PC’s acid test: they’re not paedophiles, they’re “minor-attracted people”

While I’m uneasy with World Net Daily’s indelicate bracketing of child abuse with homosexuality, that rather pales in the light of the rest of their report on the latest deliberations of B4U-ACT, an organisation that works with those sexually attracted to children in the state of Maryland.

WND reports that at a symposium held by B4U-ACT last week, speakers “promoted the idea that the American Psychiatric Association should remove pedophilia from the list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Pride yourself on your open-mindedness? See how these soundbites grab ya…

• “Dr. John Sadler (University of Texas) argued that diagnostic criteria for mental disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health professions from their role as healers.”
• Another speaker “argued in favor of acceptance of and compassion for people who are attracted to minors.”

An observer at the symposium, meanwhile, was horrified at other themes that it developed: the unfair demonisation of paedophiles, an objection to the word “wrong” being applied to them and the idea that children are not inherently unable to consent to sex with an adult.

I don’t know if this symposium had a title but ‘Moral Relativism Comes of Age’ wouldn’t have been far off the mark. So what did you do at work today, Daddy? Why, I attempted to sanitise child abuse, darling. Now don’t go spitting in Daddy’s face like that…

The irony is that those at whom the symposium was aimed are in this line of  work precisely because civilised people regard paedophilia as repugnant: no exceptions, no pleas in mitigation. If that sits uncomfortably with the refined intellects mouthing the inanities listed above then they need to find a desert island where they can set up the la-la-land they apparently crave.

By all means, care for your patients or ‘clients’ as you no doubt insist on calling them. Analyse them and attempt to understand them to the nth degree but be in no doubt that you do so not because their psychiatric intricacies look good on your c.v. but because you’re charged with that task by a Society who wants these people controlled, restrained and cured – that’s right, CURED, go on, say it out loud… – as far as is humanely possible.

And don’t you dare patronise ordinary people for their revulsion, tut-tutting that old shibboleth ‘demonisation’ as if it were some gigantic roadblock to your doing a decent day’s work. You work in the public sector, you dance to the public’s tune and that public happens to have zero tolerance when it comes to adults who view kids as sex toys. Do excuse our primitive ways.

You’re not paid to destigmatise, folks: you’re paid to find answers to one of Mankind’s greatest evils. Do your job and save the sordid idealism for your own time.

The hollow ring of synthetic kindness

It’s not like the bullying that made him change schools in the first place, he assures me.

This is the dripping tap variety. It doesn’t frighten you; it simply wears you down. As being the butt of countless schoolyard ‘paedophile’ jokes will do.

So much for coaching courses broadening your horizons. He’d taught rugby to under-12s about 18 months ago. Enjoyed it, because he’s always related better to those younger or older than him, than he does to his own age group.

The kids enjoyed it too and when one of them fell and hurt himself and his coach took him to the school nurse for some treatment, it was the most natural thing in the world for the younger child to take the older one’s hand as they walked.

Alas, the older one’s peers saw it. And so it began.

“Paedophile.”

This much I already knew and I could just about imagine the dulling, wearying effect on the soul, of so baseless an insult somehow managing to run for 18 months and counting.

It’s what I didn’t know, however, that pains me the most.

“One of the teachers came up to me afterwards and said that perhaps I shouldn’t have held the kid’s hand,” he now tells me.

He was 15 at the time. Fifteen years old and your lesson for the day is How Not to Look Like a Paedophile.

A young child is upset, dazed and in need of comfort but you keep your distance. For appearances’ sake. The smart play.

I surely can’t be alone in seeing the irony of this. All the rules and protocols we’ve come up with – from health and safety to sexual propriety – supposedly designed to produce a kinder, fairer Society and what have they made us?

A people more detached, more reserved and more suspicious. An already selfish species now positively encouraged to cover its own back before covering for its neighbour.

I feel just about as desolate as he does.

Bedford book ban – facts and bluster don’t add up

Image via Wikipedia

Having raised an eyebrow at some of the content in books set for my own son’s English course, I’m not surprised to learn that some parents are kicking up a stink in New Hampshire, USA over the reading material being put before their kids.

“A second book has been pulled from the Bedford High School curriculum following complaints about its sexual content by the same parents who started the argument about “Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America,” which was removed from the high school’s personal finance course last month” – from The Nashua Telegraph, brought to my attention via Indyposted.com

Nor am I exactly stunned by some of the high-falutin’ outrage of those commenting on the report, with ‘Nazi’, ‘tyrant’, ‘Victorian’, ‘censorship’ et al given a predictable airing.

First, the substance of the complaint – extracts of Water for Elephants can be read here, here and here. My understanding is that it was offered as optional reading (parental consent required) for 13-year-olds.

Second, the protagonist. I might stand shoulder to shoulder with Dennis Taylor in his dismay at what he read but his way of making his case would not be mine. His is but one voice, one opinion and he seems to have lost sight of that fact in the midst of his indignation. I’d also like to know what he has in mind when he talks of people behind the decision to incorporate Water for Elephants, being fired or terminated from the School Board…

This apart, and for all that I accept the argument that it is ultimately for parents to teach their children how to process anything they might read, I too am unhappy with material of this type cropping up in schools.

I believe it’s yet another aspect of a Society that is fixated upon the groin. Sex is a wonderful thing and as much fair game for discussion as any other facet of life but are we so incapable of finding fulfilment elsewhere that we have to keep coming back to it in debate, like fat kids to a sweetshop? The sexualised bombardment we endure from the media seems to have spawned a belief that we can’t engage properly with life, through art or education, unless there is a sexual element to be addressed in there somewhere. I’m afraid I don’t buy it.

Film directors can protest until they are blue in the face but I maintain that you can count on one hand the films that would lose anything whatsoever were their sex scenes hinted at instead of graphically played out. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the latter option being taken occasionally but its absence wouldn’t diminish the film as art. I’m also a little older than 13.

Similarly, there’s an idea out there, it would appear, that unless children are regularly addressing sexuality while at school, their education is incomplete and they will trip out through the school gates at 16, a bunch of naive, vulnerable Pollyannas.

Unfortunately, the full-on, candid approach favoured by some educationalists  is resulting in something as bad, if not worse; a generation of youngsters who reach puberty under the impression that sex is just another commodity, like cigarettes or a loaf of bread.

That they should be left in no doubt as to what it involves and its consequences is not in dispute but I question whether sex education goes much beyond that nowadays, or is it deemed unwarranted interference to teach young people about the emotional context in which sex most comfortably sits?

The fact is, sex needs a little mystique. Not ignorance, I grant you, but a little reverence, magic, call it what you will. It’s a big deal, not least because of the huge physical and psychological backlash that can result when it’s indulged in callously or irresponsibly. You’re most definitely not just buying cigarettes here and merely showing a 12-year-old how condoms function doesn’t come close to ticking the ‘sex education’ box.

When you present books like Water for Elephants to young- or mid-teens and passages involving strippers, erections and tongues sliding around nipples are read out in class, you take another step towards commodifying sex. Once again, it is reduced to the everyday, the humdrum. No big deal; we even talk about in English. I would question whether sex-as-routine is a great mindset for any young person to carry into adult life.

Point is, I don’t think schools lose any credibility if they rise above this and refuse of their own accord to put literature on their programme that incorporates sexual content. In fact, if they did this already, I doubt we’d have heard a whisper of complaint from any quarter, because anyone objecting to a school’s insistence on being an oasis amid 21st century culture knows he or she would get some very odd looks indeed.

And if Water for Elephants and its like are such vital reading for this age group, I’m sure the authors, as creative artists, would consider themselves duty-bound to write an edited version for the younger audience.

Of course teenagers will read the racy stuff out of school hours. I can still remember reading Sven Hassel‘s WWII novels in my teens and being shocked to learn that it wasn’t my generation that invented the f-word. But it’s for parents to monitor that and act as they see fit. And it’s for teachers to know how to guide – not terminate, guide – the ensuing discussion when such extra-curricular reading material is mentioned in class.

We lose nothing if the bar gets raised whenever our children go to school, by a syllabus that keeps minds above the waist and sex confined to biology lessons, where it’s presented as more than just an exercise in mechanics. For just a few hours each day, kids would get to study art, literature, history, philosophy and science and have their minds opened to the possibility that satisfied living revolves around so much more than just the genitals.

If that sounds ‘repressive’, some Nashua Telegraph commenters may be pleasantly surprised by its long-term consequences.

Bare breasts and the innocence of youth

One from the Something Not Quite Right Here Dept, as I finish doctoring Younger Son’s new laptop, rendering it hopefully impregnable to the pornographer’s art.

He’s not stupid. He knows exactly what I’m doing; what I mean by the phrase “unsuitable sites”. It won’t be long before he’s pubescent and utterly dismayed at being denied this Pandora’s box.

But not just yet.

“That’s all sorted then,” I mumble uncomfortably, like a debutant circumcisionist fumbling for the correct post-op conversational protocol.

“Thanks Dad.”

I look at his face. My God, he actually means it.

Someone else’s prostitute

Is it a trick of memory or was there indeed a time when people were polite enough to whisper when their conversation while on public transport turned to sexual matters?

Two twenty-somethings behind me were sharing their weekend experiences while we travelled home on the bus last night. His seemed to have involved an inept prostitute.

“So how much did she charge for the unsatisfactory cock rub?”* his fellow passenger enquires in full voice, as if comparing notes on a dodgy garage.

My gaze is frozen on the white lines hurtling towards us. Yet again, the sense that I am living my life in the midst of some giant, open sore.

[*£30. Because some of you, I appreciate, are just dying to know]

[pic courtesy of SkilliShots]

Old men called George

What is it with old men called George?

R and I swap old folks’ home tales during a lull at the office. An old guy called George I use to visit took his affability too far and was confined to barracks after climbing into bed with several female residents – individually, I hasten to add. No sexual impropriety took place; he just didn’t want to sleep alone.

R, meanwhile, knew a man who’d had a heart attack that entailed his being effectively brought back from the dead in an operating theatre. Recovered and back at his residential home some weeks later, he embarked on a one-man crusade .

“You can forget your God,” he’d tell everyone. “I’ve been there and there’s bugger all.”

He too was confined to his room. Not so much because of his message as of the effect it was having on morale.

And his name was George.

Things I wish I’d known at 12…

Image via Wikipedia

We’re talking different shades of dark here, to be sure but the bestiality bar has undoubtedly been raised lowered by this fellow.

Sex with a horse is one thing. The idea of oral sex with a horse, on the other hand, might have stopped even Caligula in his tracks.

I thought I knew sexual desperation as a teenager: those desolate nights alone – hormonally all dressed up and nowhere to go – crushed by the suspicion that everyone in the world was having sex but me.

How much better I’d have felt about myself if I’d known there were men out there so bereft of fulfilment they would contemplate having their penis anywhere near a horse’s teeth…

(As an aside, do you suppose the Jockey Club automatically warns off people with this kind of criminal record, or must a formal application be made?)