Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Tom O'Carroll

Tromovitch sets a poser on prevalence

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I promised (or threatened !) more about the Cambridge conference on DSM-5. Groan ye not, though, dear heretics, as this week’s despatch will be a tad less arcane. Turning to the poster presentations, in particular, several of these were lively sessions, with subject matter of wider potential interest than the knotty diagnostic concerns that constituted the main business of the event. Three stand out: Noëmi Willemen, from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, speaking on “Liberating the paedophile: a discursive analysis”; Diederik Janssen, editor of Culture, Society & Masculinities, on “Specification of the perverted: anthropologizing bad sex”, and Philip Tromovitch, […]

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Stifling but stimulating in sunny Cambridge

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Summer is here at last in England after a long, cold Spring so where better to enjoy the belated sunshine than in the, err, stifling atmosphere of a conference centre with no air conditioning? Well, call me a masochist but I had a great time last week at Classifying Sex: Debating DSM-5, a two-day conference at Cambridge University. DSM, for the uninitiated, is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, routinely dubbed the bible of psychiatry, a description often criticised but one which captures the intensity of the religious warfare its various versions and

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How to take a vacation from yourself

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When is a paedophile not a paedophile? When, among many other possibilities, he is a fell-walker. The fells, for the uninitiated, are the high hills and low mountains of northern England, where hiking, unlike in the Alps of Europe, or the world’s even higher ranges, is on a human scale: delightfully, the proud walker may “conquer” several peaks in a single day merely through modest exertion rather than perilous adventure. Having just returned from a week spent hiking in the Cumbrian fells, or The Lakes as the mountains are perversely known in a collective way, I feel immensely refreshed, not least

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All the world loves a lover?

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All the world loves a lover, according to an essay on love by the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson; but he died long before today’s bleakly unromantic killjoys got to work on “underage” love. A classic case of the misery merchants’ baleful influence was to be seen in the British courts recently, when maths teacher Jeremy Forrest was sentenced to five and a half years in prison after his relationship with a 15-year-old girl pupil seemed near to discovery and the pair escaped to France. She went willingly; but the authorities called it abduction, a view supported by the law –

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Street grooming: a nut to be cracked?

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Street grooming is a hot “child sex abuse” topic in Britain right now. Many months of celebrity scandal in the wake of the Jimmy Savile allegations have seen numerous big names going under or else left in a legal limbo of unresolved court cases – a time of stomach-churning suspense for those caught up in the net, but not exciting enough to sate the public’s voracious appetite for fresh sources of disgust and outrage. So there has been a ready market for “grooming” stories. Grooming  is itself a relatively recent concept, dating from a 1985 report in the Chicago Tribune, according

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The consequences of consequentialism

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A big thank you to everyone – and I do mean everyone – who has commented on Why children may want to keep a secret. This has been an exceptionally lively debate, now amounting to well over 11,000 words and it ain’t necessarily over yet. Inevitably, some words of real wisdom in all this will be overlooked, failing to make the impression they deserve. The ones I most strongly feel need to be rescued from oblivion came in a contribution by T. Rivas, when he talked about the development of society over decades or centuries. In his view, “the development of

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Why children may want to keep a secret

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Heretic TOC invited the GL website Visions of Alice (VoA), some time ago to comment on the lively discussion going on here at that time about T. Rivas’s book Positive Memories. A contribution was duly forthcoming but unfortunately did not arrive until after I had closed the debate, after it descended into something of a “war of attrition”. As I invited the contribution, though, it would be churlish not to run it (albeit quite heavily edited), especially as it makes an interesting point about secrecy from the child’s point of view. It also provides a suitable opportunity to run a further

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Riding the donkey of their desires

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As some here may remember, back in January Heretic TOC ran the first two parts of a promised imperial trilogy. The first was a humorous reflection on this blog’s global reach from its UK base, titled British Empire re-conquers America; the second was much more serious, looking at the mistreatment of women in a highly patriarchal part of Britain’s old empire, India: No wonder women turn against ‘teasing’. Now, better late, I hope, than never, this third part goes back in time with a question about the sexual adventurers of the imperial adventure – the men who ran the administration and

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Rivas takes his analysis deeper

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The book Positive Memories, first featured in A positive sighting of 118 black swans at the beginning of this month, was rightly welcomed by many heretics here. As a substantial and well organized collection of accounts by adults looking back upon positively remembered sexual relationships with adults in their childhood it could hardly fail to amount to a valuable database. Not everyone agreed, one notable dissenter being “virtuous” paedophile Ethan Edwards, who raised a number of objections. Those which criticized the book itself were rebutted by the author in a guest blog Author Rivas defends ‘black swan’ sightings. In a companion

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Hail, an improbable age of consent heroine!

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Heroes, or heroines, do not come much more improbable than lawyer Barbara Hewson. Who would have thought that this champion of women’s rights, with a reputation to protect as a successful, high-profile advocate in leading cases, would suddenly throw caution to the winds and call very publicly for the age of consent to be lowered to 13, as she has done this week? It’s a British story, and it has been all over the media here, replete with predictable reactions, including “shock” at the large London law firm where she is one of many barristers, who are all self-employed members of

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