“Feminism and Child Sex Hysteria”

Long, runs to 18 pages. If you don’t like it, don’t read! Sorry bout that!

Feminism and Child Sex Hysteria

by Frank Adamo

Found this article on Academia. It says some interesting things, but it also takes a line that, well, let’s just say I don’t agree, ok? And I’m with the prohibitionists. This is a bit too much on the “child liberation” side.

But it’s interesting to explore that anyway because it’s important to know the libertine and anti-prohibition arguments in favor of adult-child sex. This mindset was a lot more prevalent back in the 1970’s. I believe you could actually go into Hollywood and buy a child porn magazine from Denmark back then. It might be under the counter, but you could still buy it. Not that I think that was a good idea, but I’m just showing you how people were a lot calmer about this sort of thing back then than they are now.

And by the way, there was no more child molestation then then there is now, and in fact there may have been less. The general attitude about child molestation was that it was rare and did not typically result in severe harm. Whether that’s true or not, that’s definitely not what the mindset we have now.

Note the hysteria about adult men “grooming” teenage girls and having sex with them.

There were just as many (or probably many more) adult men trying to seduce and having sex with teenage minor girls back in the day, but people didn’t make such a big deal about it or think it was so weird. Of course grown men want and try to fuck teenage girls. Duh. Every teenage girl knew that and didn’t particularly care.

I suppose they mostly just blew them off. It was just a fact of life that you accepted, shrugged off, and moved on. Further, a lot of 14=17 year old teenage girls here in California were having sex with men, typically young men aged 18-21, and not one of them was getting damaged by this.

Now we have generations of basket case teenage girls and young women claiming they experienced “grooming” and “child sexual abuse” (child molestation) in their teen years and continuing to suffer from the effects of this fake trauma for years later. Yet none of them would have experienced one lick of harm back in the day.

And the reactions, as usual, tend to be of the “regret rape” variety. Usually they loved it at the time, but then when they thought it over later on, they decided that it was wrong, and this is where the “damage” began. Obviously if they were damaged, it would have been the case from the get go. There’s no such thing as regret rape. Things either effect you or they don’t. Events are not time bombs. They don’t lie dormant forever with a shrug of the shoulder and then suddenly explode later on when you change your mind about them.

If that is what is happening to you, then you are simply self-harming.

Anyway, this paper doesn’t even deal with the issue of teen sex. He’s dealing with the explosive issue of child molestation. And he’s taking a libertine line on that!

there is clearly an anti-feminist element in the mass hysteria that terrorizes little girls against sex.

That’s an important point. But do you see where he’s going with this? This is the libertine line. By hyping up child sexual abuse in little girls, we are terrorizing them about sex. I doubt if that’s true but perhaps we should be more easygoing about it.

The next phase in activism on child sex abuse should be to confront and reverse the hysteria.

We have gone hysterical about this issue. That’s generally what I’ve been writing about all this time. The hysteria. All feminism is behind all of this madness.

Along with the rediscovery of the sexual exploitation of children in the 1970s, there were repeated if not constant references to women’s own feeling of guilt over their early victimization and hence the need to reassure survivors that early abuse was not their fault.

This is actually where almost all of the damage from non-coercive child molestation comes from – guilt and shame on the part of the girl, especially later on when she reflects on it. As you can see, this hysterical attitude is causing most of the damage these females are experiencing. So the feminist approach is failing because it’s based on false theory as usual.

But why is such propensity to feel guilty so prominent, if not because women never let go of the traditional ideal of the innocent (i.e. asexual) girl and woman?

Exactly. So feminists have taken up an extremely backwards, anti-woman, patriarchal, repressive and puritanical agenda. Way to go, ladies! Good job!

Worse, far from liberating women from patriarchy, Whittier notes the grass roots activist movement melded with the traditional state agenda to control citizens, with the result of increased law enforcement, expansion of the prison system, and now even post-sentence confinement or registration of sex offenders, and increased surveillance of suspects and anti-sex indoctrination of children – especially girls.

It’s all been a massive clusterfuck. Are we any better off for all of this? The jails and prisons are full. Anti-sex puritanical hysteria sweeps the land. Society is pervaded with an obvious anti-male agenda. Girls and women are being terrorized into being afraid of boys and men because we are all “abusers,” “rapists,” and “harassers.”

And the numbers of girls and women being damaged and the level of damage they have experienced have done through the roof. Way to go, feminists! Following feminist theory has resulted in a devastated society full of self-harming females getting damaged by harmless things. So obviously the feminist theory doesn’t make sense unless you want to end up with societies full of millions of damaged women. Sometimes I think feminists want this.

Furthermore, this had led to “carceral feminism,” which is the new model, based on the perennial feminist idea of “let’s lock up all the men!”

Have molestation rates gone down? Not at all.

Having teen sex rates gone down? Yes, they have, but who says that’s a good thing? Don’t teenage girl deserve sexual freedom to have sex with other teen minors?

And that Sex Offender Registry? It doesn’t do the slightest thing to lower sex crimes.

The pre-feminist, traditional view of professional psychologists and the broader society was that child sex abuse (CSA) is rare and not usually catastrophic.

This was the traditional view of this sort of thing before the 1970’s. My Mom told me this was the view when she was growing up. In fact, my late aunt actually got molested as a young girl. Everyone hushed it up and my aunt was told to not let it happen again and don’t worry about it. The man was described as an annoying idiot or fool of the sort that girls should avoid in the future. My aunt experienced exactly zero harm from this molestation.

Also, as you can see, before feminism, people actually made sense.

But feminist activists in the 1970s decided it was neither rare nor mild in effect.

Exactly. What was once rare was now everywhere. What was once typically mild was instead always ruinous, and every molested girl was a ruined woman for life. That would be fine if it were true, but was it?

The simplicity and convenience of attributing all your complex problems to a single cause (and a single bad guy) were irresistible.

Exactly. And women love these “one cause to explain whole problems” theories and they also love being victims so they can blame all of their adult life problems on one thing so their problems end up not being their fault.

That viewpoint was also attractive to some individual bigots who wanted to demonize men, since in the beginning amateur theorists thought CSA was exclusively men against girls and hence a sinister conspiracy of males to make females submissive.

Even when feminists discovered that both women and men sexually abuse boys as well as girls, they believed the majority of cases were men against girls and hence good PR for the broader movement against patriarchy.

Well the feminists were correct.

Yes, women molest boys, but a lot of little boys like it! I recall a case where a female teacher had a lot of her little boy students over at her house. She taught 2nd or 3rd grade. She ended up naked on her bed and she invited boy after 7 year old boy into her bedroom to lick her hairy red-haired pussy.

10-20 boys ended up doing it and they all liked it just fine, although I doubt if they got erections because little boys don’t get those. Later on in high school and as adult men, they continued to croon about this wonderful experience.

Now hear me out. I don’t want grown women having sex with little boys. It needs to be illegal. But it doesn’t look like boys get much harmed by this sort of thing, does it? Still, I don’t want to live in a country where it’s ok for women to have sex with little boys or for adults of either sex to have sex with children of either sex.

Little boys also get molested by men, and this can be a lot more harmful.

Child molestation, generally speaking, is men and teenage boys having sex with little girls, usually fathers and uncles and daughters and nieces and brothers and sisters. Women don’t do a lot of molesting of either boys or girls. Feminists were right for once.

Early theorists on CSA repeated the traditional assumption that good little girls are not interested in sex, so men abuse girls to “prepare” and “socialize” them for future submission to unwanted contact.

I disagree with this libertine author that little girls have sex drives because that is one of his consistent positions here. Are they curious about sex? Yes. Are they sexually responsive? Yes. They have no adult sex drive but the clitoris is still responsive and they can definitely have orgasms by clitoral stimulation. In fact, I’ve known some women, including ex girlfriends, who masturbated to orgasm as little girls. One ex started doing it at age five!

But seeing this as a plot by men to socialize girls into becoming women who like basically getting raped is ridiculous. The feminist argument doesn’t make sense.

However, there are definitely some men out there who  advocate the molesting of girls for that very reason. There are all sorts of porn blogs out there pushing this line.

So there had to be some sinister explanation for so many girls not saying “No!” or “I don’t like this,” or at least “Let’s go the amusement park instead.”

Sure, clitoral stimulation feels good whether you’re a girl or a woman, so girls often enjoy getting molested at the time. There is sexual pleasure involved. The typical response of girls to getting molested though, even if there was pleasure, is, “Wow that was really weird!” They don’t know what sex is so they can’t figure out if it’s good or bad or right or wrong. Hence the ambivalent or even positive attitude of most girls towards getting molested.

While traditional psychologists claimed little girls naturally try out their seductive skills on older men, feminists were unwilling to concede any ground on the supposed innocence of girlhood.

I actually don’t think they do. Teenage girls, sure. I’ve had 13 and even 12 year old girls do that. But the they had all obviously experienced the onset of their sex drive. Little girls try to seduce men? Real dubious!

Particularly thorny was that some women confided having experienced arousal and pleasure during their childhood victimization. How could something so wrong feel so right?

Exactly. A woman I dated said, “It’s wrong but it feels good, so it’s confusing.” She had been molested at age eight. She told me she had experienced no damage from it.

Some women felt they needed to defend themselves from the “shameful” suspicion that they wanted to be touched and cooperated in the sexual contact for basic hedonistic motives. So they settled on the excuse: “that was your body, not you.”

Exactly. The girls liked it, it felt good, and now they feel shame and guilt for finding it pleasurable. People who work with women molested as girls are coming around to the idea that it’s ok to feel that you liked it.

But there are still some taking the crazy feminist line that “You didn’t really like it. It was actually destructive. Your body just brainwashed you into thinking you liked it.”

What do you mean, “That was your body, not you?” Are you not your body? Are we going to get Cartesian here? Am I not my body and vice versa? Another feminist argument that makes no sense.

But as Whittier points out, CSA was seen from an “often lesbian-feminist perspective” and responses utilized a “lesbian-feminist approach,” so at least some individuals may have had an additional need to justify their personal rejection of men.

Some of those individual activists were so – shall we say – selective they couldn’t stand to be in the same room with a man. When self-help groups of former victims met and hugged each other, some individuals preferred that only females were present and hugging.

Exactly. And feminism is still swarming with these lesbian feminist lunatics. Lesbians are everywhere in feminism, crawling out of the rafters.

Regardless of gender, the crusaders taught that each child’s body is her own, so she has a right not to be touched if she doesn’t want to.

Of course. But there’s a problem with that theory, as usual.

But it follows that each child also has a right to be touched if she wants to, otherwise what does your body being your own have to do with anything?

This is the problem with the theory right there. Now I don’t agree that little girls should be able to decide that they like getting molested, so we should allow it to go on, but the point still holds. As usual, the feminist theory makes no sense.

The result was surely the same: millions of little girls are being mentally castrated today no less than before they were rescued from the risk of early sex abuse.

Ok, here’s the libertine line. You might want to read it to see what they are getting at. By not allowing little girls to feel sexual pleasure, we end up with a bunch of repressed teenage girls and women with sex hangups. Do I believe it? I doubt if it’s true, and the idea makes me uncomfortable.

The PR value of violence against women was exploited by Women Against Rape, which identified sex with assault, making no distinction between sex play and violent assault.

And feminists conflate sex with rape and aggression to this very day, in fact more than ever in the #metoo era. It’s irrational but feminist arguments never make sense.

WAR declared that no adult should touch a child in an uncomfortable “or” sexual way. Huh? In other words, being touched in a sexual way is unacceptable no matter how comfortable that touch may feel.

Well, I happen to agree with these feminists in WAR on this. I don’t want adults touching kids like that. Period.

Conveniently, the early feminist activists didn’t define sexual “abuse” specifically, let alone define it carefully, so sex abuse was construed so broadly that eventually any and all sexual contact in childhood was demonized or at least any contact between individuals ≥ 5 years apart in age, a magic number similar to the sacred contemporary dictum that every female becomes competent to consent on midnight of her 18th birthday.

They haven’t done this to this very day. No one knows what “child sexual abuse” even is. Apparently now it includes 18 year old adults. And even beyond that, women can get groomed, molested, and sexually abused, which is just nonsense.

Are we talking teenagers or little girls or both?

“Children can’t consent.” First of all, that’s bullshit, and second, teenage girls are not children, and they can absolutely consent to sex.

What about with teen minor peers? Oh, they can consent with them, just not with adults, they say. Wait, I thought children can’t consent. Well, if they can’t consent to sex with adults, then obviously they can’t consent to sex with teen minors either, right? Of course they can’t. You can either consent or not. You can’t consent with some people but not with others. According to feminists, teenage minor girls can’t consent to sex except when they can. As usual the feminist argument makes no sense.

How is it possible that teenage girl minors cannot possibly consent with anyone 18 or over but can somehow consent with other teenage minors? The feminists bend themselves out of shape inventing arguments for this. It’s weird because now they need to make a new argument that teenage girls can consent after all, at least sometimes. But then they still say minors can’t consent. As usual, feminism is incoherent.

And where does this magical “five years apart” idea come from? In other words, if child sex play occurs between minors who are no more than five years apart, then it’s usually not harmful? But I’ve heard of cases of women getting molested as girls by brothers who were 9-10 years older, and the women were fine. One said she missed him and wished he would come back so they could start doing it again.

Rather than specifically acknowledging insensitivity and exploitation as the true crimes against children regardless of the age or gender of those involved, feminists promoted the traditional idea that sexual desire and sexual pleasure are evil in themselves, especially – by coincidence – when fathers and daughters or any other men and girls are involved.

This is exactly what they’ve done. What else is #metoo saying other than this? On the other hand, I want it to be illegal for fathers to have sex with their minor daughters.

When the movement against CSA was embraced by mainstream society in the 1980s, the original focus on incest and gender changed. Instead of reporting rampant incest within families, the mass media focused on more palpable “stranger danger.”

At one point the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect stopped reporting pesky data on the relationship of abuser to victim. The politically correct mass media advised “parents” on how to protect “children” from “adult abusers,” instead of advising women how to protect girls from men.

See, this is where the movement went nuts.

This is correct though. The feminists were right for once. Child molestation is generally (in 80% of cases) a father or uncle molesting a little girl, often a daughter or niece. Brothers do it too but we don’t typically call that molestation. By focusing on 20% of cases and leaving out 80% of them, we don’t make much sense, do we?

Recently one activist against CSA, Sharon Lamb, had the courage to question the traditional myth that girls are naturally asexual – especially in childhood. She interviewed over 100 girls and women in over 20 states who described their early sexual experiences, mostly in neutral or positive terms. But they clearly experienced desire and arousal, and somehow survived to report it.

That’s actually the typical reaction of girls to getting non-coercively molested – neutral or positive. The attitude continues into adulthood. No one wants to hear this, but it’s true.

Hysteria is a failure to carefully evaluate or even see the many aspects of something and instead focus on only one aspect: usually the worst aspect, what Lenore Skenazy calls worst-first thinking.

A good definition. So why don’t we stop?

Most adults who victimize children (sexually or otherwise) are more accurately classified as psychopaths.

Molestation typically occurs in the family with an adult male relative and a child female relative. And almost all of these molesters are not pedophiles at all. They’re just criminals, often with elevated psychopathy.

More concrete evidence of hysteria was the reception of the Rind Study (8), a meta-analysis of 59 unbiased studies that did not support the dogma that CSA is usually seriously harmful. Previous studies of CSA suffered from selection bias by focusing on women who were already in psychotherapy, but Rind et al. avoided such bias by analyzing studies of a group more representative of the general population: college students.

A famous study, since replicated many times. Problem is that no one believes it’s true. The Wikipedia article on the  study is typical. It says that the study’s conclusions are erroneous and unscientific. That’s not true. It’s the gold standard for studies on child molestation.

Rind’s findings and conclusions were not really radical and should have been welcomed as a relief. But they provoked a firestorm of popular criticism that led to an extraordinary Congressional Vote of Censure of the publisher (the American Psychological Association).

That vote was an abuse of science right there. It just goes to show you that politics often doesn’t make sense or follow logic, instead following irrational emotion and hysteria. Hence most political movements, especially those based on Identity Politics like feminism, are irrational, and most of their arguments don’t make sense.

There is still a strong incentive for feminists NOT to admit that sex play in childhood is normal (both statistically normative and healthy) rather than necessarily harmful. That admission would not only mean feminists have been wrong about denying and demonizing children’s sexual desire and sexual pleasure for over 30 years.

Worse, the belief in a male conspiracy to shame girls and women was clearly paranoid.

Well, sure. Ever notice that people don’t change their minds much about things, especially politics? If I change my mind, that means I was wrong before and now I think I’m right. But people don’t want to admit they were ever wrong. It’s a blow to the ego. So instead they double down and keep the same positions they’ve always had.

Political movements are worse because when they admit they are wrong, it is a blow to the (collective) ego of the movement, and leaders of the movement think it will bring shame to the movement and result in fewer adherents to their cause.

There is also good reason to believe that the traditional taboo against sexual contact outside marriage (in this case in childhood) contributes to some girls becoming sexually dysfunctional.

Now here’s the libertine line I don’t like. But this is how these people think: “We need to allow little girls to experience sexual pleasure because if we don’t, they’ll end up teenage girls or grown women with sexual hangups.” I really doubt that’s the case.

Yes, little girls are denied the opportunity for sexual pleasure. But this is no loss to little girls, and some find sexual pleasure themselves on their own via masturbation, which is harmless.

Deborah Tolman’s study makes sexual problems among young girls painfully clear, although Tolman prefers the euphemism that some girls today have “silent bodies.”

He means teenage girls, ok? Well, ok, hangups are real even at this late date. But do people really have “silent bodies?” Whatever’s going on in that fake silent body, I’m sure the trail leads right back to the mind.

Rather than stating the obvious, that little girls are not at fault for insensitive and exploitative treatment by adults, we should say that young girls who rebel against sex taboos must be praised for their courage in participating in their own liberation from the traditional taboo against expressing female sexual desire and pleasure even outside patriarchal marriage – especially in childhood when the growing brain needs stimulation to develop healthy organ function.

Well, there ya go. There’s the liberationist, anti-prohibitionist argument for adult-child sex. Yuck. Whatever causes female sexual dysfunction, I doubt it’s being caused by the sexual repression of little girls.

Note that this is the pedo argument: little girls are horny as Hell, and they try to seduce us pedos all the time. See above where I concluded that little girls have no actual adult sex drive until the onset of the female sex drive in puberty four months before menarche.

It’s wrong for anybody to use coercion or threats or otherwise manipulate children to cooperate in sex. We need to separate “sex” from the crimes of deception, insensitivity, and exploitation.

And…there it is. The classic pro-pedo argument. Adult-child sex is ok as long as there is no coercion, deception, manipulation, insensitivity, exploitation, or threat involved. Oh, yuck. I don’t care if the girl likes it. So what?

Now, I suppose you are wondering if the author a pedophile? I don’t think so. For instance he noted that true pedophiles are rare. First of all, they’re not, and second of all, not pedophile is going to tell you that his species is rare. I don’t think he’s a child molester either. He doesn’t seem wrapped up in it enough, he’s a known name, and he has a good job teaching English.

Instead he’s just one of those intellectual total freedom advocates or libertines. There are far more of them out there than you think.

Pro-pedophile literature and argumentation has a certain flavor about it of downright advocacy. I’ve read enough of it to know what it looks like. As a teleiophile, I have no personal interest in the matter, but I’m fascinated by anything wrong, taboo, messed up, evil, or thought crimes. In fact the truth that I have no personal interest in this subject makes it very easy for me to write about it because it enables me to have an emotional distance from it.

References

Lamb, Sharon. 2001. The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do – Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt. The Free Press, 2001.

Skenazy, Lenore. Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children. Jossey-Bass, 2009.

Rind, Bruce. 2000. “Science Versus Orthodoxy: Anatomy of the Congressional Condemnation of a Scientific Article and Reflections on Remedies for Future Ideological Attacks.” Applied & Preventive Psychology 9: 211-225. Cambridge University Press.

Rind, Bruce, et al. 1998. “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples.” Psychological Bulletin, 124: 1, 22-53.

Rind, Bruce, et al. 2001. “The Validity and Appropriateness of Methods, Analyses, and Conclusions in Rind et al. (1998): A Rebuttal of Victimological Critique from Ondersma et al. (2001) and Dallam et al. (2001).” Psychological Bulletin 127: 6, 734-758.

Tolman, Deborah L. 2002. Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality. Harvard University Press.

Whittier, Nancy. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State. Oxford University Press, 2009.