Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

Angus Stewart, inspiration of a generation

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Get to Edinburgh this week if at all possible, where Angus Stewart’s Sandel, “a notorious novel about underage gay sex”, as Gay Times puts it, “has been dramatised in a production playing at the city’s Festival Fringe until 24 August. The particular interest for heretics here is that the notoriety is about paedophilia rather than a relationship between two minors: both of the lovers depicted are teenagers, to be sure, but one is 19 and the other 13. The older partner, being over 18, is defined as an adult in English law, and his boyfriend is more than five years younger, […]

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New quests sparked by fading old charts

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Heretic TOC is delighted to report that readers here are increasingly leaving comments on old blogs – even from last year – as well as the latest one, and these comments include some excellent contributions. This reflects the fact that Heretic TOC aims to do more than just respond to the latest headlines: a goodly proportion of the blogs so far have engaged with topics that will remain live issues long after many “major” news stories have been forgotten. Admittedly, the mainstream media is where the “dominant narrative” is at its most comprehensively, well, dominant, and this blog is pledged to

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Cameron’s crusade and the ‘sexting’ generation

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When a president or prime minister personally announces a new moral crackdown, rather than leaving it to the justice or home affairs secretary to announce a law proposal or action plan, you know something is afoot: either there is an election not far away, or a need to divert public attention from intractable economic problems, or perhaps a runaway media-stoked moral panic is making it imperative for whoever is in charge to look like a leader not a follower. While British Prime Minister David Cameron need not face the electorate until early 2015, it has been speculated that his recent declaration

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An activist who is actually active

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Meet Jed Justice, an activist who is actually active, unlike many of us these days, including me, who tend just to moan about the way things are going rather than engaging directly with political and legal processes to right egregious wrongs. Jed submitted a detailed comment this week in response to All the world loves a lover?, Heretic TOC’s blog on the Jeremy Forrest case. He plainly has fire in his belly. This case of a teacher sentenced to five and a half years for a consenting relationship with a 15-year-old girl, even though the couple want to marry, had plainly

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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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