Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

It’s no accident we’re getting the hump

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The size of a boy’s testicles, according to Dr. Laura Bachrach, is the gold standard for assessing the arrival of male puberty. What you do – for strictly scientific purposes, of course – is use an orchidometer, a string of oval wooden or plastic beads of increasing size. To use the device, you gently pull the testicle to the bottom of a boy’s scrotum and use touch and sight to find the bead that matches it in volume. Be careful not to squeeze*! Pubic hair, by contrast is “very very misleading” because it is a later, less predictable indicator. You can […]

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ATSA agonising gives grounds for hope

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Angst and turmoil within the ranks of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) has been brought to Heretic TOC’s notice this week thanks to a leak from internal discussions. I did not personally encounter the Deep Throat of this episode in a dimly lit underground car park and do not know his identity (or hers); but the information is highly credible and was transmitted to me indirectly by a source I will be happy to credit later for this scoop, providing no one is going to be compromised. The leak, from a thread on the ATSA listserve, sees

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A not-so-funny thing on the way to the Forum

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I am relieved and delighted by the overwhelmingly supportive response to Why I am talking to the terrorists. Many thanks to everyone for submitting such thoughtful comments. Your remarks included quite a few requests for further information. You asked for a link to the ATSA article itself, and happily I can now give one because the ATSA Forum editor has kindly indicated he has no objections. So here goes: What to do with the entrenched client. You asked to be told about any feedback from the article, and follow-up developments. ATSA Forum does not run a comments/letters section, but the editor,

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Why I am talking to the terrorists

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Fraternising with the enemy! Treachery! There, I’ve said it. It’s out there. Loud but not that proud and not yet that specific either, so I’d better spit it out properly. Deep breath. Here goes. I HAVE BEEN NEGOTIATING WITH TERRORISTS – although I’d better deny it immediately in case they send someone to have me beheaded. Deny, that is, that they are terrorists not that I have been in talks with them. I refer, of course, to the fearsome international terror machine that is the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA). Well-funded, well-equipped, its tentacles stretching around the globe,

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Love is confoundedly complicated!

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A lingering social death by contempt, humiliation and shame is the daunting prospect I face when I go ahead with my next planned blog in a few days’ time. It is not the enemy’s scorn I fear – the more resilient of us can live with that – but, far worse, that of my friends. So, in a bid to ease the anticipated sting of your withering rebukes, I am going to use today’s Heretic TOC to set the scene in what I hope will be a disarming way. What appears below is a book review I wrote a few years

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Hail to a hero of ‘transgressive expression’

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Robin Sharpe is a writer of proven literary merit, as judged by the Supreme Court of Canada no less. I heartily endorse that verdict. He is indeed a damn fine writer, imaginative and linguistically inventive. Whether Sharpe is conjuring up a primitive paradise or a post-apocalyptic dystopian hellhole, his talented evocations are dotted with freshly minted words and striking images. He is wryly humorous and ironic, with a perceptive eye for the hilarious tragedy that is “the human condition” – whether visited through individual foibles and monstrosities or the bizarre, confused, mishmash of dimly understood myths, rites and traditions we use

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The strange case of the brilliant ‘bimbo’

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I ended last time with a description of how the News of the World had published a misleading photograph, in which I appeared naked with a young boy. My original narrative, written in 2001, continues below. It is not just “more of the same”, I promise you, so do stick with it. If you don’t find this intriguing, then intrigue just isn’t your thing. With photos like this one it could hardly be more apt that “Hannah”, if that was her name, kept referring to her “boyfriend” as “Con”. Con artist he certainly was. But it seems he could also have

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When Heretic TOC met the Fake Sheikh

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“The king of the sting reveals all” boasts the subtitle of Confessions of a Fake Sheik (sic), the memoirs of tabloid “investigative journalist” Mazher Mahmood, published in 2008. He certainly did reveal all at a French naturist resort back in 2001, as did two of his colleagues when the three of them stripped naked, posing as nudists in a bid to lay bare my supposed misdeeds at the resort to the readers of the infamous News of the World. What the Fake Sheikh (to give the more usual spelling, with an h) has always kept firmly under wraps, though, is his

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PIE spy, with my tabloid eye…

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The plots thicken. After the story broke a week ago about 114 British government files on “child sexual abuse” mysteriously going missing, the media exploded into an orgy of speculation about politicians, top civil servants and other Establishment figures in alleged paedophile rings, and conspiracies to cover up their dark deeds. Immediately, a panicked government responded, with Home Secretary Theresa May announcing to a packed House of Commons that there would be not one inquiry but two, one to look into the current allegations and also an overarching inquiry into loads of past inquiries that apparently hadn’t inquired enough. A thread

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Can you tell who he is yet?

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Rolf Harris you are 84 years old. You have no previous criminal convictions or cautions recorded against you. You are no longer in the best of health. For well over 50 years you have been a popular entertainer and television personality of international standing – with a speciality in children’s entertainment. You are also an artist of renown. You have been the recipient of a number of honours and awards over the years. You have done many good and charitable works and numerous people have attested to your positive good character. So began the sentencing remarks by Mr Justice Sweeney at

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