i’m really not interested in arguing about this but you’ve followed me for a while so i’m going to try and engage in a measured way.
1. “no one is arguing that child abuse is okay” you are reading a specificity into my post that assumes that you and i have observed the same people and that i am commenting on the same people that you are thinking about. this is evidently not the case. there is a seemingly cyclical history of child sexual abuse apologia that has reared its ugly head many times. “MAP” or “Minor-Attracted Person” is more recent but is a concept that has existed since the early 2000s. NAMBLA or the “National Man-Boy Love Association” was founded in 1978 and spent several decades lobbying against age of consent laws, among other things. At the beginning of the 20th century there were some homosexual men writing about how “maybe the ancient greeks’ practice of pederasty had some merits.” Couple of years ago, [former] tumblr user Toonimal created a whole damn forum wherein self-identified adult pedophiles and children were explicitly allowed to interact and post about sexual topics. This was all justified by ideological explanations. You cannot actually tell me that “NO-ONE” is materially arguing in favor of child abuse.
Hell, Michel Foucault argued against age of consent laws. Even now people argue about this.
I am not here to point fingers at persons du jour and say “that person is a pedophile!” rather, i think that a lot of the language that is thrown around on this topic is very pernicious and negative. The overall point that I am trying to make is that people can use the language of progressivism for some really very negative things. If you disagree with everything else I have said, that should be the one takeaway. Every sentence I wrote in the original post traces back to something that someone has said in earnest, either on tumblr or elsewhere. But i have no interest in making a huge list of people who have merely said things I disagree with.
2. “intrusive thoughts / acting on impulses.” “Pedophile” is not actually a medical diagnosis. Neither is “psychopath.” These concepts exist in a sort of grey area of either “criminal psychology” that is fundamentally dubious, or “layman psychology” in other words “something that someone said one time.” If someone has urges to abuse children that they vociferously don’t want to act on, WHY ARE WE ALWAYS FUCKING HEARING ABOUT IT? WHY TALK SO MUCH ABOUT SOMETHING THEY ALLEGEDLY DON’T WANT TO ACT ON? WHY SIMULATE THAT ACTION WITH OTHER ADULTS? And, ultimately, if someone says that they have indomitable urges to abuse children, why the fuck would i believe them? Why the fuck would I treat them as an individual who is safe to be around kids?
I think that the unproven idea that pedophiles merely have inherent urges that can never be gotten rid of lets them off the hook. I don’t think our collective attitude towards people who abuse kids should be “Oh well, it happened again, i guess their indomitable impulse to abuse kids triumphed again, well let’s just kick them out of this parish/business/internet forum/police department/subculture and they can go do that somewhere else where I don’t have to look at it.”
Have you ever had a male friend who for your entire historical friendship with him seemed to be a completely benign, even feminist man? And then at some point down the road you start hearing rumors, whispers, start to get bad vibes, which you deny and suppress the doubts that bubble up from your gut until a woman explicitly comes forward and tells you how that man abused her? It sounds unbelievable at first but the more you think about it the more sense it makes. House of cards comes tumbling down. People start to talk. More accusations surface. Façade gone. Everyone else’s stories start to align into a much bigger picture. You realize that your friend did some pretty horrible stuff. You wish in retrospect that there had been some more indications, that you had been more perceptive, more discerning, more empathetic.
when people say shit like “i have friends who are self-identifying pedophiles and i trust them to be around kids” i get a real bad sinking feeling. the feeling of “it’s happening again.”
3. “there is a difference between being a pedophile and committing CSA, those are two separate camps with some overlap” What? Huh? When the hell did we decide that? I never agreed to that definition, and that’s not the common definition used in society. Generally people understand “pedophile” to mean “person who either HAS ALREADY or EXPRESSES THAT THEY WANT TO sexually abuse kids.” There is no commonly accepted diagnostic criteria for “pedophile.” Maybe that will change in the future but that’s just not how everyone talks about this other than an extremely small minority of people whose opinions on the matter i do not agree with.
4. “people who commit these crimes do so because they can and not because they are actually attracted to children” ACCORDING TO WHO? I do not believe you or anyone else has any data to back that claim up. Also, let’s think about this logically for a second, under what circumstances does someone “commit these crimes” NOT because of an “attraction” or desire. What factor is causing people to abuse children regardless of the fact that they apparently DON’T want to abuse children? This makes no sense. For a person to abuse children or do anything else in the world they have to have means, motive, and opportunity. Nobody abuses children simply because they have the means and opportunity. They aren’t going to do it if they don’t want to do it.
5. “we shouldn’t be fantasizing about killing people who haven’t done anything” I never said anything about killing anyone.