Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Tom O'Carroll

On Sex and Love, Child Attraction, and Contemporary Word Politics

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Welcome to this, the first guest blog to be hosted by Heretic TOC. Others have been submitted and will appear in due course: many thanks to those who have taken the trouble to write. The standard has been excellent, giving me confidence that guest blogs will have a continuing role here as an occasional feature. This first blog is by Gil Hardwick. As a frequent contributor of comments on the regular blog, Gil needs little introduction, except to say that he is an anthropologist and writer whose work is better described on his website than I can manage. See also Sniffer […]

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‘Work of genius’ lost in obscurity

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Heretic TOC yesterday meant to cover a further aspect of “Three reasons to be cheerful” but ran out of time and space. Well, I say ran out of space: I suppose a blog page can stretch to infinity but I doubt the same can be said for readers’ patience. I had wanted to elaborate on one of the sources used by Jon Henley in his Guardian article. He refers to J Michael Bailey of Northwestern University: “…writing last year in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Bailey said…he was forced to recognise that ‘persuasive evidence for the harmfulness of paedophilic relationships

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Three reasons to be cheerful

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A trio of weighty articles on paedophilia and related “sex offending” have made their appearance in leading journals in the last couple of weeks. What makes them stand out from the perpetual blizzard of bollocks thundering down on us with increasing intensity for the last decade or three is their positivity. OK, it’s all relative. I’m not saying the revolution is around the corner or even that the worst is past. But at least we have seen a bit of resistance in influential places against prejudice, virulent hatred and inhumane treatment. Leading the way was The Guardian, in the UK: Jon

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Compared to Sinason, Savile was a saint

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Heretic TOC has now read the official Metropolitan Police Service report on Jimmy Savile  in its entirety. As suspected, there is much sound and fury, signifying nothing very much except the virulence of moral panic in the UK right now. Far from being the worst “paedophile” offender in UK history, Savile may not have been a paedophile at all, and any offences could well have been relatively trivial. The report admits, in a coy footnote, that some respondents “don’t wish the matter to be reported as a crime”, inviting the suspicion that at least some of those involved as minors at the

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Savile: sound and fury, but signifying what?

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Followers of Heretic TOC hardly need to be told “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers”. What is worth pointing out, though, is that there are good reasons not to believe everything – and perhaps hardly anything – in the joint police and NSPCC report into allegations of sexual abuse made against Jimmy Savile out with an almighty, nation-blasting, media-saturating, fanfare in Britain today. I have not yet read the report, Giving Victims A Voice, but the title alone gives grounds for scepticism: Savile, lest anyone forget, died without facing trial. He is no longer around to defend himself and

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Heretic TOC threatened with closure

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This blog is under threat of closure. Scarlet Wilde@wilde has tweeted: “Paedophile blogs at WordPress: Heretic TOC, Boy Chat, Girl Chat, CLover, Every Farthing, Growing Up Sexually, (more) am reporting to close.” If the site goes down, I’ll aim to reopen elsewhere but it may take a while. Keep an eye out for new link announced at the start of the month on Boy Links or contact me here to be on list for info about new URL: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk . Also, advice appreciated on best way forward. Can we fight this?

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No wonder women turn against 'teasing'

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We hear much these days about independent India’s soaring economic growth and advanced IT skills. But in the last couple of weeks a much grimmer story has emerged: the sickening gang rape and murder on a bus of a young unnamed woman. Apparently her death came about through evisceration when, after multiple rapes, an iron bar was shoved into her. It is a story which might at first seem of questionable relevance here, concerned as we are with minor attraction and with consensual sex not the atrocious rape and murder of an adult. Again bearing in mind John Donne’s words that

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British Empire re-conquers America

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My old leftie friends are going to hate me for this, but I have become a neo-imperialist. Not since I was a 10-year-old schoolboy gloating over the world map showing all “our” countries in the British Empire, displayed in pink and stretching across the globe from Canada to Australia and New Zealand, with India and huge chunks of Africa in between, have I been so puffed up with pride in imperial conquest! Wherefore this sudden resurgence of vainglory? Well, the British Empire has been revived, overnight! Even the American colonies, lost by Mad King George a couple of centuries ago, have

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It’s all kicked off in the British media

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Wow! It’s all happening! Jon Henley’s Guardian article on paedophilia yesterday has provoked an immediate and massive reaction. The piece itself drew over 900 comments on the paper’s website before the no doubt exhausted moderators closed the thread: they had been kept very busy reading and deleting abusive posts. In general, though, the exchanges, though passionate, included a lot of thoughtful if not always very well informed material. There were inevitably those who said they had been abused as children, and there were others who said they had enjoyed being sexually engaged with an adult, without later ill effects. I was

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Finally, a word in edgeways at the Guardian!

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I’ll keep this brief, as I hope you will be more interested in reading the Guardian today than Heretic TOC. The long-awaited article by Jon Henley (see “Taking the hex off a media word in edgeways”, 23 Dec 2012) has finally appeared. Do tell me what you think of it, but first, in the next few hours, you might want to focus on sharing your views with the Guardian, in their comment space. Don’t dither: latecomers (tomorrow, say) are likely to find the comment thread closed.

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