Can we just settle something? Please?

[trinityvixen]

Without explicitly stating from whence my aggravation of these issues comes, I'd like to simply, accurately educate the world. Those of you on my f-list pretty much know this already, but humor me. It won't take long. I just have two common misconceptions that I would like to correct. Right. Now.

1) Do you think women are people, with all the inherent complexities, strengths, and failings thereof? CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE A FEMINIST.
Contrary to what you may have heard, women, you don't have to stop shaving any part of your body--legs, "down there," armpits, mustache--nor burn bras, nor hate pornography, nor change the spelling of words to either "feminize" them--WO-mandatory, for example--or "neuter" them--"hyr," "womyn," "semyn"--in order to be a feminist. You just have to think women are people. Men, you do not have to encourage your female friends and significant others to do any of those things nor is feeling emasculated a necessary prerequisite of being a feminist. You can be a feminist by thinking women are people! It's just that simple!

2) You know who likes to molest little boys and girls? PEDOPHILES.
Being sexually attracted to people under the age of 10 is a disease, currently an incurable one. It's a psychological pathology. Some times, that pathology manifests in way that might appear "gay" to you, and not in that Johnny Weir, "That's gay," locker-room-towel-fight gay way. We're talking male-on-under-age-male gay. So I understand it is confusing when I say it's not gay, it's PEDOPHILIA. It is not gay because it's not about having sex with someone who has the same genitals as you. It's about abusing someone who has the same genitals (or will, when they, you know, fully mature) as you. People who are sexually attracted to under age boys or girls are sick, sick people. They're not gay. Even if gayness is sickness to you (and if it is, I'm now 99% sure you're a self-hater), gay is a different sickness, a different pathology entirely from the one that makes you want to abuse kids. Please correct your thinking.

Comments

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

1. While I agree, I've never liked the word "feminist," because it's been taken/used to mean "women first" rather than "women are equal." I prefer "egalitarian." :)

2. Not all pedophilia is same sex. So there are homosexual pedophiles, heterosexual pedophiles, and probably bisexual pedophiles as well. But yes, gender preference is not an illness. Preying on children is.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'll fight you, a little, on using "feminist." The point of posting, as I did, was to prove that such "well, it means women are better" impressions are wrong. I think being timid about being a feminist or, if you prefer, feminist-ally, is part and parcel of the patriarchal problem. (If you'll forgive the alliteration.) "Could you tone it down? We'd listen to you about being real people if you would just, you know, be less in our faces about it.

It's your right to say "I'm a humanist, egalitarian," and clearly actions are better than words any day. But I do find the backlash against the term "feminism" very telling. Because it means a woman who speaks up, who refuses to be second class, and, my, my, my, isn't that just unladylike? So, yeah, call yourself whatever you like, but know that you're a feminist because that's all being a feminist means, exactly what you've said you are. We need to reclaim the word from the negative impression. Feminists: not crazy man-haters after all!

As for pan-sexual nature of pedophilia, that was rather the point. The particular issue that prompted this post was, of course, the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, which some asshats are trying to lay off as being proof that gayness is the problem. No, making your leaders celibate is the damn problem. (Mostly.) Allowing them unquestioned, unfettered private access to young people, over whom they have enormous power, is the other problem. The fact that a lot of boys have been abused is just because they happened to have a lot of boys running around Catholic churches, more so than females, who are over-protected, relative to boys. (In general. Young females, more so.) It's not about being gay, it's about which bodies you have access to.

Also, ack! Don't say "gay pedophiles." Don't say "straight" either. They're not any such thing. It's really, really and truly, an entirely separate sexual predilection from homo/heterosexual orientation. That's what people don't realize. Pedophiles aren't sexually attracted to people with genitalia of one order or another. They don't get aroused by men or women. They are solely aroused by children, and usually children who are pre-pubescent to a degree that the sex of the abuse victim is irrelevant. Do some solely abuse one sex or another? Yes, but studies have shown that it's about how they prey on the victim, not about what genitals the victim has. If they have success working on a male victim in a particular way that they get away with, they're more likely to repeat that rather than branch out and try to work an approach that would ensnare a female victim. Moreover, pedophiles, like serial killers, are aroused by remembering their previous acts. So a man who abuses boys may start to be solely aroused by boys because it recalls for him a previous successful abuse.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Actually--for once :)--we're not arguing at all.

My point about "feminist" was exactly that--that the word has been twisted and made to be uncomfortable to anyone who isn't a rabid activist. Which is a shame.

I did not know that about pedophiles, that they aren't attracted to gender at all.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Time to reclaim "feminist," I say! ::stomps on soap box::

Yeah, pedophiles are fascinating research subjects. I may be overstating the case when it comes to their sexuality, but only because stating anything about their sexual preferences confuses the issue. They are, primarily, attracted to children, full stop. Some have preferences that may be sexual in nature, but that's a far cry in terms of importance from the first urge.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Since you are on a feminism rant, have you heard of the book Enlightened Sexism? I want to get a copy to see how she makes her argument, but I definitely think she has a point that the general impression that we've "solved" feminism makes it possible for people to return to sexist behaviors while claiming there isn't sexism anymore.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Nothing she's saying is anything like news to me, but I would be interested in seeing how she phrases her argument, too.

The problem with any -ism is that people assume they have ends even when, almost to a one, they never do. An ideology may fade, but it doesn't have an "end." All fights for equality, especially, are on-going and will have to be maintained even in that mythical, near-impossible future in which equality exists. Because even if it is achieved, it will still take work to maintain.

There are demonstrable waves of feminism. Right now, we're in a lull, something Susan Faludi identified as being (and I think she's somewhat right) a backlash that was provoked by 9/11. Now, it's paranoid to say that terrorism causes sexism, but that's not her argument. She's actually saying that the conservative freak-out with the terror attacks favored stereotypically male responses. We threw out a lot of the fuzzy, good-feeling, Constitutional stuff in favor of the hard, punishing, take-no-prisoners-unless-you-torture-'em response of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. It was SUPPORT YOUR COUNTRY, or else, a motto that is akin to the abuser's credo: love your man, or he'll hit you.

We are recovering, but not soon enough. Like feminism, kids take terrorism more or less for granted now. (Some post-9/11 babies are almost nine years old!) Because they didn't live through the nuances and failures and struggles, they don't think it affects them. Until it does. Until they realize that even if their generation doesn't see the difference, they'll have to deal with older generations that do...

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

You speak the truth! And pedophiles who do more than look at a child are rapists. I was reading This piece about bullying and how we treat children as a society and the topic (though I can't find the quote, so it may have been in comments) of the fact that we downplay child rape by calling it molestation, that crimes against children are downplayed. Instead of worrying about whether or not pedophiles are gay, people should be focusing on the fact that they are sick, morally bankrupt rapists.

(I think I have read that there's a theory that pedophilia has a lot to do with people getting off on the idea of being able to totally control someone smaller, and the gender selection has more to do with which gender of full-grown adults makes them feel small and weak - it's a revenge fantasy taken out on innocents. It seems like a pretty solid theory, but it's sick all the same.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh god, the bullying story is breaking my heart. Especially since I look at that girl, think of her with an Irish brogue, and all I can think is, "Who wouldn't love her?" It's bad, it's totally bad to stereotype because she's cute and had a cute accent, but she is and did and I can't imagine the kind of perverseness that would lead people to hound her, literally, to her death. The New York Times article pointed out that the bullying was almost the last thing she experienced before dying, seeing as someone chucked a can at her head as she walked home the day she hung herself. You call that bullying? That's assault. I hope they throw the book at all these kids. Judging from the way they're still behaving (a girl who spoke up about bullying at the school was, not surprisingly, assaulted by one of the accused), I don't think they feel an ounce of remorse.

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

It is assault, and too many people have this weird notion about not punishing kids because it might harm their self-esteem, with no thought of what they are doing to the feelings of other kids. I was just listening to a lecture where the notion was put forth that one thing that distinguishes primates from many other animals (though not all) was that they carry their young with them instead of leaving them behind in a nest - but that in this day and age, we are making nests for our children and leaving them unattended. Fascinating way to think of things.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Re: Pedophilia, you're absolutely right that it is about control. A large part of the thrill is, as I mentioned above, akin to that a serial killer experiences. It's about having power, absolute, terror-inducing power, over another being and getting away with abusing that power in the most egregious way.

I would caution against ascribing to the sexual frustration theory you mention, however. Sexual frustration is, partially, what leads the celibate clergy into trouble, I've no doubt. But that trouble and frustration do not, necessarily, have to be expressed in abusive ways. Priests/ministers can and do have affairs, adult, consensual affairs. But some don't. Some sexuall assault and rape children. Not because they're sexually frustrated but because they're pedophiles. To me, people get the sexual frustration thing backwards when assessing the Church's scandal. (I know the people blaming the gays do.) It's not that sexually frustrated clergymen abuse because they can't get sex and are desperate to keep the sex they get a secret. It's just that among the people who are likely to volunteer for celibacy are going to be a higher proportion of those who don't really have another option. If you're a pedophile, you have to be celibate or you get into a lot of trouble. Et voila, you have a method to recruit an unusually high concentration of pedophiles into your ranks.

That speaks to the problem I find in the "frustrated with other sex" pedophilia explanation. If it's an accredited assumption, I'm happy to read papers arguing the point. But to me it feels like a cart-before-the-horse proposition, supposing that, as in the case I made about clergy, sexual frustration creates pedophilia. It's the other way around. Pedophilia exists, nascent, in a pedophile. I do believe it can be trained into a person (I believe people sexually assaulted as children are more likely to become abusers, but I can't back that up with more than common wisdom appeal), but for the most part, if you're a pedophile, you're a pedophile long before you're anything else, including sexually frustrated or longing for revenge against emasculating women/domineering men. I think this theory steers dangerously close to assigning normal sexuality to pedophiles--as I argued against doing--when they are, in fact, aberrant in every way.

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

You make a good point about the way people view sexual frustration. I didn't actually say or mean sexual frustration, though. I was referring to people who felt persecuted or abused by someone of a particular gender and wanting to torment someone weaker so they could feel strong.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Obviously I'm a feminist by definition # 1. I just think 99% of the male and female population would qualify as feminist by that definition. Hell, it looks perfectly compatible with sexism at its narrowest (i.e., the belief that women are somehow inherently "inferior").

You could also classify as feminists those who support a certain political agenda, abortion rights and so forth (and I'm probably a "feminist" in that sense, too).

I understand that feminists wear bras, shave their legs, etc., and honestly wouldn't have an issue if they didn't (no one should have to do those things if they don't want to). My problem has always been with certain styles of argument associated with feminism, particularly in cultural criticism, that's prevented me from embracing the feminist label.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The culture criticism I am of two minds about. For example, I think it's perfectly acceptable to criticize pop-culture for its sexist problems--the lack of female-led, created, produced, directed, written movies/tv/etc.--and to be unapologetic about it. But the flip side is that I don't think it's been done from a spiteful place and I don't try to shame people about it. What I do emphasize is how much more interesting everything would be if we had more gender parity. Romantic comedies wouldn't suck! We could have more movies like Alien!

By saying things like "I'm a feminist, and that doesn't mean I'm a freak," and proving it, we do more to reclaim feminism than a hundred people lambasting a jock-strap-fest of a movie like The Expendables (http://itsyournickel.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978144573&grpId=3659174697243100).

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

God, it's just too much of a mental effort to get myself through this. I don't think I'd be able to get up in the morning if I had to think these things about the world - it would simply shatter my entire psyche and render me a helpless, drooling idiot... on a certain level I'm not sure what other defense someone could reasonably offer up against these points while still being honest with themselves about their intentions.

On a more serious note, I hesitate to call anything regarding sexuality an illness, if only because (as has been the case with homosexuality) it implies that there's a cure of some sort, even if we don't know what it is, which implies malfunction. The behavior in question with pedophilia isn't with the sexual attraction, but with the act of abusing another person. Child molestation is rape, but the focus seems to get shifted to the idea of pedophilia in general. As far as that goes, outside of molestation, the issue feels fuzzy. If it's possible to be turned on by balloons or paint and not have it considered a psychosis, it seems like attraction to children isn't a huge leap. If a person doesn't act on their desires are they still sick for having them? Is it possible for attraction to children to not be about power? With the seemingly infinite variety of ways sexuality manifests itself in people, I'd have to believe that to be true for some people out there. I wouldn't call them sick. There are a lot of people who are just shit out of luck because the rest of us won't stand for what they want and that's the nature of the social contract.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The sticking point for sexual permissiveness tends to (and should) be consent. Being sexually attracted to children who cannot give what amounts to informed consent is definitely a pathology that is focused on power. This is especially evident in the majority of cases where the abuse is by a trusted person with power over the child. The pedophile that attacks from behind the bushes, even the creepy neighbor out of The Lovely Bones accounts for fewer molestations than the priest, the uncle, the parent. The manifestation of pedophilia is so intractably linked to games of power, and, to date, there seems to be no other explanation for pedophilia but that it is about power, about abusing that power or at least fantasizing about exercising it.

You bring up social contract at the end but assume that the people with deviant/alternative sexualities are the ones who violate it. They do not, not strictly speaking. Yes, our morally-uptight, slut-shaming society basically frowns on sex outright, and farther you get from married, cis-gendered missionary sex, the deeper the frown. But so long as you have permission to do it that someone you're having sex with gives to you, you violate no contract. That's why so-called "deviant" sexual behaviors that have been or are shamed--homosexuality in your example--or romances where there is a power imbalance--BDSM, age-gap romances--are not, in fact, violations. They have consent. The sub into BDSM has all the power. The rape-fantasy victim gets to call out a safeword. It comes down to, no matter what the context of the sex, it is all within the consent playground. The social contract is only violated in cases were that consent cannot be made or cannot said to be fairly made. Children cannot give consent. You can quibble about the age of consent, but there is no question but issues of consent are trickier and trickier the younger the persons involved. People who fixate on children fixate on sexual objects that cannot (for the most part) give informed, willing consent. There are too many ways that "consent" could be biased in favor of the pedophile for it to be true consent worth the name--the influence an adult has is just too great. And pedophiles enjoy that and are aroused by it. Ergo, pedophilia is aberrant in a way that does violate the social contract, in the same way that a rapist does. There's no question but that rape is wrong, that wanting to hurt and dominate someone else for your own pleasure against their will is wrong, even if you never do it. Pedophilia, likewise, is wrong and aberrant whether you molest or no.

I am not sure if you're arguing for arguing's sake here, but I find the conflation of "but homosexuality was once deviant" and the condemnation of pedophilia disingenuous at best. The kindest thing I can say is that you're game to defend those with oft-maligned sexual proclivities. It's a useless exercise, however. No matter how they are persecuted or hounded by their desires, no matter their pathologies, unless they seek to use others for sexual purpose against their will, they are not to be compared with pedophiles. It's an insult to gay people to even make that argument, frankly.

It also seems more like a "teach the controversy" argument, a rhetorical flourish designed to hide or ignore an apples-to-oranges comparison of healthy, deviant behavior and anti-social, aberrant behavior. I wouldn't have expected someone as smart and savvy about nuance as you are to advance such a theory, which is why I asked about the source of your dissent in this. If it's purely intellectual, I stand on what I've said. If you truly think there's an argument to be made in favor of accepting that pedophilia might just be a "sexual appetite" instead of a psychiatric pathology, we'll have to agree to disagree. Also, no offense, but that creeps me out. (I couldn't hold the pretense of disengagement there, so my apologies, but I speak my mind.)

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

I think I take more of a "human beings have the capacity for anything" point of view than pretty much everyone I know. That said, I also feel that when it comes to ethics it's all about the choice made between another person's pleasure or pain and the ability to recognize that distinction, regardless of the particulars of the situation. It always seems to me that arguments about human nature end up with a subtext that whatever's "natural" in some way must be correct or somehow given acceptance, or that society (and civility in general) is about some kind of optimization based on "natural" features rather than the fundamental respect for our shared capacity for pleasure and pain. To describe what is (or what could be) isn't to advocate for its virtue, much the same way that normative arguments don't hold water. Understanding what could be provides a way of both imagining ways of "dealing with it" on an practical social level (whatever that might mean for the situation, positive or negative), as well as peering into how the different pieces of the human mind function and fit together to construct a person, since we're still a very long way from having a clear picture.

To the issue at hand, there's a big distinction to make. If someone molests a child, they're a rapist, pure and simple. The pathology is in the willingness to harm, to violate. People focus on the child more than the act itself, which I think points to how our culture perceives rape as a whole- too often putting the focus on the victim.* A child is always a blameless innocent in need of help and protection while a grown woman (or a teenager for that matter) doesn't get that same benefit.

No other sexual proclivity can justify an act of violence, and pedophilia is no different. Along the same lines, I don't think any sexual proclivity necessitates violation inherently since sexuality itself isn't about power, it just serves as a mechanism for pathological use of power... it doesn't even have to be about other people in any way, either, just about personal desire, whatever that is. People can, and do, sexualize anything and everything. It's how we work - as open-ended as our internal logic will allow, though we have some basic machinery pushing and pulling. There is no thoughtcrime and people can feel and want whatever they do feel and want. The basis of morality is the ability to have that freedom of thought but still control one's actions.

Does this mean we should deal with pedophilia any differently? Not really, no. There's enough real damage caused in secondary ways (particularly through pornography) that it's expression isn't acceptable even in the absence of molestation. Sorry for them, but they're just shit out of luck. If there were a way for there to not be harm done then I would have no problem, but that just doesn't seem possible.


* - there's a component of this (enhancing, I think, the sense of social dissonance and self-justification that makes people cling to their damaging old ideas) which I think is a form of psychological shielding from having to understand the criminal, to see from their point of view in order to understand their reasons and the criminal act itself. People don't want to humanize criminals because it opens the idea that there isn't a such thing as "evil", that every person has the same set of tools to work with, that the choices we make and inclinations we have could possibly lead to such terrible results... and, as above, to humanize them doesn't mean to justify or sympathize (though I do feel sorry that anyone would get themselves so unnecessarily trapped in a twisted mindset). The monsters of the world are just as human as the rest of us, but that's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

1) I'm pretty much with gryphonrose here. I like to think of myself as a feminist for precisely those reasons but I don't tend to identify as such out loud; not because I think women shouldn't be all in your face about equality but because the term's been somewhat taken over by the One Step Too Far brigade. If you can help reclaim the word, more power to you.

2) I read an article in Savage Love a month or so ago, Gold Star Pedophiles (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=3347526). The guy who writes the letter isn't talking about revenge or control or anything, he is saying "I am attracted to young children. I hate that I am, I would never do anything about it, but there you are." The column makes a point that we should distinguish between people who have a sexual kink (or whatever you want to call it) and people who abuse children. I wouldn't invite either one to my kid's birthday party, but only the second is really deserving of real venom.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

See my comments to cbreakr above. I don't believe that wanting to have sex with children is a kink akin to a rape fantasy. It's a power-trip psychiatric pathology. Generally speaking, I disagree with that expert in that I don't think we unfairly demonize pedophiles because we demonize those that are exposed in deed. We certainly dislike pedophilia because we see the damage of it. Pedophiles who do not abuse, however, cannot be demonized unless they act out. They are still aberrant (something the expert and I agree about) and that sucks for them. The ones that don't abuse don't do so because they also know that it's fundamentally wrong, not because they're embarrassed about their kink.

It's not wrong to like younger bodies. We're obsessed with younger bodies, and teenage/tweener bodies are biologically crafted to be the most attractive bodies there are. There's definitely a difference, however, in looking at a smoking-hot young thing and going "Sexy!" as we're almost programmed to do and acting on that desire. And we've got that strong taboo in place when those bodies are sexual--post-pubescent enough such that no matter the psychological maturity of the body in question, it is at least identifiably adult physically--to say nothing of those bodies that do not meet that barest of physical baselines. The more you obsess over sexual contact with younger people and the younger you prefer those bodies to be, the more troublesome your pathology, the clearer the sign you have one, to be honest. There is a line where liking hot, young things crosses from kink to pedophilia. I set the starkest line a pre-pubescence, personally--sexual attraction to relatively powerless human beings does not imply so much as insist on pedophilia. Up from that level, it's an issue of pedophilia by degrees. Doesn't make it less aberrant.

[saikogrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah I think people, even women, can shy away from that word because for them it has connotations of a more extreme view, but I get that you're trying to reclaim it. :)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. There's no word better to reclaim than one that was meant to promote equality.

[sols-light.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I've been working with that definition for many years and I'm sick to death of female feminists telling me off for it. I think we're all people first and everything else second and that sticky-outy-bits aside, men and women of the same culture are usually more similar than they are trained to think they are. The original feminist movement was about equality, so far as it's possible. Let's face it, there is a biological issue that at some point, to continue the species a proportion of women will have to take time out of their lives to have children. What happens after that point is once again a thing we can talk about equality over. There are also certain biological realities associated with being able to carry a child, such as monthly cramps which men don't need to work around.

There are several other words to describe what many self-proclaimed empowered feminists are. There's matriarchs, attempting to subvert the patriarchy into what they see as a superior matriarchy (to a limited point, I approve of this because some patriarchal values really are redundant if you treat everyone as people). There's misandronists, not a word you hear much, if at all but it should be. It's the equivalent of misogynist and it means hater of men. There's a large amount of this sentiment around and it's one of the words which much better describes many of the female empowerment movements where they're happy with things where it's to the female's advantage and see no reason to change those, but everything else is unequal, unfair and oppressive.

Yes, there are things in society which are to a female's advantage, believe it or not. Men like women and women are generally trained to like women, unless they see them as competition. This can make it easier for women to take opportunities offered, but doesn't mean there's as many opportunities offere as the men (allegedly) get. There may be more, there may be less.

There's also other forms of social currency than money, such as beauty, status, ability to call in a favour and women arguably have the ability to use the other forms of social currency easier than men do to leverage an advantage. Whether they choose to conform to an ideal and do so, is an entirely different point. Whether they should have to because it's expected is yet another one.

As for the gay vs paedophile defintion. Yes, I agree with you.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

There are female sexists, and they ruin it for the rest of us either by hating women or compensating for women being hated by hating men. Neither is a feasible or acceptable solution. Hate an individual person all you like but not entire segments of the population, please?

As for the theory of social currency, it's a question that my friend chuckro asked a while back--literally, how much money would you accept in exchange for trading away a bit of social currency that being in the mainstream (in whatever way you are) affords you? I mean, would you trade being cis-gendered for $1M? Possibly, seeing as being gay/trans/bi is becoming less and less of a problem and can, to a great degree, be hidden if necessary to minimize social backlash. What about skin color? Gender? What price do we put on those? The funny thing is that a lot of people don't really realize how their advantages translate into assumptions of power/importance until they're asked to quantify them. It's very sad.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Just for the sake of saying it: If I haven't made it obvious enough, I totally agree with the above.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You're a feminist ally and someone who can tell the difference between aberrant and alternative sexual behaviors. Congratulations, you're in the 99% percentile of humanity. I wish I were kidding. But, no, really, kudos. We need more like you.