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Title: THE LAST TABOO: SEXUAL DESIRE FOR PRE-PUBESCENT CHILDREN
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edstrong.blog-city.com
URL Source: http://edstrong.blog-city.com/the_l ... desire_for_prepubescent_ch.htm
Published: May 29, 2006
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Post Date: 2006-05-29 09:04:01 by Mind_Virus
Keywords: None
Views: 532
Comments: 59
THE LAST TABOO: SEXUAL DESIRE FOR PRE-PUBESCENT CHILDREN
All photos are by Sally Mann. Visit her online gallery
Sexual Fascism in Progressive America Progressives in America are rightly concerned about increasing signs of fascism in this country, such as a so-called war on terrorism that allows massive invasion of privacy and wholesale imprisonment without charge.
Such as state manufacture of propaganda for its own people; such as the assertion that anyone who challenges government policies on these matters is a traitor.
Such as a "great leader" who puts himself clearly above and outside the law.
They ought to be concerned also about another sign of the demise of American justice and human decency: scapegoating.
One sign of fascism has always been the creation of a scapegoated class whom people are taught to fear and hate, and whose very existence demands a totalitarian state apparatus of surveillance and control. A class whom no-one would dare defend.
There is a class of people in America today, numbering two million or more, who have been utterly scapegoated, ostracized, demonized and shunned. There is no longer any defense available for these people. Almost no-one on the left or the right, civil libertarians or ordinary citizens, will defend their rights.
They are regularly vilified with the most vicious and hate-filled language—language previously reserved for classes now protected: Jews, Blacks, homosexuals. They are fair game as targets of abuse and vandalism.
They are subject to utter public scorn. About 600,000 of them have been rounded up and forced to register—many soon to be monitored for life with electronic bracelets and global positioning devices.
Nearly 4000 have been locked up for life, not on criminal charges, but by civil commitment, and those numbers are growing by the day.
The remainder are mostly in hiding, desperately afraid of sudden exposure and witch hunts by neighbors, fellow-workers and friends, whom they fear will suddenly see them as monsters beyond redemption.
They are a class defined not by specific crimes (though they are accused of many offenses) but by their very being, their desires, their constitution, as allegedly broken human beings.
Presidents and Governors call them "despicable," "disgusting," "incapable of rehabilitation or reform," "beyond help."
They are loudly reviled as examples to be shunned by fundamentalist and bigoted preachers, but also by left-wing media, progressive community leaders and feminists.
Who are these scum? Arab terrorists? Muslim fanatics? No—those evil-doers appear almost benign when compared to this heinous mob. These are the most awful people in the world: SEX OFFENDERS! Worse, many are PEDOPHILES!
In fact, these two terms become mingled. Jeb Bush recently alluded to all the sex offenders in Florida as child molesters, though fewer than 1/3 of those incarcerated in that state for "sex crimes" involved people under 18.
Bush went on, "These are a group of people who are the sickest of the sick. They are truly perverts and it's not curable. Instead of civil detention, we ought to make sure...these pedophiles...are locked up forever."
Of course among these sex offenders are indeed some criminals who have caused extreme harm: violent rapists of adult women as well as children. A few of them have kidnapped, tortured or murdered their victims.
Dr. Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins University Sex Disorders Clinic in Baltimore estimates that such crimes account for less than 1/10th of 1% of all sex offenses in America.
His studies also show that fewer than 10% of child sex offenders re-offend—though recidivism is usually given as a reason for draconian measures against them.
As child abuse experts point out, about 50 children are reported kidnapped and raped or murdered by strangers annually, compared to more than 3,000 children murdered by parents and other family members in non-sexual cases.
Most sex offenders, says one therapist who works with sex offenders in a state prison system, are "Gentle grandfathers who made one mistake in judgment years ago and fondled their grandchild.
Or lonely, geeky gay men—teenagers some of them—who sought mutual sexual release with adolescent boys.
Or young female teachers who succumbed to the wiles of handsome adolescent boys or girls. Or young men who got drunk and pushed their girlfriends over a line that is now called date rape."
Yet the media, police, prosecutors and politicians continue to insist that children are in dire need of protection from serial rapists and murderers.
Two-thirds of parents surveyed said they feared their children would be kidnapped and or murdered by strangers. Facts simply do not matter when hysteria is involved.
The New York Times recently published a sensational story about a teenage boy who went on line to entice more than 15,000 customers to watch his own pornographic images of himself.
The Times reporter, acting less like a reporter and more like a crusading cop, coaxed the boy away from his life of debauchery, reminding him he would instantly switch from "victim" to "perpetrator" when he passed his 18th birthday.
(Actually, those under 18 may be treated as perpetrators, too.)
He helped get the boy to the FBI to close in on many of his key customers, whom the Times had further investigated on its own. These customers included police officers, lawyers, ministers, rabbis, social workers—and especially those who work with children and adolescents.
Many also were parents and grandparents with ostensibly happy families of their own. Surely one sign that something is wrong with this picture is that the "heinous criminals" are otherwise law-abiding, decent human beings with successful careers and "normal" personal lives.
No. With scapegoating, such apparent normalcy is just one more sign of devious perversity.
The key ingredients of this scapegoating campaign are of course sex and children. "Nowhere," wrote Linda Williams in Children and Sex (1993), "is sexuality more feared in America than in the lives of children."
(Williams has spent her professional career assuring that these ingredients produce repression.)
The core demon in the campaign is the recently created category of "pedophile" (which does not predate the 1960s as a so-called scientific construct).
Although defined by the American Psychiatric Association as persons with a dominant sexual desire for pre-pubescent children, the pedophile tag now applies to any person who every entertained a sexual desire or had a sexual incident, however minor, with anyone under 18.
In some circles, the term pedophile is now used to put down any older person who has an affair or shows interest in younger persons—35-year-olds, for instance, who "prey on" 20-year olds.
By the early 2000s, pedophile had become morphed with the still broader "sex offender," with even mainstream media free to refer to the feared and hated class as "pervs" and "perps" and "deviants."
This scapegoating also requires public exposure and shunning, even of those who dare defend the civil liberties of pedophiles and sex offenders or challenge attacks on them.
In particular, public wrath is displayed against those who would challenge "age of consent" laws, which are higher in the United States (now effectively 18 in all states due to Federal statutes) than in most other societies.
(Mexico's age of consent is 12 in most cases; Japan is 13,; Spain is now 14—raised recently; France, 15; and Germany 16 and under 16 with parental consent.)
Although as of the 1880s, common law age of consent was 10 in England and its former colonies, and zero in many other societies—where child-brides were common—it has been increasingly raised until there is today, within UNESCO's campaign to protect children, a call for a universal age of 21.
All sex between persons under 18 and those over 18 (or 21) thus becomes "abuse," since there is the myth that underage persons are simply not capable of consent.
Journalists and scientific researchers who challenge this construct—or who defend some relationships between adults and minors as not being abusive—face severe consequences.
In the only instance of a U.S. Congressional resolution against a scientific paper, the House of Representatives, with only minimal opposition, denounced a study by Dr. Bruce Rind & others, published in the scholarly review, Psychological Bulletin, in 1998.
This "meta-analysis" reviewed several research protocols about adult-child sexuality, and summarized them as showing that relationships in which force was not used did not appear to cause harm, and sometimes might be beneficial. Rind and his co-authors have been systematically ostracized and excluded from many scholarly journals.
In 2005, a book by a major publisher, which contained another scholarly article by Rind, was withdrawn by that publisher (Hayworth) because of protests from fundamentalist Christians.
Other gay writers like William Herdt and John DeCecco who researched sexual outlaw behavior in the U.S. (DeCecco) or intergenerational sexuality in non-western cultures (Herdt) simply moved on to other topics.
This did not keep DeCecco from experiencing extreme persecution—while a Professor in San Francisco he had to hire bodyguards to protect him from right-wing attackers.
A number of women researchers and radical feminists have attempted to undermine or slow down the sex panic.
Among them have been Camille Paglia, Debbie Nathan, Joan Nelson, Elizabeth Stoney, Laura Marks, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, Carole Vance, Marjorie Heins, Joanne Wypijewski, Janice Irvine and Judith Levine.
Paglia has been castigated by other sex researchers and many feminist writers for her defense of man-boy sexual relationships in particular.
Although she has published lengthy, well-researched summaries of the history of sexuality and sexual research, she is seldom included in university curriculums involving these topics.
Many of the other women writers suffered similar consequences or censorship of their views. Debbie Nathan, who exposed and virtually stopped the so-called satanic cult child sex panic with her book Satan's Silence (Basic Books, 1996), has spoken of the icy reception her work has sometimes received.
She said, "... I have often had a sense of being intellectually and professionally marginalized, and I have experienced instances of editors killing pieces I've written about sexual hysteria because they got cold feet, as well as refusals to assign such stories."
One woman writer, who had never had problems with previous articles on other subjects for a prestigious national magazine, attempted a balanced look at the crusade against Catholic priests, especially the sensational case of Father Paul Shanley. She was called in by the editor who said he simply could not run her piece.
Even before Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex was published in 2002, a massive campaign by fundamentalist Christian groups, including Concerned Women for America, attacked the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press.
While the book was published, the Press created a new process for reviewing its books before publication.
Levine spoke publicly about how she was humiliated time and again in public. She said the manuscript for her book had been turned down by many publishers, treated as if it were "radioactive."
Among other insights, Levine wrote that "obsession with pedophiles stems for the reluctance to confront incest and the rampant sexualization of children" in American culture.
"Adults project the eroticized desire outwards, creating a monster to hate, hunt down and destroy." Of the outcry against her book she added, "What happened to me is a perfect example of the hysteria my book is about."
Nowhere is censorship and shunning greater than against those who would describe or depict childhood or adolescent sexuality, or mere nudity.
The "victims" of the evil perpetrators must also be protected—and projected as the spotless mirror image of their violators—at all costs—their purity and innocence asserted (even in the face of post-Freudian revelations of the sexual lives and interests of children).
Anything portraying the physical beauty of children or erotic aspects of their lives must be banned. (See Bob Chatelle's excellent summaries of the impact of the child porn crusade on freedom of expression: Kiddie Porn Panic, 1993; Limits of Free expression & the Problem of Child Porn, 1997.)
A spate of prominent photographers were censored beginning in the late 1980s, for photos of nude children or adolescents.
The most prominent case was that of the gay photographer, Robert Maplethorpe, whose works were removed from galleries across the country, including the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1990, with conservative attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts which had funded some of his work.
Some cases involved prize-winning women photographers, including Sally Mann [her photos accompany this article], Star Ockenga, and Judith Livingston.
Each of them was pilloried. Livingston's son was temporarily removed from her home after she published a photo of him nude. Livingston was eased out of her professorship at Cornell, and Ockenga was dismissed as director of the MIT photography exhibitions.
Sally Mann, who did some of the most widely-published nude photos of children. Her frankly erotic photos of her own children were called incestuous, pedophilic and pornographic.
Feminist writer Germaine Greer has said of her work, "The censoring of a mother's physical delight in her children marks the last stage in the denial of the sensuality of children." Mann now does landsape photography, and Ockenga, after a period of not working at all, turned to photographs of flowers.
Allen Ginsburg and Joseph Richy published an essay in 1990 against the radical departure from art history in which nude children and adolsecents are out of bounds.
In "The Right to Depict Children in the Nude," their main point was that sex and nudity in children, and especially adolescents, had been a primary theme of the visual and literary arts throughout Western culture, as well as in many non-Western societies.
He pointed out that even popular advertising used photos and drawings of nude children—especially boys—and Norman Rockwell often portrayed nude or semi-nude boys on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
Suddenly, all such photos and pictures disappeared. By the 1990s, when Calvin Kline made public a campaign to sell jeans showing scantily clad teenagers, he was forced to withdraw it within days. The nude child disappeared.
In fact, almost ALL photographs of pubescent and post-pubescent boys and girls vanished from most public media.
No wonder, since the Faber Supreme Court decision in 1982 labeled child pornography as wholly unprotected expression not covered under the Bill of Rights, and since the child pornography acts, beginning in 1990, increasingly criminalized almost all such depictions of any person appearing to be under 18, even when "real children" were not depicted in drawings and simulations.
(This was part of the 1996 law, but the Supreme Court declared that part of the bill unConstitutional. The language has reappeared in the 2006 bill now before Congress.)
Almost the sole exception to the disappearance of erotic depictions of children has been Greer's The Beautiful Boy (Rizolli, 2003).
She notes, "At the end of the 20th century, the guilty panic about pedophilia completed the criminalization of awareness of the desires and charms of boys."
She took care not to provoke with openly sexual photographs, but she was clear that her purpose was to resurrect the erotic image of the boy, not as pedophilia, but as a reasonable erotic interest of homosexual or heterosexual artists.
The response to Greer has been largely positive in the art world, though not without expected attacks in mainstream newspapers and conservative journals in which she is labled a "female pederast" among other things. Greer is Australian and has always been known as one to challenge taboos and court sensational publicity.
A Supreme Court decision (Knox V United States,1993) criminalized photographs of even clothed children, if they could be deemed erotic.
Most anti-censorship organizations simply stopped complaining about censorship in cases involving depictions of nude children or erotic situations involving children.
These were now deemed beyond the pale of civil liberty. The Parade magazine cover (Feb. 19, 2006) featured the words in large, bold type,"...Every image of a sexually displayed child—be it a photograph, a tape or a DVD—records both the rape of the child and an act against humanity."
The feature article from which these words came was by Andrew Vachss, not a child sexuality expert, but a very high-priced lawyer who has successfully sued institutions and individuals in child sex abuse cases.
Vachss does not define a "sexually displayed child"—neither in terms of age (a 17 year old is still a child in most jurisdictions and under most laws), nor in terms of what it includes—nudity? nearly nude erotic poses?—but he makes the absolute statement that it is rape and a crime against humanity.
Nothing could be more heinous (his word). Who says? Why? Those questions are not asked and may not be asked. To ask them is to risk being accused of complicity with rape and crimes against humanity!
Vachss goes on to urge stiffer penalties for mere possession or viewing of a downloaded photograph from the internet—one assumes he means at least life in prison (which is already in force for many such offenses). The utterly evil act becomes the basis for completely scapegoating the utterly evil perpetrator.
The full force of this shunning and scapegoating is aimed at those who can be labeled pedophiles. As the National Center for Reason and Justice, a group that supports those it deems wrongly accused in sex cases, says on its website:
"Especially vulnerable have been those accused of sex offenses against children and adolescents. While none of us deny that these crimes occur, those accused nevertheless have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and to receive fair trials. But too often, hysteria reigns and the accused are tried and convicted by the media."
One day—perhaps fifty or a hundred years from now—it will appear ludicrous that our society was so consumed with anger at this class of scapegoats that it obliterated its fine traditions of liberty and justice in favor of retribution and vengeance.
It will seem odd, that American society was obsessed with concern about sexual acts with teenagers even as it pursued a pointless war that killed thousands of teenagers and others on both sides of that war.
People will hopefully someday recoil when told that a person convicted in Federal court of making a photograph of a 17 year old masturbating would receive a mandatory sentence of life in prison, yet a person convicted of the (non sexual) murder of that teen would face far less.
It will seem incredible that the focus was on sexual deviance rather than on the astronomical rate of murder and other real violence, or the growing gap between rich and poor, and the indelible mark of real poverty on so many children.
Until such a day of greater sanity, this scapegoating and shunning of all sex offenders and "pedophiles" will inevitably lead to less freedom and more insecurity for all who might engender the wrath of puritan preachers or stoke the greed of media outlets and pandering politicians.
For now, it seems unlikely that even those who traditionally guard our civil liberties or those who traditionally challenge state repression from the left will dare speak out, lest they, too, be marginalized and shunned.
"Pariah" @ APR
The writer remains anonymous because he writes and is politically active in several completely unrelated social justice movements. He fears that the shunning and marginalization he describes for those who write about this topic could compromise (unfairly) his other work.
posted Monday, 29 May 2006
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 32.
#7. To: Mind_Virus, AKA Stone, mehitable, Zipporah, robin, All (#0)
Good God. This pervert is blaming the children for inticing him and pointing fingers at everyone who does not approve of molesting/raping children. As each day goes by I become more convinced the holy spirit is leaving this earth. Where is Stone when we need him??
That's exactly what narcissists do; "It's not my fault; it's yours; you made me do it."
There are too many of them around. Police getting their jollies out of torturing citizens in our own country now, perverts running amok, rampant violent porn and torture videos which I suspect too many people enjoy looking at; this is turning into one very evil country. Sometimes I wish I was a 90 yr old with a fatal illness. I'm just sick of it all. I mean is this the kind of life we get to look forward to? And it's only going to get worse from here on out.
You know Diana for years on these forums (FR, LP and 4um) I've sometimes said that the delivery of porn over the computer to the people should be taxed. Meaning that everyone who wants porn should just have to pay an extra $5/month on their bill. It is easy to screen the porn out at ISP level and I've said that the screening service should be offerred for free and that anyone who doesn't want it should be taxed at $5/month. and of all the times I advocate that virtually nobody agrees with me. And people come out of wood-work to oppose. People are OK with the idea that political speech be limited, that is what campaign finance reform does. People are usually OK with the idea that someone like Zundell the holocaust doubter be thrown in jail for speaking. But speech that involves porn must be protected strongly. the people are lost, they're being led down a bad path.
I know, and it's a great source of worry for me. Porn has powerful effects on the mind and it damages men's ability to have healthy relationships with women, in fact many of them become women-haters when they were previously normal. Also many of them like to watch torture videos and their minds become totally twisted and evil from it all. It's been documented that watching that stuff actually causes changes in the brain, and I'm convinced it has demonic effects on the soul. You are right, when it comes to porn, people become very defensive, though no one wants to come right out and admit they are into it. Sick, sick, sick. What a demented world we now live in. I've learned so much these past few years about human beings that I wish I had never found out about.
umm, this may not be popular but why is there such an obsession with pornography in the US? its like the gun thing - why are there other nations with a higher proportion of weapons but less murders? there's far less censorship in mainland Europe but the Scandinavians, for example, aren't overrun with rapists and molesters. i'm an abuse survivor (a priest, not family) and i feel VERY strongly about protecting children and other vulnerable people from sexual exploitation but i really don't trust soem of the politicians and so-called moral crusaders who use this issue as an easy target for votes. it seems like the perfect excuse for people who want to restrict freedom, to use the "protecting children" argument to justify repression. when soembody expects me to trust them with my freedom because they are protecting me from danger, i smell a rat. and there's soemthing very sinister about the people who shout loudest against sexual perversions. they seem to be almost obsessed with it too, like it has become a new fetish in its own right. sorry if i upset people but i think people should be respected as grown-up adults by the state, not like easily-led children :(
ruthie I am sorry if I appear sinister to you, I am simply concerned about the amount of time in recent years that American men spend looking at pornography and torture videos on the internet. It does something to their behavior and that behavior spills over onto other people and then many people end up suffering because of it. Many policemen in the US are now using torture on drug suspects, this is something that was rarely if ever done when this country still had some decency. When many men watch this stuff, they tend to want to act it out, and too many become addicted to it. I lived in Europe in the mid-90s and I watched a lot of tv in the evenings. I watched BBC 1, BBC 2 and Sky tv, along with Dutch channels, and was somewhat alarmed at the many anti-American documentaries on the British channels, though otherwise the European programming was much better than it is here. These propaganda shows distorted American reality very much, portraying it as a country with very ignorant, fat and ugly white people with missing teeth who live on MacDonald's hamburgers and shooting their guns when they are not eating their MacDonald's hamburgers, or drinking poor quality beer getting drunk and loud in their run-down trailers. The black people in these documentaries were all in prison, most of them around 17 years old and on death row for crimes they did not commit. This is not an accurate portrayal of America, there actually are some refined, intelligent and attractive people in this country, and many of them do not even eat MacDonald's hamburgers, and the vast majority of people I've known have not owned guns. While living there I took Dutch classes, and I encountered some rather snotty English women who accused me of living on MacDonald's hambergers because I was an American, as I was told all Americans live off of MacDonald's food. One of them asked me how many guns I owned. Normally I get along well with others, but for the first time in my life I felt discriminated against. I'm not a loud person, I have good manners, hopefully better manners than those bratty English women had. They also wanted to know if I got married in Las Vegas, as many Americans apparently dream of gettng married in tacky wedding chappels there. I hadn't realized that before they told me (!). I'm not some grim, spoil-sport schrew who wants to take away free speech under the guise of being against porn. I simply think it's very harmful to a society and it's breaking up many marriages, because the men quit having sex with their wives, and prefer to shut themselves up in the computer room and masturbate. This has not been my personal experience, but it's very common, well documented, and causes a lot of sadness and negative energy. I hope someday you can come to visit America, you can see there are all kinds and types of people, and you will find out those documentaries are very distorted and appeal to a hateful, bigoted nature. I find it curious that British tv would have so many of them, considering they are our allies (reluctantly, I'm sure). I saw a lot of French tv too as my mother lives in France, they didn't have nearly, if any of the anti-American propaganda shows. And in my experience the French were very friendly, warm and helpful people. In a way a person's society is an extension of their family, and it's heartbreaking to see it torn apart by so many negative influences. I am not a grim spinster, I do not "need to get laid", I am not attempting to outlaw free speech, I simply do not like the sorrow and suffering caused to people and animals by the rampant porn and torture videos.
I wasn't aware of the rampancy of torture associated with pornography. Is it your opinion that this is a recent phenomena?
you can laugh about it pandora and poke fun as you desire. but it has been documented that the bad serial killers in our history have mostly been porn addicts. porn doesn't just increase the likelihood of serial killers, it tends to make men dysfunctional and give them unwholsome desires. this results in much unhappiness and destruction. the one serial killer who was the #1 serial killer (ted bundy?) gave an interview before being executed and in that interview he specifically said that his sickness started with porn. and contrary to pandora's opinion - it is a good thing for people to be sheltered from porn.
What ever gave you the impression that I was laughing, Red? I asked Diana the question earnestly.
#35. To: Pandora, Red Jones (#32)
sorry, i will butt out. i didn't see this post when i posted.
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#8. To: Diana (#7)
This pervert is blaming the children for inticing him and pointing fingers at everyone who does not approve of molesting/raping children.
#9. To: YertleTurtle, Starwind, Red Jones, CAPPMADNESS (#8)
That's exactly what narcissists do; "It's not my fault; it's yours; you made me do it."
#11. To: Diana, robin (#9)
#13. To: Red Jones (#11)
#15. To: Diana (#13)
#16. To: ruthie, Red Jones, robin, christine, YertileTurtle (#15)
#18. To: Diana (#16)
#19. To: Pandora (#18)
#32. To: Red Jones (#19)
you can laugh about it pandora and poke fun as you desire.
Replies to Comment # 32. What ever gave you the impression that I was laughing, Red? I asked Diana the question earnestly.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 32.