I hope you won’t think I’m oversharing if I tell you that I’m the most sexually open-minded person I know. I think moralistic arguments about non-monogamy and sexual promiscuity are silly. I’m against kink-shaming, no matter how weird I might personally find those kinks to be. I think sexual expression between two consenting adults, in all of its weirdness and awkwardness and occasional downright bizarreness, is a beautiful thing.
Speaking as an abuse survivor, I can spell out very clearly what is magical about the age 18.
It is the age at which, in this society, a person can vote, own property, sign a contract and work a full-time job (okay technically one can work full time at 17). Prior to age 17 or 18, then - unless legally emancipated - one is dependent upon one's family (or the state, if in the foster system) for survival. A person under 18 years of age is not free to choose where they live, whom they live with or even what activities they participate in, without permission from their legal guardian. And if that person is in a situation - at home, at school, at church - where they are expected to have sex with someone, unless their legal guardian intervenes on their behalf, they are essentially a slave to that situation. Tragically, more often than not, where abusive situations exist, the legal guardian either has failed to intervene in the way they should, or is the perpetrator. And even if a child runs away, choosing homelessness over an abusive situation, they may be brought BACK to the abusive situation by police if they are found. So the child is stuck with it, until they can get a job and sign a contract to get their own place to live.
And THAT is what is magical about the age of 18.
Now, if we were to grant individuals full rights of adulthood at 16 or 17 years of age, then it would also make sense for 16 or 17 to be the age of consent for sex.
"Now, if we were to grant individuals full rights of adulthood at 16 or 17 years of age, then it would also make sense for 16 or 17 to be the age of consent for sex."
Exactly. Pedophilia apologists always make the argument that the age of consent is arbitrary. And they're right. The age of majority os different in different countries and makes different things legal/illegal. There's no airtight argument that the age should be 18 vs 17 or 16.
But there *is* an airtight argument that there needs to be an age of consent. An age where we can say, legally speaking, that most people will be mature enough to make serious decisions for themselves. That makes it harder for predators to manipulate young and vulnerable people.
If an adult feels aggrieved because they're being asked to put a child's (or, in fact, *anybody's*) emotional needs before their own sexual needs, I think that tells us everything we need to know about them.
People have gone all their lives without sex. I don't recommend it but it didn't kill them. Needs are things like food and water, denial of which leads to illness or death. This Rogue guy doesn't "need" underage girls. He desires them. If he acts on that desire he will end up in prison where this sort of thing is not survival-positive.
I urgently desire a Moog One. I can afford it but the double shipment and the customs would double the price, as they did for my Moog Grandmother. I will likely go to my grave without a Moog One.
I urgently desire a certain drug-enhanced extremely dangerous sexual experience. I accept that I will never have it.
Wants and needs. I would not want a world restricted to "why does anyone need [x]?" but is important to understand the difference.
In the case of the subject at hand, sex drive is powerful for most people in their teens but it is certainly not a need. Indeed, immature choices can screw up your whole life. There, I think, is the reason for age of consent laws.
We already have more than enough pull to screw up our lives in youth without some asshole adult coming along and pushing us off that cliff.
We all know that 18 is based on averages and that until recently the threshold for some rights was 21. Kids at 18 don't seem as mature as they were a few generations ago, with their ability to reason crippled by desperately short attention spans. We didn't have computer games or channel-surfing in the 1960s.
For example I would say that anyone who starts smoking has shown an indisputable inability to run his own life. I don't care how old he is.
"ability to reason crippled by desperately short attention spans"
A huge issue. Are the members of society victims in the face of purposeful shortening of attention span to maximize exposure to advertising in the digital world? Perpetually toddlers who drop a toy at the sight of another toy.
Could be, but I try to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Where it really scares me is how few people can read a book, or even a short document, or hw brief a period of dead air leads someone to say "gotta go, things to do," which is horseshit, it's just about getting back to the phone or the TV and smiling at it.
I don't recall if I've mentioned it here before. One year as I reviewed one of my daughter's reading lists, I noticed that a number of books dear to me in my youth were struck out. I went to the parent meet the teacher event and asked about it. She said that those books had Cliff's Notes. She wanted her students to read books, not summaries. Sacrificing good books to achieve that was her reason. What happened to a love for reading?
Since I started doing technical writing in 1993 I've had to shorten paragraphs and use more bullet lists. Half the software management fads like agile and scrum are founded on deprecating documentation because so many can't read a full page and hardly anyone can write.
Years ago, a mentor advised me to put an executive summary at the beginning of my multi-page technical reports because few managers would read the whole thing, even engineering managers. There was some justification for that.
I think it’s pretty obvious that this guy wants access to children, sexual access. There is simply no reason to be so wrapped up with the “arbitrary” age of 18.
The alternative to setting a “one age fits all” standard would be regular and routine psychological testing of adolescents for decision-making ability and not only would this be impractical, it would simply shift your opponent’s outrage from the “arbitrary age” to "the tyranny of the government-administered tests." Again, government is keeping him from the underaged bodies he craves.
And since the test score would replace the "arbitrary age of consent," there would be those who would never pass, who in their 30s or 40s or 60s would still not be allowed to do things that everyone is "arbitrarily" granted on the 18th birthday.
And frankly this guy is dumb. “Divided states” wasn’t even funny once but he kept repeating it. His threat to report responses was indicative. His use of “proof” instead of “evidence” shows a weak education if not a weak mind. And resentment of government is increasingly tiresome. So he had to wait his turn at the DMV. This shouldn’t be the basis of an ideology.
Edit: about your introduction here. It's easy to see promiscuity in a relationship as a moral issue. But when a relationship began with a pledge of monogamy and one partner breaks that pledge, the issue isn't morality, it's betrayal. My first two relationships each lasted four years because my partners wanted to pursue sexual fantasies. If the original agreement had been that the relationship was sexually open that would be a different thing, but I don't have a lot of confidence in the longevity of such pairings.
"I think it’s pretty obvious that this guy wants access to children, sexual access. There is simply no reason to be so wrapped up with the “arbitrary” age of 18."
100%. Hilarious that he tried to play the victim card because people have implied he's a pedophile in the past. The "kids" in scare quotes is enough to make me thing somebody needs to check his hard drive.
Ultimately his issue is simply with the existence of boundaries. There's a certain type of person who can't accept that they don't get to do whatever they want, whenever they want, whatever the consequences to andbody else. And lately this disrespect for boundaries is labelled "progressive."
As for the intro, I think you're conflating promiscuity and cheating. Yes, cheating is morally wrong. But that's because, as you say, it breaks an agreement and a bond of trust. Promiscuity is just having a lot of sex, and non-monogamy implies that the people in the non-monogamous relationship have different agreements and boundaries around their sexual behaviour.
It's possible to cheat, even in non-monogamous relationships. Many open relationships still have dos and don'ts, and if you violate them, it's still morally wrong. I'm just saying that choosing to set up your dos and don'ts in non-traditional/monogamnous ways isn't a moral issue one way or the other.
I just read through his and your comments. It reads like a Keystone cops comedy of errors and misunderstanding. I believe that the support group he was talking about was for men trying not to be gay, not men trying not be pedophiles. But of course, the question of pedophilia is one the gay community has dealt with for years, quite understandably since there are traditions dating back thousands of years of older men introducing younger men, often adolescent, to homosexual sex. It's not a creation of decadent modernism. So, it's not at all clear to me that Rogue is interested in having sex with children. I could be wrong, as his comments are not very articulate. One thing is clear: virtue-signaling and moral grandstanding are easy. Talking frankly and without snide judgment about why "we" as a society have this issue with sexualizing children is hard.
"Boiling the concept of pedophilia down to an age is dysfunctional"
"I'm the one who is so frustrated with the current cultural definition of a child is 18 or under"
And last but not least:
"If they are old enough at 10, aren’t they old enough then to consent to sex?"
Seems pretty unambiguous to me.
I'm not saying that Rogue is interested in having sex with children. As I said, I'd prefer not to think too deeply about that one way or the other. But I am saying that his rhetoric around the age of consent and sexual boundaries for children is poorly thought out at best and predatory at worst.
"I use to lead a group call the Samson Society in my church. It was a group that let men speak honestly about their sexual desires and activities without fear of being 'cancelled'"
Also, note that the group he mentions here is different to the group he mentions in the first reply that tried to help gay men not to act on their sexuality. He talks repeatedly about the importance of pedophiles being able to come forward and seek help. This is the one point where we're in complete agreement. I agree that stigmatising pedophilia to the point where pedophiles can't come forward and ask for help is a disaster for all concerned.
But as I said, if you take Rogue's view that the age of consent is "a placebo created by politicians and a mindwashed American citizenry" (seemingly ignoring that age of consent laws exist all over the world) why exactly would you seek help? Help for what? If the age of consent is meaningless, what exactly is wrong with having sex with a child? Especially if the child "wants to consent".
I think the age of consent is just one pillar in protecting children from abuse. But it's arguably the most important one, because it defines what a child *is*. So I have very little patience for people trying to muddy the waters with abstract philosophising about something that doesn't affect them at all (unless they're a pedophile), but could affect a child for the rest of their life. If you consider that virtue signalling or moral grandstanding, that's fine.
The only other possibility for all this intricate rationalization is that he was deeply attracted to one underage child and has built an edifice of BS around the denial of his lust. Otherwise, yeah, scan his phone and hard drive for pics of naked kids.
I had a friend in Norfolk, the guy I was with the night I had a certain breakthrough I don't talk about online, whose older brother just disappeared one day, sent away because, as I learned later, he had taken a child into the basement and had him? her? in a state of undress. He was of a recognizable type: unkempt, shirttail out, don't-care haircut, taped unfashionable glasses. I mention this because years later I saw a guy sitting on a curb near a playground looking fixedly at kids playing and occasionally "touching himself" and he had the exact same look.
My impression of Rogue and I hope I'm right is that he's too busy seeking justification to act out of desires just yet, what he wants is too dangerous to talk about publicly. Just on what you posted someone could send the cops to his house.
But don't forget: this isn't a temptation, it's an illness, and it's incurable. Some pedophiles beg to be castrated because they know they'll otherwise molest again, others are angrily defiant.
I ran into one guy on AOL ("DarknessXX") who wanted to rape and murder young boys and the murder scenarios were freaking gruesome. Recurving razor blades.
I could have been more precise in my choice of words, and called it cheating. I've been promiscuous; I had my adolescence at age 42 instead of my late teens and I bedded as many men as I could manage. I got it out of my system and quit but while I was in it I was perfectly aware I was being idiotic.
But yes I meant cheating. I've known enough people intimately to have figured out that the wantonly promiscuous aren't just excessively horny but have self-esteem issues, most recognizably in aging men who date much younger to convince themselves they "still got it."
One of the many reasons I got away from the gay community was its deeply-held notion that promiscuity was our birthright, our gift to the straight world (straight world: "no thanks"). Even aside from the risk of HIV there is clearly something unhealthy about it.
And one of the few advantages of being older is being so much less horny. I used to leave work for sex twice a day.
"But yes I meant cheating. I've known enough people intimately to have figured out that the wantonly promiscuous aren't just excessively horny but have self-esteem issues"
Yeah, this is doubtless true. At least in some cases. Then again, lots of behaviour can be traced back to self-esteem issues. I just don't think it's a moral issue.
I remember one from years ago, a fat man in his late 50s and a little rich, dating a 24yo attractive woman with whom he planned to murder his wife and marry the girl.
It was a belly laugh that this overweight and aging man actually believed this girl wanted him for his dick.
I dunno about moral issue but it sure was pathetic.
"scare" does not make sense, the intent is clearly a sneer. Somebody heard it wrong.
"Slim chance" once meant what it sounds like; "fat chance" was sarcasm, now they are interchangeable.
"Unique" once meant singular, now it more commonly means "distinctive." When I hear "very unique" I want to get up and go for a walk away from humanity.
Americans say "have gotten," in the Commonwealth it's still "have got." The American started as a confusion with "forgotten."
All this is a big part of why I have turned down management jobs.
“ "scare" does not make sense, the intent is clearly a sneer. Somebody heard it wrong.”
Uh, “scare” came first! In fact, if you search for “sneer quotes” you’ll get results for “scare quotes.” (Including a reference to the woman who coined the term in 1956.)
You’re going to have to accept that you’re not the arbiter of the English language my friend. The fact that you don’t like a turn of phrase doesn’t make it wrong or rewrite the history of the phrase.
I was wondering for a minute there if he was talking about the difference between children and teenagers and adults, because of course there are big differences, as the varying ages of consent can attest to. Honestly I found the points he was trying to make to be really confusing. But then I saw the lines "When is a person “old enough” to chose when they are trans? If they are old enough at 10, aren’t they old enough then to consent to sex?" and suddenly his perspective was... clarified. 😬
"because of course there are big differences, as the varying ages of consent can attest to."
Yeah, pedophilia apologists often try to muddy the waters with teenage edge cases to give their arguments a veneer of respectability. But in most cases, the law already protects close-age underage sexual relationships. I think pretty much everybody would agree that teenagers shouldn't go to jail for having sex with each other. That's very different from his argument that age of consent laws are meaningless.
I think his arguments were confusing simply because they were geared towards pretending there's no need to legally protect children from predators. It's very hard to be coherent when the target you're trying to hit is, "It's mean to 'cancel' people just because they have sex with kids."
This guy is freakin scary. I read a series by Andrew Vachss who is a child advocate in sexual abuse cases. He couldn’t get his non-fiction book traction so created a hard-bitten character named Burke who would have had NO tolerance for talking to Rogue.
There is such a short window for innocence. To be a child, smiling in sheer joy at the sun.
Those who prey on this are simply evil. Takers. Robbers of innocence.
Thank you for challenging this guy. He’s just dead wrong. I don’t know what the age of consent is/should be yet indulging crap like this without pushback makes no sense.
And I, too, care nothing about what consenting adults choose to do with each other - although I will admit the self-mutilating trans stuff gives me pause.
"And I, too, care nothing about what consenting adults choose to do with each other - although I will admit the self-mutilating trans stuff gives me pause."
Yeah, I think this is the line a lot of people bump into in various ways.
I have to admit that I can't help feeling sad when a healthy woman chops of her breasts or a healthy man chops of his penis and they engage in this pretence that they're the opposite sex. Even if I don't know them. I can't help wishing there were a better way for them to accept themselves for who and what they are. But I'd still fight for their right to do it. Adults should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies, regardless of what I or anybody else thinks about it.
But this thinking simply cannot apply to children. In order to protect children, we have to agree on an age where they don't get to make serious, life-altering decisions. 16-18 seems to work pretty well for all kinds of things. So anybody who thinks this boundary is too high (or shouldn't exist at all) should have to give a clear, detailed and *very public* explanation as to why they need access to children younger than that.
"Adults should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies"
I can't agree with an absolutist expression like this. Why do we have laws against suicide? Kurt Cobain killed himself because his girlfriend dumped him. I think we have responsibility to each other to step in and help those we care about instead of shrugging it off as "it's his body to do what he wants."
Take gender transitioning. The satisfaction and fulfillment of the sliced turns out to be a huge lie; a lot of the "trans" cult is made of people (kids) who have a lot of problems but as soon as "trans" comes up the other existing conditions recede to invisibility and transition is supposed to fix everything. Most them end up more miserable than before and the tyranny of the "trans" activists guarantees that we won't hear about that. I don't know if you've seen Affirmation Generation but they report that post-transition suicide is nineteen times the demographically matched statistic.
As for alternatives, psychiatric counseling has proven to be more effective, though it will be a long time getting off the ground in America where surgical transitioning is good for $70,000 and the activists are so strident about locking kids into the "trans" club, screaming louder and louder that puberty is too late.
And then there's BIID, where people want a healthy limb amputated because they have this idea that it's just an encumbrance. I think to take the "shrug" attitude toward that is irresponsible.
Would you hire someone who broadcast that he was a troublemaker like this? I would discard any résumé with any pronoun pairs. Such an employee is going to be nothing but trouble
Do we?! A law against suicide seems kind of redundant, no? I think suicide is widely seen as a moral wrong, but I'm not clear on its legality.
But yes, I agree with you, at least in principle. I think people should be able to do what they want with their bodies, but I also think we should try to help people make healthy decisions. We shouldn't pretend there aren't clearly better or worse choices, whether we're talking about diet, exercise, plastic surgery or surgical transition.
I also think we should take into account people's mental health when they're making major, life-altering decisions. Removing your sex organs is drastic and permanent, so of course, there should be a careful psychological assessment. Definitely no argument there.
But I think it should require the most extraordinary circumstances to deny somebody the right to do what they want after that process is completed. Even if we personally feel the decision is a mistake. The desire to do something we think is weird can't be held up, in and of itself, as evidence that the person is mentally incompetent. That's a dangerous path to go down.
Personally I sort of believe in Vonnegut's Monkey House, where suicide can be achieved by choice but only after serious counseling and I don't mean a single 30-minute perfunctory interview.
I had a friend in Seattle, a close friend, black and gay, one of my few sex partners I saw socially. He liked to go to the clandestine cruising ground and give blowjobs. All the time. This was mostly while I was away for four years, when I returned to Seattle I learned he had died a month before.
I remain angry to this day that nobody sat down with him and said, "Michael you really need to stop this, a lot of those men have HIV and you are eventually going to get it and die."
I'll risk friendships telling people they need to quit smoking or quit drinking so much. I expect people to do the same for me if I'm out of line, though I have none of the common vices.
And, yes, in the end people make their own choices but I think we tend to shrug off their bad choices as "not my problem" way too readily.
"And, yes, in the end people make their own choices but I think we tend to shrug off their bad choices as "not my problem" way too readily."
Yep, sadly I think you're dead right about this. We also see it reflected in the culture of people whipping out their phones and recording instead of helping or even calling for help when somebody is being beaten up or some other preventable wrong is happening right in from of them.
If others are already calling 911 I support videos of what's going on. It can hold perps accountable and make it easier for the cops to nab him or her, and provide documentary evidence in court that s/he did do the crime.
I remember suicide being illegal in the USA but that seems to have vanished, possibly because of the absurdity when successful and the cruelty when not.
I have an acquaintance (I can't really call him a friend anymore), a former coworker who is now psychotic, who is obsessed with child abuse. He casts himself as a "child advocate" but if you engage him on the topic he starts recounting experiences that are clearly inventions of a disturbed mind, for example that he was raped 3000 times as an infant.
He turns any and all discussions to child abuse, which seems to include birth control. I'm >< this close to blocking him on Facebook because I live in a Communist country that monitors social networking activity within its borders and if some cop whose English isn't fluent reads his responses to my posts and loses track of who said what, I could get deported.
I'd wager that there are child molesters who think about molesting children a lot less than he does. He has thrown away his life with this stuff; he's on psych disability, hasn't worked in decades, and threw away a job at Microsoft by the incomprehensible indiscretion of sending an email about his hobbyhorse to a public figure from his work email.
I let him live with me when I ran into him and learned he was homeless but I came to regret my generosity pretty quickly and in the end had the police remove him. I'm a gay man who actually does sodomize other men and given his proclivity to believing things that never happened, I didn't feel safe sleeping with him in my house.
I dropped him off at the mission around 2009, and lost track of him until about a year ago when he appeared on Facebook. Since then he's gone on disability and he still writes about kiddy rape. I did a post about hibiscus tea and he responds with something about Spartans screwing little boys.
I felt sorry for him for a while, I knew him before this started, but now I'm just sick and tired of it.
Yeah, honestly, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, I wish it were easier to find challenging and/or meaningful debate online.😅
I have an advantage in these conversations, in that I’ll have done some considerable research before writing an article, so I know what I’m talking about, but all too often the opposing argument isn’t even about the facts. It’s just some variation of “the points you’ve laid out here don’t validate my feelings so you’re stupid/evil/racist/transphobic/etc.“
The internet makes it very easy to have an opinion without ever really needing to defend it.
I hope I’m not getting out of my lane here but I enjoy your writing and ideas so much that I can’t resist asking if you would share your take on theme of navigating the post colonial world generally. How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good? How do we separate the colonial contributions (eg modern political systems) from the bad and who decides? How do indigenous and the descendants of colonialists coexist? These questions are relevant to almost every country on earth. Your experience abroad and unique family background give you a good vantage point from which to think about these questions. I’ve lived in India and other countries like Mexico and all are still litigating the post colonial world.
""How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good?"
😁 A lot to cover here, but very broadly speaking, I think the way to deal with the post colonial world is to stop pretending that past and present are equivalent. And to focus on real issues instead of distractions. This would be helped enormously by teaching history accurately, tying it to the present effectively, and abandoning the idea that we automatically share the sins or oppression of our ancestors. We can do this without denying our culpability in the present.
For example, let's consider a few different types of cultural appropriation.
I saw recently that some Aboriginal spears stolen by James Cook in 1770 will be returned to the original clan. I think that's great if that's what the clan wants (I'd love to see the same thing happen with the British Crown Jewels, but I won't hold my breath 😄).
There's no denying that colonialism stole a lot of material and cultural wealth from around the world and if the descendants of the original owners want it back, I think that's what should happen. That wrong, at least, can be undone relatively easily.
Then there's appropriation in the form of capitalism, which is a lot more complicated. To take Africa as an example, vast amounts of wealth and resources have been (and still are being) effectively stolen from the continent.
Right now, China is buying up vast swathes of land and infrastructure that will keep Africa indebted for centuries. This is colonialism too. Aided and abetted in the case by extreme poverty and corrupt governments (both African and Western). It's one of the greatest injustices of history and hardly anybody is talking about it because we're all, and I mean *everybody* in the west, complicit. To undo *that* colonialism we'd all need to sacrifice. To be fair, the reluctance to sacrifice for the greater good is why colonialism throughout history has gone unopposed by people of good conscience.
And this is why it's so infuriating to see people going about "cultural appropriation" in the form of dreadlocks and beads and surfing. This is what always happens. There's a legitimate problem somewhere in the world, the problem is complex or the solutions are unpalatable, and so a sect of noisy "activists" finds some idiotic low-hanging fruit that nobody really cares about and they act as if that's the key issue.
Some people *pretend* to care because it's trendy and they get social media points, and the people most affected, the people starving and dying in poverty and unsafe working conditions, never even cross their minds. But hey, at least we yelled at Kim Kardashian for wearing cornrows or for calling her shape wear line "Kimono."
Anyway, rant over.😅 I hope I mostly answered your question.
That was a take on the symbolic “cultural appropriation” as “idiotic low hanging fruit that nobody really cares about” in the context of the massive material appropriation that nobody talks about is original and really perceptive. I had never linked them that way.
When I raised the issue of the challenges of post colonialism I was not expecting your substantive answer. I was hoping it could be a topic of future articles. You have a lot to add I am sure.
There is actually one anti-appropriation law that I know of. It is on behalf of native Americans. I have a Navajo flute (crafted and sold by Navajo people) and a native American style flute (not made by native Americans). Notice the inclusion of the word style. It's the law. Selling crafts native to native Americans is a common source of income and falsely selling imitations is truly a ripoff.
That is quite different from me playing clawhammer banjo or blues which are considered to be Americana. The African roots are acknowledged but the extraordinary richness of American music is a cultural blend.
As for things like hair styles. I am a champion of women doing whatever they please to accentuate their beauty. No tribe has a monopoly.
I'm not trying to answer for Steve with this, but part of the difficulty in my opinion is that people want to maintain their tribal status. I posted this link on my Facebook page with the words, "Historical song with a hidden meaning. More of the old music is like this than I knew." The only person to put a 'like' on it was my 90-year-old conservative uncle.
Do people not want to know about such things, or do they fear being thought of a woke if they publicly like it? I didn't put it there to signal virtue or wokeness, I found it to be interesting a few days late for Black History Month.
I'm fairness I understand that my interest in history found in song is not exactly common.
I'm the book "Banjo Roots and Branches" it must have been painful for slave owners to give the detailed descriptions of their runaway slaves, but they wanted them back. "He is a skilled blacksmith and carpenter who speaks and reads English and French. He is also a fiddler who plays at dances for white people." That from people who justified being slave owners with the idea that black people were inferior, but passed laws making it unlawful to teach a black person to read with no apparent sense of irony. Something I learned because of my interest in the banjo.
I am currently working with Greg "Sule" Wilson's "Funky Banjo" instruction. Volume Two has a good bit about the history and meaning of the songs. Some black musicians refuse to play "Turkey in the Straw." He teaches the uncensored names of versions that we could not be comfortable singing. When you hear that ice cream truck coming down the street you don't think about that being "N****r Love a Watermelon Ha! HA! HA!" during the Coon Era and points out that watermelon were a taste from home.
He teaches "Run N****r; Run or the M.P. 'll Catch You" (without the asterix) with the explanation. "Yes, we get it. Most folks are NOT going to sing this song in public; to use the word "n****r" is still pretty volatile. Yet we include it. Why? A couple of reasons. One: ALL our history is not to be shut out least we not learn from our mistakes. Two: This folk expression of bravery and humanity, a testament to heart and perseverance, was taken and used against us. Let's all grow up, re-contextualize and heal."
My few years on Medium proves your point. Sometimes I get the sense that the smart and reasonable people on there avoid politics, culture, race and gender. They talk about math or gardening or programming etc. Anything but those subjects.
You do realize that they, often with justification, say the same about progressives. You even begrudgingly admit that they are sometimes right.
Thor should strike progressives with lightning for calling themselves liberals. We live in a world where tribal hostility is so extreme that hyperbole and straw man arguments are the norm from all sides when things become heated.
It would be comforting if it were so one-sided that I could chose a tribe to mindlessly agree with, but I don't seek that kind of comfort or see it as one-sided as the partisans. Neither do you, though it doesn't always show. You are not about show and speak Frankly.
You know that I completely repudiate a lot of what people are calling “left” now. But I don’t see the symmetry you mention. Sure there are a few progressive trolls but on the right that’s all there are.
Woke is MAGA in a mirror. Just as rigid, just as orthodox.
I'm going to sleep now too, but I can't help but say that the idea that the majority of conservatives are racists, MAGAs and such is from the same set of molds as the idea that black people are all criminal thugs, liberals are all idiots, etc. We can of course find plenty of examples to confirm our beliefs, but we can also find examples that don't.
As an aside, we all have bias, but it does not mean we are speaking falsehood. Effective propaganda is a mixture of truth and lies. People focus on the part that supports their views. I have never claimed there is no truth coming from any "side."
As I tell my MAGA stop the steal friend, Trump won is a fool's errand. If Jesus Christ came down from the heavens to declare that the election was a crooked as a dog's hind leg the fact checkers would declare it false, the courts would say Jesus has no standing because he is not a US citizen and throw it out. The Democrats would declare that the courts found no evidence, though they didn't actually look. American must believe that fraud and corruption only happens in other countries but not America because we are special. A cellophane cat could run thru hell and not get scorched before the election would be overturned and Trump be reinstated into the office of POTUS. They just look idiotic dreaming that that could happen.
Was there voter fraud? According to the courts, yes, but was it enough tip the election? Who knows? I don't have a dog in that fight. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search
Election fraud claims are not in the interest of the liberal side until it is. Is it delusion to claim there is no evidence of election fraud in America when there are convictions for it?
I was talking about conservatives active online. To a close approximation they’re all trolls. I’ve been doing this since the early 90s and it’s always been that way.
The civil ones just repeat the lies with less confrontational words. Instead of “Trump won” they say “doubts about election integrity.”
The coming Republican dog fight will be interesting. DeSantis may be more effective in pushing Trump aside than any Democrat. The MAGA Trumpsters are more vocal on-line, but he may have less appeal than people think. Trump's greatest strength is progressives. If the more liberal Democrats can push the progressives aside it will be hard to elect a Republican. I didn't even vote in the midterms. I would have just written in no acceptable candidate on all of them.
The left lost its moral compass a long time ago, just like the right. Its mania for 'inclusivity' and lightening up on sexual mores (which the world DID and still does need) has led it to becoming *too* inclusive, 'too' being defined as 'to the detriment of others'.
Like the much-discussed-here-already problem of the androcentric trans movement and its misogynist treatment of adult human females (I had one yesterday on Twitter try to argue how TW are 'adult human females' and I set him straight on that tout de suite.)
The other problem is the increasing embrace of *open* sexual fetishism. While whatever goes between consenting adults, it doesn't mean the rest of us should be exposed to it or pressured or coerced to accept it, esp as it relates to children and the increasingly pedophilic tone I'm getting from the 'drag show for kids' crap.
Did anyone else see Twitter trending yesterday with Jon Stewart slapping down an anti-drag conservative by pointing out to him, quite rightly, that guns were a bigger threat to children? Good point, but it sure did sound like a defense of drag shows for kids. Stewart strikes me as having lost his own moral compass, his ability to think logically on some occasions, and now he can't even tell that however this guy feels about gun rights, he's RIGHT to come down on drag queen story or whatever the fuck they call it?
If the left can't see what's going on with these people, they're no more morally correct than the right. I don't know if this guy is part of the trans movement, even if just a supporter, or not but I'd bet me he is. Because I think pedophiles are beginning to latch onto the overly-inclusive movement for their own agenda.
I wonder how long it will be before this guy & others like him start mouthing NAMBLA talking points.
“ The other problem is the increasing embrace of *open* sexual fetishism.”
Also, yes, this is very true. Sex positivity is all well and good, but a basic standard of public decency doesn’t infringe on anybody except perverts. I don’t know why some people have become so concerned with pandering to them.
You can thank the gay culture for that; if you weren't into letting strangers know what you thought about while masturbating then you were suffering from "internalized homophobia."
It's one of those things like the unrecognized sickness of selfies. Erasing boundaries between private nd public.
“ The left lost its moral compass a long time ago, just like the right. Its mania for 'inclusivity' and lightening up on sexual mores (which the world DID and still does need) has led it to becoming *too* inclusive, 'too' being defined as 'to the detriment of others'.”
Couldn’t agree more. It’s so heartbreaking to see what’s become if what I’ve always felt was my political team. Hijacked by a bunch of lunatics who are allowed to run wild because the reasonable majority are afraid of being called made-up names on Twitter.
Just cowardice all the way down.
And yeah, so weird what’s happened to Jon Stewart. There are so many flashes of his brilliance in his show, but somehow that makes the parts when he’s intellectually dishonest even more painful.
In his defence though, he was making a point about constitutional rights. Less a defence of drag for kids than saying, “hey, if the government has a responsibility to regulate a drag queen’s First Amendment right to perform in front of children, why don’t they have a responsibility to regulate a civilian’s Second Amendment right to buy a gun that can kill children?”
Cause voyeurism and pedophilia have a few more legal constraints (like precisely what you were discussing with Rogue) than irresponsible firing of weapons that catch kids in the crossfire? I believe what something can do is different from what someone is doing in front of children.
“ I believe what something can do is different from what someone is doing in front of children.”
Agreed. And I think both issues are worthy of attention. But as Jon was pointing out, guns are the leading cause of death for kids in America. So when Dahm is trying to repeal laws on gun control and trying to pass laws in drag shows, all while claiming his concern is safety, it highlights a certain hypocrisy, no?
I don’t know what Stewart’s position on Drag Queen story hour is. Sadly, I suspect he doesn’t see the issue (or wouldn’t admit to seeing it). But I don’t think this interview could be considered a defence of it.
Agreed, hypocritical for sure. I briefly dug into the ‘gun deaths of children’ story: age 1-19, excludes infants. I would be extremely interested in a breakout for age 16-18 (eg both hovering around that ‘age of consent’ thing and incorporating teen gangs.
We all shudder at the headline envisioning 5-year-olds shot in their car seat. I’m just wary of media manipulation.
I detest transvestites because every one of them I ever trusted stole from me, even pocketing 50¢ rolls of pennies while I was in the bathroom.
But telling stories to kids, sorry, I can't summon any outrage at that. The kids probably see them as clowns. I doubt very many boy children come out of story hour thinking "I want to dress as a woman."
Drags are the most ineffectual people on the planet.
I saw the Jon Stewart video. He handed that bearded gun nut his own ass. I just loved how he wouldn't let him change the subject, I wish to god there was more of that,.
I remember feeling outrage as a 7 year old girl at seeing drag queens, on tv. "So women are a joke for men to make fun of?" was my first thought. It didn't even occur to me how offensive it was that it was often a sexualised caricature of women being presented for entertainment. So while I agree very few boys watch and think they want to now dress as a pronified version of a woman for fun, they are definitely getting the message (as are little girls) that women are a joke and a sexualised joke at that. That's not ineffectual, I promise.
Drags are as cringeworthy as the blackface minstrels in that regard. It could make you think that women are being made fun of it the same way black people were being made a joke.
The minstrels were doing it while appropriating the music of people from Africa. I've never been to a drag show. Is there vaudevillianesque mimicry of women entertainers?
Thanks for sharing! I'm right there with you in being totally ok with however consenting adults desire to express their sexuality amongst themselves. I'm also in agreement that children must, absolutely be protected in as much as possible from sexual interaction that they have no way of understanding or refusing. My mother had huge sexual issues and abused both of my sisters. I can tell you how helpless and terrified you feel as a child. That there are laws defining a child vs an adult are important for many reasons.
As for how the respondent referred to his 'kids' (whom he still considers kids?!?) but also Israelis, Danes and, perhaps most telling, his involvement with the Samson and Mankind projects makes my skin crawl. Thanks for taking on the daunting task of trying to communicate with people of his ilk.
"perhaps most telling, his involvement with the Samson and Mankind projects"
Is there more to these projects than meets the eye? I wasn't familiar with them when he mentioned them, I just assumed they were community programs like many others.
The conversation brought an awkward thought. I frequently opine, "no victim, no crime" for other issues. I doubt that I am unique in saying that I had sex before the age of 18. I dated girls older than myself, in some cases they were older than 18 when I was younger and I'm not talking about a one or two year difference. Was I a victim? How does one justify that opinion? If the sexes had been reversed and I had been a girl would that change anything? Why? I'm not giving an opinion with this and even if you are in favor of victimless crime laws I ask, where is the victim in this? https://youtu.be/G2NhmnI0dpc
"The conversation brought an awkward thought. I frequently opine, "no victim, no crime" for other issues. I doubt that I am unique in saying that I had sex before the age of 18."
Yeah, there are a few important nuances to pick apart here. First, some laws are important even if there's no clear victim, no? Drunk driving springs to mind. I think drunk drivers should be punished if caught, even if they don't kill anybody on that particular drive. In this case, the law exists to prevent the behaviour, not because every time somebody commits the behaviour somebody dies. In fact, probably most of the time when somebody drives drunk, nobody dies.
I think age of consent laws are similar. Some people under the age of consent are nonetheless mature/intelligent enough to make informed decisions about sex. Like you, and I suspect many other people, I had sex before I was 18. I wasn't a victim of anything. But once we move out of the window of close-age exceptions already covered by law, once one of the parties is old enough that they should know better, I think there should be consequences simply for not exercising the restraint to protect that minor from the possibility of harm.
To put it in more concrete terms, let's imagine a 24-year-old who is genuinely in love with a 15-year-old. Let's gloss over the details of how that's possible without some other disturbing things happening first. Even if the 15-year-old "consents" to sex, I think the 24-year-old should refuse until that child is no longer below the age of consent. The 24-year-old is aware of the law, they should be mature enough to control their urges, and they have a responsibility to protect that minor from potential harm. Even (or, in fact, *especially*) if their feelings are genuine.
The choice to ignore all that and have sex anyway is not only against the law, it's an act of pure selfishness that I would strongly argue is abusive. None of this is perfect. As no laws are. The age of consent, sadly, can't be a scientifically determined safe point. It's a line in the sand. But it's a necessary one.
I doubt these words accurately define real categories of any significant size so as with the woke it's just a pointless exercise in neologism.
there is no useful distinction between attraction to the barely-pubescent and the same kid a year later. Be as attracted as you want but if you undress her, you're going to lose pieces you were born with in Quentin.
I wasn't endorsing that link; it is an example of people trying to address that zone between sexual maturity and mental/emotional maturity.
One of the most disturbing realizations of my lifetime was the existence of child prostitutes in the proximity of the military. They wouldn't be there if there were no patrons. A testimony to what some people will do if they can get away with it.
On one occasion a woman paraded two prepubescent girls out in front of us, advertising. For all I know they were her daughters. There were witnesses which tempered my urge to shoot her if I had been able to get away with it.
Disturbing. How different were the two cases (sexual predator and killer) of being able to get away with something as a deciding factor? Therefore, we do have laws.
Sorry I should have used the impersonal "one" instead of the sloppy "you." Of course I don't think you were endorsing that.
Parenthetical: I subscribed to that magazine for over forty years. Then it went Happy and I don't even read it anymore. As a child it was pure joy for me.
The law is intended to prevent much older adults from taking advantage of their superior powers of manipulation, as in a 35yo man getting a 14yo girl into bed.
It becomes absurd when a 18 plus a day male is branded a sexual predator for bedding an 18 minus a day girl. But this has indeed happened.
I think you stumbled upon the connection between pedophilia and the trans movement. I didn't pick up on it this morning as Rogue's words were confusing. But the bit about "if you can make a decision about being trans at a young age," now makes it clearer how pedos can take advantage of this movement, like adult sexual predators already have. It's kind of a backhanded good point: If we can trust them with this, why not that? Instead of questioning how fucked up it is to medically "treat" children and young people for a non-problem, he asks why we can't shag the little kiddies if they agree.
Oh, I think I remember that guy! I didn't realize he was here in Toronto, and I probably didn't pay too much attention at the time. Yeah, you've got to wonder what stupid-ass parents of *small children* are thinking letting this asshole into their family. And oh god, that poor mother with seven kids to raise on her own. (Although...these are the things you have to think about when you're making babies...what if something happens to the other person? What if he'd died?)
I am not well informed on these programs but am aware of controversy around the ManKind project, despite its criteria that appears positive and may be helpful to some men. The Samson project deals more specifically with men who have sexual issues/addictions. That your correspondent was a leader in his local Samson group while still obviously having issues with what defines a child in regards to consensual sexual activity seems disturbing. You may wish to research these organizations further.
MAPs - "Minor attracted persons" are the new 'politically correct' term that some are trying to use to normalize pedophilia. The LGBTQ movement has nothing to do with it so far, but they WILL be targeted eventually, and if any of their number are willing to embrace pedophiles, my guess it will be the TiMs who might go for children if it were legal. Because they're trans? No, because they're men, and that's the demographic who go after children the most.
"The LGBTQ movement has nothing to do with it so far, but they WILL be targeted eventually, and if any of their number are willing to embrace pedophiles,"
Yep, sadly we're already there. Some fairly prominent members of the LGBT community have already been quite clear about their support for bringing pedophiles into the fold (https://twitter.com/jamescantorphd/status/1071499969910198274?s=46&t=SkFKo_zIZKy4JSFHYLY02Q). If I were lesbian, gay, or bi, I'd be so furious that all these other groups were piggybacking onto my community.
Yeah, I don't blame pedophiles for their proclivities at all. I don't think anybody chooses to be a pedophile.
I blame people who seek to justify inappropriate behaviour, either by quibbling about things like the age of consent, or because they think "dismantling" any and all boundaries is "progressive."
I blame people who are afraid to call out obvious inappropriate behaviour because they don't want to be called a prude.
I blame a society that demonises pedophilia to such a degree that pedophiles can't come forward and seek help.
And yes, absolutely, I blame a society that normalises the sexualisation of children in various ways. I actually wrote an article on that topic not so long ago. Rogue took issue with that one too...
I'm not sure all pedophiles are born that way. Many are, I suspect, but I wonder if any are learning to like it through porn. Lotta that going on, even on the free official porn sites.
Speaking as an abuse survivor, I can spell out very clearly what is magical about the age 18.
It is the age at which, in this society, a person can vote, own property, sign a contract and work a full-time job (okay technically one can work full time at 17). Prior to age 17 or 18, then - unless legally emancipated - one is dependent upon one's family (or the state, if in the foster system) for survival. A person under 18 years of age is not free to choose where they live, whom they live with or even what activities they participate in, without permission from their legal guardian. And if that person is in a situation - at home, at school, at church - where they are expected to have sex with someone, unless their legal guardian intervenes on their behalf, they are essentially a slave to that situation. Tragically, more often than not, where abusive situations exist, the legal guardian either has failed to intervene in the way they should, or is the perpetrator. And even if a child runs away, choosing homelessness over an abusive situation, they may be brought BACK to the abusive situation by police if they are found. So the child is stuck with it, until they can get a job and sign a contract to get their own place to live.
And THAT is what is magical about the age of 18.
Now, if we were to grant individuals full rights of adulthood at 16 or 17 years of age, then it would also make sense for 16 or 17 to be the age of consent for sex.
Until then, no.
"Now, if we were to grant individuals full rights of adulthood at 16 or 17 years of age, then it would also make sense for 16 or 17 to be the age of consent for sex."
Exactly. Pedophilia apologists always make the argument that the age of consent is arbitrary. And they're right. The age of majority os different in different countries and makes different things legal/illegal. There's no airtight argument that the age should be 18 vs 17 or 16.
But there *is* an airtight argument that there needs to be an age of consent. An age where we can say, legally speaking, that most people will be mature enough to make serious decisions for themselves. That makes it harder for predators to manipulate young and vulnerable people.
If an adult feels aggrieved because they're being asked to put a child's (or, in fact, *anybody's*) emotional needs before their own sexual needs, I think that tells us everything we need to know about them.
"before 'their' own sexual needs"
This is not a need. This is a desire.
People have gone all their lives without sex. I don't recommend it but it didn't kill them. Needs are things like food and water, denial of which leads to illness or death. This Rogue guy doesn't "need" underage girls. He desires them. If he acts on that desire he will end up in prison where this sort of thing is not survival-positive.
I urgently desire a Moog One. I can afford it but the double shipment and the customs would double the price, as they did for my Moog Grandmother. I will likely go to my grave without a Moog One.
I urgently desire a certain drug-enhanced extremely dangerous sexual experience. I accept that I will never have it.
So it goes.
Wants and needs. I would not want a world restricted to "why does anyone need [x]?" but is important to understand the difference.
In the case of the subject at hand, sex drive is powerful for most people in their teens but it is certainly not a need. Indeed, immature choices can screw up your whole life. There, I think, is the reason for age of consent laws.
We already have more than enough pull to screw up our lives in youth without some asshole adult coming along and pushing us off that cliff.
We all know that 18 is based on averages and that until recently the threshold for some rights was 21. Kids at 18 don't seem as mature as they were a few generations ago, with their ability to reason crippled by desperately short attention spans. We didn't have computer games or channel-surfing in the 1960s.
For example I would say that anyone who starts smoking has shown an indisputable inability to run his own life. I don't care how old he is.
"ability to reason crippled by desperately short attention spans"
A huge issue. Are the members of society victims in the face of purposeful shortening of attention span to maximize exposure to advertising in the digital world? Perpetually toddlers who drop a toy at the sight of another toy.
Could be, but I try to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Where it really scares me is how few people can read a book, or even a short document, or hw brief a period of dead air leads someone to say "gotta go, things to do," which is horseshit, it's just about getting back to the phone or the TV and smiling at it.
I don't recall if I've mentioned it here before. One year as I reviewed one of my daughter's reading lists, I noticed that a number of books dear to me in my youth were struck out. I went to the parent meet the teacher event and asked about it. She said that those books had Cliff's Notes. She wanted her students to read books, not summaries. Sacrificing good books to achieve that was her reason. What happened to a love for reading?
What happened was shortened attention spans.
Since I started doing technical writing in 1993 I've had to shorten paragraphs and use more bullet lists. Half the software management fads like agile and scrum are founded on deprecating documentation because so many can't read a full page and hardly anyone can write.
I read more than ever.
Years ago, a mentor advised me to put an executive summary at the beginning of my multi-page technical reports because few managers would read the whole thing, even engineering managers. There was some justification for that.
I think it’s pretty obvious that this guy wants access to children, sexual access. There is simply no reason to be so wrapped up with the “arbitrary” age of 18.
The alternative to setting a “one age fits all” standard would be regular and routine psychological testing of adolescents for decision-making ability and not only would this be impractical, it would simply shift your opponent’s outrage from the “arbitrary age” to "the tyranny of the government-administered tests." Again, government is keeping him from the underaged bodies he craves.
And since the test score would replace the "arbitrary age of consent," there would be those who would never pass, who in their 30s or 40s or 60s would still not be allowed to do things that everyone is "arbitrarily" granted on the 18th birthday.
And frankly this guy is dumb. “Divided states” wasn’t even funny once but he kept repeating it. His threat to report responses was indicative. His use of “proof” instead of “evidence” shows a weak education if not a weak mind. And resentment of government is increasingly tiresome. So he had to wait his turn at the DMV. This shouldn’t be the basis of an ideology.
Edit: about your introduction here. It's easy to see promiscuity in a relationship as a moral issue. But when a relationship began with a pledge of monogamy and one partner breaks that pledge, the issue isn't morality, it's betrayal. My first two relationships each lasted four years because my partners wanted to pursue sexual fantasies. If the original agreement had been that the relationship was sexually open that would be a different thing, but I don't have a lot of confidence in the longevity of such pairings.
"I think it’s pretty obvious that this guy wants access to children, sexual access. There is simply no reason to be so wrapped up with the “arbitrary” age of 18."
100%. Hilarious that he tried to play the victim card because people have implied he's a pedophile in the past. The "kids" in scare quotes is enough to make me thing somebody needs to check his hard drive.
Ultimately his issue is simply with the existence of boundaries. There's a certain type of person who can't accept that they don't get to do whatever they want, whenever they want, whatever the consequences to andbody else. And lately this disrespect for boundaries is labelled "progressive."
As for the intro, I think you're conflating promiscuity and cheating. Yes, cheating is morally wrong. But that's because, as you say, it breaks an agreement and a bond of trust. Promiscuity is just having a lot of sex, and non-monogamy implies that the people in the non-monogamous relationship have different agreements and boundaries around their sexual behaviour.
It's possible to cheat, even in non-monogamous relationships. Many open relationships still have dos and don'ts, and if you violate them, it's still morally wrong. I'm just saying that choosing to set up your dos and don'ts in non-traditional/monogamnous ways isn't a moral issue one way or the other.
I just read through his and your comments. It reads like a Keystone cops comedy of errors and misunderstanding. I believe that the support group he was talking about was for men trying not to be gay, not men trying not be pedophiles. But of course, the question of pedophilia is one the gay community has dealt with for years, quite understandably since there are traditions dating back thousands of years of older men introducing younger men, often adolescent, to homosexual sex. It's not a creation of decadent modernism. So, it's not at all clear to me that Rogue is interested in having sex with children. I could be wrong, as his comments are not very articulate. One thing is clear: virtue-signaling and moral grandstanding are easy. Talking frankly and without snide judgment about why "we" as a society have this issue with sexualizing children is hard.
"Boiling the concept of pedophilia down to an age is dysfunctional"
"I'm the one who is so frustrated with the current cultural definition of a child is 18 or under"
And last but not least:
"If they are old enough at 10, aren’t they old enough then to consent to sex?"
Seems pretty unambiguous to me.
I'm not saying that Rogue is interested in having sex with children. As I said, I'd prefer not to think too deeply about that one way or the other. But I am saying that his rhetoric around the age of consent and sexual boundaries for children is poorly thought out at best and predatory at worst.
"I use to lead a group call the Samson Society in my church. It was a group that let men speak honestly about their sexual desires and activities without fear of being 'cancelled'"
Also, note that the group he mentions here is different to the group he mentions in the first reply that tried to help gay men not to act on their sexuality. He talks repeatedly about the importance of pedophiles being able to come forward and seek help. This is the one point where we're in complete agreement. I agree that stigmatising pedophilia to the point where pedophiles can't come forward and ask for help is a disaster for all concerned.
But as I said, if you take Rogue's view that the age of consent is "a placebo created by politicians and a mindwashed American citizenry" (seemingly ignoring that age of consent laws exist all over the world) why exactly would you seek help? Help for what? If the age of consent is meaningless, what exactly is wrong with having sex with a child? Especially if the child "wants to consent".
I think the age of consent is just one pillar in protecting children from abuse. But it's arguably the most important one, because it defines what a child *is*. So I have very little patience for people trying to muddy the waters with abstract philosophising about something that doesn't affect them at all (unless they're a pedophile), but could affect a child for the rest of their life. If you consider that virtue signalling or moral grandstanding, that's fine.
The only other possibility for all this intricate rationalization is that he was deeply attracted to one underage child and has built an edifice of BS around the denial of his lust. Otherwise, yeah, scan his phone and hard drive for pics of naked kids.
I had a friend in Norfolk, the guy I was with the night I had a certain breakthrough I don't talk about online, whose older brother just disappeared one day, sent away because, as I learned later, he had taken a child into the basement and had him? her? in a state of undress. He was of a recognizable type: unkempt, shirttail out, don't-care haircut, taped unfashionable glasses. I mention this because years later I saw a guy sitting on a curb near a playground looking fixedly at kids playing and occasionally "touching himself" and he had the exact same look.
My impression of Rogue and I hope I'm right is that he's too busy seeking justification to act out of desires just yet, what he wants is too dangerous to talk about publicly. Just on what you posted someone could send the cops to his house.
But don't forget: this isn't a temptation, it's an illness, and it's incurable. Some pedophiles beg to be castrated because they know they'll otherwise molest again, others are angrily defiant.
I ran into one guy on AOL ("DarknessXX") who wanted to rape and murder young boys and the murder scenarios were freaking gruesome. Recurving razor blades.
I could have been more precise in my choice of words, and called it cheating. I've been promiscuous; I had my adolescence at age 42 instead of my late teens and I bedded as many men as I could manage. I got it out of my system and quit but while I was in it I was perfectly aware I was being idiotic.
But yes I meant cheating. I've known enough people intimately to have figured out that the wantonly promiscuous aren't just excessively horny but have self-esteem issues, most recognizably in aging men who date much younger to convince themselves they "still got it."
One of the many reasons I got away from the gay community was its deeply-held notion that promiscuity was our birthright, our gift to the straight world (straight world: "no thanks"). Even aside from the risk of HIV there is clearly something unhealthy about it.
And one of the few advantages of being older is being so much less horny. I used to leave work for sex twice a day.
"But yes I meant cheating. I've known enough people intimately to have figured out that the wantonly promiscuous aren't just excessively horny but have self-esteem issues"
Yeah, this is doubtless true. At least in some cases. Then again, lots of behaviour can be traced back to self-esteem issues. I just don't think it's a moral issue.
I remember one from years ago, a fat man in his late 50s and a little rich, dating a 24yo attractive woman with whom he planned to murder his wife and marry the girl.
It was a belly laugh that this overweight and aging man actually believed this girl wanted him for his dick.
I dunno about moral issue but it sure was pathetic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
Both correct.
"scare" does not make sense, the intent is clearly a sneer. Somebody heard it wrong.
"Slim chance" once meant what it sounds like; "fat chance" was sarcasm, now they are interchangeable.
"Unique" once meant singular, now it more commonly means "distinctive." When I hear "very unique" I want to get up and go for a walk away from humanity.
Americans say "have gotten," in the Commonwealth it's still "have got." The American started as a confusion with "forgotten."
All this is a big part of why I have turned down management jobs.
“ "scare" does not make sense, the intent is clearly a sneer. Somebody heard it wrong.”
Uh, “scare” came first! In fact, if you search for “sneer quotes” you’ll get results for “scare quotes.” (Including a reference to the woman who coined the term in 1956.)
You’re going to have to accept that you’re not the arbiter of the English language my friend. The fact that you don’t like a turn of phrase doesn’t make it wrong or rewrite the history of the phrase.
I don't claim to be the arbiter of anything.
I first read "scare quote" about a year ago. I've heard of "sneer quotes" for over twenty years.
And "scare" still doesn't match the clear intent. When people do that two fingers/both hands air-quote thing they are expressing mockery, not fear.
I was wondering for a minute there if he was talking about the difference between children and teenagers and adults, because of course there are big differences, as the varying ages of consent can attest to. Honestly I found the points he was trying to make to be really confusing. But then I saw the lines "When is a person “old enough” to chose when they are trans? If they are old enough at 10, aren’t they old enough then to consent to sex?" and suddenly his perspective was... clarified. 😬
"because of course there are big differences, as the varying ages of consent can attest to."
Yeah, pedophilia apologists often try to muddy the waters with teenage edge cases to give their arguments a veneer of respectability. But in most cases, the law already protects close-age underage sexual relationships. I think pretty much everybody would agree that teenagers shouldn't go to jail for having sex with each other. That's very different from his argument that age of consent laws are meaningless.
I think his arguments were confusing simply because they were geared towards pretending there's no need to legally protect children from predators. It's very hard to be coherent when the target you're trying to hit is, "It's mean to 'cancel' people just because they have sex with kids."
Rogue sounds like a pederast, not a pedophile. I doubt he craves prepubescent children but he definitely resents being limited to over eighteen.
Dave linked a blog post with a pile of new words with fine distinctions but I can get by in this case with "creep."
This guy is freakin scary. I read a series by Andrew Vachss who is a child advocate in sexual abuse cases. He couldn’t get his non-fiction book traction so created a hard-bitten character named Burke who would have had NO tolerance for talking to Rogue.
There is such a short window for innocence. To be a child, smiling in sheer joy at the sun.
Those who prey on this are simply evil. Takers. Robbers of innocence.
Thank you for challenging this guy. He’s just dead wrong. I don’t know what the age of consent is/should be yet indulging crap like this without pushback makes no sense.
And I, too, care nothing about what consenting adults choose to do with each other - although I will admit the self-mutilating trans stuff gives me pause.
"And I, too, care nothing about what consenting adults choose to do with each other - although I will admit the self-mutilating trans stuff gives me pause."
Yeah, I think this is the line a lot of people bump into in various ways.
I have to admit that I can't help feeling sad when a healthy woman chops of her breasts or a healthy man chops of his penis and they engage in this pretence that they're the opposite sex. Even if I don't know them. I can't help wishing there were a better way for them to accept themselves for who and what they are. But I'd still fight for their right to do it. Adults should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies, regardless of what I or anybody else thinks about it.
But this thinking simply cannot apply to children. In order to protect children, we have to agree on an age where they don't get to make serious, life-altering decisions. 16-18 seems to work pretty well for all kinds of things. So anybody who thinks this boundary is too high (or shouldn't exist at all) should have to give a clear, detailed and *very public* explanation as to why they need access to children younger than that.
"Adults should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies"
I can't agree with an absolutist expression like this. Why do we have laws against suicide? Kurt Cobain killed himself because his girlfriend dumped him. I think we have responsibility to each other to step in and help those we care about instead of shrugging it off as "it's his body to do what he wants."
Take gender transitioning. The satisfaction and fulfillment of the sliced turns out to be a huge lie; a lot of the "trans" cult is made of people (kids) who have a lot of problems but as soon as "trans" comes up the other existing conditions recede to invisibility and transition is supposed to fix everything. Most them end up more miserable than before and the tyranny of the "trans" activists guarantees that we won't hear about that. I don't know if you've seen Affirmation Generation but they report that post-transition suicide is nineteen times the demographically matched statistic.
As for alternatives, psychiatric counseling has proven to be more effective, though it will be a long time getting off the ground in America where surgical transitioning is good for $70,000 and the activists are so strident about locking kids into the "trans" club, screaming louder and louder that puberty is too late.
And then there's BIID, where people want a healthy limb amputated because they have this idea that it's just an encumbrance. I think to take the "shrug" attitude toward that is irresponsible.
Good news from the backlash front: https://notthebee.com/article/new-report-says-resumes-using-the-pronouns-theythem-are-more-likely-to-be-overlooked-by-employers
Would you hire someone who broadcast that he was a troublemaker like this? I would discard any résumé with any pronoun pairs. Such an employee is going to be nothing but trouble
"Why do we have laws against suicide?"
Do we?! A law against suicide seems kind of redundant, no? I think suicide is widely seen as a moral wrong, but I'm not clear on its legality.
But yes, I agree with you, at least in principle. I think people should be able to do what they want with their bodies, but I also think we should try to help people make healthy decisions. We shouldn't pretend there aren't clearly better or worse choices, whether we're talking about diet, exercise, plastic surgery or surgical transition.
I also think we should take into account people's mental health when they're making major, life-altering decisions. Removing your sex organs is drastic and permanent, so of course, there should be a careful psychological assessment. Definitely no argument there.
But I think it should require the most extraordinary circumstances to deny somebody the right to do what they want after that process is completed. Even if we personally feel the decision is a mistake. The desire to do something we think is weird can't be held up, in and of itself, as evidence that the person is mentally incompetent. That's a dangerous path to go down.
Personally I sort of believe in Vonnegut's Monkey House, where suicide can be achieved by choice but only after serious counseling and I don't mean a single 30-minute perfunctory interview.
I had a friend in Seattle, a close friend, black and gay, one of my few sex partners I saw socially. He liked to go to the clandestine cruising ground and give blowjobs. All the time. This was mostly while I was away for four years, when I returned to Seattle I learned he had died a month before.
I remain angry to this day that nobody sat down with him and said, "Michael you really need to stop this, a lot of those men have HIV and you are eventually going to get it and die."
I'll risk friendships telling people they need to quit smoking or quit drinking so much. I expect people to do the same for me if I'm out of line, though I have none of the common vices.
And, yes, in the end people make their own choices but I think we tend to shrug off their bad choices as "not my problem" way too readily.
"And, yes, in the end people make their own choices but I think we tend to shrug off their bad choices as "not my problem" way too readily."
Yep, sadly I think you're dead right about this. We also see it reflected in the culture of people whipping out their phones and recording instead of helping or even calling for help when somebody is being beaten up or some other preventable wrong is happening right in from of them.
If others are already calling 911 I support videos of what's going on. It can hold perps accountable and make it easier for the cops to nab him or her, and provide documentary evidence in court that s/he did do the crime.
I remember suicide being illegal in the USA but that seems to have vanished, possibly because of the absurdity when successful and the cruelty when not.
There are countries where the attempt is illegal: https://www.understandsuicide.com/_files/ugd/2caebd_62c53227c2784fd5ae5d3833321e7d62.pdf but any such question has a hotline as the first answer.
I wonder if any cop ever put handcuffs on a corpse.
I have an acquaintance (I can't really call him a friend anymore), a former coworker who is now psychotic, who is obsessed with child abuse. He casts himself as a "child advocate" but if you engage him on the topic he starts recounting experiences that are clearly inventions of a disturbed mind, for example that he was raped 3000 times as an infant.
He turns any and all discussions to child abuse, which seems to include birth control. I'm >< this close to blocking him on Facebook because I live in a Communist country that monitors social networking activity within its borders and if some cop whose English isn't fluent reads his responses to my posts and loses track of who said what, I could get deported.
I'd wager that there are child molesters who think about molesting children a lot less than he does. He has thrown away his life with this stuff; he's on psych disability, hasn't worked in decades, and threw away a job at Microsoft by the incomprehensible indiscretion of sending an email about his hobbyhorse to a public figure from his work email.
I let him live with me when I ran into him and learned he was homeless but I came to regret my generosity pretty quickly and in the end had the police remove him. I'm a gay man who actually does sodomize other men and given his proclivity to believing things that never happened, I didn't feel safe sleeping with him in my house.
I think you’re making a rational choice with this ‘acquaintance.’ His obsession is consuming him - best keep some distance.
I dropped him off at the mission around 2009, and lost track of him until about a year ago when he appeared on Facebook. Since then he's gone on disability and he still writes about kiddy rape. I did a post about hibiscus tea and he responds with something about Spartans screwing little boys.
I felt sorry for him for a while, I knew him before this started, but now I'm just sick and tired of it.
I’m looking forward to your taking on someone really interesting, smart and controversial. Flex your considerable intellectual muscle.
This turd is not in your league Steve.
Yeah, honestly, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, I wish it were easier to find challenging and/or meaningful debate online.😅
I have an advantage in these conversations, in that I’ll have done some considerable research before writing an article, so I know what I’m talking about, but all too often the opposing argument isn’t even about the facts. It’s just some variation of “the points you’ve laid out here don’t validate my feelings so you’re stupid/evil/racist/transphobic/etc.“
The internet makes it very easy to have an opinion without ever really needing to defend it.
I hope I’m not getting out of my lane here but I enjoy your writing and ideas so much that I can’t resist asking if you would share your take on theme of navigating the post colonial world generally. How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good? How do we separate the colonial contributions (eg modern political systems) from the bad and who decides? How do indigenous and the descendants of colonialists coexist? These questions are relevant to almost every country on earth. Your experience abroad and unique family background give you a good vantage point from which to think about these questions. I’ve lived in India and other countries like Mexico and all are still litigating the post colonial world.
Interested?
""How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good?"
😁 A lot to cover here, but very broadly speaking, I think the way to deal with the post colonial world is to stop pretending that past and present are equivalent. And to focus on real issues instead of distractions. This would be helped enormously by teaching history accurately, tying it to the present effectively, and abandoning the idea that we automatically share the sins or oppression of our ancestors. We can do this without denying our culpability in the present.
For example, let's consider a few different types of cultural appropriation.
I saw recently that some Aboriginal spears stolen by James Cook in 1770 will be returned to the original clan. I think that's great if that's what the clan wants (I'd love to see the same thing happen with the British Crown Jewels, but I won't hold my breath 😄).
There's no denying that colonialism stole a lot of material and cultural wealth from around the world and if the descendants of the original owners want it back, I think that's what should happen. That wrong, at least, can be undone relatively easily.
Then there's appropriation in the form of capitalism, which is a lot more complicated. To take Africa as an example, vast amounts of wealth and resources have been (and still are being) effectively stolen from the continent.
Right now, China is buying up vast swathes of land and infrastructure that will keep Africa indebted for centuries. This is colonialism too. Aided and abetted in the case by extreme poverty and corrupt governments (both African and Western). It's one of the greatest injustices of history and hardly anybody is talking about it because we're all, and I mean *everybody* in the west, complicit. To undo *that* colonialism we'd all need to sacrifice. To be fair, the reluctance to sacrifice for the greater good is why colonialism throughout history has gone unopposed by people of good conscience.
And this is why it's so infuriating to see people going about "cultural appropriation" in the form of dreadlocks and beads and surfing. This is what always happens. There's a legitimate problem somewhere in the world, the problem is complex or the solutions are unpalatable, and so a sect of noisy "activists" finds some idiotic low-hanging fruit that nobody really cares about and they act as if that's the key issue.
Some people *pretend* to care because it's trendy and they get social media points, and the people most affected, the people starving and dying in poverty and unsafe working conditions, never even cross their minds. But hey, at least we yelled at Kim Kardashian for wearing cornrows or for calling her shape wear line "Kimono."
Anyway, rant over.😅 I hope I mostly answered your question.
Well said Steve. Very well said.
That was a take on the symbolic “cultural appropriation” as “idiotic low hanging fruit that nobody really cares about” in the context of the massive material appropriation that nobody talks about is original and really perceptive. I had never linked them that way.
When I raised the issue of the challenges of post colonialism I was not expecting your substantive answer. I was hoping it could be a topic of future articles. You have a lot to add I am sure.
There is actually one anti-appropriation law that I know of. It is on behalf of native Americans. I have a Navajo flute (crafted and sold by Navajo people) and a native American style flute (not made by native Americans). Notice the inclusion of the word style. It's the law. Selling crafts native to native Americans is a common source of income and falsely selling imitations is truly a ripoff.
That is quite different from me playing clawhammer banjo or blues which are considered to be Americana. The African roots are acknowledged but the extraordinary richness of American music is a cultural blend.
As for things like hair styles. I am a champion of women doing whatever they please to accentuate their beauty. No tribe has a monopoly.
I'm not trying to answer for Steve with this, but part of the difficulty in my opinion is that people want to maintain their tribal status. I posted this link on my Facebook page with the words, "Historical song with a hidden meaning. More of the old music is like this than I knew." The only person to put a 'like' on it was my 90-year-old conservative uncle.
https://youtu.be/UYJafpW1siE
Do people not want to know about such things, or do they fear being thought of a woke if they publicly like it? I didn't put it there to signal virtue or wokeness, I found it to be interesting a few days late for Black History Month.
That video was history, not wokeness or postmodernism. Thanks for it!
I'm fairness I understand that my interest in history found in song is not exactly common.
I'm the book "Banjo Roots and Branches" it must have been painful for slave owners to give the detailed descriptions of their runaway slaves, but they wanted them back. "He is a skilled blacksmith and carpenter who speaks and reads English and French. He is also a fiddler who plays at dances for white people." That from people who justified being slave owners with the idea that black people were inferior, but passed laws making it unlawful to teach a black person to read with no apparent sense of irony. Something I learned because of my interest in the banjo.
I am currently working with Greg "Sule" Wilson's "Funky Banjo" instruction. Volume Two has a good bit about the history and meaning of the songs. Some black musicians refuse to play "Turkey in the Straw." He teaches the uncensored names of versions that we could not be comfortable singing. When you hear that ice cream truck coming down the street you don't think about that being "N****r Love a Watermelon Ha! HA! HA!" during the Coon Era and points out that watermelon were a taste from home.
He teaches "Run N****r; Run or the M.P. 'll Catch You" (without the asterix) with the explanation. "Yes, we get it. Most folks are NOT going to sing this song in public; to use the word "n****r" is still pretty volatile. Yet we include it. Why? A couple of reasons. One: ALL our history is not to be shut out least we not learn from our mistakes. Two: This folk expression of bravery and humanity, a testament to heart and perseverance, was taken and used against us. Let's all grow up, re-contextualize and heal."
Should this history not be taught? Why?
My few years on Medium proves your point. Sometimes I get the sense that the smart and reasonable people on there avoid politics, culture, race and gender. They talk about math or gardening or programming etc. Anything but those subjects.
The programming articles are garbage now.
So are most of the “trans” trash and all of the Trump trash.
Every forum I’ve ever been on has yearned for some debaters from the other side who weren’t liars or stupid.
I concluded they don’t exist.
You do realize that they, often with justification, say the same about progressives. You even begrudgingly admit that they are sometimes right.
Thor should strike progressives with lightning for calling themselves liberals. We live in a world where tribal hostility is so extreme that hyperbole and straw man arguments are the norm from all sides when things become heated.
It would be comforting if it were so one-sided that I could chose a tribe to mindlessly agree with, but I don't seek that kind of comfort or see it as one-sided as the partisans. Neither do you, though it doesn't always show. You are not about show and speak Frankly.
You know that I completely repudiate a lot of what people are calling “left” now. But I don’t see the symmetry you mention. Sure there are a few progressive trolls but on the right that’s all there are.
Woke is MAGA in a mirror. Just as rigid, just as orthodox.
More later I’m going back to sleep.
I'm going to sleep now too, but I can't help but say that the idea that the majority of conservatives are racists, MAGAs and such is from the same set of molds as the idea that black people are all criminal thugs, liberals are all idiots, etc. We can of course find plenty of examples to confirm our beliefs, but we can also find examples that don't.
Instead of me posting something you will call biased, suppose you go out and look up how many Republicans believe that Trump actually won in 2020.
And find the equivalent delusion on the liberal side.
As an aside, we all have bias, but it does not mean we are speaking falsehood. Effective propaganda is a mixture of truth and lies. People focus on the part that supports their views. I have never claimed there is no truth coming from any "side."
As I tell my MAGA stop the steal friend, Trump won is a fool's errand. If Jesus Christ came down from the heavens to declare that the election was a crooked as a dog's hind leg the fact checkers would declare it false, the courts would say Jesus has no standing because he is not a US citizen and throw it out. The Democrats would declare that the courts found no evidence, though they didn't actually look. American must believe that fraud and corruption only happens in other countries but not America because we are special. A cellophane cat could run thru hell and not get scorched before the election would be overturned and Trump be reinstated into the office of POTUS. They just look idiotic dreaming that that could happen.
Was there voter fraud? According to the courts, yes, but was it enough tip the election? Who knows? I don't have a dog in that fight. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search
Election fraud claims are not in the interest of the liberal side until it is. Is it delusion to claim there is no evidence of election fraud in America when there are convictions for it?
I was talking about conservatives active online. To a close approximation they’re all trolls. I’ve been doing this since the early 90s and it’s always been that way.
The civil ones just repeat the lies with less confrontational words. Instead of “Trump won” they say “doubts about election integrity.”
The coming Republican dog fight will be interesting. DeSantis may be more effective in pushing Trump aside than any Democrat. The MAGA Trumpsters are more vocal on-line, but he may have less appeal than people think. Trump's greatest strength is progressives. If the more liberal Democrats can push the progressives aside it will be hard to elect a Republican. I didn't even vote in the midterms. I would have just written in no acceptable candidate on all of them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/desantis-vs-trump-pits-accomplishments-against-narrative-conservative-election-2024-republican-woke-populist-candidate-florida-tallahassee-e8b473dc?st=olxrxjklq4kyrh0&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“Where are they?” Enrico Fermi. Thanks for this Chris. The elusive intelligent life forms
Yeah but now we know the answer.
The left lost its moral compass a long time ago, just like the right. Its mania for 'inclusivity' and lightening up on sexual mores (which the world DID and still does need) has led it to becoming *too* inclusive, 'too' being defined as 'to the detriment of others'.
Like the much-discussed-here-already problem of the androcentric trans movement and its misogynist treatment of adult human females (I had one yesterday on Twitter try to argue how TW are 'adult human females' and I set him straight on that tout de suite.)
The other problem is the increasing embrace of *open* sexual fetishism. While whatever goes between consenting adults, it doesn't mean the rest of us should be exposed to it or pressured or coerced to accept it, esp as it relates to children and the increasingly pedophilic tone I'm getting from the 'drag show for kids' crap.
Did anyone else see Twitter trending yesterday with Jon Stewart slapping down an anti-drag conservative by pointing out to him, quite rightly, that guns were a bigger threat to children? Good point, but it sure did sound like a defense of drag shows for kids. Stewart strikes me as having lost his own moral compass, his ability to think logically on some occasions, and now he can't even tell that however this guy feels about gun rights, he's RIGHT to come down on drag queen story or whatever the fuck they call it?
If the left can't see what's going on with these people, they're no more morally correct than the right. I don't know if this guy is part of the trans movement, even if just a supporter, or not but I'd bet me he is. Because I think pedophiles are beginning to latch onto the overly-inclusive movement for their own agenda.
I wonder how long it will be before this guy & others like him start mouthing NAMBLA talking points.
“ The other problem is the increasing embrace of *open* sexual fetishism.”
Also, yes, this is very true. Sex positivity is all well and good, but a basic standard of public decency doesn’t infringe on anybody except perverts. I don’t know why some people have become so concerned with pandering to them.
You can thank the gay culture for that; if you weren't into letting strangers know what you thought about while masturbating then you were suffering from "internalized homophobia."
It's one of those things like the unrecognized sickness of selfies. Erasing boundaries between private nd public.
“ The left lost its moral compass a long time ago, just like the right. Its mania for 'inclusivity' and lightening up on sexual mores (which the world DID and still does need) has led it to becoming *too* inclusive, 'too' being defined as 'to the detriment of others'.”
Couldn’t agree more. It’s so heartbreaking to see what’s become if what I’ve always felt was my political team. Hijacked by a bunch of lunatics who are allowed to run wild because the reasonable majority are afraid of being called made-up names on Twitter.
Just cowardice all the way down.
And yeah, so weird what’s happened to Jon Stewart. There are so many flashes of his brilliance in his show, but somehow that makes the parts when he’s intellectually dishonest even more painful.
In his defence though, he was making a point about constitutional rights. Less a defence of drag for kids than saying, “hey, if the government has a responsibility to regulate a drag queen’s First Amendment right to perform in front of children, why don’t they have a responsibility to regulate a civilian’s Second Amendment right to buy a gun that can kill children?”
Maybe there wasn't enough context. I watched it twice, and didn't get that. I think he could have made his point better.
Cause voyeurism and pedophilia have a few more legal constraints (like precisely what you were discussing with Rogue) than irresponsible firing of weapons that catch kids in the crossfire? I believe what something can do is different from what someone is doing in front of children.
“ I believe what something can do is different from what someone is doing in front of children.”
Agreed. And I think both issues are worthy of attention. But as Jon was pointing out, guns are the leading cause of death for kids in America. So when Dahm is trying to repeal laws on gun control and trying to pass laws in drag shows, all while claiming his concern is safety, it highlights a certain hypocrisy, no?
I don’t know what Stewart’s position on Drag Queen story hour is. Sadly, I suspect he doesn’t see the issue (or wouldn’t admit to seeing it). But I don’t think this interview could be considered a defence of it.
Agreed, hypocritical for sure. I briefly dug into the ‘gun deaths of children’ story: age 1-19, excludes infants. I would be extremely interested in a breakout for age 16-18 (eg both hovering around that ‘age of consent’ thing and incorporating teen gangs.
We all shudder at the headline envisioning 5-year-olds shot in their car seat. I’m just wary of media manipulation.
I detest transvestites because every one of them I ever trusted stole from me, even pocketing 50¢ rolls of pennies while I was in the bathroom.
But telling stories to kids, sorry, I can't summon any outrage at that. The kids probably see them as clowns. I doubt very many boy children come out of story hour thinking "I want to dress as a woman."
Drags are the most ineffectual people on the planet.
I saw the Jon Stewart video. He handed that bearded gun nut his own ass. I just loved how he wouldn't let him change the subject, I wish to god there was more of that,.
I remember feeling outrage as a 7 year old girl at seeing drag queens, on tv. "So women are a joke for men to make fun of?" was my first thought. It didn't even occur to me how offensive it was that it was often a sexualised caricature of women being presented for entertainment. So while I agree very few boys watch and think they want to now dress as a pronified version of a woman for fun, they are definitely getting the message (as are little girls) that women are a joke and a sexualised joke at that. That's not ineffectual, I promise.
Drags are as cringeworthy as the blackface minstrels in that regard. It could make you think that women are being made fun of it the same way black people were being made a joke.
The minstrels were doing it while appropriating the music of people from Africa. I've never been to a drag show. Is there vaudevillianesque mimicry of women entertainers?
He likely does in his little chat groups. Ugh.
Thanks for sharing! I'm right there with you in being totally ok with however consenting adults desire to express their sexuality amongst themselves. I'm also in agreement that children must, absolutely be protected in as much as possible from sexual interaction that they have no way of understanding or refusing. My mother had huge sexual issues and abused both of my sisters. I can tell you how helpless and terrified you feel as a child. That there are laws defining a child vs an adult are important for many reasons.
As for how the respondent referred to his 'kids' (whom he still considers kids?!?) but also Israelis, Danes and, perhaps most telling, his involvement with the Samson and Mankind projects makes my skin crawl. Thanks for taking on the daunting task of trying to communicate with people of his ilk.
"perhaps most telling, his involvement with the Samson and Mankind projects"
Is there more to these projects than meets the eye? I wasn't familiar with them when he mentioned them, I just assumed they were community programs like many others.
Somehow my response posted below. Ah, patience with old people and computers.
The conversation brought an awkward thought. I frequently opine, "no victim, no crime" for other issues. I doubt that I am unique in saying that I had sex before the age of 18. I dated girls older than myself, in some cases they were older than 18 when I was younger and I'm not talking about a one or two year difference. Was I a victim? How does one justify that opinion? If the sexes had been reversed and I had been a girl would that change anything? Why? I'm not giving an opinion with this and even if you are in favor of victimless crime laws I ask, where is the victim in this? https://youtu.be/G2NhmnI0dpc
And then there's this. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/pedophiles-hebephiles-and-ephebophiles-oh-my-erotic-age-orientation/
"The conversation brought an awkward thought. I frequently opine, "no victim, no crime" for other issues. I doubt that I am unique in saying that I had sex before the age of 18."
Yeah, there are a few important nuances to pick apart here. First, some laws are important even if there's no clear victim, no? Drunk driving springs to mind. I think drunk drivers should be punished if caught, even if they don't kill anybody on that particular drive. In this case, the law exists to prevent the behaviour, not because every time somebody commits the behaviour somebody dies. In fact, probably most of the time when somebody drives drunk, nobody dies.
I think age of consent laws are similar. Some people under the age of consent are nonetheless mature/intelligent enough to make informed decisions about sex. Like you, and I suspect many other people, I had sex before I was 18. I wasn't a victim of anything. But once we move out of the window of close-age exceptions already covered by law, once one of the parties is old enough that they should know better, I think there should be consequences simply for not exercising the restraint to protect that minor from the possibility of harm.
To put it in more concrete terms, let's imagine a 24-year-old who is genuinely in love with a 15-year-old. Let's gloss over the details of how that's possible without some other disturbing things happening first. Even if the 15-year-old "consents" to sex, I think the 24-year-old should refuse until that child is no longer below the age of consent. The 24-year-old is aware of the law, they should be mature enough to control their urges, and they have a responsibility to protect that minor from potential harm. Even (or, in fact, *especially*) if their feelings are genuine.
The choice to ignore all that and have sex anyway is not only against the law, it's an act of pure selfishness that I would strongly argue is abusive. None of this is perfect. As no laws are. The age of consent, sadly, can't be a scientifically determined safe point. It's a line in the sand. But it's a necessary one.
I doubt these words accurately define real categories of any significant size so as with the woke it's just a pointless exercise in neologism.
there is no useful distinction between attraction to the barely-pubescent and the same kid a year later. Be as attracted as you want but if you undress her, you're going to lose pieces you were born with in Quentin.
I wasn't endorsing that link; it is an example of people trying to address that zone between sexual maturity and mental/emotional maturity.
One of the most disturbing realizations of my lifetime was the existence of child prostitutes in the proximity of the military. They wouldn't be there if there were no patrons. A testimony to what some people will do if they can get away with it.
On one occasion a woman paraded two prepubescent girls out in front of us, advertising. For all I know they were her daughters. There were witnesses which tempered my urge to shoot her if I had been able to get away with it.
Disturbing. How different were the two cases (sexual predator and killer) of being able to get away with something as a deciding factor? Therefore, we do have laws.
Sorry I should have used the impersonal "one" instead of the sloppy "you." Of course I don't think you were endorsing that.
Parenthetical: I subscribed to that magazine for over forty years. Then it went Happy and I don't even read it anymore. As a child it was pure joy for me.
The law is intended to prevent much older adults from taking advantage of their superior powers of manipulation, as in a 35yo man getting a 14yo girl into bed.
It becomes absurd when a 18 plus a day male is branded a sexual predator for bedding an 18 minus a day girl. But this has indeed happened.
I think you stumbled upon the connection between pedophilia and the trans movement. I didn't pick up on it this morning as Rogue's words were confusing. But the bit about "if you can make a decision about being trans at a young age," now makes it clearer how pedos can take advantage of this movement, like adult sexual predators already have. It's kind of a backhanded good point: If we can trust them with this, why not that? Instead of questioning how fucked up it is to medically "treat" children and young people for a non-problem, he asks why we can't shag the little kiddies if they agree.
“makes it clearer how pedos can take advantage of this movement, like adult sexual predators already have.”
Oh, they’ve already got that covered with “Transage” (https://thebridgehead.ca/2018/01/29/trans-age-pedophile-defends-himself-by-claiming-that-hes-trapped-in-a-nine-year-olds-body/) 🤮
But yes, it’s an adventure playground of slippery slopes.
Oh Jesus.
Oh, I think I remember that guy! I didn't realize he was here in Toronto, and I probably didn't pay too much attention at the time. Yeah, you've got to wonder what stupid-ass parents of *small children* are thinking letting this asshole into their family. And oh god, that poor mother with seven kids to raise on her own. (Although...these are the things you have to think about when you're making babies...what if something happens to the other person? What if he'd died?)
That is *seriously* fucked up.
I am not well informed on these programs but am aware of controversy around the ManKind project, despite its criteria that appears positive and may be helpful to some men. The Samson project deals more specifically with men who have sexual issues/addictions. That your correspondent was a leader in his local Samson group while still obviously having issues with what defines a child in regards to consensual sexual activity seems disturbing. You may wish to research these organizations further.
MAPs - "Minor attracted persons" are the new 'politically correct' term that some are trying to use to normalize pedophilia. The LGBTQ movement has nothing to do with it so far, but they WILL be targeted eventually, and if any of their number are willing to embrace pedophiles, my guess it will be the TiMs who might go for children if it were legal. Because they're trans? No, because they're men, and that's the demographic who go after children the most.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-lgbtq-community-p-acronym-idUSKBN2352J8
Betcha my bottom dollar Rogue is familiar with 'MAP' ideas.
"The LGBTQ movement has nothing to do with it so far, but they WILL be targeted eventually, and if any of their number are willing to embrace pedophiles,"
Yep, sadly we're already there. Some fairly prominent members of the LGBT community have already been quite clear about their support for bringing pedophiles into the fold (https://twitter.com/jamescantorphd/status/1071499969910198274?s=46&t=SkFKo_zIZKy4JSFHYLY02Q). If I were lesbian, gay, or bi, I'd be so furious that all these other groups were piggybacking onto my community.
Hard to blame pedophiles for their proclivities when mass culture gives them a wink and a nod.
Yeah, I don't blame pedophiles for their proclivities at all. I don't think anybody chooses to be a pedophile.
I blame people who seek to justify inappropriate behaviour, either by quibbling about things like the age of consent, or because they think "dismantling" any and all boundaries is "progressive."
I blame people who are afraid to call out obvious inappropriate behaviour because they don't want to be called a prude.
I blame a society that demonises pedophilia to such a degree that pedophiles can't come forward and seek help.
And yes, absolutely, I blame a society that normalises the sexualisation of children in various ways. I actually wrote an article on that topic not so long ago. Rogue took issue with that one too...
I'm not sure all pedophiles are born that way. Many are, I suspect, but I wonder if any are learning to like it through porn. Lotta that going on, even on the free official porn sites.