A topic of “immediate relevance and personal significance for many MAPs” was promised last time as today’s blog. The theme I had in mind has of necessity been pulled from the schedule for the moment. I intend to return to it soon, when all will be revealed, but for the moment I have another revelation that I trust will also be considered significant. The volunteer team behind it certainly think so. I refer to their magnificent work in bringing out an audio version of my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, which continues to attract an extraordinary level of interest even though it was published way back in 1980. Why this should be so is a question I have explored in a special new preface I have voiced for the book. You will be able to hear that, if you wish, along with a superb voicing of the whole book generated by AI from an actor’s voice sample, and tweaked to perfection by the production team. What follows is a edited version for readers here. The full audiobook can be accessed here and has been added to the blogroll (Hotspots).    

AUTHOR’S NEW PREFACE

Paedophilia: The Radical Case came out (in more than one sense) decades ago in a brief historical moment of optimism when children’s liberation was being taken seriously along with great advances for the gay movement and sex-positivity more widely. How times have changed! Whereas, in the wake of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, a feminist revival initially flirted with “free love” for all, the movement soon split and the “gender revolution” took a darker turn, emphasising danger and victimhood arising from abuses of power, especially “patriarchal” male power in relationships perceived as unequal – with age inequality, especially that between adult and child, standing as the most transgressive possibility. So history has not been kind to paedophiles (strictly speaking, those sexually attracted to prepubertal or pubescent children), or even to the much broader category widely known as “minor attracted persons” (MAPs), which includes minors up the age of consent, whatever that age might be set at..  Paedophilia has become an obsessive and ferocious taboo, arguably to an unprecedented extent, the stigma now even extended to include “age gap” relationships between adults.

Even in these inauspicious circumstances, though, there have been strong indications recently that there is still a great deal of interest in my dogged-eared old tome. Late last year, when an audio edition was proposed, plans were also in place for a new German edition, and a Spanish one, to follow Cyril Galaburda’s translation into Russian a few years ago. Also, a version in Italian is now at an advanced stage of development.

While this burst of enthusiasm for spreading the word has come from within the MAP activist community, there have also been indications of others paying attention, at least within the academic world. In recent years, since I became an accredited independent scholar with a public profile at ResearchGate, Paedophilia: The Radical Case has been one of my most read publications among those available for download at the ResearchGate website, and it continues to gain new citations in academic journals and books, with a total of 164 listed by Google Scholar, over 30 of which have been in the last 10 years. In the course of checking the latest figures as I write, I was pleased to note that Google has added (albeit without my permission!) its own PDF of the book for free download.

Google thus joins Ipce, which has provided a free download of the book for many years, very much with my permission, as this organisation’s website has been a key scholarly and support resource in the field. All this interest invites the question, “How many readers has the book had?” It’s hard to say, because the various free download sites do not come with relevant statistics, but I would be surprised if it was less than a hundred thousand and it might be far more. I deduce this by looking at comparable items for which we do have figures. Former mental health and philosophy podcaster Danny Whittaker’s interview with me for his platform My Own Worst Enemy, which later morphed to Renegade Ape, has had over 56k views. There is also an article I did for Sexuality & Culture, a prestigious peer-reviewed academic journal but expensive to access (price per article £29.95, currently nearly 40 US dollars), which has been reached through Open Access by over 70,000 readers.  Bearing in mind that Paedophilia: The Radical Case has been accessible for far longer than either Whittaker’s podcast or the Sexuality & Culture, piece, there is every reason to believe readership figures would be quite high by now.

As for the original print edition, and the paperback two years later, again I can only guess at the total readership, which may exceed any figures for print runs or purchases because the book was bought by university libraries and public libraries in the UK and the US. In England, notably, the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge listed Paedophilia: The Radical Case for many years as one of its set texts on the reading lists of postgrads studying criminology.

All this might make it sound as though I have made a fortune from the book, especially when you learn that the hardback was offered (by the publisher, not me) at what was then the impressively high price of £14.95. Sadly, not! This figure was well over double the average of around £5.95 for a fiction hardback and maybe £6.45 for non-fiction in 1980. And in those days, books in general were relatively expensive compared to other household purchases. Allowing for inflation, the purchase price of £14.95 then would translate into a whopping £83.27 now!

It was a deterrent price. Many would-be buyers would have been unable to afford it and might well have seen the pricing as an outrageous rip off. But there was method in the London publishers’ madness. Peter Owen Ltd was a top-of-the-range independent publishing house who had brought truly great writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre to the British public, and their non-fiction list included works by no fewer than seven Nobel prize winners at the time my book came out. Their first objective for pricing strategy was to avoid any suggestion by the more moralistic media that they were descending into the so-called “dirty books” market. They wanted the book to be reviewed in classy periodicals such as the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

And so it was. The reviews were also remarkably civilised, discussing my case seriously and courteously even where they didn’t agree with it. But what about sales? The idea here was to aim for the library market. In those days, public libraries and university libraries were generously funded compared to the meagre budgets of more recent times, and those outlets felt obliged to buy books deemed “serious” and “important”, a key measure of which was whether they had been reviewed in posh places. So that is where many of the early sales went, although it took a long time to sell the initial print-run of 1,000 copies and I never received a penny beyond an initial advance of £1,000.

As for the American paperback, this was brought out in 1982 by pioneering gay publisher Sasha Alyson, through Alyson Publications, Boston. I was delighted to see this new edition, which added a Foreword by Hubert Kennedy, a maths professor who moonlighted as an expert on early 20^th century boy-love activism, and an Afterword by Dan Franklin, my editor at Peter Owen Ltd, who later became a leading figure in British publishing, bringing out the top literary novelists of the day, as editor for the likes of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Hubert is sadly no longer with us, having died last year aged 94.

At the time when the paperback was published, in 1982, I was unfortunately not well placed to keep a check on how the sales were going, as I was behind bars at the time, serving a two-year prison sentence for “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”, a charge that arose from my work with P.I.E., the Paedophile Information Exchange, not the book. Even to this day I have no idea how many copies Alyson sold. I suspect it was quite a lot but mysteriously I never received a penny in royalties – or a dime, or a dollar.

So, no, I haven’t made a fortune. Fortunately, I am just pleased to see Paedophilia: The Radical Case in free circulation, with substantial evidence of continuing interest in it. But why does that interest continue? That is the other obvious question.

In 1980 few people other than psychiatrists had ever heard of the word “paedophilia”. If they hadn’t seen the spelling, they might have guessed it was someone who loves peas. They had heard about “child molesters” and didn’t like what they’d heard, but the subject was hardly the intense focus of public denunciation it is today. So when a radically new and positive view of paedophilia burst onto the scene in the UK through P.I.E., intelligent people would have wanted to know more.

That is what prompted Peter Owen to take an interest, and why his young editor Dan Franklin contacted me out of the blue after P.I.E. (or “pie” as we used to say it) had been the nation’s Number One news story for day after day in the summer of 1977, carried as the front-page lead in all the national papers at a time when they had huge circulations and when it was “the power of the press” that set the agenda for what everyone would be talking about.

So I didn’t need to go looking for a publisher. Dan asked me to write a book before I had even thought of doing so.  Paedophilia: The Radical Case was the outcome, and a slew of other radical, or at least cautiously liberal, books on the subject came out soon after, mainly as multi-authored (safety in numbers!) academic volumes. None of these other books are much remembered today, as far as I can tell. If mine has stood the test of time somewhat more successfully, that might well be because it was more radical, more committed to its argument – although there were those on the Left at the time who felt I had been merely liberal, with an insufficiently revolutionary approach to children’s rights.

I won’t try to resolve that dispute here but there is a bigger question it would be feeble to dodge entirely. Was Paedophilia: The Radical Case actually any good? After all, beyond the MAP community it was a book that epically failed to convince the world of its case, whether that was a truly “radical” one or otherwise. No MAP needs any reminding that an utterly contrasting and hostile narrative has become increasingly dominant over the last half century, one in which sex negativity has crushingly triumphed over the positive story I attempted to tell.

The story now is all about victimhood and abuse, leaving us not just with the old wisdom that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, which is not a bad rule-of-thumb in itself, but in a virulently dogmatic new strain of pathogen transmitted through a gender revolution that was benign and welcome in its early stages (leading to greater equality and fair treatment of women), but which quickly went rogue, forgetting its early body positivity as it morphed into an obsession with danger rather than discovery and development, with misadventure rather than adventure. Intimate relationships came to be judged and policed not by whether they are in reality kind, loving and pleasurable but by whether they fit a preconceived ideal of precise equality – an ideal that is increasingly taking us towards a barking mad insistence that even adult couples need to be close equals in age to avoid the taint of being creepily paedophilia-adjacent.

Likewise, adult relationships have become bogged down in legalism. The false dogma that children cannot consent has morphed even more malignantly towards the bizarre claim that adults cannot consent either, or not without protracted prior negotiation of explicit terms and conditions, known as the process of obtaining “affirmative consent”, thereby trussing up sexuality in red tape, with all the passion-killing allure of a chastity belt. No wonder so many young adults, especially males, can no longer be bothered with dating and romance, preferring instead the simpler satisfaction to be had through readily obtainable porn – a trend now so pronounced that the political classes are beginning to fret over world-wide declining birth rates, leaving too few young people to support ever more pensioners as longevity increases.

Well, even from this brief foray into asking whether my book was any good, it will be clear I am not hugely impressed by the victimhood story that has so eclipsed its message. My instinct, in light of the gender revolution’s manifestly crazy and unsustainable downside, is simply to assert that we in P.I.E. were right all along and that sooner or later our culture cannot avoid noticing that it has painted itself into a corner.

But of course that would be a grossly inadequate response, one which failed to undertake any self-critical analysis. Were there genuinely weak aspects of our case? Why did our message carry so little conviction with the world all those years ago? How might that message be reframed more productively?

Such an analysis lies far beyond the scope of this new Preface, in which my main task is to celebrate the arrival of the audio edition in the belief that the original printed one presented a case that is still largely valid and worth considering today.

It would have been prohibitively expensive to engage an actor professionally to speak the entire text, and my own voice really isn’t up to it – as you will discover if you listen to the new preface, which is the one part of the audiobook actually spoken by me. And yet a superb (new preface apart!) audio version has been achieved. How? Through the dedicated work of a volunteer taskforce recruited by team-leader Marco through Heretic TOC. Their skilful teamwork has brilliantly harnessed the wonders of AI. The result, after careful checking and painstaking tweaking, is an excellent rendering of the text in a richly sonorous delivery, with natural cadences and emphases that bring out the meaning and make for easy listening.

My heartfelt thanks go to the three-strong team, who were “Rooster”, “Undey”, and of course Marco himself (aka “FairBlueLove”). It is enormously fortunate that in the course of their labours it emerged that Rooster has a fabulous speaking voice himself and is an experienced voice actor. He graciously accepted an invitation to provide his rendering of the Foreword and Afterword from the American edition. The inclusion of these elements into the audio edition amounts to a wonderful bonus.

PILING ON THE PROPAGANDA

Did you see The Crow Girl on Channel 5 recently? I watched the first episode and a half. Even as early as that (there were six episodes) the plot seemed all too drearily predictable, as in all honesty I had expected. Pissed off, I switched off.

But this second, and apparently concluding, series based on an epic Nordic noir trilogy of novels has been a hit for its audience and the media, so my gut reaction might seem premature. It was right though. The story may have been brilliantly thought through, with lots of gripping twists and turns, but it still unwound with the dreary inevitability of a long cliché.

How did I know it would? Because a paedophile character, arrested over child porn and found to be sexually involved with his daughter, made an early appearance in this detective thriller, which was initially focused on a series of murders of young men, whose naked corpses were turning up very publicly and dramatically on a city’s streets.

The leading detective on the case is a woman whose own gut feeling was just like mine, odd as that may seem. Whereas her subordinate sidekick thought, reasonably enough, that the paedo was just a non-violent “kiddie fiddler”, she theorised he had some connection to the murders. Her “feminine instinct” (i.e. prejudice) turned out to be correct, as did my paedo instinct that in any drama with a MAP in it these days, the plot is bound to be twisted beyond all logic to make sure he ends up as a truly heinous villain.  Not only must he be attracted to children, he also has to be malignly evil at a Hannibal Lekter level.

And, wow, what a stupendous heap of horror it turned out to be. Wisely, I feel, I chose not to waste my time on what would undoubtedly have been a riveting if also irritating watch, judging by the reviews and post-conclusion synopses. This one has everything: dozens of murders, a Jekyll and Hyde split personality motif, a terrifyingly violent industrial-scale child abuse ring led by a powerful local figure in a high-level conspiracy, and a revenge sequence to rival the spectacularly bloody come-uppances of Greek tragedy.

As such, The Crow Girl amounts to yet another grievously libellous representation of MAPs in general: collectively, we are only ever shown in one way, as the bad guys. When that happens, audiences are being fed propaganda. Rather than opening us up to fresh, thought-provoking, perspectives on reality, as the best drama does, it closes thought down and makes its appeal only to feelings. As such, it leaves no headroom for maintaining any distinction between fiction and reality. Fiction becomes reality, with grievous political and personal consequences. The Crow Girl is a particularly egregious example because it is so extreme in its cranking up of unrealistic fear and hatred, although for those of us who are anti-censorship liberals it is hard to know how to object, other than by calling it out for what it is.

HEARING FROM HANNIBAL

Speaking of Hannibal Lecter, he has just dropped me a line. Or rather the grotesque individual who may well have been his real-life inspiration has – a certain Albert Fish. Or rather his namesake, a retired solicitor who strikes me as a pleasant, sensible professional. This other Mr Fish posted a message to me through the Heretic TOC Contact button. He reflects on his experience. Although not a MAP himself, his opinions accord well with what we MAPs know about ourselves, so I am persuaded the letter is genuine. I am sure heretics here will be interested in his thoughts, and it would be great if others were to take notice, especially those in influential positions. Here, then, is the complete message:

So long ago that it seems like a past life, I was a criminal defence attorney practicing on an island off Antarctica, known as Australia.

For the record, I was born in the first half of the 1960s and there were public libraries, but no internet. That’s how I ended up with my name. No one in my family or I dare say in Sydney’s western suburbs knew anything about my namesake.

I am not a paedophile or homosexual.

I concentrated on criminal defence work and over time represented a small number of male clients charged with paedophile offences.

The first such client’s story will stay with me owing to its hilarity. He was living in a unit in a beachside suburb and struck up a relationship with a young boy who lived down the street. Things progressed from there.

This young friend grew increasingly close and used to visit him often, because he enjoyed what occurred. The problem was that this boy was a Pacific Islander who began entering puberty and his visits became more rampant as his hormones kicked in. My client admitted that he was glad he’d been caught, as the teen was growing larger and was seemingly insatiable.

As a young solicitor, what I quickly realised was that the whole legal process made the situation worse for the ‘victims’. Sometimes they’d sit with a representative from Youth and Community Services – or should that be Circuses? – whilst clutching a teddy bear, doll or whatever and being asked, ‘Did he touch you there?’ And this question was repeated until a (learnt response) nodding of their dear little head.

There is a government funded industry built around ‘the victims’, which is not to imply that there aren’t real child victims, only that the legal process makes whatever damage done indelibly deeper and more profound.

Decades ago, at a Sydney law court I spoke with a policewoman who told me that she’d been seconded to a police child sexual abuse unit. She told me her work had been hard and had affected her. She was walking to her local newsagent on Saturday morning to purchase a newspaper when she saw a man walking with a little girl, who’s hand he was holding. It was obvious that he was the girl’s father; nonetheless, this police officer confessed she had these sickening thoughts. She resigned from the child sexual assault unit the following Monday morning – just couldn’t take it anymore. Nonetheless, she admitted that the scars would be with her for the rest of her life.

The other thing I noticed was that the few paedophiles I represented were all pleasant, attentive people, aware of their surroundings and interactions with others.

A.H. Fish

Retired solicitor