Kit,
For a long time I was a right winger religious person. I owned and operated a company in one of the most fascist industries in the world, the iron and steel business. No wonder I was fascist in my thinking.
Then I lost that.
Thought I would check out the left wingers. It has taken me a long time to realize they are just as dangerous as the right wingers. Now I can hardly stand to attend meetings of my county Democratic Party even though I trace my democratic roots back to watching with my coal miner grandfather the nomination of Adlai Stevenson to be the Democratic Candidate for President of the United States. We watched it on a black and white television while I was setting with him on the bed where he was dying of cancer. I was 10-years-old.
If you know about Stevenson you will understand that I believe government does good and without government we have nothing, we are lost. I think you think the same thing. I think Tom O does also.
Can you imagine how the assassination of President Kennedy affected me? Probably about like it affected you. Who are these people who have taken over our party, these feminist that study Phrenology, head bumps, and the frontal lobe?
Linca

Thank you Kit, I don’t disagree with much of what you say.
For those of us who were early adopters of feminism (before so many amongst them embarked upon an agenda of actual female supremacism) we were very much (and still are) critical of the oppression of women as well as children by, in many cases, a ‘patriarchal’ society.
I would argue, however, that their position in much of the world today is massively improved, certainly in North America and Europe. Of those women most in need of liberation, the vast majority are to be found in Africa and the Middle East and in other selective pockets of the developing world.
I find it ironic that few of our first-world champions of women’s rights spend as much time decrying the very brutal conditions in those countries where women are clearly abused as they do the ostensible injustices they claim to encounter in western society.
They have grown rather attached to the perceived benefits of perpetual victimhood, in my opinion.
So, I think that we need to consider the possibility that many of the ‘voices’ amongst feminists (and many non-feminists, for that matter) can do nothing BUT ‘speak’ and are wholly incapable of ‘listening’. Indeed, they are unreceptive to ideas or perspectives not their own.
They appear far more interested in being seen as arbiters of morality and praying, as it were, “ostentiously in the marketplace”. This is classic puritanism. And Salem was a natural outgrowth of puritanism.
Given that, I’m not sure that we can hope to influence them by portraying ourselves as slavishly benign and worshipful at their feet or even by appealing to their sense of reason or justice.
I’m not even convinced that reason or justice are goals which they pursue.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I suspect they often possess darker and unexamined motives, jealousy being one that comes to mind and lust for power over others being another.
As for potentials for children to be abused, raped, and subject to power imbalances, etc., our organizations have always been at the forefront in insisting that their rights be secured well beyond those they enjoy today.
We have pointed out that abolishing age-of-consent laws, for example, will not diminish the rights of kids but expand them.
Men (and women) would still be thrown in jail for violating their rights (including coercing them into sex) or causing demonstrable harm.
In fact, we demand that actual rape, i.e. forcing sex upon someone against their will, be punished. I’m not sure how much more clear we could be about that.
I just question the extent to which many ‘feminists’ (or right-wing conservatives or even the great, bulging ‘middle’) are acting in good faith and receptive to evidence that contradicts their preconceptions.
That doesn’t mean that I think we have done a great job in communicating our beliefs. We haven’t. But even when we do it seems to make little difference to the ‘dominant narrative’, whatever its politics.
However, we do have to keep trying and, yes, affirm our own positions. But we also need to broaden the conversation and point out facts inconvenient to our accusers. In fact, there is a huge amount of work that is needed to be done that is not being done.
I think that one makes a rather serious error in judgement by allowing the stated concerns and strawmen advanced by the anti-paedos to continue to successfully hijack our message. We must continue to respond to their accusations forcefully and without fail, but we should not consider that that alone will be enough.
We need to be far less ‘reactive’ and ‘defensive’ and our sense of fairness (and morality) far more ‘offended’ (as you can tell mine certainly is).
At this point, we’ve got plenty of dirt on them. We should not hesitate to throw it in their faces.

I really appreciate this comment Kit and think you are completely right. From having been a rather misogynistic teenaged girl (it’s a type) I have gradually, over the years, become more and more of a feminist, simply from the experience of living as a woman.
There are feminists these days who do wonderful, and underappreciated, underpaid and widely attacked, work as sex educators for teenagers. Heather Corinna of Scarleteen.com comes to mind. While very sex-positive, she is none too keen on relationships between adolescents and older people. And from reading her stuff, I’ve gone from blanket disagreement with her on that to realising that she probably has a point in some respects. Because of her line of work, she’s seen things I haven’t seen, like teenaged girls in relationships with somewhat older men who really are being manipulated and fed a line of nonsense because they’re too young to know any better. And the data on this kind of thing don’t look any too good, either. There are studies from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, for instance, indicating that teenaged girls whose partners are half-a-dozen years older are less likely to use contraception, more likely to contract a sexually transmitted infection, etc. In some cases, the girl probably just has a risk-taking sort of personality, hence the relationship with an older guy, the taking chances about pregnancy, etc. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that very often the older guy is being a jerk. And in the face of evidence like that, which good feminist women working in abortion counselling, for instance, see up close and personal all the time — well, no wonder they’re against age-gap relationships.
The point to be made is that these relationships don’t have much to do with child-love. We’re talking about sixteen-year-old girls going out with twenty-three-year-old men: nothing unusual about that at all. And we are probably talking about teenaged girls who are disproportionately black, Latina, working-class and poor, who are getting the short end of the stick and by their teens know this perfectly well, know that they don’t have much of a future, know that their bodies may well be the only thing about them considered valuable. We’re talking about communities where a twenty-three-year-old man may be going out with a sixteen-year-old girl just because all the women his age are already working exhausting jobs for very little money and/or are chasing several toddlers. It’s a whole mess of things, but it isn’t representative of child-love.
Likewise, the feminist factions who talk about ‘sexualisation of children’ have a point. Being sexualised is different to being sexual: to be sexual is to act and choose, whereas to be sexualised is to be acted upon, subjected to other people’s notions about sex. We’re not doing anybody any favours by allowing the putting about of a lot of sex-related ideas that are at best ill-fitting for quite a lot of people and at worst howlingly reactionary. And I do think those kinds of ideas are being put about more than in the recent past.Twenty years ago, consumer goods for kids weren’t as heavily gendered as they are now, with all the pink-princess-sparkle for girls and the musclebound superhero T-shirts for boys. My feeling, which various people have told me they share, is that the current young generation’s ideas about gender and sexuality are actually more conservative than those of the generation before or the generation before that. And, well, kids are hitting puberty earlier, and for young girls especially, that’s not a barrel of laughs — you are still a child mentally, you just want to play on the swings and at the swimming pool, but you’ve grown breasts, and Strange Men take that as a good reason to shout at you in the street or to grab you and try to pull you into their cars. This is a common memory for women to have — it happened to several friends of mine when they were eleven or twelve — and women getting angry about ‘sexualisation of children’ are speaking from memories like that. Where I part company from the mainstream feminist position (insofar as there is such a thing, which isn’t very far) on this is in thinking that there is nothing wrong with sex at any age provided that it is consensual and, ideally, strongly wanted and engaged in with full agency and mutual care. You know, yes means yes and all that. Those ideas are already present in feminist thought. Their big flaw is that they shut out children and those who love them.
Here are those Guttmacher Institute studies I mentioned, by the way: ‘Age Differences Between Sexual Partners in the United States’ : https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3116099.html ; ‘Older Sexual Partners During Adolescence: Links to Reproductive Health Outcomes in Young Adulthood’ : https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/4001708.html .

Samples of Heather Corinna: it would probably be unwise to link to Scarleteen on this blog, but you can do a websearch for some of her articles, of course. A good one to search is “a calm view from the eye of the storm: hysteria, youth and sexuality”. Also search “rage of consent” and have a read (note: I agree with the article as a whole but I disagree with the importance she assigns to puberty – in my view puberty is neither the beginning of sexuality nor the end of childhood nor a sign of mental maturity). Then search “why I deeply dislike your older boyfriend” and read that. When a person who has written ‘Rage of Consent’ in 2001 turns round and writes ‘Why I Deeply Dislike Your Older Boyfriend’ in 2008, you have to figure it’s for a good reason. It’s because of what she’s seen in her line of work. When certain feminist groups talk about abuses of power, they aren’t entirely making it up, nice as it would be to think they were. They aren’t totally wrong-headed. Sometimes, they are just overgeneralising, partly due to lack of information.
For a dialogue between feminists and MAPs around this, I always think a good place to start would be ‘Sexuality, Violence and Psychological After-Effects’, Michael Baurmann’s authoritative study of the 8058 ‘sexual victims’, females up to 20 and males up to 14, who were known to the police in Lower Saxony in 1969-1972. I feel that it vindicates both some central feminist ideas and some central ideas held by those who want to legalise adult-child sex.
NAMBLA has the short version: http://nambla.org/baurmann.html
Here is the very short version:
A large majority of the children and adolescents in the study were girls; 99.6% of the adult ‘perpetrators’ were men, mostly ages 25-35. 70.3% of the adults were known to the kids; the rest were mostly exhibitionists – 93% unknown to the kids.
51.7% of Baurmann’s subjects fell into group 1: children who had had comparatively ‘mild’ sexual contacts with adults or had been flashed by a strange exhibitionist. Most were not considered ‘injured’ (physically or mentally damaged) by the experience. This group contained some of the girls and every last one of the boys.
Group 2, 11.6%: All girls, mostly with ‘disturbed’ family situations, who had had ‘more intensive’ sexual contact with adults, some of it incestuous. Some of the girls showed no injury; others showed injury which fell within the average range for the entire investigation – i.e., was not extremely severe. It seems reasonable to assume that their ‘disturbed’ family situation may well have contributed, in some cases more so than the sexual contact, to the emotional damage they sustained.
Group 3, 31.3%: All girls, who had suffered “sexual assaults under duress, rape and sexual contacts with highly emotional defensive behaviour or attitude of the victim.” These incidents were reported immediately to the police. The girls in this group had the highest injury index.
So what does this tell us?
Can it really be the case that no boys at all were raped or sexually assaulted in Lower Saxony during those four years? Male-on-male rape and sexual assault go unreported even more frequently than male-on-female rape, in large part because of homophobia and other messed-up ideas about masculinity. Female-on-male and female-on-female rape and sexual assault exist, but are very often not even considered possible. But even if we assume, for safety’s sake, that some boys were raped and sexually assaulted and it just didn’t get reported, and that more women and older girls were raping and sexually assaulting than the very few who were reported, the inescapable conclusion is that the burden of sexual violence and coercion fell very disproportionately on women and girls, and that men and boys were overwhelmingly the ones responsible. Score one for feminism.
On the other hand, many of the girls in this study were not considered ‘injured’ at all. It is then possible for a girl-child, as for a boy-child, to have sex with a man and not be harmed in any way. This seems more likely if the sexual activities are ‘mild’, but is apparently quite possible even if they are ‘more intensive’. And surely that should be good news for everybody.
We know from other studies that rapists tend to have a history of violence and sexual assault. However, this doesn’t mean that every one-time groper will become a rapist. Baurmann points out that the fondlers and flashers in his study apparently kept fondling and flashing, comparatively harmlessly, rather than progressing to rape. In other words, totally demonising such people is not called for and not helpful.
I would bet quite a lot of money that of the adults concerned, most of the paedohebephilic ones were the older partners of all those unharmed children in group 1. Group 2 was quite small and contained, among other things, incestuous contacts: a classic situation of this type, seen sadly often, involves a stepfather whose usual preference is not for children drunkenly fondling his stepdaughter, or outright raping her. Group 3 also probably contains relatively few paedohebephiles. The girls involved were mostly 14-20 and the men an average of 7 years older. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of the ‘victims’ of ‘sexual assault on children’ were aged 7-13 and for the study as a whole the average age difference between adult and kid was 25 years. Apples and oranges.
Since Baurmann’s study was published, David Lisak, Paul Miller and Stephanie McWhorter have contributed to the development of a ‘predator theory’, backed up by much solid data. Most rapes, it seems, are committed by a smallish minority of distinctly unpleasant men who rape over and over, and who typically start raping in their late teens. Statistically speaking, a small minority of such men must be paedophiles, and somewhat bigger minority must be hebephiles. But most paedohebephiles aren’t like that just as most other men aren’t.
Finally, Baurmann says that those subjects considered injured – again, all girls — “often had been brought up with relatively strict regulations concerning going out in the evening”. Could it be that they were raised in an atmosphere of sexual shame and fear, of heavy restrictions on female sexuality, of blame for the victims rather than the perpetrators of genuine sexual assaults and rapes? Could it be that this contributed to their feeling terrible about what was done to them? Score two for feminism.