/Documents/Unredacted/PreventionPodcast-Transcript.pdf
https://sheilavdh.com/about/
Max’s article is one of the very best I have encountered on this website. I should state at the outset that I have a non-contact position, which agrees with my life philosophy and aesthetic preferences, but I hope that doesn’t invalidate my opinions in the eyes of users. I too am concerned that men attracted to children are grossly stigmatised, but the sad fact is that many amoral, low IQ and aggressive men do engage in acts of violence against children. This has muddied the waters and complicates the underlying issue of whether adult-child sexual relations can ever be philosophically justified. I made a mistake (at the lighter end of the scale) and now have a sex offender manager. But regardless of how I viscerally feel about whether, on a purely basal sexual level, I would want to for example engage in oral sex with a child, especially giving pleasure to a child, I instinctively hold back from this and consider that I have no right to inflict sexual knowledge on the innocence of a child’s mind, however we might see childhood innocence as a societal construct. For I believe childhood innocence is a real and objective quality, and furthermore a quality inherent in and inextricable from the nature of childhood, and this is why I have a non-contact philosophy. Furthermore, I write regular letters to a young child (with the parent’s acquiescence) and I am always especially careful with my language and focus on giving her moral and intellectual instruction. Nevertheless, I found Max’s article fascinating and note that many individuals attracted to children carry around an intolerable burden of shame and guilt.
It’s ok. Although I think you understand perfectly well that puritanism and sexophobia impose shame, fear, stigma and barbarian laws in society. Children are also sexual beings (surprise) who have genitals, “dirty” fantasies, desires and ability to orgasm. Knowing our nature and our body cannot be a harmful burden if it is given appropriate and gradually just as they are taught to ride a bicycle, starting with small kid’s tricycle and traffic rules.
>I…note that many individuals attracted to children carry around an intolerable burden of shame and guilt.
Surely after all these years thinking Zen knows that benign LGBTQZ MAPs & AAMs since the post-WW2 counter culture ‘Love Generation’ have shed irrational unnatural body-Guilt & Shame. Ancient Biblical, Olde Victorian, and modern fake media abuses by mass deception deviously masked as ‘Public Protection’. Corrupt cultural abuses perversely causing far more harm than benign proactive sex which can never be stopped. Or, would mere self-masturbation by natural infants still be deemed ‘abusive’ by retarded fake virtue-wavers for corrupt careers, ratings, profit, power and control over the kept dumb shallow ignorant mob-rule masses? A new ‘fake patriotism’ last refuge of $COUNDRE£$ !!
Can’t help but think ZT that being *genuinely* sexually aroused by our smallest beings and simultaneously imagining the defilement of their – shall we say ‘pristine condition’ ensuing from any “contact” (dreadful word that!) must produce a dreadfully schizoid sort of mind state, no? Are you sure that a man in such a state is capable of moral instruction? Heavens to Betsy!
Your take on “innocence” would appear to be a rather quaint one indeed. For how would you say that very quality, born in Blakean/Wordsworthian reaction to The Enlightenment, to relentless market spread and so on, can ever extricate itself from the vastly erotic potentiality that is born with it? With which it is coeval? And that has virtually underwritten the confusion and doublethink of our W E I R D, lolitafried culture ever since?.
In a word, does.not an enttity so alluring and lovely that you do not even wish to touch it for fear of despoiling, not constitute erotic paralysis in extremis?
Exactly. The fallacy of “childhood innocence” is conveniently believed by people who get off on breaking the rules or fantasizing about it.
Then the abuse industry takes these useful idiots and amplifies their beliefs for profit and tyranny. Enough!
Interesting point. I am genuinely sexually aroused by female children. I believe children have the capacity for sexual feelings and eroticism. But I do not believe I have any right to touch a child, discourse sexually with a child, or act irresponsibly and with unethical intent towards a child. However, I find pleasure in children and I invite children to find pleasure in me. That does not mean transgressing any ancient boundaries. Adult-child physical sexual intimacy is maximally damaging to the social fabric, because it upsets the careful order of society that has been set in sacred bounds throughout the history of civilisation, in ways you can’t possibly imagine. It is a naive and foolish wish to have physical sex with a child. On the other hand, a subtle psychological intimacy between adult and child is perfectly fine and can never be legislated against, and the irony is that the latter is more rewarding. Any physical sexual act upon a child is defilement, because the child is constituted psychologically and spiritually in a radically different way to the adult. The child has a more innate imaginative awareness, is more in tune with the ‘unfiltered brain’ whereas adulthood witnesses a radical narrowing of the imaginative perceptions, and the state of primeval connection and ‘eternity’s sunrise’ that we associate with childhood has been termed, perhaps poorly and inadequately termed, ‘innocence’. But when we introduce the existential violence of a physical sexual encounter into this world of the child, the end result is a deleterious ‘system shock’ that leads to a radical loss of primal imaginative cognition and a deep incision into moral development. Now let’s consider the moral alternative, for those who feel an attraction towards children. We open an existential space of love, understanding and mutual fulfilment through a degree of psychological tension, admittedly, but primarily through a refined, or even erotically charged, connection which focuses on genuine nurturing, joyful exchange of erotic energies safely and without the existential violence of a physical sexual act, and mutual joy and fulfilment in the being of the other through a deeper connection than could ever be achieved through penetration, digital or lingual (tongue) manipulation of a child’s body – an act that is rooted in a shocking level of manifest, tangible and experiential violence, even in a superficially ‘gentle’ mode of action. So, this deeper, ‘moral’ connection: certainly psycho-eroticism, finding more effective, joyful and clever ways in the mutual exchange of pleasure between adult and child. A physical sex act is the bluntest of instruments; and the sad irony is that all the enjoyment is in the anticipation, and the corruption of the unique childhood modal landscape, the crushing of their spirit through foreign adultified impositions like a physical sex act, will only blunt the enjoyment of the adult, especially over time, and become a soul-destroying exercise. In conclusion: focus on the infinite gradations of psychological mechanics in mutually pleasurable eroticism, but do not invite pain on both parties through the naive folly of thinking a physical sexual act is somehow preferable to this; it is not.
You can handle sophisticated punctuation such as the semicolon, ZT. How about paragraphing? Makes for a much easier read.
Apologies
Accepted. 🙂
Very unique perspective… 🙂
>I find pleasure in children and I invite children to find pleasure in me. That does not mean transgressing any ancient boundaries. Adult-child physical sexual intimacy is maximally damaging to the social fabric, because it upsets the careful order of society that has been set in sacred bounds throughout the history of civilisation, in ways you can’t possibly imagine.
Kinda Biblically backward (for non-Judeo/Christians) ULTRA CONservative, negative, near Fascist? Not least now with varying AOCs and no-guilt ‘Love Generation’ LGBTQZ POSITIVE norms Worldwide. Who can still possibly imagine so called ‘ancient boundaries’ throughout the Genocidal history of so called ‘civilisation’ being maximally damaging to the carefully ordered anti-social sacred disorder for CONservative/Fascist Power & Control, perversely masked as so called ‘protection’? All the usual suspects in the millenia ongoing fake virtue-waving Public-Protection RACKET generating hate! Last refuge of $COUNDREL$!!
While millions of ex-AAMs later grinning grannies and grandads recall their so called ‘illegal’ PRIVATE FUN sex with attractive adults – positively no one else’s effin’ business.
Parrotfaze a SeXy ’70s Mom to ‘Love Magnet’ Bold MAP, “My girls LUV you, and I knew a nice man like you when I was young. Our minds, our bodies know pleasure from pain – so FUCK the fake system!”
Mighty glad you said all this, ZT, for if i may briefly pop a cliché, it dearly, clearly needs to be said. Sadder than sad it is that no MAP will engage with it – aside from HHP that is dragging along his entire retinue of buzzword-dingleberries, which is really no engagement at all – leaving His Turpticles alone to rise to the occasion?
Can we formate on this chase plane right here?
“..and the sad irony is that all the enjoyment is in the anticipation” (will set aside the UCML = “unique chiildhood modal landscape” for the moment )
Yes. A preconceived outcome is what destoys the capacity to play, destroys the ability to fully imhabit the erotic wiilderness of an ever expanding moment, ‘uncontaminated’ by expectation of any kind..I fully agree that pitifully few adults (i think ‘large humans’ is better) could ever be capable of that..
But shouldn’t the question before us now be one of asking how many small children we reckon are capable of it? Keeping in mind all the while your very own (many) exultations on behalf of instagram rugrats doing their very darndest to chew some of that always looming ‘adult fat’? To participate in that which they surely must be said to be anticipating all the while? As surely as they do the smartphone which beams to them from clear across the universe?
Would they prefer that nothing’s gonna change their world (= UCML?)
It’s pretty clear to me that when we speak of what is erotic to us. we are invoking something already at many removes from the plainly sexual..
We are speaking instead now of the appearance of our most cherished figure on a scene-of-representation which we can have no certainty we still share with him, her or it. The mercurial elusiveness of intimacy itself is virtually predicated on such mutually alienated presences upon an always evanescent scene.
Who can even begin to say where a prepubescent person might’set about internally ‘situating’ herself on such a haphazard horizon?
This all comes crashing back to TO’C’s fight against the alleged.tyranny of a romantic/erotic ideal, doesn’t it? His attempt to redefine what “virtue” might be, in the context of, might one say, accountable vs non-accountable person ?
But do any two adults have any more idea of “what it is they’re doing”? And if so, how did they come by such…gnosis?
I for one find myself re-reading from that paper quite often. At its hottest juncture it asks “So is erotic love a critically distinctive feature of human sexuality that demands its own ethics?”
My own answer to that is along the lines of asking if what is felt/imagined to be erotic can really be shared? Obviously all that precedes two bodies in a space they’ve never been before, ie the social elements of what is usually described as “romantic”, can be. But.
But I can’t help asking myself how hard MAPs present here have thought about just how they thiink they would handle themselves in even one such *close encounter of the third kind*.wiith a little one? Whose “ethics” exactly, will we then be f-f-following? Forgive me (readers) I’m trying to get inside this one ..
Maybe ZT, equipped with his starbelt of Zentronics, will be bold enough to tell us what he thinks might happen if the suckled breast was simply swapped out for a handy penis, in the course of an infant’s early career?
Woud that infant then get to see the world as one giant phallogocentric possibility? Would the fortunes of every paedo’s own custard-launcher thus be already in peril upon the sea?
If all else fails here ZT, then perhaps you could do us the great honour of recounting a misadventure or two with your sexy offender’s manager??
Sorry for the lack of spacing between my paragraphs above. Comes from c & p’ing to TO”C direct from my own kit!
Some people just have a knack of getting things wrong no matter what they do! 🙂 If you c/p from Word you can pre-insert the spacing from your “own kit”.
Was using QuickMemo app. But you are probably right anyway, sir! .To atone for my error i offer this pic of Melania Trump as child with her sibs and chums growing up in Communist Slovenia. The waif at foreground left should get MAPs going in no time!
Nice pic, Mr Turp. Theologically speaking, I don’t think I am qualified to offer absolution. Informally, though, your act of atonement strikes me as a more than sufficient expiation of the “sin” in question. Rest assured, you will not be scapegoated on this occasion! 🙂
Dear Mr Turp, ok so you’re asking me what would be the psychological, moral or spiritual consequences on a young child if they engaged a male adult in act of fellatio. I should preface this by saying that isn’t my particular fantasy. Call me passively sexual or whatever you want but my fantasy is entirely to give pleasure to the child, and sometimes I burn with desire to give pleasure to a child; but this can be sublimated into normal acts of human kindness or everyday safe interactions rooted in kindness and nurturing.
So my particular fantasy is to give oral pleasure to a child. I imagine it would be fantastic; in fact I imagine it would be so overwhelming for me that I would scarcely be able to cope with it. And then I ask myself, what is the existential value of such an experience? Is it qualitatively superior to showing loving kindness to the child in an innocent and harmless, though greatly rewarding way? Is a direct act of sexual contact qualitatively superior to the eroticism of indirect mutual interdependency?
And finally, we come to the nub of the problem. If I was to engage in that existentially violent act of physically touching the child in a sexually intimate way, what would be the overall consequences? I’m sorry to say I strongly believe it would have a deleterious effect on both the child’s psychological faculties and her moral sense. In fact, it could be devastating.
Now let’s consider a young child performing an act of fellatio upon an adult male. This would be of a significant magnitude more psychologically devastating than oral sex upon the child. This is because fellatio is in effect oral penetration, and is therefore a penetrative act upon the young body of a child. This act upon the child, is for one thing, an act of utter selfishness on the adult’s part because the child is dehumanised as a passive tool of sexual fulfilment. It is even callous, because no regard is given to the child’s subjective experience or the psychological consequences for them. It is therefore, finally, an act rooted in psychopathology because it involves a radical dismissal of the needs, wants, wellbeing and psychological and physical welfare of the Other.
I certainly do not agree with any penetrative acts, including oral, upon a child, and I also do not agree with, as Tom suggests, focusing on the child’s body or their pleasure in a hypothetical adult-child sexual encounter, which while theoretically more kind, also has a devastating psychological impact (of a lower magnitude than penetration).
So what is this ‘devastating psychological impact’? The child’s brain is radically different from the adult’s, being in a continual state of vulnerable development and formation. Vulnerable, because it is especially sensitive to exogenous shocks, traumas and intensive experiences. Now introducing sexual contact with a child risks inflicting or embedding a trauma in their developing brain, but even if the experience does not reach the threshold of ‘trauma’, which is very possible as we hear about in some French underage sexual encounters, for example, it still creates new neural pathways reflecting a precocious sexual experience, which weaken the rational capacities of the Will and can create sexual difficulties, abnormalities, addictions and problems later in life, because the radically developing brain cannot safely handle the existentially violent dimension of the experience.
Hence setting an age of consent of 16 today in the UK, or 12 in the Middle Ages, was not a mean-spirited act of unfairness, a killjoy mentality or an oppression against both adults and children, but an act of wisdom rooted in the practical needs and realities of a healthily functioning society. The discrepancy between ‘12’ in the Middle Ages and early modernity, and ‘16’ in recent modernity, reflect the additional care given to the child, indicative of moral and civilisational progress.
I repeat: eroticism is on another plane altogether. The eroticism we feel in a state of mild psychological tension with other people is existentially gentle, and healthy, even if it occurs between adults and children. And hence adults can find pleasure in children, and children can find pleasure in adults, but this happens through the normal everyday realities of our lived experience, and certainly not through direct sexual contact.
Again, the law is not being cruel to minor attracted adults: the law is protecting on a macro level the healthy functioning of society, and on the micro level the psychological integrity and wholeness of the individual, against both traumas and difficulties.
I hope I have made this sufficiently lucid and clear.
Damn you ZT, i was just putting some finishing touches on my attenpt to ‘deconstruct’ Tom’s response to me way down yonder at base of this burgeoning comment stack, when you hit with this rather enormously overloaded thing, purporting as it does to have the last, universally applicable word on relationship between pleasure and a developing brain, all wilfully confused as it is with the assuned motivations of agents involved in any pleasure provision (gosh, did i really say all that in one coherent sentence?)
Cutting to the chase then. Most.MAPs (i ASSUME) have seen enough erm..old Russian movies by now to know, to see with their very own eyes, that an infant can be just as intrigued and delighted by the presencs of a oenis at its mouth as any other suckable.
Why are you here to bombard your text with words like devastating, vulnetable, shock, trauma and all the rest of them?
Verily it is as if you are trying to assimilate yourself, with everything you’ve got, to the standard, utterly reflex take on all these things, just to suppress your realest feelings? Just where do you think that is going to get you? Certainly in the good books of your SOM,
You’re in the process it seems of trying to UNDO years of work hereabouts trying to consider separately somehow, in their respective fullnesses, pleasurable interactions in themselves and subsequent interpretations of same made retrospectively way down the track …
Give me one bald reason that pleasure felt via the sexual apparatus of a snall being cannot be as potentially “innocent” as any other kind of felt pleasure! Give us even one clear demonsration that such pleasure has the automatic effect of befouling a small budding brain!
You also bypassed all my enquiry into the contradictios of your Instagram rugrat fanboyhood, and your present baroque sentiments…
..
Haha, Mr Turp, do not take me in the wrong way! Maybe children can experience bodily pleasure in an innocent fashion, I’m open to persuasion. As for Instagram, I love Instagram. I love the plump thighs and cute faces of young girls in bikini pictures. I love to masturbate to them on occasion. It gives me great pleasure and fulfilment. Do not assume that I am not on your side. I only hesitate to say whether a real sexual encounter with a child, were it hypothetically legal, might be a step too far. But I utterly sympathise!
ZT, these confident assertions all hang on the single dubious premise that early sexual experience is inherently violent.
It is easy to see how this notion takes hold. Penetration leading to climax tends to be an energetic, vigorous affair, with lots of hard thrusting. “Vigorous” and “violent” are very adjacent concepts. And it is easy to agree that anyone, from baby to adult, stands to be alarmed and traumatised when such activity is imposed.
The question of children’s brain physiology is really just a fashionable, pseudo-scientific red herring. Psychological trauma at any age implies deleterious brain changes.
What you are not factoring in, I suggest, is that MAPs who pride themselves in caring about kids’ feelings would die rather than upset a child. Because they are so keen for intimacy to be mutual and consensual, the last thing they want is to shock and traumatise. So they avoid activities that might be frightening or unpleasant. (Impositions on an unwilling child are another matter, of course.) The available evidence on this runs completely against your presumptions.
But you wouldn’t be aware of that, would you? Like the mainstream media and the political blowhards, you apparently think your own opinion is somehow a sufficient guide to reality.
Tom, I completely understand. I know you are far more competently versed in the evidence and the literature than me. Believe me, nothing would be more sweet or pleasant to me than a caring and gentle sexual encounter with a child, looking to her pleasure, her safety and her fulfilment. Such a thing could even be noble, I suppose. However, I am minded of the current legal reality, and the plain fact that many men are rough and brutal, and not gentle at all.
>the plain fact that many men are rough and brutal, and not gentle at all.
All too true, which is why there are (and need to be) criminal sanctions against a whole range of bad behaviours, including what is now in the UK called “controlling or coercive behaviour” towards (adult) partners, as well as assault and rape. But I am not persuaded that laws against bad behaviour should also be used against non-violent, non-coercive contacts.
Are you saying that the young were more mentally stable in the past ? Or were they all deeply mentally traumatized ? No. The physiological aspects have not changed. It is this “additional care” that makes them infantile and psychologically vulnerable.
Modern society has all the necessary knowledge and resources to ensure sexual education and safety without unnecessary restrictions. Puberty has accelerated, instead of helping young people develop naturally, their sexuality is supressed, which leads to negative manifestations. The atmosphere of moral panic allows people to be intimidated and politicians to score points on “protecting children” using them to introduce restrictions on freedom
Interesting point. I only presented an alternative perspective in the interests of constructive argument. But you make valid points.
Addendum to comment below:
>No adult should be ‘fucking’ kids, if by that the poster means pre-pubescent children. Surely it is so extremely uncommon for pre-pubescents to have vaginal or anal intercourse with another human being short of being raped, that it’s hardly worth debating. The only case of this being normative that I’ve come across in research is among the Tiwi in aboriginal Australia, described here. And that’s in a society which had cultural beliefs justifying the practice, as “Sexual intercourse is considered by the Tiwi to be the direct and only cause of breast formation, growth of pubic and auxillary hair, menarche, and subsequent menstrual periods.“ It’s not impossible that a radically sex-positive and sex-educated future society could see very young people being open about and desiring of this kind of activity, but in our current reality where young people are increasingly monitored and kept from sexual information or experience at least until adolescence, it’s not an idea or discourse that very young people will have access to and thus have any strong desire to do, especially with another person. Young people do experiment of course, inserting objects into themselves, but much of this will be private and solitary and not involve other people, least of all legal adults. Again, rare and hardly worth debating. Add to that, it’s not what educated “pro-c’s” advocate for anyways, when arguing for legal reforms in a future, kinder world. The poster should read Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980), and learn what pro-c’s are all about: a complaints system, an effective age of consent at 12 with no penetration permitted before that age, etc. etc…
On the kids being equal to adults: Again, refer to my comment below with a line from Gert Hekma. Inequality is the basis for social and sexual life. Inequality is the norm; trying to force equality in a fundamentally unequal world is the aberration. Whilst I agree that young people should be encouraged towards independence from an early age and given more rights and freedoms socially and under law – it eases the burden on parents and gets youngsters used to being agentic – I don’t think that adults and children will ever be considered “truly equal.” Or even that they should be or need to be. It’s simply not necessary.
We don’t need to be equal in law or in status, money, height, strength, or anything else, to have voluntary and positive sexy fun time together. Adults aren’t “truly equal” amongst themselves, so why would that ever be the case with younger people who, by their nature, will generally have smaller bodies, be physically weaker, and have less experience to draw on when making decisions? Our particular society is structured by inequality: we all come from different class backgrounds and have unequal access to resources. You might have more money and a car where your partner or date doesn’t – it’s unequal (oh no! :o) – but a positive and an asset to you both. You can pick your date up and take them out, how wonderful… You could abuse that power, driving them to somewhere secluded, locking the doors and beating and raping them/ But, thankfully, most people want to be liked by others, have fun times with them, and have a conscience (in addition to knowing that rape and violence are already illegal)!
In short, the goal is not equality, it’s kindness, understanding, openness. As many mutual positive experiences we can have before we die. The goal, is freedom… People aren’t “equal” and they never will be. That’s not the point…
In case anyone is left unsure, I totally endorse what Prue is saying here. This captures a lot of important stuff brilliantly.
>an effective age of consent at 12 with no penetration permitted before that age, etc. etc…
Long before and much since the 19Haties, paediatricians have cases of horny preteens self-penetrating anal or vaginal with phallic objects. Including at least one bath-time HOT Loli who loved slipping warm wet soap-bars into her tight twat, and even gleefully CAME back (with mortified Mom) for repeat seXtractions of slippy-soaps by the gentle handy HOT Doc.
AngloVictorianAntis, cuNt to the chase? Mere consensual pre-legal, preteen, sex with a gentle kind MAP is FAR LESS harmful (de fuckto BENEFICIAL) than proven SERIOUS HEALTH-RISK commonplace smokes or vapes behind or beyond the primary/grade school bike-sheds, in plain-sight SUCKAS!!
Recalls a humorous postcard on open sale in SeXy ’70s Holland, A preteen blonde HOT Loli stares at the camera with a ciggy in her hand, while blowing smoke rings from her pert mouth, “Of course I smoke, but only after SeX.” Recalls another SeXy ’70s HOT quim, er quip, “Do I smoke after sex? I dunno, I never looked!”
Plus, the profiteering ‘Menarche Industry’-encouraged/approved SELF-PENETRATING mini-tampons for preteen HOT Lolis . .
Adolescents usually get their first period between the ages of 10 and 15, but it can occur earlier or later. Twelve is considered an “average” age for menarche — the start of the menstrual cycle. Some individuals may find that they begin their period around the same time that other family members had theirs, but this is not always the case.
https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/pediatrics-articles/getting-your-period-normal-menstrual-cycle-teens-preteens
AOC is weird. 16 , in UK , you can consent to gang bangs, but at 15 you cant consent to a kiss??? thats daft.
And what could be wrong with people meeting, being friends, hugging, kissing, masturbating. However, sex-negative agenda and criminalizing laws create opportunities for intimidation and blackmail. Openness would allow us to better control and prevent bad relationships and not destroy healthy ones.
https://forum.map-union.org/viewtopic.php?p=3049#p3049
Incredible post by Fragment. A bit like in Hikari’s video on Ole Martin Moen’s “The Ethics of Paedophilia”, Fragment looks into the reality of victimological research studies cited to justify the current social order. He finds, upon actually reading them, that they do not support blanket prohibition.
I may set up an account on MU to respond to this.
They write:
>Well, speaking as a Teilio non-MAP, I agree with Moen (2015) and Moen and Sterri (2018) that asking people to remain celibate their whole lives is actually a very big ask. It wouldn’t be such a big a deal if MAPs were able to live without fear, have their own law-abiding, open, positive community culture, supported by their family and friends; if they didn’t have the few legal outlets available to them (artwork and sex dolls) under constant scrutiny and threat of being banned or criminalized. Then, yes it wouldn’t be as big a deal.
I do not want people to suffer over something so easily preventable.
>Yes, it is preventable. How? By “dialing down” the panic, as past APA president Martin Seligman said. Distinguish, as we do (or should do) in lawful relationships, between voluntary and involuntary, forced or coerced experiences. We (the dreaded “pro-c’s”) recognize young people’s spectrum of experiences, from negative to positive and shades of gray in-between. All we ask is that other’s do the same. To not deny, erase, or overwrite young people’s positive self-perception; a remarkable and brave thing to express given widespread demonization of such perspectives. Imagine how confusing, how distressing it would (could) be, to have had a positive, or “meh” sexual experience as, say, a 15-year-old, with someone in their mid 20s, which was completely unremarkable to you until you start hearing narratives years later that your experience was “abuse,” the past partner is a “pedophile,” and everyone’s “so sorry you had to go through that…” It is, in fact, incredible that contemporary data like the Finnish victim survey, of 30,000 cases (mentioned in the linked post), shows what it shows. Despite intense moral panics, heavy legal and social penalties, reality continues unabated. It is only, and unfortunately, that many people have become detached from reality, since they only see sensationalist, attention-grabbing and therefore profitable negative messages and stories.
The poster talks about “expert consensus”, but as usual, couldn’t prove their claim. (They never can)… Trust me, I’d prefer they were right. It’d make my life a TON easier. Society would be justified (up to a point)…
Well I can tell you, as a non-MAP “expert” who has taken time to study this subject in-depth with no particular personal incentive – you don’t hear the positive side very often because researchers are afraid and don’t want to become the next Rind et al. or Allyn Walker controversy. I have it on good accord that many researchers are privately secret radicals, but know they can’t say so openly. After all, it’s no secret that there’s currently a widespread moral panic over “pedophilic elites”, QAnon, Trans groomers, etc., and online fearmongers regularly trawl the internet looking for proof that academia is secretly pro-pedophile. Why risk your job to report on positive experiences?
Like former young people who occasionally speak out online, researchers also don’t want to be bullied off the internet, shouted down, accused of justifying “child abuse,” or perhaps of being a “pedo” or “groomer” themselves. People want to keep their jobs and not alienate their family and friends. So, when it comes to researchers, they do find positive results if they bother to include voluntary relations, but they don’t loudly announce them to the world. With the advent of the digital age making research more accessible than ever before – even to those with a hostile agenda – researchers now tend to bury positive results in obscure statistics, or frame them as young people needing to be ‘better educated’ to adopt of a victim subject position. (Felson 2019 did this, I believe…)
Bruce Rind is an “expert,” Paul Okami is an “expert,” Allie Kilpatrick is an “expert”: Susan Clancy, Steven Angelides, Terry Leahy, Amanda Littauer, Mark Smith, and the list could go on and on. Will H.L. Ogrinc (2017) produced an 1,000+ page bibliography of sources on just the male youth alone, that’s how long the list can go… There are and have been tons of experts who come to “pro-c” conclusions, but stigma and fear of the mob prevents a less negative consensus from forming…
>Incredible post by Fragment.
Agreed. Check it out, everyone! It’s superb right to the scrupulous concluding remarks on the limited nature of the evidence. Thanks for posting this link, Prue; and, of course, for your own extremely well informed and wise input.
> “I just don’t personally think it’s some fucking terrible hardship to MAPs to just not do sexual shit with children.”
Another fake media misinformed mug on MU. No thought nor empathy for the millions of sex-keen proactive AAMs from around age 4. Ogling, chasing, grabbing, groping, grooming, fucking adults including Pop-Rock-Sport-Glamour stars, also ogled 24/7 near nude in hypocrite sex-filled ‘Family’ media.
Quote, a UK SOTP mind-raped victim Dad, who dumbly groped his 11 yo HOT Loli daughter, “I can see now that children can’t possibly find adults sexually attractive.”
Quote, ‘Love Magnet’ Bold MAP setting the bent-Brit record STRAIGHT, “So, the UK best selling SUN Page 3 adult models are NOT attractive sex-objects to horny young boys masturbating over them, and role models for horny young girls sexually imitating them?”
Parrotfaze, brainwashed UK SOTP faSILLYtator, half-trained traffic-warden to street-wise Bold MAP, “Er, that’s NOT helpful (to our mind-raping abusive agenda).”
Quote, SeXy ’70s grinning AAM HOT Loli, 4, lolling nude on the living room rug to TV-watching ‘Love Magnet’ Bold MAP, “Look at me! Look at me!!”
Quote HOT Loli’s jealous MAD Mom, “No one wants to look at you! Now get in that bath!!”
Once more unto the breeches, er breach, er beach-head landing crafty Truth Nukes on TV masturdebates from which Anglo Victorian Antis/AVAs can never recover, in plain-sight?
1) Centuries of Anglo elite high-fees BRUTAL boarding schools ritually serially abusing young boys from age 8, create not life-scarred victims needing lifelong HELP and BIG Cash Compo, but trauma-free sneering high achievers, National and World leaders then paying high-fees for their own young.boys from age 8 sent to BRUTAL boarding schools. To sustain their cynical cycle of the ritually aMused not aBused. Truth Nuked Anglo Victorian Antis-AVAs pleeze SeXplain?
2) Decades of AAMs by the MILLION chasing, grabbing, groping, GROOMING, kissing, fucking adult celebs. Now, ex-AAMS many Grinning Grannes/Gee Gees recall their fun Trophy Sex with the Stars. Truth-Nuked Anglo Victorian Antis/AVAs pleeze SeXplain?
3) Worldwide modern MILLIONS of under age all-the-rage selfie-SeX-keen kids from Age 4 including AAMs MOCK Anglo Victorian SeX Laws beyond all control. Truth-nuked Anglo Victorian Antis/AVAs pleeze SeXplain?
This boring longform TV masturdebate shortened by HHP to THREE STRIKES and OUT, Antis OUT!!!
Thousands of children from age four have been investigated by police in England for sexting since 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/30/thousands-of-children-under-14-have-been-investigated-by-police-for-sexting
the police are perverts doing this. (they loved looking through my collection too)
Tom, you do sterling work and I’ve been an admirer of yours for many years, after discovering “The Radical Case”. Despite the extraordinary constraints you have to deal with you attract some of the sharpest minds to your circle, and continue to advance the cause. We may sit in opposite sides of the gender divide in terms of our areas of attraction, but you continue to give me hope that this 21st century hysteria will eventually be dismantled.
May you remain blessed and strong.
Thank you, Chris, for your appreciation of the input here from guest writers and erudite, thoughtful, commentators, as well as by me.
As for being on “opposite sides of the gender divide”, it may not have been obvious from RadCase but I was exclusively BL only until my mid-twenties. I then experienced a quite sudden epiphany when it dawned on me that little girls also have their positive attributes!
How did this come about? Blame Canada!
Well, not quite. Unlike the folks in the South Park classic, I don’t blame Canada at all. I say:
Blame Denmark!
When I went there in the mid-1970s, CP magazines were on open sale in big city centre stores, and could even be bought from vending machines on the street. Those mags depicted girls as well as boys. Truth is, growing up without sisters, and going to a boys-only school from age 11, I had never socialised with girls and neither had I experienced their naked bodies.
By my mid-twenties I’d had unsatisfying sexual relations with grown women; but, where little girls were concerned, I literally hadn’t known what I was missing!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1g709bj/i_am_a_female_non_offending_pedophile_ama/
Tom, the police of Luxembourg confiscated my phone
MODERATOR: The fragment above is the beginning of a 200-word post from Cyril that I hesitate to publish in full because of its largely private nature. I would delete it entirely and reply to him solely by email but he says he is currently without access to the internet (although he must have had at least limited access in order to make his post to HTOC).
Directly to Cyril, I will say this: Cyril, you probably lost information on all your contacts along with your phone, so you no longer have my email address. If you wish to get in touch on a personal basis, here it is: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk .
What I can tell other heretics here is that this incident marks the latest chapter in a long history of misfortunes for Cyril that can be explained in large part by his exceptional openness as a MAP. If anyone feels in need of a cautionary story about the perils of coming out, Cyril is your man.
He was a guest blogger here in 2016 and HTOC ran a news feature about him three years later, after a spectacular confrontation he had with the police in his native Ukraine. After the start of the war with Russia he was deemed unsuitable for military service. He has lived in Luxembourg since then.
In 2019, I wrote:
Cyril Eugenovich Galaburda, the 32-year-old Ukrainian physics graduate who translated my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case into Russian, and who has been a guest blogger here, was arrested last month soon after he began an extraordinary one-man demonstration outside council buildings in his home city – a demo for which he had been given written permission a week earlier.
For this item in full, see here:
https://heretictoc.com/2019/07/07/are-we-making-useful-idiots-of-ourselves/
Cyril’s earlier guest blog is here:
https://heretictoc.com/2016/06/02/a-grim-dispatch-from-the-eastern-front/
Just wanted to express my appreciation and incredible respect for public sexual advocates like Tom and Cyril, your bravery is more than any Eastern European soldier, it an obvious service to truth and humanity that the Gods of the various intolerant religions would admire in spite of the opinions of their cult scum.
I arrived here through the right wing’s incredible feminist persecution and redefinition of teenage pubescent sex into pedophilia, a clear attack on male heterosexuality that is completely ignored by their own followers and encouraged somehow. I have since learned that the right wing is far more feminist, miserable, stupid, and dangerous than the left wing, as seen by Cyril’s posts about right wing Russia for example. Therefore, I no longer support the right wing.
As a consequence, I have become far more tolerant to pedophilia, even though it is not my attraction, as it is the decision of every person and family of any age how they wish to live their sexual lives, independent of feminists, tyrant governments, moralizers, and hypocrites. The evidence is also overwhelming that sex at any age can be positive, thus making completely unreasonable and suspicious any extreme stance against that statement; obviously, we also have evidence from our own sex lives as children.
A big problem now appears to be with the destruction of masculinity in the left wing through anti-sex feminism and the abuse industry. From Soviet Russia to Alan Ginsburg to Steven Tyler (and other sex, drugs, and rock and roll heterosexuals), these are lefties who are seen as toxic, evil men by the modern left wing. Without masculinity in the mainstream left to push back against the obvious feminist fascism of the mainstream right, anti-sex feminism spreads because it has no rival.
Also, closet homosexuals are the worst soldiers of the right wing. I am not sure I could anally rape a man even if threatened at gunpoint due to no attraction, let alone willingly take part. These right wing sex fascists are simply insanely frustrated homosexuals, and must be called out (from a safe distance if possible).
In terms of activism being a boomerang and causing negative results, you have to look at it like a football game – not every attempt to gain ground will work, so you try your best, then based on results, you update your strategy, alternating between consistent and novel plays, reinforcing the defense and offense, etc. In this way, even negative setbacks simply become information on how to play a better game and achieve your goals – the game is only lost if the team quits the field, since time alone cannot limit ideas 🙂
Interesting to hear you describe the development of your views, Honesty. Some of us are perhaps somewhat too inflexible in our outlook, including maybe me. But it is not always easy to see when changed views would be an improvement, making a better fit with reality.
Anyone to the right of the far left is seen as far right in the MSM. I’d say the right is more pro freedom whether that is US or UK. The Labour Party plans to shut down Twitter/X, just like in Brazil. And it does annoy me when discussing MAPs in circles hostile, I always get accused of being in the LBGT crowd. I have never supported them beyond supporting homosexual rights, rights that they dare not return to ‘us’, last time they made the false LBGT connection I just replied with “Not me mate, I remember Christopher Biggins at Pantomimes, but that is about it.
Pat, just because Elon Musk tweets something, that doesn’t make it true. As with the Donald, it very often is not. Also, your first three sentences here are completely off-topic. Please take more care in future to avoid spreading unsubstantiated rumours and avoid general political stuff. Posts should be directly on MAP-related issues.
New, lengthy page on The Right-wing and Minor Attraction. I didn’t write all of this btw. It was made using a document prepared by someone from PCMA, who did a wonderful job. It hadn’t been posted, presumably, because it’s a lot of effort to input all the references. But, I went ahead and did that as quickly as I could, which also gave me a chance to proofread it as I went. The resulting page is a pretty good primer on some interesting people, and I hope the original author will consider doing a version for Left-wing figures. There’s quite a lot in modern history, from Foucault and others in the French scene, to our dear own Tom O’Carroll… Earlier figures could include Andre Gide…
IMO, sexual politics are bipartisan issues. You can be Right or Left in your economic thinking, and still come to supportive conclusions on MAPs and consensual age-gap fun time.
IRL, I was once told that the political Right are far more supportive of MAPs and age gap sex contact than the Left, and was asked to defend / justify my Lefty perspective. Apparently, I did well, and he was impressed by the end of that convo. But it was a slog on my end; I had to go back to basics and set up some clear distinctions between myself and the kind of social progressive, liberal and social democrat perspectives that dominate the online landscape and give people a warped impression of the political Left. I.e. I’m about equality under the law, not literally about making everyone “equal” as in the same.
I like the line from the late great Gert Hekma: Inequality is the basis for social and sexual life. Inequality is, after all, embedded and recognized in the key phrase of Lefty politics, “to each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Everyone has different abilities and different needs, so we are by our nature not equal and not the same.
For his part, Marx was an economist and mostly wrote extremely dry, complicated and verbose texts which debate the economic and popular idealist theories of his contemporaries. He didn’t care much for sexual politics and in fact, as MAP-sympathetic historian Hubert Kennedy has shown, Marx and Engles were homophobic… This wasn’t uncommon, of course, but the point is that the Left has traditionally been the economic sphere, the division between the working-class and the capitalist class. The people who own the companies we sell our Labor to and make a ton of money (profit) for, where the workers only receive part of that value, usually in the form of wages. The wealth gaps that emerge from that can of course be minimized, and social democracies with strong welfare states tend to do that well. (At least for a time until those rights and protections are chipped away at…)
What relevance does this have for the MAP struggle? Well, one of the reasons MAPs are so demonized is because it’s profitable. The amount of money that can be made being a vigilante is huge, and the amount that’s made in having slave labor in private prisons and mandatory therapy and lie-detector tests for those on the registry, is also huge. The amount you could lose in any industry, by contrast, if you are perceived as supportive of MAPs, is potentially enormous.
As I see it, the strategy of B4U-ACT has been so successful in part because it has material consequences and is not about ideas alone. It does not tell therapists that their jobs should be abolished and they’re all inherently evil, but gives them and out. You can keep your job and get access to a valuable client base who are often deeply disturbed by the society they live in, but only if you’re willing to drop the unjustified, stigmatizing beliefs of society at-large. If you’re safe to be around.
There’s a material incentive to change, for these therapists and researchers. Withholding your labor (participation in research and therapeutic services), the thing that makes these people money and provides them an excuse for a job, provides a material incentive to change. The ideas need to be there, sure, but if you’re talking about the non-MAP majority, many of whom work in professions where it would be seen as suspicious or concerning to talk without hostility about MAPs (think of teachers, for example) – these people have a vested interest in maintaining MAP-phobia.
How could the teaching profession be tackled? Well, here’s a thought: focus on MAP children. “Think of the children,” but MAP style. Adolescents who are discovering their sexual feelings and need support, not demonization. No one wants to treat children badly, or for kids to be bullied at school, and it is teachers who have a material incentive to change their attitude on this front. That’s their wedge issue. You will make progress in drumming the idea into people’s heads that your child could be an MAP, and your child isn’t some evil monster, so think before you speak… You’d want to target professional bodies who deal with teaching standards and regulations, and the researchers and professionals who inform them (or want to work with them in future). I am not saying this will happen. Just explaining how it could, and why it’s important that there’s increasing recognition that minor attraction starts in childhood – something that many B4U-ACT aligned researchers point out in their scholarship – and that this recognition can be used to great effect if targeting the people whose jobs depend on being supportive to youngsters. You could, for example, author (or make effort to influence the authorship of) a research paper or policy paper on best practice in the teaching profession when students disclose non-standard sexual interests or behaviors. What should the procedure be? What to do if a student is being bullied? What to do if a student seems at risk from other students?
This is just one example…
I do also think it’s no coincidence that openness and experimental thinking, including positive attitudes towards sexual diversity, were at their peak in the 1970s, which coincides with worker’s rights and benefits, including class consciousness and the power of work unions, being at its peak. Especially true of the UK when the GLF were active and PIE was formed. The 1980s of course saw the great conservative backlash, and we now live with its consequences in the alienated and fear-based “risk” and “victim” society it produced… Paraphrasing Gayle Rubin: “In times of great economic strife, people are liable to become dangerously crazy about sex.”
Fabulous insights, Prue. Don’t know how much is you and how much is that big new page, which I must read ASAP, but the materialist analysis you have presented is great. Well worth a guest blog! As for “dear” Tom, thanks, although one is rather put in mind of the Dear Leader in North Korea! Just in case anybody is wondering, I am Moderator here, not Dictator — although anyone who has had a post deleted might beg to differ! 🙂
Thank you, Tom.
I should just point out that, reading some of this Newgon page again in its published form, there are many mistakes or points that could be made more concise.
Will improve this page soon (maybe tomorrow)…
Prue, seeking PROUD victimless former AAMs might try HHP’s BIG faves?,
1) Anglo elite BRUTAL boarding schools:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Addington_Symonds
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=english+public+schools+homoerotics
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/history-of-education-quarterly/article/abs/training-an-elite-the-prefectfagging-system-in-the-english-public-school/7A82E5CFD3DE7063F9E1D8834981204C
2) Anglo/Global Rock-Pop BABY Groupies:.
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/obvious-history-rocknrolls-baby-groupies-lori-lightning-sable-starr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Mattix
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=baby+groupies
[MOD: Go easy on the link-bombing, HHP.]
I’ve just realized that a more concise version of this would be to say that B4U-ACT (and VirPed in its own way) have worked, or helped, to make MAP rights profitable.
If you can get paid for being nice about MAPs, spreading a positive message, then you’re far more likely to see people being openly positive.
If you can make supporting MAPs profitable, both financially and socially, then you’re opening up avenues for social change.
The key to a strategy to overcome victimology is for present and former AAMs to organize as a constituency protesting their victimization by the CSA ideology and its attendant institutions and practices. Flip the script.
Flipped Script since 2007- True Scholars Marshall Burns & Co.
Next an AAMU – AdultAttractedMinors(not miners)Union? For equal SeX not dough – DOH!
SOL Research conducts research on sex laws and their effects on people and society. Since we started posting our research results online in 2007, we have occasionally been approached by people who complain tearfully of being identified as victims of sex crimes when they don’t agree. Amber said, “I really don’t think that what was done was fair. Things were twisted around to make it look like he abused me.” Jennifer pleaded, “Please tell me what to do. He was nothing more than my friend.”
Spurred by such inquiries, we launched a project to investigate cases and collect first-hand accounts of juveniles who enjoyed physical intimacy with someone older and hold it as a positive experience in their lives. Many times, the older partner was not prosecuted, but the legal threat was a heavy burden. Kirk Read wrote about how angry he felt “every time I saw a girl wearing her boyfriend’s class ring, knowing my friend could go to jail because of me.”
This website presents the preliminary results of this research, which is ongoing.
Main Page | Consenting Juveniles™ Consenting Juveniles
https://www.consentingjuveniles.com
We launched a project to investigate cases and collect first-hand accounts of juveniles who enjoyed physical intimacy with someone older and hold it as a …
Cases in the Research Consenting Juveniles
https://www.consentingjuveniles.com › cases
Below is a list of over 50 cases studied in the Consenting Juveniles research, presented in three columns, as follows: Name. A single name, such as just …
https://www.consentingjuveniles.com/
I’ve known about this project for a few years. I wrote Burns to suggest creating a forum for such people that could serve as a support group but potentially also a launching pad for a political/public messaging campaign. He said he plans to do that when it becomes feasible.
A question for anyone here in response to this quote:
What incentive or benefit would former AAMs get for speaking out?
Seriously. I only know of women who had sexual contact with people older than them as minors, and they’re positive experiences but tend to keep quiet about it. If people feel strongly about it they might post anonymously on some comments thread or something, but otherwise people stay quiet for fear of the backlash that making a TikTok or YT video could generate. Why risk starting an argument or being demonized yourself? Especially if you think that you’re the exception, and think it’s perfectly fine that such experiences are illegal? After all, the law didn’t stop you and you (thankfully) turned out fine. You’re the exception. The law’s fine the way it is, it only catches the real “bad” people; my experience is “different” (something I’ve heard said IRL).
I am not saying it’s impossible. You could after all, focus time and energy on bringing together people who’ve had positive experiences. But what are you advocating for that would keep these people together as a special interest group? For recognition of their experiences as valid?
People organize together to make TikToks? Once they see they’re not alone and other people feel similarly, if the backlash to any public story doesn’t put them off, what’s to keep them involved? If you in any way cross the boundary into arguing that such relationships should be legal, you’re endangering yourself and may even lose your job and be investigated by police. Many women are way too risk averse to speak truth to power on this issue. The base of potential support is simply not yet enough.
Though, I’ll raise you that a determined activist cell like PCMA could make it a mission to have its members send supportive messages and attempt to befriend anyone found to speak positively about their past experiences online. This could be done with any account depending on if you care about anonymity for something like that…
Diddy or did he not? that is the question…
This is an excellent guest post. I liked it very much. Congrats to Max Woolf, and deep thanks to Tom for continuing to bring this space open to other guests, and to keeping us up to date with interesting topics and news.
Indeed, CSA stories must be listened to, with great care and respect. But that should not prevent us from analyzing the discourses that come from those who narrate them (and, very especially, those who react to them). Whenever someone tells me that has been abused, I do not question the facts.
I think this is the key point. It’s a shame it has not been developed further, but I understand that a post cannot cover everything. There are indeed people who have had a trauma in consensual fully-desired sex. But I don’t think that any study will be able to show (with a strong, tangible evidence) that in those cases the trauma comes from the societal views. Where would you take the control group from? In a globalized world, there isn’t any region these days where adult-minor sex is fully tolerated. And if so, I doubt that those instances are within reach of researchers. Maybe it’s time to leverage philosophy more, rather than relying only on science to save us… Just my thoughts.
History provides the equivalent of a controlled experiment. Until the CSA ideology arose, no one ever said they’d been psychologically harmed by willing AMSC. There’s a handy pie chart on the Newgonwiki showing for what a tiny sliver of history the concept of childhood innocence has existed.
Thank you Marco, I’m glad you enjoyed my post, and thanks go to Tom as well for this opportunity.
Yes, societal reactions are an important element to discuss. However, most victimologists already understand the concept of secondary harm, and discuss ways to avoid it when helping young people deal with their (real or assumed) trauma. Demonstrating that society’s reaction to AMS can cause harm does not contradict the supposed need to prevent it at all costs.
Discussions of secondary harm are done best by referencing the words of minors themselves. Many have overtly stated that the need for secrecy, and the overeaction after discovery, were the only negative parts of their relationship. We are meant to believe the children, after all.
I did a meme on that theme which is on the wiki.
The anti-MAP narrative is full of circular arguments like that one. Like, legislators banning adult-minor sex because it is a disease. And psychologists labeling it as a disease because it is a misalignment with society. Or, adult-minor sex must be made illegal because it is an aberration. It is an aberration because they are doing something illegal.
Parallel to the circular arguments, the judicial system goes like in a spiral. Consensual adult-minor sex is viewed as something horrible by society, thereby it is made illegal. Yet there are many people who do it anyway. Those cases get published sensationalistically on the media, and people react: ‘we should make laws more stringent!‘. Then the laws (or their interpretation) are made more stringent, so the figures on ‘sex offenders’ inevitably increase. Which in turn justifies to make laws more stringent. And the game continues on and on. By the way, this is a perversion of the system, because since there are people who indeed abuse sexually, then the system takes out sexual freedom from children. In other words, the system lets actual abusers decide how much freedom can children have.
I loved that.
Thank you for this article, Max.
Some reading that may resonate with you:
https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Essay:Pro-Reform:_The_Rational_Middle_Ground
https://www.map-union.org/blog/perspectives/16-12-pro-reforms-position-on-amsc
I urge you to adopt the term AMSC, which I, as one of the originators of the ‘minor-attracted person’ term*, hope will achieve widespread adoption.
*https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Minor_Attracted_Person_(archive_research)
b.ribbon@map-union.org
Hopefully not overlooked?
But, courteously once more what’s missing is most telling, in yet another word-wanking one-eyed jackoff with no nude Emperor’s new clothes in plain-sight?
WHERE are the fake narrative-nuking MILLIONS of sexually aMused not aBused pro-active AAMs in plain sight? Ogling, chasing, grabbing, groping, GROOMING, fucking adults, and furiously wanking over near-nude adults seen 24/7 in Anglo sex-filled hypocrite so called ‘Family’ press/media before and since ‘Game of Thrones’ or Greco-Roman Emperors? E.G. UK tabloid SUN reader dire Dad, “My sex-mad young son’s bin at Page Free agin STUCK to Page Two!!”
Not for Capital punishment here, but surely such 1st Degree AngloVile HYPOCRISY in deep de-Nile well away wi’ the Pharaohs, should at least be a HANGING OFFENCE – just streeetch ’em a bit? “NO!” You say? OK then a lot!! Hang ’em High and then Streeeeeetch ’em – real Looowwwwww!!!
E.G. LARGELY straight/bi/try ‘Love Magnet’ Bold MAP peacefully pissing in a 1990s muddle-class suburban park Gents deserted bog, suddenly BOLDLY encouraged by a grinning pretty AAM boy, 14, fast wanking in plain-sight. And then beckoning Bold MAP into a closet. Quote wary Bold MAP, “Clear off, I’ll get 10 years just for being in there with you!” “Nah! No one will know, cum on Ur LUVLY!! On my family holiday in Torquay there were great bogs where married traveling salesmen paid me £20 for SeX!! But I like it for FREE. And if you see me outside with my mates say nothing cos they don’t know I’m gay – OK?”
Bold MAP, “OK, I’ll give you £20 to FUCK OFF!!”
Eat ya hearts out millionaire MAP ‘Love Magnets’ straight/gay/bi Bowie, Bolan, Bieber, et al Y’all…
I remember someone on Sp!ked with that style of writing.
Id recognise that writing anywhere ! Probably how i found him on facebook…
Max’s guest blog is absolutely amazing.
It’s something I’ve been feeling recently and discussed with a few people. MAP acceptance can only come by, to some degree, challenging the narrative of AMS as absolutely harmful.
I don’t believe the “destigmatization model” of MAP acceptance as advanced by groups like VirPed through the 10s has legs. Such an approach accepts that there is a rivalry between MAP interests and victim interests. And in that battle MAP interests will always lose out.
(I wonder if Max would be interested in hosting this guest blog at Mu, too. That’s how much I enjoyed it.)
>Max’s guest blog is absolutely amazing.
Maybe give it a star rating? It doesn’t have one yet.
Also after getting familiar with Tom’s interview “Interview with a paedophile”, the interviewer didn’t want to chat with VERPED because there is always the argument that they just haven’t been caught etc and the conversation wouldn’t get very far.
I think that the narrative is already being challenged (and very well challenged in Max Woolf post). I agree that there is always room for refinement and we should always be open to revisit our discourse, as we do in the posts and the comments. But the actual limiting factor is the lack of pedophiles coming out. And, to be clear, I don’t blame anyone for not doing so (I am myself posting anonymously, for the moment being). People like Tom have gone a painful way of outing themselves, and the current state of things make it extreeeemely difficult for anyone to come out. It is a decision that cannot be taken lightly in any way. But, to be honest with ourselves, no narrative will ever be valued unless there is a visible face defending it.
To illustrate my point, I would like to quote the “La Palabra” song, by Nach.
“No hay alma más mortífera que una palabra brotada de un corazón noble y un par de huevos que la respalden.”
Translated: There is no soul more deadly than a word from a noble heart and a pair of balls to back it up.
I’m very glad you liked it.
I believed that, because so much of the discussion regarding MAPs was centered around the discourse of the CSA victim, the issue needed to be confronted directly. I felt that pro-contact MAPs needed news ways to approach the victim identity in a broader, more macrohistorical light which did not necessitate sorting CSA victims into “real” or “fake” categories.
At the same time, I felt that non-contact MAPs needed to understand that they can’t sidestep the victim rhetoric by confining their demands only to destigmatization and accessible therapy–for the purposes of “protecting minors” to boot. Merely by existing visibly as people in pain, who have been denied social justice, they are contradicting the “official story” of CSA, which is sustained by denying MAPs a voice in society and depicting them exclusively as predators.
I would be honored to see this blog at Mu. If it’s alright with Tom, be my guest.
>I would be honored to see this blog at Mu. If it’s alright with Tom,
Fine by me!
I hope in the future Max might write about the ‘Children cannot consent’ commandment that antis always use.
This has already been done, with meticulous care, comprehensivity and penetrative power by Leonard Sisyphus Mann
https://heretictoc.com/2015/08/06/the-staircase-has-not-one-step-but-many/
The later abandonment of all known ‘MAP’ pursuits by LSM remains a profound mystery
Im still trying to work out if people are stupid or evil. I mean if people are uneducated, its not their fault really? But i do wish harm on bullies, who are generally uneducated… People who been University are
apparently
educated, but they like to attack people for age gap relations. So, i guess they are evil.Learned ignorance. Unlike sexual preferences, people are not born racists, homophobes or anti-MAPists, they become so, absorbing delusions from society that breeds hatred and aggression.
I have been reading H-TOC since around 2013, though I haven’t commented much since 2020 pertaining to more immediate totalitarian concerns (Lockdown and vaccine fascism violation the Nuremberg Code) But I have kept up with every article up till now. There are various Psyops going on in the World, and the above blog mentions one: Manufacturing consent. We have Wars that entail the military-industrial-complex, climate propaganda (class 4-5 junk weather sites etc) and Big Pharma that RFK hopefully will expose if Trump wins.
But with Huw Edwards under the spotlight, the subject of paedophilia or minor attraction came back up (it always resurfaces) and as I have said before, if I was to hate all that hate MAPs, I would hate 99’9% of humanity, such is the universality of the stigma. Of course, after years of reading this blog, chatting to the late Oldfield on Twitter etc, I still can defend my position, but had got a bit rusty because my attention has been on what is mentioned above.
So I thought where can I get a good recap (I remembered Rind et al 1998 of course) I decided to watch the three hour interview ‘An Interview with a Paedophile with Danny W. One thing I got confused was the Rind study did not look at coercion separately, they just pooled the 59 meta samples but used neutral language to prevent bias. TOC could you remind me of the study you mentioned in the video where they DO study coercion/consent separately?
The other quick recap I’m after is the percentage of men that are minor attracted (including post puberty) hebephilia etc, some suggest maybe at least 50% or more considering the crossover into heterosexuality/homosexuality. That was a great interview Tom in 2018, there was an on going discussion after if I recall but not on video. Cheers Tom.
The vast crimes of the pharmaceutical industries have long since been exposed. RFK, Jr. has nothing to offer except conspiracy theories and lies about the alleged harms of one of the most successful and beneficial scientific discoveries in history: vaccines. For a science-based analysis, I suggest Ben Goldacre’s excellent books Bad Science (2008) and Bad Pharma (2012). But that you refer to ‘climate propaganda’ perhaps shows you’ve been entrapped by the science deniers [REMAINDER OF SENTENCE DELETED]
[MOD: Keep it courteous, please, Airlane. The deleted part was gratuitously offensive and only served to draw attention away from your strong factual points. Also, you were rebutting claims already made here, which is fine. That apart, I will remind everyone not to stray too far off topic.]
If you think the malign influence of big pharma is just a theory [MOD: Remainder deleted: off topic.]
There are not that many studies in which consensual cases have been considered separately. I think the one in the video would have been Coxell et al.* For more recent work along these lines, check out this blog of mine from a couple of years ago, which brings you up to date on Rind’s important later work and includes a link to Nathan Daly’s PhD thesis:
https://heretictoc.com/2022/02/21/stunning-comeback-for-a-great-champ/
Daly’s thesis takes a bit of digesting. You might want to read a short evaluation of it that I made in a post to Prof. Mike Bailey’s Sexnet forum in 2021. See Word file at this Dropbox link:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mdrdf22vlhtbdycjgnnlf/Nathan-Daly-PhD-post-to-SN.docx?rlkey=ug0g40lxcx60wcnhi32124rhm&dl=0
On the prevalence of minor attraction, Rind’s former colleague Philip Tromovitch made some interesting and well documented claims, with plenty of figures. I blogged about this too, here:
https://heretictoc.com/2013/07/19/tromovitch-sets-a-poser-on-prevalence/. Note especially the links to the two pages of his conference poster session that summarises his findings.
Pat, it is good to see you first discovered HTOC in 2013 and are still turning up here. I am pleased to note that although people come and go, quite a few readers have been around a long time.
*Coxell, A., King, M., Mezey, G.,& Gordon, D. (1999). Lifetime prevalence, characteristics, and associated problems of non-consensual sex in men: Cross sectional survey. BMJ, 318, 846-850.
Cheers….I thought by going through that video it would bring me up to date so to speak. I wasn’t sure how the study you mentioned in the video was spelt and there were no links. Also it was reading sites like this, and Sp!ked in their early days that prepared me to see through the groupthink on other matters in 2020. Hope you are still able to Ramble from time to time despite the toll time can take.
>Hope you are still able to Ramble from time to time
Yes, thanks. Knees getting creaky but managed The Old Man of Coniston a few weeks ago. I told some young folk at the top that I am the old man of Coniston! 🙂
As long as it wasn’t Dead Man’s Hill:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Mort_Homme
LOL! After the next time I attempt The Old Man of Coniston they might have to rename it Dead Man’s Hill, although Dead Man’s Mountain would be more dignified: it is quite steep and big! But this is straying off topic, so no more hiking yarns from me for a while.
“Rind comments, “conforms to the pubertal marriage arrangements that were normative throughout most of human history before modern complex societies”
It is also worth pointing out that several hundred years ago, when the English AOC was 12, due to less nutrition than today, puberty often started later?
Yes! Great point, Pat.
Reference [31] is missing in the notes.
An important aspect of of CSA ideology is missing in the essay: the dogma of childhood innocence, viewed as a state of carefree bliss that is destroyed by any interference with adult interests; then ASM is viewed as “destroying childhood innocence” or “robbing children of their childhood”.
Concerning Tom’s appendix on shota: in Greek classical sculpture, muscular men are shown with small genitalia in order to stress the philosophy that bodily passions must be controlled by the mind.
>Reference [31] is missing in the notes.
Well spotted, Christian. It should have been deleted from the text as well as the notes. My fault, not the author’s. Task now done.
As for childhood innocence being missing from the essay, Max can address that if he wishes. I will only say that I imposed a length limit on him so it would have been difficult to cover every relevant theme. Of course, anyone keen to see a challenge to the dogma in question is welcome to check out my paper, “Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal: Virtue Ethics and Child–Adult Sex” in Sexuality & Culture. Now with over 63,000 hits at the official Springer link! See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-018-9519-1
>Concerning Tom’s appendix on shota: in Greek classical sculpture, muscular men are shown with small genitalia in order to stress the philosophy that bodily passions must be controlled by the mind.
Good information to share, Christian. I was aware of it but I still find it baffling that artists and their patrons thought this “minimalism” was a good idea. It’s as though they thought having a big dick IRL, rather than just in art, meant you must be a sex addict. Did they joke about it when they were naked at the gym together? “By Zeus, Phallosthenes, with a whopper like that what a satyr you must be!” Umm. On reflection, maybe that’s exactly what they were like! 🙂
May i be the first to commend, with all my heart, mind, soul (& fortitude!), the author of this fine, oh so fine guest blog. It’s summary, recapitulative breadth is a potent thing indeed, and i will be sharing it in as many ‘high places’ as i possibly can.
Now, not to ‘jump the gun’ or anything, but what complicates the whole business for me is the existence, growing every day, of thousands upon thousands (just look at the site stats at ATF. for example) of putative ‘paedos’ who have become so not because of any innate, special “sexuality” w/w they were “born” or anything,, but simply because of the enormous power and irresistible appeal of representations of the forbidden, that they have discovered casts all other forms of pornograohy into the poubelle, if not the oubliette..
I’ll leave it right there for the moment, as i wish my heartfelt commendation of the writer’s achievement to be foremost and centred!
The main blog essay is not my writing, Mr Turp, but I am glad you approve.
As for attraction to the forbidden, yes, I am sure it is an important human trait, but is there any reason to believe it is exceptionally strong in paedophiles, or MAPs more generally? It would seem to be linked to curiosity and adventure-seeking, both of which we see as useful, positive qualities. So far, so good. But there are many things – robbery, fraud, murder, rape – that are forbidden for good reason and which good people are repelled by, feeling no attraction no matter how curious or adventurous they might be as a general character trait.
There is plenty to suggest that most MAPs feel alarmed and dismayed in their teen years to find themselves experiencing illicit desire for minors. Rather than being attracted to the forbidden, they are horrified by the thought that their desires seem to be radically different to those of their peers. At that age most of us desperately want to normal. We are at an early stage of joining society and hoping to thrive in it. The last thing we want is to be seen as weirdos with weird interests. So we do not seek the forbidden because it is forbidden.
Not everyone here will agree with me, including perhaps our strongly social constructionist guest blogger, Max, but I don’t think we can ignore individual developmental factors in the psychology of desire. It is those factors that set us in a different direction to the statistical norms of desire. If everything could be explained by attraction to the forbidden, then everyone would be a MAP. In that case, we may be fairly sure there would be no AOC laws.
Note that I say fairly sure, not absolutely so. I am making a nod here to those who cleave to the idea that incest would be universal but for the fact that humans decided long ago that it is a bad thing and on that basis declared it taboo. This view, widely held among cultural anthropologists, has come under strong research-based challenge in relatively recent times, notably by Arthur P. Wolf. I reviewed his last writing on the subject a few years ago for Sexuality and Culture. Full text open access here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-015-9327-9
Wolf’s view, which draws on the more-than-century-old Westermarck Effect, is that most people do not feel strong sexual attraction to brothers or sisters they grow up with; and most parents, although they may feel tender affection towards their children, do not want sex with them. The most intense desire is felt for sexual partners who are new to them: excitingly fresh faces, not familiar old ones. The taboo against incest, he says, arises because the majority always tend towards hostility to those who are different. There is an innate human instinct to sniff out the “abnormal” and stamp on it – an instinct based on the evolutionary survival principle that anything odd might be poisonous or dangerous in some way. I find this very persuasive.
Exactly. By nature, people tend to look for scapegoats based on external and behavioral signs (religion, skin color, nationality, sexuality) but ultimately all these prejudices are devalued under the influence of accumulated knowledge and experience.
I’d have thought that the taboo against incest arose from the knowledge that offspring arising from it are so much more likely to have damaging genetic conditions.
That is an intelligent speculation, but it is not correct. It true that animal breeders have known for at least 15,000 years, ever since the first dogs, horses, etc, were domesticated and selectively bred for particular attributes, the downside of excessive inbreeding, even without a modern scientific knowledge of genetics.
But homo sapiens and other hominids have been around for much longer than that. Back in the deep past they had no idea why some babies were born with defects, which could be for any number of reasons: witchcraft, disease, displeasure of the gods, whatever. Even within the last 100 years or so, anthropologists have found strong incest taboos in numerous hunter-gatherer cultures where nothing was known about the physical effects of inbreeding, and who gave unrelated reasons for the specific taboos in question, some of which forbade sexual relations with kin (in-laws) who were not blood relatives.
Well, I didn’t know much of that, so thank you for educating me.
Thanks, although it occurs to me my last point could have been made more watertight. I wrote about hunter-gather taboos, “some of more which forbade sexual relations with kin (in-laws) who were not blood relatives”. I should have added that not only do some tribes forbid sex with in-laws, they may also permit certain sex between some (but not all, depending on their concept of kin) very close blood relatives, even fathers and their daughters.
Here, for instance, is a relevant passage from a recent review of a book on the subject by the late Maurice Godelier:
— From a review by Francis Gooding in the LRB last month: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/francis-gooding/doing-it-with-the-in-laws
Tom, i”m confused already. I’ll bypass.the strangeness of your not noticing that i acknowledged the “guest blog” and cut to the chase – i cannot understand how you can be aware of all you demomstrate yourself to be aware of in subsequent responses to Leonird and Airlane, yet offer in your concluding remarks to me – if your short description of this Wolf’s approach is accurate – something so dreadfully reductive i do not not know how it would persuade a loon! An “innate instinct to sniff out the abnormal and stamp on it”? An innate instinct? You can fall for that when next minute giving every indication you are aware of just what *human* systems of differentiation can and do entail, how complex, unpredictable and illogical they are on every other front? That wherever humanity is found, it is paradox before anything else that reigns?
And that this utterly simplistic formulation of Wolf’s regards the orgin of incest taboos somehow transcends the some 150 years of exhaustive anthropology preceding it?
Do you honestly believe there can be a “survival principle“? When what survives can only be known after the fact? Does not a principle presuppose some sort of foreknowledge? Do you honestly believe that the multiple forms and functions of human discernment and discrimination, of deferral, sacrifice and sacrality are all best reduced to analogy with an animal’s preprogrammed ability to detect poison in its habitat? That this is, in effect, the highest intellectual blessing we can today bestow on them? And we haven’t even touched on all that follows from the equally challenging and complex human problem of dedifferentiation….
Still mulling over your earlier comments concerning the murky genesis of an individual’s desire, which comments by some ‘necessity’ (hehe) must omit the mimetic component at work at all times. But this matter must await another exchange. Right now i’ll just say that interdiction, the highly conscious awareness of what is forbidden, affects different souls in different ways, the majority however being either cowed by it or ‘self-taught’ to displace their real desire onto projections of wicked others… Can a standard “psychology of desire’ begin to “explain” away all this? Is explanation even what we’re after?
Hmmm. Plain to see i’ve plunged unanswered to the bottom of the tank here, just as i do on widely public sites in the UK., where it would seem all MAPs still fear to tread, despite being in no danger from doing so there at all..
Ah, so you were expecting a response from me, or from someone?
The trouble is, Mr Turp, once a post goes past a certain length and includes multiple questions, it begins to read rather like an expression of opinion rather than an invitation to debate. That’s fine. I am happy to give space to all manner of opinions but it is for readers to decide whether there are matters that need debating.
I hope you will take it as a constructive suggestion when I say it would have been better to end your original post after your first seven questions, instead of pressing to a grand total of no fewer than 12! This would take you to part-way through your penultimate paragraph, ending with “Does not a principle presuppose some sort of foreknowledge?”. Your further elaboration, and especially your last paragraph, definitely constitute a deterrent to committing one’s limited time to a response.
But I’ll have a go at the first seven questions, taking them together as expressing what seems to be basically a single objection to Wolf. To Arthur P Wolf, that is, just to avoid confusion for any readers casually dropping in. I do not mean our guest writer, Max Woolf.
Briefly, you appear to be objecting either to Darwin’s theory of evolution in its entirety or else its specific application to the evolution of human psychology. In either case, the argument would seem to be that it is too “reductive” when we bear in mind that humans have very impressive cognitive capabilities, are able to make reasoned choices, and are not limited to instinctive pattern following such as might be all a spider needs when making its web, using a quite simple, repetitive, genetically coded behavioural scheme such as might be set out in a knitting pattern or basic algorithmic computer program.
Well, here is a question for you. What makes you think that our impressive brain power, exquisitely nuanced and sophisticated opinions on such matters as art, history, politics, etc., is engaged in all our decisions? As regards sexual behaviour, for instance, isn’t there some truth in the suggestion that we men often think with our dicks, allowing desire to trump well mannered restraint? Did I mention Trump? I might have named Clinton as well, and loads of very smart guys with big brains but even bigger dicks. Even among the most sophisticated, when it comes to the crunch, crude instinct often rules.
Where instinct is concerned, we do not need to give ourselves reasons. Hunger, for food or sex, comes unbidden. These feelings arise from our deep animal biology. So does the sense of danger that lies behind our tendency, or “trait”, towards avoiding strange, unknown things, as described in Wolf’s interpretation of the origin of the incest taboo.
Coming to what I think are your most revealing questions, you ask:
The word “principle” implies something that is thought out, rather than instinctive. Darwin’s theory of evolution is certainly thought out, and it includes the principle that traits are selected (automatically, by nature) for their survival value. Individuals well adapted to their environment will tend to survive and reproduce more successfully than those who are not well adapted. Their successful traits will then be carried genetically by their descendants. This happens to life forms from bacteria to humans, without any thought. In other words, the bacteria etc do not need to be “principled” specimens. They do not need to be paragons of ethical behaviour, nor do they need to be clever.
So, when you ask “Does not a principle presuppose some sort of foreknowledge? the answer is yes, but, as I have just indicated, “principle” is the wrong concept to apply to the survival behaviours of individual specimens (of any species).
Good answer Tom…A bit deep for this time in the morning!
Everyone is welcome to read it later in the day! 🙂
To be perfectly honest Tom i’m disappointed by this reply. Clearly all my comments of yore (regarding man as sign-bearing creature etc) have gone with the wind. For it is not “brain power” or “cognitive capabilties” that should concern us first and foremost but what makes those possible to begin with. We have big brains because we have language, not language because we have big brains!
It seems we are right back at that point where trying to interrogate a human on the nature of that which she uses and depends on every minute of her life, both ‘internally’ and ‘externally’, is like trying to probe a fish about water!
Do you really believe we can “think with our dicks”? Think? That this is anything more than a tiresome expression, one moreover most contemptuous of the beloved organ? I mean, what kind of godforsaken word is “dick”?
The moment we speak of desire, ntm desire “trumping” anything, we are speaking of the appearance of the appetitive object on a scene-of-representation. Instinct is merely the visceral sponsor of actions and intentions that now have shared significance. And this significance is the only reason we can talk, and are talking, about them at all!
I had a hunch you’d zero in on the ‘survival principle’ coupling, but in fact in my yes, rather rude cascade of questions that was not meant to be the focal one. My big objection was to your apparent acceptance of APW’s conjecture that “a majority” looking askance at that which seems “different”, to it is how best to think of the all-pervasive human incest taboo!
“Where instinct is concerned, we do not need to give ourselves reasons”
Oh really? So when you are.hungry you BYPASS all consideration of ( = representing to ypurself) how, where and what you will eat? When you are horny do you BYPASS altogether contemplation of the myriad images of that which might assuage the condition for you in some way? (Are you transformed in a trice iOW to the predator you always dreamed you could be? 🙂
Thankyou for the.little Darwin 101 there Tom, but methinks tis a theory to which we are too vastly attached, and that the over-attachment derives primarily from its function for us as alternative religion,, establshed in our minds to ward off ‘that other one’. Nothing was clearer when the Evolutionists and Creationists went at each other for years on end like rabid cats in a whirlwind, each believing to his core that his scene of origin was being defiled
I can surely use the concept of natural.selection whenever getting my learn on, say, virology wise, ie as clear instances of micro-evolution – but as confirmation of the entire Darwinian edifice? Nah.
* * *
Think of that last canapé on the plate, at the last dinner party you attended. Did you grab it? Or did you make a gesture of deferral? Right there you have TOOL. The origin of language, no less.
Whatever.
Ok in parts i may come off sounding a leeetle too didactic (believing something of the sort even necessary to put our thinking on a fresh track)
..but “whatever”? How should i interpret that? That’s iits past the ‘bewitching hour now in Merrie Olde Angleland?
I do not like to see you upset, Mr Turp, but your frustration does tend to express itself through somewhat petulant bombast. Well, it wouldn’t do to indulge that sort of tone by spending too much time in response, would it? Hence the dismissive “Whatever”, although I had paid careful attention to what you said.
I also explored your thinking at some length in a comment post here a couple of years ago. In response to your invitation to “Ask me anything”, I concluded with three short questions. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think you ever answered them, or subsequently referred to my post in any way. Maybe you missed it.
With that possibility in mind, I have copied it below. Maybe you would like to address those questions this time? What follows then, is my post from two years ago, with an initial link to the blog with which our comment thread is associated. The most relevant part starts with the reference in the third paragraph to the origin of language. For other readers, I should briefly explain that “Gans” is a reference to Eric Gans, whose “generative anthropology” has informed Mr Turp’s thinking [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans]. So, here goes:
https://heretictoc.com/2022/07/18/naive-idealists-not-cynical-hangers-on/#comments
In reply to warbling j turpitude.
8 Aug 2022 at 8.04pm
Hi Mr Turp,
Thank you for focusing on how you feel Gans takes anthropology far beyond the work of Girard. You say, “For reasons that none of us can quite fathom, the work of Girard has achieved academic respectability, whilst what Gans has done… remains situated in perfect obscurity.”
I can only guess, because I haven’t read Girard, but I would think his focus on scapegoating strikes a very strong chord as it is so well documented, especially in the Bible, and we all recognise it as a very distinctive, unmistakable, social phenomenon.
Gans, by contrast, has a theory about the origin of language that may or may not be true but which lacks an obvious and compelling connection to reality once the details start to be elaborated. Admittedly, it begins with an attractively simple idea: the origin of human language happened in a singular event. This is an appealing notion to the extent that it potentially explains a great deal, unlocking a great deal about why we behave as we do, especially as regards such fundamentals of behaviour as violent competition and harmonious cooperation. Like the Book of Genesis, it provides a foundational story. As WP puts it, it is “a kind of origin story that hypothesizes the specific event where language originated. The Originary Scene is powerful because any human ability: our ability to do science, to be ironic, to love, to think, to dominate, etc can be carefully explained first by reference to this scene of origin.” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_anthropology ]
So far so good. But it is the elaborations that follow this “carefully explaining”, that strike me as problematic (as outlined in WP at least), both for the popularity of the theory and for its credibility. It looks as though there are concepts and propositions that have to be taken on trust, whereas a good scientific theory would be designed with the generation of testable hypotheses kept clearly in view.
Freud’s armchair anthropology can be criticised on similar grounds, as merely speculative. Not that there is anything wrong with imaginative speculation. Darwin, for instance, speculated on the early social and sexual arrangements of humans, but he did so from a highly informed evolutionary perspective that included observing the behaviour of our close primate relatives.
Freud took Darwin’s ideas about the “primal horde” and ran with them, producing his own origin myth to explain the beginnings of the incest taboo. Or, rather, he didn’t just run with the idea but let it run away with him, making bold assertions that have been discredited by subsequent investigation.
Well, that too is fine. Freud’s work fired the imagination and inspired investigative follow-up. But Gans appears explicitly uninterested in empirical investigation and validation. He seems positively to repudiate it, as I discovered when giving some thought to the broad sweep of linguistic philosophy, and linguistics, across the 20th century, from Wittgenstein to Chomsky, and pondering where Gans could be said to fit in (or not).
In the course of this little investigation in the last couple of days, I came across an interesting 2016 online essay by Gans called “Learning from Chomsky”, in which this paragraph caught my eye:
Note some key phrases here: “not concerned”; “precludes the examination”. This looks like a dogmatic attachment to his own ideas in the teeth of key features of evolution as well understood in modern biology. Gans says, “Evolution normally proceeds from the simple to the complex.”
No. Not just “normally”. It always proceeds in this way. If Gans or anyone else can give an example of an exception, please tell me about it. Yes, there are “saltations”, or leaps, when the usual glacial pace of evolution is dramatically speeded up against a background of rapid environmental change exerting urgent selection pressures, but there is no sudden emergence of complexity that is unattributable to prior simple adaptations.
The essay title, “Learning from Chomsky”, suggests that Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition can be taken as a reasonable “saltational” precedent for his own work (notwithstanding that Gans’s “generative anthropology” is radically at odds with Chomsky’s “generative grammar”). If so, I would point out that empirical work in recent years has significantly undermined Chomsky’s work.
According to WP, the main source of criticism of Gans is from his mentor Girard, “who claims that generative anthropology is just another version of social contract theories of origins”. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans ]
I don’t know about that, but I would certainly dispute the word “just”. Social contract theories from Hobbes onwards have been hugely important. The social contract imagined by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice formed an important underpinning of my own writing in Paedophilia: The Radical Case.
Hobbes has been credible for centuries even though, like Freud, he was an armchair anthropologist. He had to imagine “the state of nature” long before the academic discipline of anthropology was established, with its field studies and systematic reports. Like Girard, he has remained influential because his thinking resonates with common experience.
Rawls, by contrast, makes no pretence that his social contract ideas are grounded in social structures of the past. Rather, they are a completely imaginary construction, a thought experiment that projects into the future rather than relying on any truths about the past. His theory is designed to help us envisage the ethical foundations of a notional just society. Because it makes no claims about the past, its propositions can be accepted or rejected (which is arguably all we need for ethics) but they cannot be disproved or validated (which scientific claims require).
Unlike Rawls, then, who needs no factual grounding, and Hobbes (and Girard), whose appeal lies in their theories’ resonance with our experience, Gans’s ideas seem rather out on a limb. His originary claims are interestingly original and perhaps have interestingly high explanatory value, but without tight empirical validation the “explanations” in question might well collapse under scrutiny. After all, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories for children (“How the Leopard Got His Spots”, etc.) explain a lot, but not in a way that would convince a biologist!
I note that in December last year, Mr Turp, you wrote:
Don’t get me wrong, Mr Turp. I have no wish to deprive you of what you “believe to my bones”. You have studied Gans at length and doubtless have stronger grounds for feeling he is right, or at least “onto something” than I do. You may be right and I may be wrong, so I come to this with humility.
My point is simply that looked at from a stance of evolutionary science (or my lay understanding of it), I cannot see a good reason for accepting Gans’s arguments over a more evidence-based approach.
That said, Gans invokes concepts that do have scientific support, notably mimesis in nature. At least two books with significant input from scientists have been published on this theme in recent years. My worry is whether and to what extent Gans goes beyond the evidence without producing testable hypotheses.
You invited me to “AMA”. So, let me try to ask something that should be possible to answer simply, without going deeply into explaining Gans’s theory. So, here goes:
1. Has Gans produced testable hypotheses?
2. If so, can you give me one or more examples? (one or two will be enough).
3. Have any such hypotheses actually been tested, whether by Gans or anyone else? (via psychology experiments, say).
Over to you if, as I hope, you are still listening!
I do thank you for returning to this point, Tom, and make no mistake, i have email drafts aplenty concerning it from the time elapsed since, none of which appear to have yet made the cut. That should give you some indication (i hope).of how anxious i am to deliver the goods, but also just how vexed and confounding remains my relationship with “my native tongue”
You will have to give me a little time to recover from “perulant bombast” however!
I guess you could say I’m taking it pretty hard! So far as i can tell i write what i write as conscientiously as i possibly can, with no little attention to terrifyingly precipitous things like “tone” … But perhaps the feel of bombast comes from my desperation to overcome, to override at any cost even as i write what is oft referred to as “perfectionism” ?
Later: What i think i’ve learned so far: expressing disappointment is the wrong way to begin a response to you!
The treacherous pitfalls awaiting anyone trying to convey a sense of the originary hypothesis (OH) to another have proven to be many, and in that respect at least it shares much with The Radical Case . I would be greatly intrigued now to revisit that work to appreciate in what way it is inspired by Rawls. Gans of course has explored the relation of his OH to A Theory of Justice with great care, and to same can i direct you at any time, should you so wish.
I should definitely mention that to the GA community i have always been quite open about my paedophilia, and aside from one woman who reacts with standard-issue womanly scorn, trying to peg me as a sexual loser and so forth, relations are perfectly harmonious – if not as ‘participatory’ as they could be whenever the topic arises!
Thus there’s a lovely sort of symmetry revealed when Tom O’Carroll, heretic incarnate, proves capable of an intellectual receptivity that thousands upon thousands of supposedly smart folks throughout the academic world and beyond have failed to be altogether!
You address many things indeed here, but especially given that it’s HTOC and not the GAlist where we’re exchanging, and that readers are very likely having WTF reactions all over the place, i will set aside for now your challenge to Gans’ assertion regards the evolutionary in its biological sense, and restrict this response to two other matters foremost in your text; firstly, the notion that Giradian theory “resonates” with everday experience, in a way that the OH does not.
This is quite remarkable to hear for a GAnik, for to him it can only mean one thing – that we are quite happy to acknowledge our human rootedness in shocking events of violence, in bewildering events of mimetic crisis, but ask us to acknowledge how a scene collectively recalling those events ever got established, how or via what means that scene began thenceforth to continually evolve – ritually, conceptually, ethically and so on, and we react as if language, well, language must have come from another planet.
The originary scene is recapitulated with every utterance we make, every single attempt we make with them, no matter how ‘consciously’ or ‘unconsciously’, to defer desirous/resentful conflict and restore harmonious presence among ourselves (Of course, this does not preclude language’s capacity developed much later in the piece to foment conflict, but this is a matter for discussion elsewhere).
Now, bobbing about in your text like giveaway lifebuoys only waiting for someone to grab hold of them, is the familiar gang – “empirical”, “testable hypotheses”, “evidence”, is “falsifiability” still afloat? What i’ve decided to do here is feed you Gans direct from the man’s gob; here goes:
“We should not confuse falsifiability with rigor. In Popper’s world, the strongest hypothesis is the most easily falsifiable one, the one that makes the most vulnerable claim on reality. In the anthropological world of meaning, the strength of a hypothesis is measured rather by its minimality. The more it explains with a minimum of presuppositions, the more powerful a claim it makes on our intuition. But we can make a still greater claim for minimality in the anthropological domain. The explanation of meanings and the meanings themselves are all part of the same anthropological universe. The minimal explanation is not simply the most efficient; in referring all meaningful events of human culture to a minimal basis, it approaches the historical understanding of the origin of human meaning in a unique event.
By positing such an event, the originary hypothesis transcends the pre-generative techniques of humanistic interpretation. But no direct physical evidence for this hypothesis is conceivable under present conditions. The evidence for the scene of origin is not an unambiguous physical trace; it is the whole of human culture. And even if we had a film of an event that took place exactly as I have hypothesized, how could we tell it was the first such event? The claim that the originary hypothesis is the minimal hypothesis consonant with the existence of its object, humanity, appeals not to empirical corroboration but to a fundamental intuition: that the sign cannot arise unconsciously, since its use implies consciousness. The rest of GA, in principle if not in detail, follows from this premise.“
Mr Turp, you wrote:
>The treacherous pitfalls awaiting anyone trying to convey a sense of the originary hypothesis (OH) to another have proven to be many, and in that respect at least it shares much with The Radical Case.
Interesting comparison. My guess is that the “treacherous pitfalls” awaiting those who try to “convey a sense of” the OH all involve the apparent difficulty of explaining it. Many would be left baffled rather than hostile.
>I would be greatly intrigued now to revisit that work [RadCase] to appreciate in what way it is inspired by Rawls. Gans of course has explored the relation of his OH to A Theory of Justice with great care
At least this is easily answered. Chapter 7 of my book is on children’s rights, especially the right to autonomous decision-making on matters within the growing competence of the child from infancy to adulthood. Rawls’s principles of justice proved useful for the philosophical discussion.
Moving on, thank you for the direct two-paragraph quote from Gans. I’ll consider them one at a time:
Popper’s essential point about falsifiability is not brought out here. The important thing for a scientific hypothesis is that you need to be able to stress test it. If you cannot do that you can have no idea whether it is strong or not. A good hypothesis will be potentially falsifiable, and the more easily (and surely) the falsity can be demonstrated the better.
But (and this is the important part), the fact that a hypothesis is potentially falsifiable (if it fails the stress tests), does not mean that it will actually fail. If it passes test after test after test, showing itself to be robust against all efforts to destroy (falsify) it, then whatever the hypothesis is proposing will be provisionally confirmed as a scientific finding. This is because the testing has demonstrated that, far from having a “vulnerable claim on reality”, it has a very strong claim on reality.
As for “In the anthropological world of meaning, the strength of a hypothesis is measured rather by its minimality”, this too is misleading. It wrongly implies an inevitable clash with “Popper’s world” i.e. the world of science. There are many fields of rigorous inquiry, such as history, philosophy, or indeed anthropology, whose scholars typically do not test hypotheses experimentally (which is at the heart of “the scientific method”) but who nevertheless fully appreciate the principle of falsifiability and commend its use where possible. Paleoanthropology, for instance, has made great strides in recent years through the adoption of DNA findings validated via science that could certainly be falsified – if it were wrong!
Conversely, preferring a minimal hypothesis is hardly a monopoly of “the anthropological world of meaning”. Science has always preferred the simplest possible explanations of phenomena over more complicated ones, ever since Occam and his celebrated “razor”. Modern scientists generally refer to it as the principle of “parsimony”.
The final clauses of the paragraph set us up for a “big reveal” in the next one, when Gans says “in referring all meaningful events of human culture to a minimal basis, it [The minimal explanation] approaches the historical understanding of the origin of human meaning in a unique event”.
To locate something as profound as “the origin of human meaning” in a single event sounds rather exciting. So, what was this event? Here is the next paragraph:
So, the evidence “for the scene of origin” is no less than “the whole of human culture”. Umm. That sounds like a maximalist investigation beyond the reach of any hypothesis, even the most virtuously minimal one. How do you stress test such a holistic hypothesis, covering such a vast evidential landscape? Not very practical, as Gans admits. He says the hypothesis does not “appeal” to “empirical corroboration”. In lieu of any scientific way of testing its validity, he offers us a “fundamental intuition” which is left to do all the heavy lifting: “the sign cannot arise unconsciously, since its use implies consciousness”.
Ah, the sign! Semiotics. From Saussure to Derrida to Chomsky and beyond, the 20th century has bequeathed us a vast scholastic industry on the relationships between signing, speaking, language, consciousness, and meaning, generating dozens of sub-disciplines and a plethora of competing theories. What do they all have in common? That none can deliver a knock-out blow to rivals because all of them remain highly speculative, in the realm of metaphysics rather than science, of debate rather than established (stress tested) fact. To its credit, such debate may be logical and analytical, drawing deeply on real-world research in such important fields as cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, and linguistics, works which are often factually well grounded in themselves.
The trouble comes when imaginative myth-making is added to this edifice, via attempted explanations of human phenomena such as the origin of human sexual orientation (Freud’s Oedipus complex), or the incest taboo (Freud’s primal horde myth). Such myth-making may be extremely useful to the extent that it inspires testable hypotheses. Where it does not, however, the myths remain just that, and should be taken with a pinch of salt.
I might just add that the two-paragraph quote from Gans does at least appear to answer my original questions from an earlier post.
FWIW, coming from a non-expert, it seems to me that the discoveries of recent years in the field of primatology and other animal studies, have tended to weaken belief in the uniqueness of human language, a belief on which the GH critical depends.
For these reasons, although the work of Eric Gans may be fascinating and persuasive to those who have immersed themselves in these deep waters, I continue to feel it would be unwise to insist that the OH is a discovery rather than still just a hypothesis.