I don’t normally write content warnings, though perhaps I should.¹ Consider this the warning: Sexual controversy ahead. Here be dragons – these are politically uncharted waters, this is going way outside the Overton Window. If you are not up to processing this, turn back for now!

Imagine, if you will, a Nazi of some humanity. (Bear with me.)

She believes that there is a problem with the Jews in Europe. But she (quietly) disagrees with the methods that Hitler is employing. Instead of extermination, she favours deporting the Jews to a new homeland. Or perhaps she may even think there is a way to keep the Jews in Europe without endangering Germans – after seizing their accounts and assets, they could be allowed to live under strict controls and surveillance, especially certain individual Jews that don’t act on the Jewish imperative to corrupt Germany – for example, the ones who didn’t condone the boycott of German goods.

She disagrees with the laws against providing basic aid to Jews because it tries to force everyone to expose all Jews to extermination. She also notes that this and other elements of the crackdown make Jews more desperate and may cause retaliation or rebellion.

While this Nazi is much kinder than a Final Solution Nazi, you might think that her moral understanding leaves a little bit to be desired. She’s still labouring under the impression that there’s something wrong with being Jewish², and so everything she proposes while holding this belief is suspect. But hopefully she’ll change.

Now imagine a psychologist of the 1960s of some humanity.

He believes that there is a problem with homosexuals. But he (quietly) disagrees with the methods that the state is employing. Instead of imprisonment, perhaps homosexuals can be treated. Ammonia-aversion therapy seems promising. And thanks to advances in diagnostic imaging, we might someday be able to identify homosexuals before they act on their urges. We could also employ chastity devices and even chemical castration. Homosexuality is a terrible affliction, yes, but we should show some humanity and treat the homosexuals, not imprison them, especially not the ones that refrain from committing the crime of sodomy.

This psychologist is arguably kinder than many of the politicians of the time, but again his moral understanding leaves a little bit to be desired. He’s still labouring under the impression that there’s something wrong with being homosexual, and so everything he proposes while holding this belief is suspect. But hopefully he’ll change.

This is about where I’m at with the following Cracked article. Not that they think there’s a problem with being Jewish or homosexual. But there’s this third thing.

“Before we get started, can we all agree that there’s a difference between trying to understand something and condoning it? There’s nothing on Earth so awful that we should avoid talking about it completely. If anything, the more scared you are of a thing, the more you should try to understand it. Talking about a subject like homosexuality isn’t going to make it worse. But refusing to talk about it — or accusing those who do of glorifying it or normalizing it — definitely will. No problem has ever been solved with ignorance.

“And we are ignorant; homosexuality is almost a total mystery to modern science. We don’t know what causes it, or how to prevent it, or how to cure it (short of a form of castration), because the moment a test subject admits they’re a homosexual, they’re ruined for life. Why would anyone ever come forward? Thus, society’s insistence on taking the harshest possible position winds up exacerbating the problem.

“So, here it goes: We sat down with several self-professed (but non-offending) homosexuals, as well as David Prescott (a therapist who specializes in sex offenders) and Dr. James Cantor (a scientist who studies their brains).”

– Robert Evans, Cracked: “5 Ways We Misunderstand Homosexuality (That Makes it Worse)”

Yes, I did change a certain word. But now you understand the association that I perceive, even if you disagree with it. I’ll push this button here and reset my taboo time machine to stop substituting words.

#5. Not all Jews are committed to the destruction of Germany

Whoops.

#5. Not all homosexuals commit sodomy

Crap, did I screw that up again?

#5. Not all pedophiles molest children

Ah! There we go.

Okay, first there is a category problem here. This one-to-one association is like thinking the only type of male homosexual sex is anal gang rape (bareback, of course). If that’s your model of homosexuality, of course you’re going to have a problem with it.

When I was a kid I saw on CBC a docudrama called The Boys of St. Vincent. It was pretty freaky. You definitely do not want to be those kids. You don’t want to be molested while a spiritual and temporal authority figure like a priest is telling you to just go to sleep. And then you’re torn between people telling you to report it versus people who have power over you saying, “Whatever happens inside this orphanage stays inside this orphanage!”³

We wouldn’t tolerate such behaviour brought upon adults in a homeless shelter, and for kids in an orphanage it’s even more pointedly inhuman.

But I fundamentally believe the association of pedophilia with coercively traumatizing children is similarly wrongheaded. Your outrage is understandable if you think it’s necessarily scary and something that is unilaterally inflicted and that internal organs are being damaged. That stuff probably does happen somewhere and needs strong sanctions, but it’s like citing the bareback anal gang rape that probably happened at least somewhere for the reason why homosexuality should be condemned. And I think the people fucking babies to cure themselves of HIV⁴ probably aren’t in it for the baby-ness of the babies anyway.⁵ In any case, you have to adapt your practises for the participants. If you’re teaching someone to play goalie you don’t go straight to the Al MacInnis slapshot.

And so I think it’s a problem that “molest” dominates thinking. Everything is molestation and molestation is everything. It’s as if sex were successfully labelled rape⁶, legal consent were made impossible, and consequently [insert your favourite currently-legal sex practice here] occupies the same conceptual space same as gang rape. For a sufficiently broad definition of rape, everyone’s a rapist. This applies to other words, too.

If you’re of the mind that sexish things are or should be completely unknown to young people, or that they can’t possibly have any interest in them, please read my previous essay, “The Puritanization of Youth”. If you’re of the mind that age-disparate relationships are necessarily exploitative, please read “Mandatory Victimhood”.

You may also wish to reject what I’m saying on “mere” disgust. As powerful as disgust is, it a property of the one disgusted and not the thing one is disgusted by. If you grow up in a culture where people eat bugs, and then you move to Canada, you’re not going to be nearly as perturbed by the idea as your normative meat-and-potatoes-please Canadian. It also bears mentioning that our relationship with our own bodies is informed by cultural messages of shame. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne explores these issues in his writings:

Second. The fact that most pedophiles don’t engage in clothes-off pedophilic activity is because of the sanctions against it. Similarly, I’d be curious to find out if most homosexuals didn’t have homosexual sex when it was still illegal, especially outside cities. This ‘fact’ is like saying “People of a criminalized sexuality more often than not don’t have the criminalized sex.” I’m not sure what the point is of bringing it up.

Certainly, the primary reason homosexuals, for example, stayed in the closet wasn’t usually some “virtuous homosexual” bullshit, and even if it was you’d perhaps rightly deem it religious brainwashing. I would like to see Dan Savage’s reaction to the idea of a “gold-star homosexual” since he coined “gold-star pedophile”. Sure, he deserves credit for, like the Cracked authors, being among the humane among the persecutors. It sort of helps and it sort of doesn’t.

“There are pedophiles in the world who don’t molest children, and never will. No one disputes that fact. So what portion of pedophiles actually victimize kids? We have no fucking idea. That is, in fact, the point.”

Always the ‘molesting’ and ‘victimizing’. I suppose these guys aren’t trying out to be NAMBLA essayists.

“Hell, we don’t even know what percentage of the population are pedophiles — estimates range from one percent to an astounding 20 percent. Most people aren’t going to freaking admit they’re a pedophile on a survey, and we haven’t yet developed magical scanners that can reads people’s sexual desires from afar (note: society will profoundly change the day such a device is invented)⁷. So let’s lay out some numbers that are going to blow your fucking mind:

“In surveys, 18 percent of males admitted to having sexual fantasies about children, eight percent said they’d masturbated to those fantasies, and four percent said they’d have sex with a child if they could get away with it. ‘But that’s just a survey!’ you say, ‘They could be lying in either direction!’ True. So the researchers took a bunch of subjects and hooked them up to boner detectors. Depending on the experiment, the percentage of subjects who got turned on by naked children (under age 12) ranged from 17 percent to 50 percent.”

Perhaps I have a vivid imagination, but I can see such a scanner being used to sort people at a death camp. A lot of people exaggerate heritability and don’t think of emerging traits. You could kill all people exhibiting a trait you don’t like and it might well just keep coming up. And, I suppose, you could keep killing them. By the way, who died and made you God?

Now that 50% is a crazy outlier, of course, but just imagine for a second that it’s the real high end: They were willing to say that 17 to 50 percent of the male population have these attractions. If it really is that high, it is astonishing that they can continue to talk in pathological terms while maintaining a straight face. It could be a quarter of men! And this ain’t a passing thing like the Spanish Flu.

I suspect that if hardly any males were, for example, attracted to young females, there wouldn’t be such a constant supply of fuel for the state incarceration machine, and the panic would probably die down.

“But [incarcerated people] can’t be representative of the whole group, by any means. It would appear that the vast majority of pedophiles don’t actually commit sex crimes, for the same reason the rest of us don’t: if given the choice between ‘no sex’ and ‘victimizing an innocent person,’ most people choose the former. But since ‘child molester’ is literally the worst thing you can be in our society, these abstaining pedophiles don’t dare speak up.”

That’s not the fucking choice. The choice is between “no sensual touching with that person” and “very likely destroying your life, their life, and the lives of everyone else around you.” Well, I suppose it is “victimizing an innocent person” in the sense that they are likely to be victims of psychologists and social workers even though they did nothing wrong.

I wonder to what extent the pathological models of homosexuality were based on the homosexuals unfortunate enough to be ground in the teeth of the legal system.

#4. Society has no idea what to do with non-offending pedophiles

“David Prescott is a therapist who has spent much of his career working with ‘minor-attracted persons’ and says, ‘If we think of people who wind up with a sexual interest in children … it’s a little like growing up and realizing there’s something about you that makes it impossible for other people to love you. Imagine growing up under circumstances where you can never truly give love in a way that is legal or considered normal by others.’”

Yes, imagine that, but if you’ve been paying the least amount of attention you shouldn’t have to imagine too hard. By the way, full credit to LGBT activists for getting their persecution made to be distasteful to the point where the President of the United States made an It Gets Better video. Ahem.

“But over here in the non-Teutonic⁸ chunks of the world, people attracted to kids have to rely on each other for help. They’ve formed an organization called ‘Virtuous Pedophiles,’ or Virped. We got in touch with most of our sources through that site — and the professionals we talked to spoke highly of them.”

In a manner of speaking, that’s got to be the worst possible place to go. Why didn’t you go to NAMBLA or something?⁹ I am sure they would have been more than happy to hook you up. (No, not like that.) It’s not like you can pretend you haven’t heard of it. It’s like you wanted to do a story about homosexuality so you found a ‘gay’ organization called “Virtuous Homosexuals” (or “VirtuHomos”) and asked them about how they support each other in resisting their temptations and meanwhile there’s a riot in Greenwich Village, but those are the extremists, pay no attention to them. Bonus points, of course, if they’ve encountered the psychology-psychiatry industrial complex and have been convinced that their desires are necessarily traumatizing and abusive.

I think a stance like “I’m OK with people Y as long as they don’t ever do the thing that defines them” shouldn’t earn you all that many virtue points. For not going to NAMBLA, only the most obvious thing in the entire world, and only going to pedophilic-activity-denouncing pedophiles, you don’t get any journalism points.

Then again, I probably wouldn’t interview Intelligent Design advocates for a report on biology, so I am a bit of a hypocrite here. At some point you have to draw your own line – I vehemently dispute the beliefs behind Cracked‘s decision about where to draw theirs.

#3. Society doesn’t recognize it as an illness … even though science does

Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God.

How dehumanizing do you think it would have felt for homosexuals to read something like, “Society doesn’t recognize it as an illness … even though science does”? It might have been helpful to remind readers that homosexuality was an official mental illness until the 1970s because reasons, just like your taboo desires today can make you officially mentally ill because reasons.

Cantor: ‘Our culture is hysterical over the issue. The U.S. will spend enormous amounts of money to lock a person up, but not spend a fraction of it to learn how to stop pedophilia from developing in the first place. I don’t think any modern politicians have the cojones. The amount of money I needed to run my MRI experiment is less than what it takes to keep just one person in jail.’

Yeah, about those MRI experiments — he and his team have successfully identified physical differences in the brain matter of pedophiles, and demonstrated that being into kids isn’t a choice, or necessarily the result of abuse.

‘So really, what it seems like … is that there is a kind of cross wiring. Portions of the brain are responsible for our social instincts — responsible for figuring out “this is a person I take care of,” “this is a person I run away from,” and “this is a person I flirt with.” To most of us, a child naturally evokes our nurturing instincts. It’s as if, when there’s not enough connectivity, the instincts get a bit fuzzy … and when a pedophile sees a child, instead of their brain triggering nurturing aspects, it triggers sexual arousal.’

Can I do word substitution again, please?

“So really, what it seems like … is that there is a kind of cross wiring. Portions of the brain are responsible for our social instincts — responsible for figuring out ‘this is a person I hunt and play sports with,’ ‘this is a person I run away from,’ and ‘this is a person I flirt with.’ To most of us, a dude naturally evokes our hunting and sports instincts. It’s as if, when there’s not enough connectivity, the instincts get a bit fuzzy … and when a homosexual sees a dude, instead of their brain triggering hunting and sports aspects, it triggers sexual arousal.”

This is all well and good that there’s a material difference in the brains of pedophiles versus non pedophiles, although the knowledge could be used in horrific ways. By the way, there’s also a difference in the brains of homosexuals and people who are transgender. Fortunately for homosexuals and transgendered (and you can be both of those at once¹⁰), people in this part of the world are usually a little less kill kill kill kill kill kill kill about them.

I should say something somewhere about a spectrum, and about absolutes. Like there are, I’m sure, tons and tons and tons of guys who could be openly into other guys in freer political regimes but are straight enough to just pass for “100% straight” without too many problems. Or there are truly bi people, or even a little bit gay-biased people, and they can pass for 100% straight but it’s a bit stultifying. And then there are the people who aren’t normally, very rarely, or virtually never into the opposite sex but somewhat or very into the same sex. Well, it’s for these there is the revolution. And then everybody else can benefit.

While I was harassed mercilessly about sexualish things through the later years of school (after I moved from rural PEI to the exurbs near Halifax) – and quite a bit for being effeminate – I honestly don’t know what it’s like to be super far out of the norm on those spectra (to the point where I have to change my identity or body to love myself and others). I’ve had the fortune – dare I say, privilege¹¹ of being able to be more or less a male™ and most often being attracted to ‘appropriate’ potential partners.

Well, we know what we’re supposed to do when we’re in a privileged position. Walk a mile in the other’s shoes. Speak up for those who can’t. We’ll see if all this stuff about inclusiveness and empathy and diversity and tolerance isn’t just hot air. (Waves hand.) The power of liberalism compels you!

If I have a thesis here, it is:

The fact that something is socially condemned doesn’t make it a mental illness.

By contrast, look at the current definition for pedophilia as a mental illness:

1. Feel personal distress about their interest, not merely distress resulting from society’s disapproval; or

2. have a sexual desire or behavior that involves another person’s psychological distress, injury, or death, or a desire for sexual behaviors involving unwilling persons or persons unable to give legal consent.

– via Huffington Post

What progress! Now you’re only mentally ill if you “desire for sexual behaviors involving unwilling persons or persons unable to give legal consent.” It’s in the same clause because any illegality is the same as using force, of course.

So if you have consensual sex with a 17 year old in Canada you are not mentally ill, but if you have consensual-but-not-legal sex with that same person in… (checks map) California, you are. The fact that they put a legal fence into diagnostic criteria makes me want to throw tomatoes at every psychologist there is.¹² This is bad, bad ‘science’.

To analogize: If you’re merely aroused by other men, you’re not mentally ill, but if you desire other men, you are mentally ill, because you can’t legally consent to sodomy. Boy howdy this is some great scientific reform in the field of psychology.

Criminal behaviour doesn’t mean you’re mentally ill any more than stealing bread to feed your family means you have State Austerity Defiance Disorder, nor any more than running away from your owner means you have Drapetomania, nor any more than sharing in what feels good and not hurting anybody means you have whatever this decade’s favourite pathologization of love is.

‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first — verdict afterwards.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there are probably some psychologists and even some social workers (here’s one) who haven’t drank the Kool Aid.

The Jews didn’t need a Madagascar Plan – what they needed was acceptance or at least the right to be left alone. Similarly, pedophiles don’t need your diagnoses and treatments, although being left alone is a dream like talking to plantation slaves about how there’ll be a half-African president someday.

#2. There are supposedly victimless forms of child pornography … but the law has no idea how to deal with them

Inasmuch as this suggests that victimless crimes are met with inaction from law enforcement, this is a quaint notion indeed. The cops sure as hell have an ‘idea’, and consensual crime is the bread and butter on big government’s table. As Dave Krueger puts it:

“Fabricated crime has replaced traditional crime as the central focus of the justice system. In a traditional crime, some act injures a non-consenting person in some way; in a consensual ‘crime’, all parties engaged in the activity consent¹³ to it. Consensual crimes may still result in injury, but no force was used to compel anyone into being a party to them. Consensual crimes include almost all prohibitions on drugs, sex work, gambling, and usury; laws specifically targeting minorities (race, gender, and sexual orientation) belong to the same class. Without compulsion and victimization, it is rare for anyone to report such ‘crimes’; that is the crux of what differentiates traditional from consensual crime from a law enforcement perspective. Equally important is that many more people engage in outlawed consensual behavior, and usually do so more often than they would commit traditional crimes. In other words, consensual crime creates an endless supply of easy targets for law enforcement.”

– Dave Krueger, via The Honest Courtesan

Back to the catechisms in Cracked:

“It makes sense that non-offenders would try to find a victimless outlet for their urges. That brings us back to child pornography, but that’s hardly victimless. The subjects of photos/videos are exploited, and paying for the material — or just giving websites traffic — supports the industry that exploits them.”

I think that exploitation-or-not really depends on the nature of the material, and I also think that sexish stuff or nudity alone aren’t themselves exploitative. Maybe if there’s something like “real child-beating porn with real bruises and crying” – well, if you want to puke about that I’m right there with you, really and truly.¹⁴

Digressing into simple nudity, you may wish to read about the Australian incident when Polixeni Papapetrou put a nude pose of her daughter Olympia Nelson on the cover of Art Monthly Australia. A few Australian politicians expressed outrage. Nelson bit back:

Anyway, back to the sex-infused stuff. We (the lay public) don’t have any idea of what goes on in child pornography circles because of the necessary secrecy and the fact that you are likely to be jailed if caught looking at the product.¹⁵ I imagine law enforcement bodies, acting in their own best interest, are choosy about what they tell us. I suspect law enforcement agents are among the biggest hoarders.

Anyway, I don’t think this is a slippery slope any more than pornography in general being a gateway to rape. And no, I don’t believe that pornography in general is a gateway to rape. I think that pornography, at its best, is liberating and freeing and beautiful food for the imagination. It can be to the reality of sex what Tolkien is to the reality of life.

On the topic of simulated porn and whether it increase rates of criminalized activity, Cantor says:

“The science is pretty neutral. We’re never going to have a scientific answer to an ethical question.”

But science can answer ethical questions. You just need to pick an axiom, perhaps “well-being of conscious creatures”. If you believe science really has nothing to say on ethics, please read Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. Or you could watch this discussion.

Whether you can get enough people in a given polity to agree on the answer is another matter, I suppose. With this one, it’s gonna get pretty heated.

#1. The law prevents treatment of pedophiles … until it’s too late

Prescott: “So say a guy calls, saying, ‘Help, I’m sexually attracted to children and I don’t want to act on it. Please, can you help me?’ On one hand, yes I want to help. But according to the law, if I have any reason to believe this person has abused a child, I’m bound by law to report this to the authorities. If he says, ‘I haven’t acted on it. I have looked at videos of something that might be child sexual abuse,’ I’m not required to report it in Maine, but in California, they’ve passed a law where confessing to viewing child porn is now a mandated report. So I might think to myself, ‘I understand there is nothing to report … but can I guarantee to this client that there might not be something in what he says that would be a mandatory report?’”

I’ve exhausted both my and probably your patience for language wrangling, but let’s reflect for a moment on the evil of mandatory reporting. Of whatever. In a sense, the conservative nightmare has come true: Nothing is sacred. Doctor-patient, lawyer-client, journalist-source, husband-wife… all confidentialities are apparently fungible.

You’ll know that I don’t think ‘treatment’ is appropriate, because I’m quite convinced that there’s nothing to ‘treat’. And I’m cynical about psychology in general anyway.

But as my friend puts it, “There are people who are objectively fucked up, and we need to unfuck them.” And there are people who have problems with crippling anxieties and depression. I’m not convinced that some of them wouldn’t benefit from a philosophical and/or pharmacological boost of the type that ethical psychologists and psychiatrists can sometimes provide in certain circumstances. My current favourite blogger Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex is a psychiatrist; reading his reasoning and research forced me to be a little less cynical than I was previously:

“I have yet to prescribe any particular remedy for lice, but that is because lice aren’t so much of a problem today, or if they are they don’t make it to a psychiatrist. But I have given antidepressants.

And this seems a lot like … lice. Once again, people are crowded together into squalor, oppressed by landlords and schoolmasters, and so some of them – usually the poor – become depressed. Antidepressants are moderately effective against this problem, although they have physical side effects in some people and are considered embarrassing by many more. To take an antidepressant is a sacrifice in much the same way that cutting your hair is a sacrifice. Its only possible justification is that it does treat depression, just as haircuts do treat lice.

So I can imagine [Chesterton, an author clearly after Will Matheson’s heart], fire in his eyes, demanding ‘Why are you solving this problem by giving pills?! You should be solving this by improving society so that poor people don’t end up depressed!’

And all I could answer is ‘If I wrote a prescription for ‘improve society’, I’m not sure the pharmacist would know how to fill it.’”

– Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex: “Book Review: What’s Wrong With The World”

But if you were need-help-level depressed and also a pedophile, you’d have all the more reason to stay away, because there will be things you just can’t talk about. And that very not being able to talk¹⁶ is its own problem, a point on which Cracked and I agree.

While the folks at Cracked are infinitely better than the white supremacist vigilantes who took it upon themselves to kill someone unfortunate enough to be on the Sex Offender Registry, you might think that their moral understanding leaves a little bit to be desired. They’re still labouring under the impression… well, the one that everyone is compelled to publicly profess to, yet this means everything they propose while holding this belief is suspect. But hopefully they’ll change.

Cracked also says to please think of the children (their emphasis!). Yes, do.¹⁷ I’ll leave you with these words from Eric Tazelaar:

“But the state in which child lovers exist today is not the worst of it. An even starker reality which confronts us all is the sad and diminished state in which children and adolescents now find themselves, essentially held captive in what amounts to walled gardens where they are unable to form any contact with others not explicitly authorized or to be exposed to any idea deemed ‘inappropriate’ by any but the most puritanical governess.

“They benefit only from the society of other kids within one or two years of age or their families (but often minus Dad) or those adults specifically designated and vetted by the state.

“All potentially contaminating ideas and people are carefully filtered-out to prevent their inadvertently contaminating today’s kids who, in their strict isolation, spend less time outdoors in unstructured and unscheduled freedom than ever before.

“And, it would seem, when eventually they do grow up, they are often angrier than previous generations of young adults, harbouring resentments and suspicions which might be seen as unavoidable given their isolated and artificial childhoods in which kidnapping and molestation were identified as a continuous peril.

“So it should not be surprising that many now also see paedophiles as an underlying source of their own social impoverishment as well as their greatest fear while growing up.

“Bogeymen made their childhoods both frightening and constraining and they are, understandably, deeply resentful, even if they are misguided.”

– Eric Tazelaar, “When Labour Loved Liberty”

It’s past time to speak out, though it will be a rough ride.

Further reading:

lensman: “18 common misconceptions about paedophiles and paedophilia” – This is much more concise than my treatment, yet it has crucial details and covers things I didn’t think of and don’t really have any space for anyway.

Hajduk: “Cracked: Introducing misconceptions you didnt have” – A concise, snappy, better-informed-than-me line-by-line critique.

---

1. Scott Anderson, Slate Star Codex – “The Wonderful Thing About Triggers”

   A very long time ago, I did ‘rate’ articles, but I think I was kind of cargo-culting the norms of TV and film. I also rated my site with RSACi, which doesn’t seem to even exist anymore. ↩

2. Let’s leave aside infant circumcision for now. ↩

3. Las Vegas is 5,200 km / 3,200 mi away as the crow flies. ↩

4. Perhaps in the same way that a bear fucks a man: It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that starts, progresses, or ends well. ↩

5. And if they were it’d still be wrong for a basket of reasons. The point is to put some daylight between pedophilia and that particular practice – it’s central to pedophilia like anal gang rape is central to male homosexuality. ↩

6. radical wind: “PIV is always rape, ok?” ↩

7. my note: I’d like to see “live and let live” move about a billion or so places up our ranking of moral imperatives before the inevitable Kickstarter for that. ↩

8. referring to Germany’s relatively merciful absence of mandatory reporting laws ↩

9. Girl Chat, for instance. They even have a thread about this Cracked article. ↩

10. Hell, maybe you can be all three at once! ↩

11. I promise not to use this word as a bully whip. ↩

12. Maybe that makes me mentally ill, since that’s illegal. ↩

13. my note: actually if not legally ↩

14. Oh God no I am not Googling that phrase. ↩

15. But see this Wired report by Adrian Chen: “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed” ↩

16. And yet here I am talking about it. I feel like I have little to lose – I have neither a spouse nor a job and I’ve always lived with family members. I’m not insane, really. I’ve just always believed that society was wrong about this and I’m going to take the opportunity to express my concern now before I have an institutional affiliation that effectively prevents me from doing so.

    I am a bit fearful, yes. But somebody’s got to drive in the first spike to kill the fear beast. This is the terrifying time when the horror of not speaking out and the horror of speaking out are competitive. As for the last spike, you can bet your ass it will be some politician who does it. ↩

17. Also, please consider letting the children think. Dare to equip them with philosophy! ↩