I've mentioned before that I get barred from a lot of online forums. I am a pedophile who doesn't see anything wrong with my sexual orientation, and I am a vocal and unapologetic advocate for the rights of young people.
Quite often, the ban comes in the form of a fairly obvious and unapologetic expression of disgust at my views, positions, and/or existence. The runners of said sites establishing themselves as effectively declared enemies, and acting on the sincere belief that I'm evil and need to be silenced. In a strange way, they're some of the most respectable sorts who act to silence me, since their intentions are clear and displayed in the open for all to see. So certain of the righteousness of their position, they often hold no fear of leaving what I've already said as a matter of public record, and allow that record to speak for itself, which suits me just fine.
Slightly less often, legalistic loopholes are used to justify the bans, citing some rule or another that's been deliberately written in vague language for the sake of later selective enforcement. These are the sites that pretend to uphold a standard of free speech and pretend that censorship isn't a part of their ideology or mission statement. These are the places that tend to have drawn out exit processes, since almost no one on the internet has thought to prohibit the sorts of things I want to say. As a result, most of that overbroad language isn't actually broad enough on a simple reading, and the staff at such places is very reluctant to actually invoke and use the "we can ban anyone for any reason" clauses that are always a part of the boilerplate. They recognize that censoring me is admitting that they can't defeat my ideas in a free marketplace, and so a ban is an admission of failure on their part. These are actually some of the most satisfying notes to leave on, since typically by the time they've rewritten their rules for the purpose of getting rid of me, I've emboldened others who'd previously stayed silent.
It's only in recent years that I've encountered a peculiar third group of censors. This one actually seems to understand how public relations works, and as such, I've come to the conclusion the are the most threatening and insidious of the lot. They communicate via emails and private messages, away from the public eye, that they are oh so sympathetic to what I'm saying, but that they can't risk the public blowback of being associated with me or my ideas, before imposing secret restrictions on my posting or jumping straight to a ban outright.
In a sense, it's easy to empathize. After all, I know full well what the risks are of being associated with me. I am me, after all. Merely by letting me speak, when so many places engage in outright bans, does come across as a tacit endorsement of my words in the eyes of some idiotic members of the public, so one can see what they would have to fear.
The problem is that they're liars.
I take no issue with forums where the subjects I care about are censored entirely. Where the entire conversation simply is not allowed to happen, and anyone bringing it up is told to knock it off and/or banned. That is not what happens with those sites who utilize this friendly public relations tactic.
When you censor only one side of an argument, and allow the other free reign, that is what an actual endorsement of a viewpoint looks like. Just because the site runners and administrators don't join in on the pile-on doesn't change the fact that they've taken a side and acted as an enemy. What makes them different and worse than the first group is that they've chosen not to declare hostilities, preferring to pretend to their readership that the site is actually an open forum and that the apparent homogeneity of opinion is a fact of life rather than a product of their censorship.
These are the sites who will most often retroactively wipe away the record of any argument that didn't go their way, while leaving dozens of threads where they believe their preferred viewpoint came off better intact.
The fact of the matter is that even at my most aggressive, I don't go where I'm not invited. I never bring up pedophilia or youth rights subjects in a space where no one had breached the topic first. I do care about, and respect the fact that not every space is appropriate for this conversation. But when the conversation is happening, when someone has brought up the subject, and it's continuing, someone needs to step in and say something, speak unapologetically for the opposing point of view. The risk otherwise is that those who thoughtlessly follow the crowd will leave the mainstream viewpoint unexamined, and those who fear reprisal will be cowed into silence, creating the illusion of consensus when the truth is anything but.
I don't recall if I've said this before in one of these posts, but I care as much as I do about putting forward the idea that there is nothing wrong with pedophiles because when I was younger and figuring out my sexuality, I desperately needed to hear it. I needed to have the point that pedophiles are not the same thing as child molesters stated loudly and unapologetically, because I was afraid of what I was feeling and what the cultural gestalt told me that meant was coming. When I saw someone stand up to the crowd, that helped me, and since then, I've tried to become that voice for the next person who needs to hear it.
Showing posts with label lies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lies. Show all posts
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Age Appropriate Content
I am a hardcore believer in the idea of free speech, open exchange of ideas, and the fundamental goodness of knowledge. Censorship in all its forms is anathema to me. The best use I can think of for a time machine would be to go back and save copies of the books that were burned throughout history.
I'm also a person who believes that children are people, and deserve to be treated like human beings. These two passions of mine combine whenever the phrase "age appropriate" is uttered to send me into a sputtering, incoherent rage. Thank goodness for the written word, where I can be articulate even in moments like these where I can't vocalize anything beyond threats and obscenities at best and animal snarls at worst.
Somehow the adults of this society have fallen into thinking that information about sex has the same effect as cracking open Lovecroft's Necromonicon. I mean this quite literally with numerous pieces of propaganda being spread that claim that children "exposed" to "age inappropriate content" display the same symptoms as those who were directly sexually abused. If I believed for one second that molesting a child would do no more harm than them seeing a RedTube video, I would have done so ages ago.
Since the dawn of the internet, an enormous industry has sprung up to censor it. Governments try to block content they don't like, and not just dictatorships like China. The likes of Sweeden have gotten into the act of censoring explicit sexual content for everyone "for the children". Home based firewall solutions have been the flavor of choice for the rugged individualists in the United States, but whether the nanny is the state or the parent, the internet is being censored.
The censorship efforts don't stop at blocking the content itself, however. After all, if the consequences were really so horrific, it would be criminally irresponsible to stop there. No, efforts are made to ensure that young people never develop the knowledge base to frame the questions that might lead to them seeing something "age inappropriate" in the first place.
Avoiding the subjects of sex and sexuality isn't a silent, seamless act. A five year old can tell when you're dancing around a subject you don't want to talk about. That's where shaming starts. They know that whatever it is you don't want to talk about, it's shameful and taboo. That is, in fact, the first thing they learn about it when you behave this way. This discourages them from asking questions, because that would mean violating the taboo they've already learned is in place.
Of course, discouraging questions is more thorough than that. When adults do respond to questions about sex, they always give as little information as possible. The idea, of course, is that they should only give them as much information as they explicitly ask for, lest they be "exposing" those children to sexual knowledge. The trouble with this method is, again, a five year old can figure out that you don't want to give a complete answer for some reason, and will thus be discouraged from asking those followup questions that this method theoretically relies upon.
If you're old enough to ask the question, you're old enough to know the answer. The whole answer. If you can articulate the question of how to define acceleration mathematically, you're old enough to learn calculus. If you're old enough to ask about sex, you're old enough to get a thorough overview of the subject matter.
But what of that most universal followup question to the clinical minimalism so many people prefer? "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's the most important question in any discussion of sex, and it's the one that's explicitly left out of sexual education curriculums and parental lectures alike. Surely answering that question will just make them go out and do it, right?
They asked the question. They're going to want to know the answer, and it can either come from you actually answering the question, or it can come from them experimenting in whatever unsupervised time they have available. And they'll wait for the unsupervised time because, again, by not answering the question, you're communicating that the subject is taboo and that any further attempts to get answers should be hidden from you.
I'm not above exploiting the violent hysteria and frothing hatrid people have for my kind in order to advance my causes, and this is one that matters to me. The children who are most vulnerable to child molesters are the ones who are most ignorant and have been taught most thoroughly that sex is a taboo. If they don't know what sex is, they've no reason not to believe that this new "game" is legitimately just that. Your efforts to silence their awkward questions also silences any hope of them telling you they've been molested.
I'm also a person who believes that children are people, and deserve to be treated like human beings. These two passions of mine combine whenever the phrase "age appropriate" is uttered to send me into a sputtering, incoherent rage. Thank goodness for the written word, where I can be articulate even in moments like these where I can't vocalize anything beyond threats and obscenities at best and animal snarls at worst.
Somehow the adults of this society have fallen into thinking that information about sex has the same effect as cracking open Lovecroft's Necromonicon. I mean this quite literally with numerous pieces of propaganda being spread that claim that children "exposed" to "age inappropriate content" display the same symptoms as those who were directly sexually abused. If I believed for one second that molesting a child would do no more harm than them seeing a RedTube video, I would have done so ages ago.
Since the dawn of the internet, an enormous industry has sprung up to censor it. Governments try to block content they don't like, and not just dictatorships like China. The likes of Sweeden have gotten into the act of censoring explicit sexual content for everyone "for the children". Home based firewall solutions have been the flavor of choice for the rugged individualists in the United States, but whether the nanny is the state or the parent, the internet is being censored.
The censorship efforts don't stop at blocking the content itself, however. After all, if the consequences were really so horrific, it would be criminally irresponsible to stop there. No, efforts are made to ensure that young people never develop the knowledge base to frame the questions that might lead to them seeing something "age inappropriate" in the first place.
Avoiding the subjects of sex and sexuality isn't a silent, seamless act. A five year old can tell when you're dancing around a subject you don't want to talk about. That's where shaming starts. They know that whatever it is you don't want to talk about, it's shameful and taboo. That is, in fact, the first thing they learn about it when you behave this way. This discourages them from asking questions, because that would mean violating the taboo they've already learned is in place.
Of course, discouraging questions is more thorough than that. When adults do respond to questions about sex, they always give as little information as possible. The idea, of course, is that they should only give them as much information as they explicitly ask for, lest they be "exposing" those children to sexual knowledge. The trouble with this method is, again, a five year old can figure out that you don't want to give a complete answer for some reason, and will thus be discouraged from asking those followup questions that this method theoretically relies upon.
If you're old enough to ask the question, you're old enough to know the answer. The whole answer. If you can articulate the question of how to define acceleration mathematically, you're old enough to learn calculus. If you're old enough to ask about sex, you're old enough to get a thorough overview of the subject matter.
But what of that most universal followup question to the clinical minimalism so many people prefer? "Why would anyone want to do that?" It's the most important question in any discussion of sex, and it's the one that's explicitly left out of sexual education curriculums and parental lectures alike. Surely answering that question will just make them go out and do it, right?
They asked the question. They're going to want to know the answer, and it can either come from you actually answering the question, or it can come from them experimenting in whatever unsupervised time they have available. And they'll wait for the unsupervised time because, again, by not answering the question, you're communicating that the subject is taboo and that any further attempts to get answers should be hidden from you.
I'm not above exploiting the violent hysteria and frothing hatrid people have for my kind in order to advance my causes, and this is one that matters to me. The children who are most vulnerable to child molesters are the ones who are most ignorant and have been taught most thoroughly that sex is a taboo. If they don't know what sex is, they've no reason not to believe that this new "game" is legitimately just that. Your efforts to silence their awkward questions also silences any hope of them telling you they've been molested.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Lying About Sexual History
As I mentioned in one of my earliest posts on this blog, I have strong feelings on the importance of informed consent.
It's a fact that people lie to one another about their sexual history. Men stereotypically inflate their numbers, while women stereotypically deflate theirs. This is, of course, a response to the shaming responses both genders get as a part of gender policing, and most of the time the worst harm it does is in the form of failing to challenge that gender policing. I'm in no position to condemn anyone for the choice to avoid confrontations and difficult arguments in their day to day lives given everything I hold back, after all.
That said, a part of being in a relationship is establishing mutual trust, and within any relationship founded on a lie, informed consent is not a possibility. Those convenient lies that make our day to day lives easier need to be put aside, little by little or all at once if the resulting relationship can be said to be legitimate.
This is doubly the case when discussing a marriage. The "I do"s of a wedding vow can be rightly thought of as conditional on everything the couple has told one another up to that point being the truth.
Ah, but what of the situation where you know the other party will judge you for your past? When you're in love and absolutely sure that you were meant to be together? When you're sure that the truth will ruin everything and cause you both to miss out on a wonderful relationship and life together?
In that case, I ask: Why do you want to be in a relationship with someone who's only there because you lied?
First off, that certainty that your partner will judge you, that's you being unfair to the partner by not giving him/her the chance to show what the real reaction will be. You are so afraid of the worst case scenario that you've already assigned that reaction to your partner in your head, and you'll be blaming and resenting him/her for that reaction. That's poison to the relationship.
Second, if your partner rejects you because of your sexual history, that's his/her choice and you have to just accept that. Your partner is a human being with his/her own standards and expectations from the relationship, and just as much right to say "no" as you have. Whatever happily ever after you think you can build on a foundation of lies, that inkling that "what he/she knows can't hurt him/her" is you denying your partner's agency, violating his/her trust, and by far the more abhorrent act than his/her deciding that you shouldn't be together.
When spouses discover things about one another's sexual history years or even decades after the fact that had been deliberately concealed, it doesn't just mean that the long delayed confrontation is now at hand. It means that, but it also means that they have to deal with the fact that their partners lied to them every day of those years or decades they've been together.
This is exactly the same sort of betrayal that one experiences when their spouse has an affair. Trust going forward becomes impossible in light of the extended deception. The vows are every bit as broken as they would be in the case of the affair, because the person they said "I do" about didn't have that incident in their past.
The fact of the matter is that you aren't entitled to either sexual partners nor life partners. You have to have the fully informed consent of another human being for that, and if you can't get it without deception, you go without. Anything else is just another kind of rape.
It's a fact that people lie to one another about their sexual history. Men stereotypically inflate their numbers, while women stereotypically deflate theirs. This is, of course, a response to the shaming responses both genders get as a part of gender policing, and most of the time the worst harm it does is in the form of failing to challenge that gender policing. I'm in no position to condemn anyone for the choice to avoid confrontations and difficult arguments in their day to day lives given everything I hold back, after all.
That said, a part of being in a relationship is establishing mutual trust, and within any relationship founded on a lie, informed consent is not a possibility. Those convenient lies that make our day to day lives easier need to be put aside, little by little or all at once if the resulting relationship can be said to be legitimate.
This is doubly the case when discussing a marriage. The "I do"s of a wedding vow can be rightly thought of as conditional on everything the couple has told one another up to that point being the truth.
Ah, but what of the situation where you know the other party will judge you for your past? When you're in love and absolutely sure that you were meant to be together? When you're sure that the truth will ruin everything and cause you both to miss out on a wonderful relationship and life together?
In that case, I ask: Why do you want to be in a relationship with someone who's only there because you lied?
First off, that certainty that your partner will judge you, that's you being unfair to the partner by not giving him/her the chance to show what the real reaction will be. You are so afraid of the worst case scenario that you've already assigned that reaction to your partner in your head, and you'll be blaming and resenting him/her for that reaction. That's poison to the relationship.
Second, if your partner rejects you because of your sexual history, that's his/her choice and you have to just accept that. Your partner is a human being with his/her own standards and expectations from the relationship, and just as much right to say "no" as you have. Whatever happily ever after you think you can build on a foundation of lies, that inkling that "what he/she knows can't hurt him/her" is you denying your partner's agency, violating his/her trust, and by far the more abhorrent act than his/her deciding that you shouldn't be together.
When spouses discover things about one another's sexual history years or even decades after the fact that had been deliberately concealed, it doesn't just mean that the long delayed confrontation is now at hand. It means that, but it also means that they have to deal with the fact that their partners lied to them every day of those years or decades they've been together.
This is exactly the same sort of betrayal that one experiences when their spouse has an affair. Trust going forward becomes impossible in light of the extended deception. The vows are every bit as broken as they would be in the case of the affair, because the person they said "I do" about didn't have that incident in their past.
The fact of the matter is that you aren't entitled to either sexual partners nor life partners. You have to have the fully informed consent of another human being for that, and if you can't get it without deception, you go without. Anything else is just another kind of rape.
Friday, December 7, 2012
The Lies of Dr. Abel
"An estimated 88% of child molesters and 95% of molestations (one person, multiple acts) are committed by individuals who now or in the future will also meet criteria for pedophilia. Pedophilic child molesters on average commit 10 times more sexual acts against children than nonpedophilic child molesters."
The above statistics appear quite damning at first glance. Still, like many things in life, the first glance can be misleading. I decided to track down the source of these alarming statistics. At length, I found that they could all be traced back to a single study published in 2001 by one Gene G. Abel and one Nora Harlow.
http://www.childmolestationprevention.org/pdfs/study.pdf
Among its findings, as could be expected from the above statistics is, "Pedophilia is the most significant cause of child molestation."
This is in stark contrast to such statements as those of of FBI sex offender expert Kennith Lanning, which state that the exact inverse is true. Until I actually located Abel's study, I had no means of reconciling this apparent contradiction, but with it, locating the source of the discrepancy was easy.
The word "pedophile" when used as a psychiatric term, refers to an adult who is primarily sexually attracted to children. Dr. Abel, however, chose to redefine the term for the purposes of his study. Rather than refer to people who's primary sexual attraction is directed toward children, Dr. Abel took the term to refer to people who had engaged in sexual behaviors with children.
Because this obviously would have constituted 100% of his child molester population (by definition), Dr. Abel took the following corrective action, "To separate admitted child molesters who fit the pedophilic diagnostic criterion that behavior must have continued 'for more than six months,' we used length of time of the continuing behavior."
So in effect, what the 88% number Dr. Abel presented actually means (once one learns his unique definition for the word "pedophile") is that 88% of child molesters molest children over a period greater than six months. The 95% figure indicates that 95% of child molestations are committed by individuals who are molesting children over a period of greater than six months. The 10 times figure, thus tells us that child molesters who molest children over a time period greater than six months commit, on average, 10 times the number of sex acts as child molesters who's activities last a period shorter than six months.
In short, Dr. Abel's statistics have absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia. Rather Dr. Abel has demonstrated through his study that child molesters who molest for greater than six months tend to perform more molestations than child molesters who molest for less than six months, and that child molesters, in the vast majority do molest children for a period longer than six months.
The above statistics appear quite damning at first glance. Still, like many things in life, the first glance can be misleading. I decided to track down the source of these alarming statistics. At length, I found that they could all be traced back to a single study published in 2001 by one Gene G. Abel and one Nora Harlow.
http://www.childmolestationprevention.org/pdfs/study.pdf
Among its findings, as could be expected from the above statistics is, "Pedophilia is the most significant cause of child molestation."
This is in stark contrast to such statements as those of of FBI sex offender expert Kennith Lanning, which state that the exact inverse is true. Until I actually located Abel's study, I had no means of reconciling this apparent contradiction, but with it, locating the source of the discrepancy was easy.
The word "pedophile" when used as a psychiatric term, refers to an adult who is primarily sexually attracted to children. Dr. Abel, however, chose to redefine the term for the purposes of his study. Rather than refer to people who's primary sexual attraction is directed toward children, Dr. Abel took the term to refer to people who had engaged in sexual behaviors with children.
Because this obviously would have constituted 100% of his child molester population (by definition), Dr. Abel took the following corrective action, "To separate admitted child molesters who fit the pedophilic diagnostic criterion that behavior must have continued 'for more than six months,' we used length of time of the continuing behavior."
So in effect, what the 88% number Dr. Abel presented actually means (once one learns his unique definition for the word "pedophile") is that 88% of child molesters molest children over a period greater than six months. The 95% figure indicates that 95% of child molestations are committed by individuals who are molesting children over a period of greater than six months. The 10 times figure, thus tells us that child molesters who molest children over a time period greater than six months commit, on average, 10 times the number of sex acts as child molesters who's activities last a period shorter than six months.
In short, Dr. Abel's statistics have absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia. Rather Dr. Abel has demonstrated through his study that child molesters who molest for greater than six months tend to perform more molestations than child molesters who molest for less than six months, and that child molesters, in the vast majority do molest children for a period longer than six months.
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