Tag: sex offenses

The argument that pedophilia is inherently wrong is . . . well, wrong

In my encounters with Twitter trolls I’ve been seeing the argument more and more that pedophilia is somehow inherently wrong, so I decided to make a post to address this argument in-depth because it has become quite clear to me that most of the people making it do not really understand morality. To be sure, it’s not always an easy thing to grasp, and anyone who believes it is clearly hasn’t thought about it very much.

Unfortunately, there are tons of people who haven’t, and it’s not difficult to understand why: many people want their moral decisions to be simple, which is why they gravitate to preconceived moral codes like the Ten Commandments. Having a few short, straightforward, easily remembered rules to live by makes life soooo much simpler, doesn’t it? No need to deliberate, or cause ourselves cognitive dissonance over a moral quandary when we can just refer to the existing rule book handed down by some ultimate authority, right?

Yet ethical problems invariably butt up against each other, which creates more complex ethical problems. Sure, thou shalt not kill, but what if the person we are faced with killing is trying to kill an innocent child right in front of us? Thou shalt not bear false witness, okay, but what if your government is murdering innocent people and you know you can protect them by lying?

Psychologist Abraham Maslow, perhaps best known for conceptualizing the hierarchy of needs, famously defined a cognitive bias called the law of the instrument, or the law of the hammer. Maslow said that if the only tool one has is a hammer, then one tends to treat every problem he encounters as if it were a nail. Which is to say, our capacity to solve problems—including the problem of making sense of reality—is necessarily restricted by our own limitations.

Children certainly have many limitations compared to adults. For example, it’s well known that newborn babies see in black and white, or at least they only see black and white distinctly while the few other colors they might be able to see (there’s some debate about this) will be fuzzy and ill-defined. By design, they must see the world either fully or predominantly in black and white. Their eyes have not yet developed the nuance to discern sharp colors, and certainly not to pick up various shades of the same color. In their next stage of growth, babies can begin to see red and yellow, or red and green, very well, until they finally are able to pick the full color spectrum around three months of age.

But what’s really eye-opening to me (no pun intended) is that this phenomenon is not limited to individual humans. The most primitive human societies only had words for black and white. Not surprisingly, the next most advanced societies had words for black, white, red and yellow or black, white, red and green. And so forth. The recognition of colors in various societies was studied extensively by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay and discussed in their 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. What they found was that there was a definite evolution in color conceptualizations in the languages of the most primitive extant societies to the most advanced.

Now, this may at first seem completely irrelevant to an understanding of morality, but I beg to differ. I propose that it’s no accident that the most basic (and therefore most limited) form of morality is often framed in terms of colors, namely black and white. Indeed, popular entertainment regularly traffics in it, which is why so many people find such entertainment appealing. In a world of uncertainties, it’s comforting to know exactly who to root for and exactly who to boo and hiss in our favorite movies and television programs.

But that’s the thing: no matter how much we’d like it to be, reality is never as simple as those TV shows with clearly defined heroes and villains. Even as the political landscape becomes increasingly polarized (I suspect in part because this simplistic hero & villain mentality has now taken over the news, and the line between entertainment media and informative media have blurred to the point where in some cases they are one and the same), it’s more important than ever that we come to scrutinize these issues with a critical eye.

Which brings us back round to the matter of pedophilia as a psychological phenomenon and its relationship to morality. Of course, it is first important that we establish in the minds of the public exactly what pedophilia is and what it is not. Pedophilia is, of course, a clinical term, not a legal one, and defines a primary or exclusive attraction to prepubescent children. At the basic level, that’s it. One need not molest children or consume child pornography to be a pedophile; I knew I was a pedophile long before I ever fantasized sexually about children, and even when I did, I knew it would be wrong to act on it. To this day I do not look at child porn, and I do not sexually abuse children, nor do I want to.

I’d say to you that you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that pedophilia and child sexual abuse are not interchangeable terms, but if you’ve followed me so far then you probably wouldn’t be surprised by that at all. Even when the people I’m debating are aware that these are not the same thing, I often see them make an argument which tends to go something along these lines: “Yeah, but you’re attracted to children. That’s just wrong and always will be. So you should be _________ [fill in the blank here: ashamed/arrested/hanged/castrated/stuck in a rocket and shot into the sun/etc.]”

Now here’s the part where we critically dissect this nonsense, and it isn’t all that hard to do, honestly. Pedophilia, whether you consider it a mental aberration or a sexuality, cannot be designated as inherently immoral without rendering the entire concept of morality meaningless. To understand why, we need to understand what moral agency is. Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Moral agency is an individual’s ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is “a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.”

What that all boils down to is knowing what right and wrong are and being able to perform some action accordingly. In other words, for morality to have any real meaning, there must be some ability to act on one’s knowledge of right and wrong. Conversely, assigning a ‘morally inferior’ status to an unchosen condition cannot be right, since there was no moral agency involved.

And yet, that is exactly how a hefty percentage of people approach this issue. Such thinking is dangerous in a number of ways. For one thing, in the past this sort of viewpoint has fueled some of the worst atrocities humans have ever committed against each other. This is the sort of belief that led to most historical genocides, most notably the Holocaust, in which Nazis justified their mass murder of the Jews by first preaching that Jews were inherently corrupt and immoral just by being genetically Jewish, a condition they were born into. American slavery was likewise justified on these grounds: that blacks were amoral savage animals by nature and thus enslaving them was no different than domesticating dogs or cows.

Another problem with this line of reasoning is that it reduces or eliminates the incentive among pedophiles to behave, since they are essentially damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If the moral status of pedophiles in society is largely considered the same whether or not they offend against children and a pedophile takes that message to heart, then the only incentive he really has not to engage is to avoid arrest and/or public shaming. Considering how often people commit sex crimes against kids despite both the powerful social taboos against it and the severe legal consequences, that is not going to be effective enough to significantly curb sexual abuse. Now, some have said that this is victim blaming. It isn’t. Nowhere in that entire point did I mention the condition of victims in relation to rates of sex offending. No, the condition which I’m claiming affects the rates of sex offending by pedophiles is societal perceptions of them as a population.

The biggest problem with the notion that pedophilia is intrinsically wrong, however, has already been mentioned: it essentially renders the entire concept of morality irrelevant, for if one innate, unchosen and unchangeable condition can be deemed immoral, then it’s a short leap from there to deeming another one so, and another one, and another one. The Nazis didn’t just murder Jews after all. They also killed gypsies, lesbians and gays, and yes, pedophiles. And unsurprisingly, the most vicious critics of NOMAPs on Twitter and elsewhere have been members of the far right, many of whom also support treating all minorities as subhumans who are worthy of everything from verbal degradation to execution. You see, this sort of thinking never stops with one unpopular minority.  Look at history.

That’s not all. Over the last two years we have seen Trump and his far right base attack and begin to break down the very bedrock principles of all free and democratic cultures: those of fairness, universal freedom, morality and most importantly, truth. Those of us who care about these things cannot allow that to happen. And so, we cannot let intellectual infants define morality by unchosen traits, for that way lies Orwellian madness. The less evolved among us, who can only perceive morality in the simplest black and white terms, might assure you that no, they only think of pedophiles as bad to the core, but you should know from experience that this simply isn’t true. Given leave to proclaim that this group is naturally evil, they will inevitably gravitate to affirming that that one is as well, and then that one, and that one, until no one is left but those who look, talk and behave exactly as they do.

And what is right and wrong must be defined not by unchosen conditions but only by chosen actions, or morality ceases to have any real value, and we step over the threshold from punishing wrongdoers to punishing wrongbe-ers, and those can and will be determined by whatever faction happens to hold power in the moment.

Sex abuse survivors should be pissed about the Q-Anon myth

I don’t swear in my headlines very often; however, this deserves to be addressed in the spirit of righteous indignation. But before I get too far into this post, I’d like to direct everyone to read conservative pundit Rick Wilson’s excellent take-down of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory and it’s followers. Read it first if you can, and then return to this post. Anyway, to quote Wilson from that piece:

When difficult realities confront people without the intellectual horsepower to understand and accept the truth, some turn to conspiracy theories to paper over the holes in their worldview. No matter how absurd, baroque, and improbable, conspiracies grow on their own like mental kudzu where inconsistencies aren’t signs of illogical conclusions, but of another, deeper layer of some hidden truth, some skein of powerful forces holding the world in its grip.

It’s true that there are a lot of dumb, ignorant people out there who fall for this stuff hook, line and sinker. But that’s what makes propaganda effective, and this is propaganda, cooked up in the filthy, unregulated meth lab that is 4chan by some white supremacist asshole who knew exactly what he was doing: taking the natural next step from the politically profitable Pizzagate episode and building on it by creating an obvious V-like character with an equally short code name and making up an entire backstory and mythos for him.

Whoever concocted this science fiction scenario is ultimately of little concern; what matters is its impact on the culture, and as we are starting to see by those t-shirts worn by many people at recent Trump rallies, it has made some headway into the mainstream. This is not only disturbing, it’s outright offensive to real sexual abuse survivors, of which I am one. Because for every dumb-ass who wholeheartedly believes in this nonsense, there’s another who knows it’s bullshit and happily repeats it anyway, choking it for all of its political momentum, and the fact that sexual abuse has now become such a politicized issue—having been weaponized by the far right in order to tar prominent Democrats with the most hated designation one can have—is a grave insult to actual abuse victims and survivors.

If abuse survivors are not offended by this, they should be. This sort of cavalier treatment of a very serious issue is, in effect, a regression to the days when few would believe you or do anything about it if you worked up the courage to report these crimes to them. It was a cultural coup for survivors to finally make society aware of both the ubiquity and seriousness of sexual abuse. And now, a group of shameless schemers exploiting that hard-won gravitas for political gain is the sort of thing that every real survivor, every person who has genuinely suffered at the hands of molesters, rapists and child pornographers, should be protesting in the streets. For what it does is reinforce the counterargument offered by abusers and abuse apologists that when survivors come forward and accuse someone of this most serious of crimes, they are just making it up for attention or personal advantage of some sort.

Well, that’s exactly what the creators and purveyors of Q-Anon are doing, and it threatens to undo every bit of social good will survivors have slowly engendered over decades and create a ‘boy who cries wolf’-type situation where an actual high-level politician is caught abusing a child and few people believe it happened because it’s someone in the trusted party and/or there have been too many false alarms like Pizzagate and Q-Anon thrown around. We saw this with Roy Moore, where white Republicans essentially dismissed or ignored what were very credible accusations because it didn’t fit with their worldview. This is a dangerous situation to create.

It becomes a very real possibility in that environment for abusers to get away with their crimes simply because they happen to belong to the popular party, are well-liked, succeed at whatever they do, hold all the “correct” beliefs. How many times have we heard the stories of victims whose abusers were successful and well-liked? It’s hard enough for the survivors of such offenders to get others to believe them when they say that the person is not who everyone thinks he or she is.  And now, to throw politics into that already volatile mix, especially in such divisive times, is a slap in the face to bona fide survivors. It displays contempt for them by turning their tragedy into a well-crafted lie designed to bring down political rivals. It neither protects kids from abuse nor honors victims who have already been abused. In fact, it does the opposite by deflecting attention away from the true culprits.

The lie that the political left is attempting to justify sexual abuse of children through acceptance of LGBT folks is almost laughably absurd, but it’s part and parcel of the right’s deflection when it comes to its own corruption and hypocrisy. As I’ve said before, would it be easier to convince society that pedophiles should have civil rights akin to gays and lesbians, or to convince them that sex with kids was justified by tradition and religious beliefs? We don’t have to conjecture too far here, as we have evidence to support this point. The idea of pedophiles getting the exact same rights as those in the LGBT spectrum, including the right to have sex with their preferred partners, has never made the slightest headway in any society, no matter how liberal, in the forty or so years since NAMBLA and PIE were founded. Meanwhile, in many countries, including the United States, child marriage still occurs with semi-regularity on traditional and religious grounds, cults both large and small– e.g. Children of God, the Fundamentalist LDS Church led by Warren Jeffs, David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult—have leaders who frequently get away with abuse right out in the open, even sanctioned by the followers (to say nothing of how long sexual abuse flourished and went unaddressed in the Catholic Church), and Roy Moore came very close to winning the special election in Alabama last year, only losing because his openly racist rhetoric brought out black Democrat voters in droves, and thank God for that!

The far right has always used these sorts of black propaganda tactics, but now these tactics are being embraced, or at best ignored, by much of Trump’s base, which comprises about 30% of the US population. That’s still millions of people, a good chunk of them spreading this obvious lie around. The seeds of the Q-Anon fable have been planted and cultivated by people like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh for years, with the gradual raising of both the scale and heinousness of Democrats’ supposed crimes, to the point where almost anything will be believed now. But when the dust settles and people come to their senses again—and they will—the resulting knee-jerk reaction will almost certainly be a wholescale devaluing of abuse victims’ credibility and influence on the cultural landscape, especially if the accused is a politician or celebrity, and that will be a condition ripe for exploitation by politicians or celebrities who are, in fact, abusive to minors. They do exist, but they are thankfully rare.

I’ve been saying for awhile that the right loves to beat this particular drum louder than most, whereas in reality few of them are doing so because they care about the welfare of kids in general or about victims of abuse. That has been demonstrated time and time again by the nature of their attacks and the range of their targets, which include not only actual child molesters but MAPs who are committed to never offending, members of the medical and scientific community who are tackling this issue from a therapeutic standpoint rather than a forensic one, and even abuse survivors (some of them still minors) who do not line up with them politically.

All of the hard right’s beliefs about and policies for curtailing sexual abuse are either morally reprehensible, mostly ineffective, or both. These policies, especially the ones that tend toward violence, are neither logical nor compassionate. They have little or nothing to do with protecting kids or providing justice to survivors and almost everything to do with their own tendency towards expedient solutions to complex problems, including eradicating their own deep-seated insecurities. Pizzagate, and now Q-Anon, are just another manifestation of this, a false assurance to the faithful that the Democrats as an entity are thoroughly evil and will meet with the proper justice soon, when Q comes forward with all the hard evidence he’s apparently been hording for just the right moment. And then, somehow, all of Trump’s own crimes and corruption will be vindicated, his extremes and excesses overlooked or revealed to be illusions set up to catch all the sexual predators who supposedly gravitate to the Democrat party, even as in reality it is Republicans who are caught abusing minors at a rate of something like five to one.

Not that it matters. All offenders, no matter where they are on the political spectrum, should be exposed and treated precisely the same. But vulgar myths like Q-Anon are attempts by political partisans to make the issue entirely one-sided, to hide their own abusers while they point the finger at innocents across the aisle. If successful, it would be a win-win for the finger pointers and the real abusers and a net loss for kids and survivors. Let’s make sure that never happens.

 

 

 

Roy Moore proves the hypocrisy of the political right on sexual abuse–is anyone shocked?

As a non-offending pedophile who has been open about my sexuality for years, to the point where I wrote a couple of now famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) articles that were published in Salon—later removed because of pressure from advertisers, who were themselves no doubt pressured by thousands of Breitbart and InfoWars followers, and maybe a few hardcore feminists—I am constantly subjected to vile verbal attacks by people on Twitter, YouTube and elsewhere. Most of these people are predictably “alt-right”, often barely concealing their hateful racist and anti-gay sentiments on their Twitter pages, if at all. The rest fall just short of that, though almost all of them seem to be Trump supporters.

Oddly, they will sometimes make room for people like Milo Yiannopoulos, an outwardly flamboyant gay man who has in the past voiced his support for men and boys as young as 13 being allowed to sexually experiment with each other. Ahem. Yiannopoulos, I think, is something like a court jester to these people, tolerated simply because he’s somewhat amusing to them and they find him useful at the moment, but I’m as certain as death and taxes that if the “alt-right” ever came into real power in the US, he would, at the very least, be cast out of “polite” society just as quickly as any other LGBTQ member. There was certainly enough outrage at the time of the discovery of Yiannopoulos’s controversial views on men and boys to topple him from his prominent editorial position at Breitbart Media, though not enough to kill his book deal with Simon & Schuster, apparently.

Speaking of which, while I have not read it and almost certainly never will, I was told by a friend that he had criticized me personally in the book. Of course he did. He would be unceremoniously dumped from his current position as precious darling of the far right if he admitted what he no doubt knows to be true: that pedophilia is as much of an unchosen condition as homosexuality or any other sexual orientation. Honestly, who the hell would choose to have the most unpopular sexual preference ever? It is definitely not a choice, and anyone who claims otherwise is either profoundly ignorant or they’re lying in order to justify their position. Anyway, he did what right-wingers typically do when they’ve been found to have a morally questionable past: he pointed the finger elsewhere.

As I said earlier, as an out (and outspoken) minor-attracted person, I am frequently harassed by these far right trolls. Several of them have threatened physical violence against me, thinking they can intimidate me into silence. But I’ve been through and survived the worst existence had to offer: years of horrible depression and social anxiety, which was not unlike living in a war zone at the time, constantly fretting that this might very well be my last day on the planet. Before my depression I would never have put myself out there for the barrage of insults and ridicule, much less the real danger of violence against me. But something happened when I came out the other side of that depression—it changed me fundamentally, to the point where I no longer fear being murdered. Or anything, really. My capacity for terror has been burned out of me.

I digress. All of this leads me to a question: had my article been published in a right-wing publication, or had I positioned myself as a right-winger in general when I wrote it, would the far right have embraced me as it did Yiannopoulos, and mostly continues to do even after he was revealed to have said what he did? I will go out on a limb here and say I believe it would have. Why? Because, unlike the left, which has a tendency to overcompensate when criticized on a point of moral pride (hence the removal of my stuff from Salon, and the recent resignation of Al Franks for that matter), the right has mainly given up any pretense of morality for its own sake and simply embraces anyone that it feels will further its agenda. The Ends Justify the Means philosophy has swept through the modern conservative movement in a big way. Of course, if you point out to them that this is ultimately just another form of moral relativism, which they claim to hate, they will just flat out deny it. And that in itself reinforces my point.

Which brings us to Senate candidate Roy Moore. It’s one thing to look past bad beliefs one might’ve once held. That much I get, and I don’t fault Milo Yiannopoulos for that. I would be a hypocrite myself if I did, given that I too embraced the pro-contact viewpoint for a time, mainly from late 2006 to sometime in 2007, when I finally woke up and realized the pro-contact perspective was, shall we say, problematic. I waffled a bit on it over the next few years, but essentially I realized my error and corrected for it. Yiannopoulos now appears to have done the same, and good for him. But then you have people like Roy Moore—and there seem to be a lot of them on the right—guys who position themselves as some sort of uncompromising moral anchor in a sea of immorality while behind the scenes they are anything but.

If the allegations against Moore are true—and I have every reason to believe they are—then it is a moral travesty of the first order that, not only are the Republicans allowing him to continue running, most of them appear to actually be endorsing him! I can’t help but think that this is going to be the ultimate legacy of the Republican Party, the thing that will finally bring down their glass house of cards (and yes, I know I’m mixing my metaphors, thank you very much). The problem is, this is likely going to get much worse for everyday Americans before it gets better. This is a government official we’re talking about, someone we are supposed to look up to and mimic. If Trump now sets the agenda for how an American can be expected to behave—at least a right-wing American, because if a leftie behaved the way Trump has in office, you know very well he would already have been impeached—then we have no reason to doubt that Moore too will have his adherents. Think about that for a minute.

I want you to keep in mind that many on the right did, and continue to, suggest that the goal of the left has been to work towards destigmatizing not just pedophilia but actual sex with minors. When my articles came out, media personalities on the far right, including YouTube-based demagogues like Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, railed against me and claimed I and Salon were attempting to do precisely that, even though nothing could’ve been further from the truth. My articles and later the video interview I did for Salon were my attempt to demonstrate that not all people who are cursed with these attractions wants to act on them, and that anti-contacters like me actually understand and agree with society’s perspective. My position is that pedophiles, at least ones with an exclusive attraction to kids, should remain sexually abstinent. For hundreds and hundreds of years abstinence was a conservative Christian value, and it is still the practice for clergy in the Catholic church. And yet, not long after the revelation of Moore’s “indiscretions” with teenage girls, Watson released this video in which his defense of the clearly guilty Moore is couched in a larger commentary about how the left has gone crazy with its “sexual puritanism.” While he is careful not to say it outright, Watson is planting the idea here that people like Moore—you know, otherwise decent, right-thinking folk who just happen to enjoy the company of teenage girls a little too much—are getting caught up in the left’s widely cast net of sexual misconduct accusations.

Of course, Watson claims he is all for punishing those who are actually guilty of molesting minors, but that’s easy to say when so much time has passed and there is simply no way to prove definitively that Moore is guilty, even though Watson knows damn well he’s guilty as hell. If Moore—whom you’ll remember was the district attorney at the time all of these offenses “allegedly” took place—could be brought to justice today, Watson would have changed his message entirely to something along the lines of what other Republicans who know Moore is guilty have said. Things like, this is actually biblical (so was slavery) and it doesn’t matter because God uses bad people to do good things (but we’re not God, are we?) In other words, the Ends Justify the Means.

The sad thing is, all of these justifications for Moore’s sexual abuse of teens are going to have an effect. Outside of the conservatives who are outright denying that this abuse happened—and there are plenty of those too—there have been attempts to suggest that Doug Jones is somehow more evil than Moore simply for being a Democrat. This is the guy who helped prosecute the white supremacists that bombed a black Birmingham church in 1963 which resulted in the deaths of four little girls. Yes, there are now actually conservatives who are claiming that Democrats are categorically worse than child molesters. Even weeks ago, before the pro-Moore propaganda really ramped up, posts like these on Twitter were not hard to find:

What are we to make of this in the end? Even after Donald Trump was elected, I thought the one line in the sand that even conservatives would never stoop to was looking past the sexual abuse of minors. I should’ve known better. It’s been my experience that much of the outrage I’ve endured from these “alt-right” haters has never really been about protecting kids. It’s just that minor-attracted people—at least those of us who have had the courage to admit it openly—are easy targets for their hate. Gays and minorities are protected classes now, but MAPs are not. We are scapegoats for the far right’s rage, even as they look the other way for their own molesters. But that’s always been the case, hasn’t it? In Nazi Germany, Julius Streicher, a Nazi Gauleiter and publisher of one of the party’s main propaganda organs, Der Stürmer, was, among other things, a notorious abuser of teen girls. Hitler and the Nazi elites ignored his excesses for awhile, until Streicher finally became too much of an embarrassment even for them and was removed from power.

Knowing the conspicuous hypocrisy of the majority of the Republican Party now, consider carefully what is going on here. While the right attacks people like me—MAPs who are determined to never offend—it is also openly endorsing actual abusers like Moore, often by defending that behavior as biblical and/or historic. And therein lies the real danger. While the right accuses the left of trying to break down society’s taboo against sex with kids, it is now doing precisely what it has been accusing the left of doing. And there is ample reason to be concerned. During my years at the “child love” forums, one thing I noticed was that most of the pro-contacters were not leftists, as one might expect. No, most were actually feminist-hating right-wingers, which, in light of the Moore/Jones election, now makes perfect sense. Think about it. If you were a pedophile looking to soften society up to the idea of lowering age of consent, which tactic do you think would have a better chance of success: appealing to liberalism and the idea of pedophiles deserving the same status and rights as gays, or appealing to biblical and historical tradition, the domain of conservatives?

Mark my words: there are a bunch of pro-contact pedophiles watching this election carefully and hoping for a Roy Moore win, because they know that if society can be won over to the idea of going back to a time when victims of sexual abuse were largely ignored and kids were a much less politically protected class, then they will have a far better chance of achieving their goal than they ever would in a liberal society where non-offending MAPs are distinguished from offending ones and all sexual activity with minors, regardless of who does it, is viewed negatively while all offenders, regardless of their political affiliation, are brought to justice.

And so, if Roy Moore wins this election, and I have a strong suspicion he will, many pro-contacters will be celebrating. Not only do they, like Roy Moore, hate feminists, many also dislike LGBTQ people because they feel like that crowd have thrown them under the bus in order to win respectability in the eyes of society. With Trump—another sexual predator who has never been brought to justice—as president, and Roy Moore set to take a prominent spot in the Senate, they also see a long-term opportunity to get what they want by positioning themselves as members of the burgeoning far-right. In such a society all they’ll really have to do is gain a little power, say whatever their constituents want to hear, and deny everything, and they’re golden.

Best article yet on pedophilia

The South African branch of the Huffington Post just published an outstanding article on pedophilia written by Dr. Marlene Wasserman (a.k.a. Dr. Eve), called It’s Not A Popular Subject, But The Latest Research About Paedophilia May Help Us Protect Our Kids, and I have to say, I can’t find a single fault with it.  That may be a first.  Bravo to all involved!

Well, then . . .

Right, so, a lot of things have happened since I last posted anything in my poor neglected blog. I suppose the main one was the release of the (very short) documentary piece about me produced by Barcroft Media. If you haven’t already, you can see it here. It’s only ten-and-a-half minutes of your time, and I really think you should check it out. John and Rauridh did an excellent job on it. And as a result, there have been a multitude of articles spawned by that piece just as there was with the first Salon article. Two were in the Sun alone (here and here). Despite the crummy headlines that were clearly intended to be inflammatory, the articles themselves aren’t too bad, especially the first one. There are several other articles but I won’t link them all as most are just repetitions of the Sun articles or commentary on the video.

Moving on, there was a great piece published in the Irish Times today by a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She recounts a bit of the abuse she suffered, but what really caught my attention was that she identified her abuser as a situational offender rather than a pedophile. This distinction is very important, and I’m glad to see someone other than a MAP or scientific expert point it out. The message is getting through, and perhaps no one needs to understand this distinction more than survivors. In fact, her viewpoint towards pedophiles and child sex offenders is an enlightened one across the board. She understands more than most what is really at stake here. You can read that article here.

Obviously the presidential election has come and gone since I last wrote here. I have to say that I am not without concern over Trump becoming the next POTUS. He has already displayed signs of his willingness to trample on the rights of minorities, and there are few minorities as unpopular as MAPs, even those of us who do not offend. On the other hand, I am also emboldened as I feel now it is more important than ever to make the case for virpeds. Which reminds me: I have another article in the works which I hope to finish it soon. It is a much broader piece than those I wrote for Salon, focusing less on me and more on the issues that pertain to all MAPs. The tone of it is more official than my other articles, but I hope it is still accessible to the average reader.

Finally, I’d like to say that the Virtuous Pedophiles forum itself continues to grow and strengthen. As far as I’m aware, VirPed is the only forum of its kind in the world (in the Anglophone parts of the world, at least) and it was obviously badly needed. My hope is that it is merely the first in a succession of such forums.

An announcement and a revealing article in the Independent

So, yeah, I’ve been away for quite awhile. To be honest, I was seriously considering retirement from all forms of pedophile activism for awhile, but circumstances have revealed to me that I should go on, as I continue to be in the best position of everyone at VirPed to do it. Thus, I will try to get active again. I’m currently working on a new article for publication on the state of society with respect to non-offending pedophiles. If anyone has any suggestions as to where I might submit such a piece, I am all ears. 🙂

And speaking of articles about non-offending pedophiles, there’s an excellent one that came out in the UK’s  Independent a couple days ago, written by Ian Johnston: Brains of paedophiles who abuse children are different to those who do not, scientists discover. Check it out!

A fantastic article from The Economist

Many moons ago I was interviewed by Helen Joyce for a piece slated to come out in The Economist, a major British publication. I was beginning to think it was never going to see the light of day. Lo and behold, the piece finally dropped today! It’s called Shedding light on the dark field and it is quite a long and thorough piece. Yes, I’m in it, but the piece is not specifically about me. It’s really about the problems with mandatory reporting laws and how they are counterproductive to the goal of protecting children from sexual abuse. It’s one of the best articles on this subject I’ve read in ages, and I am very proud to have contributed to it. There’s also a companion piece in the same issue called First, save the children, though you’ll need a subscription to The Economist to read more than one article there. This is understandable, as the publication still has a print version as well as its online version, and they aren’t cheap to produce.

The child rape charges against Donald Trump should be taken seriously

Many of you may not be aware that there is currently a case pending against the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in which it is alleged by a woman that she was raped four times by Trump when she was only 13 years old. I fully understand that in the world of politics false allegations of sexual misconduct are often used as a means of discrediting a politician, but in this case there are some significant differences from the usual sorts of accusations, the main one being the young age of the victim at the time of the alleged rapes. Even more troubling is the fact that the victim claims Trump threatened to harm her family and make her “disappear” if she reported these incidents.

It is easy to simply dismiss these accusations as political in nature. After all, why did she wait until now, in the midst of Trump’s presidential campaign, to make a formal complaint? The cynic may see this as all rather convenient for Trump’s opponent, but victims come forward when they feel comfortable doing so, or when they think it is time. Remember, aside from the initial revelation to my grandmother right after it happened, I didn’t come forward again about my own abuse until I was 14 and was asked directly about it by my mother, who knew there had been a molestation of one of her mother’s grandchildren but didn’t know which one specifically. Had she not asked, it may have been years later that I finally made that revelation to her, or not at all. And I wasn’t even threatened or intimidated by my abuser (who certainly was no billionaire with vast resources at his disposal, and was long gone from my life at that point)!

With a modicum of reflection, it is easy to understand why a victim in Jane Doe’s position may finally feel that the danger to her in coming forward is outweighed by the situation at hand. After all, would you feel comfortable in the knowledge that a child rapist may be the most powerful man in the free world in just a few months’ time? It is one thing to be a billionaire who can pull strings; it’s another thing altogether to have real political power, and Jane Doe is obviously aware of that. But is there any credibility to this accusation? Let’s look at the evidence.

First off, this is not the first time Trump has been accused of rape. Long before he ever threw his hat into the presidential ring, Trump was accused by his own first wife, Ivana (mother of Ivanka), of marital rape, as well as physical assault. It apparently occurred when Ivana recommended Donald see a cosmetic surgeon about repairing his bald spot, and the surgeon evidently botched the hair transplant. In a fit of rage, Trump supposedly yanked out some of Ivana’s hair in retaliation and then raped her. This sounds a little too kooky and detail-specific to be made up, so I’m inclined to believe this. Afterward, however, Ivana signed an agreement not to disparage Trump in exchange for money. That part isn’t up for debate—it happened.

In another lawsuit, a former business associate, Jill Harth, accused Trump of sexual harassment and attempted rape, wherein he forced her into a bedroom and groped her against her will, telling her he would be the best lover she ever had. Although the case was eventually settled, Harth still maintains her story, which, I have to say, sounds pretty much right on the money with respect to Trump’s behavior and self-aggrandizing speech. These are far from the only accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump.

Furthermore, Donald Trump has a long history of degrading, objectifying and insensitive treatment of women and women’s issues, as well as delusions of grandeur and feelings of entitlement, which is consistent with what we know about rapists’ psychological profiles generally. There are countless examples to draw from here: “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” he told Brande Roderick on The Apprentice. He referred to a young lawyer who needed to excuse herself to use a breast pump so she could feed her baby as “disgusting.” And “You like your candy,” he told the heavyset woman in charge of a building project for him. These and several other such incidents are recounted in the New York Times piece Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved with Women in Private. Some of these may be minor infractions in the scheme of things, but they add up to a troubling picture of the Republican nominee.

But the most damning evidence is Trump’s close association with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted Level 3 (the level of highest severity) sex offender, while this was going on. In fact, Jane Doe alleges Epstein also abused her, including punishing her for “giving” her virginity to Trump rather than to him, and that both Epstein and Trump held her as a sex slave for a period of time and then paid her off to shut her up, as well as threatening violence against both her and her family. In the fourth and final sexual encounter between Trump and Jane Doe, she alleges he tied her to a bed and raped her violently while she begged him to stop. If this weren’t enough, an apparent witness, a woman referred to as Tiffany Doe in the complaint, who scouted and hired Jane on Epstein’s behalf, says she was present during all four rapes. That alone elevates these allegations above the simple he said/she said scenario that such cases generally take the form of.

Of course, it could very well turn out that these accusations are false, but they should still be taken seriously by mainstream media in the interim, because if they turn out to be true, the media would’ve been woefully negligent in ignoring them, and something like this could certainly impact the election.