Hi Dom
A great many thanks for the comments. They help quite a bit and I think I
have enough little chinks to go on with now. (It can be a depressing topic to
spend too much time on, I may add.)
what you wrote below was the other side, so to speak, of the discourse of
child abuse I was referring to earlier and which I was avoiding, simply
because I find it impossible to comprehend the idea of free consenting sexual
relations between adults and children in this World. But as you demonstrate
this argument also has an ability to link in with the equation that
pedophilia equals homosexuality and generally allows the same assumptions as
this child abuse lobby in Aust seems to make. So in this sense it too is a
homophobic discourse, if I can follow the suggestions you make.
As for the victim idea, the problem is it doesn't do away with the idea that
you may be to blame. It opens that question or keeps it operating even when
you are supposed to be laying the blame elsewhere. So it does not escape this
system of judgment. The victim is to be judged too as innocent when I cannot
see any case to answer or need for such a judgment. Another example, to call
someone an AIDS victim implies a measure of guilt. I am not a victim of
sexual assault. I simply refuse the label, which may be another option.
best wishes
Chris Jones.
On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 22:11, you wrote:
> Also: the perspective from which "ageism" is responsible for making victims
> out of the willing participants in adult-child sex is the perspective of
> pedophiles, which children may also adopt as a way of rationalising what
> paedophiles do to them (easier than blaming themselves, which is what they
> are really doing anyway: the fear, guilt and self-disgust will all go away
> if you can sympathise with the perpetrator and blame Society for all the
> bad feelings). It is intolerable to paedophiles that society should
> prohibit them from gaining access to children (not that it does this
> terribly effectively anyway): evidently, children should be set free from
> this prohibition, so that paedophiles can have sex with them. As this
> formulation contains the word "free", it is clearly about liberation; as it
> contains the word "society", it is obviously about social liberation;
> therefore it is Radical, and therefore it is Good...
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