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Meant to use this on a catholic church n' kidz thread but it seems as valid here.
Here is an article from Eye magazine in Toronto from May of last year.
Probing the final frontier
BY BRUCE LABRUCE
A friend of mine, an ex-Toronto gal who flew the coop for New York a decade ago and proceeded, Holly Golightly-style, to move through and exhaust a veritable Disneyland of sexual and psychosexual scenes, once blurted out over a Bloody Mary at lunch: "Pedophilia is the last frontier." At the time I thought she may have been nursing a slight case of Tourette's, but as it turns out, she was absolutely spot-on.
Now that terror is on the back burner, now that we've all come to the realization that the Bush cabinet is just using 9/11 as an excuse to extend the same old imperialist policies to control the oil resources of central Asia -- now we can all relax and focus our attention on something really entertaining: kids! Or more specifically, child pornography, "pedophilia" in the Catholic church, and the sexual peccadilloes of Haley Joel Osment and Billy Gilman.
As one of the more sexually repressed civilizations, the West has made a bad habit of trying to pretend that child sexuality does not exist. Some people, like youngsters in the midst of a tantrum, would rather cover their ears and loudly sing "Jesus Loves the Little Children" than listen to the inner voices of their baser instincts, the ones that acknowledge that adults can be turned on sexually by children, and that children experience sexual feelings and desires.
But let's get our terminology straight. Pedophiles are those who seek to have sex with children who have yet to go through puberty. Properly speaking, those men who go for post-pubescent boys, like the majority of the offending Catholic priests, are pederasts. Nature and common sense dictate that this line -- the puberty line -- is the one that should not be transgressed, and age of consent laws should reflect this. Once your hormones kick in with a vengeance at around the age of 13 or 14, there is no sense trying to pretend that you are not a fully sexual being
This is not to say that sexual desires are not forming long before puberty. As someone who knew he was a homosexual from the age of five or six, I was aware very early on that I had some sort of sexual attraction to the same sex. I had erotic dreams and fantasies while still a soprano even though I wasn't quite sure what they meant.
The American Psychological Association (APA) recently acknowledged that sexual experience between adults and children, if not coerced, particularly if enjoyed by a boy (as distinct from girls), does not have lasting harmful psychological effects. One sexologist, Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University, has gone so far as to say, "if I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 11 who's intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual ... then I would not call it pathological in any way."
The APA now encourages psychologists not to necessarily label all instances of adult/child sex as "abuse" or "molestation" -- labels that only serve to lend a victim mentality to something that may be completely natural and harmless. Of course, there are instances in which adults in positions of trust -- like priests and Boy Scout leaders -- have unhealthy and negative sexual contact with boys. In the case of priests, who are supposed to be celibate in the first place, the kind of guilt and confusion they must bring to these sexual experiences can only be severely creepy.
But ultimately, it's the split personality of a culture obsessed with youth and sexuality while simultaneously attempting to repress the reality of child sexuality that creates all the problems. In other perfectly legitimate civilizations, like the ancient Greeks', man-boy love was regarded as healthy and pedagogic, and in certain Muslim cultures today, as in Afghanistan, adult males still initiate boys into sex and act as their mentors. It was the uptight Taliban -- who were more aligned with Western, Christian sexual repression -- who tried to stop this apparently perfectly natural practice. Maybe a little more pedagogy and a little less paranoia here might not be a bad idea.
There are further responses available from the site on the following run of the column for those of you who are interested.
I can't say that I agree totally with all of the opinions posited therein but I think that on an overall basis the article does have some valid stuff to add to the current debates on the matter. |
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