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Tom, the movement in your post from (quoting Ganesh)
"What little research there is suggests that a considerable proportion of the adult population have at least some element of paedophilic attraction in the make-up of their sexual desire."
to
Certainly the idea that a "diagnosed" paedophile should be trusted not to indulge seems highly disconcerting to me
struck me as blurring an important line. It reads to me like a suggestion that people with paedophilic fantasies are "diagnosed paedophiles" - could you clarify that? Because if so, then by analogy, everyone who has had rape fantasies would be a "diagnosed" (potential) rapist, and that certainly isn't true, I don't think.
So I think there are, kind of, two modes (at least) being blurred under the term 'paedophilia' or 'paedophilic fantasies'. I also think that Haus's distinction:
The first is something that people *do*. The second is something that people *think*, and it is probably wise to think about which of those you want to legislate against or condemn before continuing. This is occasionally known as the Brooke Shields question, or the Wednesday Addams question for younger readers.
isn't quite as helpful as it could be, since... oh, I don't know. It feels to me like 'desire' is being proposed as being a unified thing which, for some people at some times, might be directed towards occasional individuals who, despite being children, fit very clearly into our culture's ideas of what is sexually attractive. It's just quite slippery and hard to get a handle on.
So I want to propose a distinction along different lines and see what people think of it. It's one that's helped me clarify my thinking about this issue, anyway.
I'm thinking about S/M 'daddy/boy' fantasies, where a 'paedophilic' fantasy may be using the idea of an adult/child relationship as a metaphor for various sexual, power-related or emotional issues the fantasizer wants to explore. I think this is clearly distinguishable from paedophilia (as a specific sexual orientation towards prepubescent children and the inclination to act on said orientation). It's as clear as, say, the distinction between someone who gets off on the idea of a master/slave relationship as metaphor and someone who gets off on the actual owning of an actual (non-consenting) human slave.
Does that work? I mean, I think the distinction is structurally or intuitively clear: obviously there will be interactions between the two modes, and individual cases might blur the distinction or render it irrelevant (cf also the "avant fascism" thread), but I think there is a distinction to be made between 'metaphorical' and 'real' paedophilia. I'm not comfortable with those terms, by the way, but I can't think of any particularly good ones. People with more S/M-fu than me might be able to help out: is there any good theory/discussion around daddy/boy as a structure of desire? Or Ganesh, is this a possible way of distinguishing between a paedophilic orientation and a sexual desire, not exactly paedophile in itself, which finds useful expression through the metaphor of adult-child relationships (this may show up as adult-child in fantasy, but would be expressed in sexual practices between consenting adults, just as S/M fantasies show up as "real" slavery in fantasy and consensual practices in reality)? For me, it seems more useful than the idea of a "continuum" from "occasional mild paedophilic response in fantasy" to "keeping tiny children in your cellar". (Similarly, after some historical reading on the subject, intrafamilial child abuse [incest] seems - in some cases - to be coming from a very different nexus of forces than the 'predatory stranger' and I don't think the 'continuum' is a helpful metaphor. It blurs over real discontinuities between different modes and constructions of desire and power.)
Finally, I should stress, just to make it clear, that I am not equating daddy/boy fantasies with specifically paedophile desires, nor do I think all daddy/boy fantasies or scenes are specifically using adult/child as a metaphor for the mode of relation. |
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) over the idea that being older in itself = power: I'd argue that a 55yo doesn't necessarily have any power over a 25yo. (The 16-year-old, almost certainly, agreed.)