- First a story about a toddler that had to die because a man was afraid to help, due to the pedophilia hysteria.
An extreme defense of pedophilia - Then Professor Harris Mirkin’s thesis that criminalization of “pedophilia” is like gay criminalization and psychiatrization of homosexuality 50 years ago and that childrens’ right to sexuality should eventually win.
- Judith Levine’s book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
- Alfred Kinsey a pedophile? He observed orgasms of children and adolescents during his University Research.
- More unbiased academic discussions about pedophilia
- And of course there is our prior article about persecution of academic research in the case of the Rind Study
There was one small detail that jumped out at me in the tragic story of Abigail Rae, the two-year-old who wandered off from her village playgroup and ended up dying in a garden pond. Tucked away at the end of yesterday’s inquest report was a line about how Clive Peachey, a bricklayer, drove past a child on her own, whom he later concluded had been Abby.
She was not walking straight, she was tottering, said Mr Peachey. “I kept thinking should I go back? One of the reasons I did not go back is because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her.”
The hysteria over paedophilia hangs like some dark cloud over almost every interaction nowadays between a man and a child that isn’t his.
Professor Mirkin got himself into deep trouble defending that consensual sex with an adolescent is not the same as raping the same adolescent. Similar to a Dutch law, Professor Mirkin contends that the age of consent should be 12 years, as long as the adolescent’s consent can be proven.
Click on MORE to read the rest of the story.
Death threats over paedophilia article
Professor Mirkin’s mistake, if that is what it was, was to break the last big taboo in American mores and suggest paedophilia should not be regarded as a monolithic phenomenon but rather as a social and political construct subject to the changing attitudes of different eras.
Raping a child, he argued, should not be put in the same category as sex between a consenting teenager and an adult; art works that refer to the sexuality of children should not be dismissed out of hand as pornography – just think of Donatello’s David.
His article, which appeared in the Journal of Homosexuality, went entirely unnoticed until a group called Concerned Women For America discovered it on the internet.
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/death-threats-over-paedophilia-article-653107.html
Here is the entire article, by permission of the Independent
The following NewYorker article recognizes Professor Mirkin’s right to publish academic discourse, even when disturbing. But they know that Mirkin’s ideas are “silly”
The professor is Harris Mirkin, who teaches in the political-science department at the University of Missouri’s Kansas City campus. The article at issue is “The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia,” published in the Journal of Homosexuality, in 1999.[…]
Professor Mirkin published a silly article. It purports to show that the current situation of pedophiles is analogous to the situation of homosexuals before the gay-rights movement and of women before the women’s movement. Pedophilia, he argues, is regarded by almost everyone who is not a pedophile as unnatural, depraved, criminal; but many heterosexuals once thought that homosexuality was a disease and an offense against God and nature, and many men once thought that sexually active women were monsters. In each of the earlier cases, the dominant group maintained that there was a “natural” type of sexual behavior. And, in each case, once it was demonstrated that what people believe to be “natural” is just a “social construction,” devised by the dominant group to preserve its own status, then the “deviant” group was on its way to acceptance. Mirkin suggested that pedophiles might be at this stage. When people realize that in earlier times sex between men and boys was thought to be unexceptionable, they will see that the present taboo is a convention, and not based on anything real. “Like homosexuality,” Mirkin writes, “the concept of child molestation is a culture- and class-specific modern creation.” No doubt, as a student of contingency, he appreciates the irony that his views have become widely known not because pedophiles are gaining acceptance (as he seemed to predict) but because of the scandal in the Catholic Church.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/05/13/020513ta_talk_menand
A few examples of open-minded Scientific Literature:
Sexuality & Culture
CUMULATIVE CONTENTS, VOL. 1–9
VOLUME 1 (1997)
THEMATIC ISSUE: SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND SEXUAL CONSENT
Editorials Sexuality & Culture: An Interdisciplinary Annual
Barry M. DankSexual Harassment, Sexual Consent, and Beyond
Roberto RefinettiTheoretical Articles Sexual Harassment in Organizations: A Critique of Current Research and Policy
Christine L. WilliamsSexual Harassment Policies as All-Purpose Tools to Settle Conflicts
Heinz-Joachim Klatt“Academia’s Dirty Little Secret”: Deconstructing the Sexual Harassment Hysteria
Klaus de AlbuquerqueForbidden Love: Student-Professor Romances
Barry M. Dank and Joseph S. FuldaOn Prohibiting Relationships between Professors and Students
Peg TittleEmpirical Articles Gender-Specific Differences in Evolved Mating “Strategies”: The Evolutionary Basis of Sexual Conflict
Peggy La CerraCollege Students’ Perceptions of the Relationship between Sex and Drinking
Gwendell W. Gravitt, Jr. and Mary M. KruegerSource: http://www.springerlink.com/content/86q8a7k0x52gpj11/
Feminist writer Judith Levine’s book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press, $25.95), has been condemned by those who say she excuses sexual abuse of children–a charge she strongly denies. Levine says she was misunderstood after a news article in March quoted her as saying that a boy’s sexual experience with a priest “conceivably” could be positive.
“Do I advocate priests having sex with their child parishioners? No, absolutely no,” she says. However, she adds, “The research shows us that in some minority of cases, young–even quite young–people can have a positive [sexual] experience with an adult.”
Featuring a foreword by Clinton administration surgeon-general Joycelyn Elders, Levine’s book endorses a Dutch law passed in 1990 that effectively lowers the age of consent to 12. “America’s drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing,” she writes. “Instead, often it is harming them.”
The book has sparked a political backlash against her publisher, the University of Minnesota Press. The speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives condemned the book and called for the university to halt its publication. Instead, the university press recently ordered a second printing of 10,000 copies after media attention helped drive Levine’s book as high as No. 26 on the Amazon.com best-seller list.
Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_18_18/ai_86868910/#comments
Judith Levine expected her book on child sexuality to stir some controversy, but she never dreamed she would be called an evil accomplice to child molesters.
Though not yet released, Levine’s book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, has already attracted angry letters, phone calls and e-mails directed at her and her publisher, University of Minnesota Press.
The book argues that efforts to protect children from sex can do more harm than good, especially when parents and educators are afraid to recognize children as sexual beings.
Sex is a part of growing up for children and teenagers, Levine argues, and not all sexual encounters with adults are necessarily traumatic for minors. This has prompted critics to accuse Levine of endorsing child molestation and sexual abuse.
“My book is not about intergenerational sex,” Levine said. “I am not endorsing sex abuse of children. Quite the contrary. It was my hope that the book would allow parents and other adults to talk realistically about issues of kids and sexuality. Instead, there is an effort to suppress the book and stop that conversation.” […]
Levine endorses the Netherlands’ approach to age-of-consent laws. In 1990, the Dutch parliament made sex between adults and children ages 12 to 16 legal as long as there was mutual consent. The child or the child’s parents can bring charges if they believe the minor was coerced into sex.
Levine believes the Dutch law is a “good model” for the United States because it recognizes children as sexual beings who can determine their future while not ignoring the fact that they are weaker than adults and still need legal protection. U.S. consent laws, she says, mistakenly put all minors under one category without recognizing their ability to pursue relationships.
“Legally designating a class of people categorically unable to consent to sexual relations is not the best way to protect children, particularly when ‘children’ include everyone from birth to eighteen,” Levine writes. “Criminal law, which must draw unambiguous lines, is not the proper place to adjudicate family conflicts over youngsters’ sexuality. If such laws are to exist, however, they must do what [social psychologist Lynn M.] Phillips suggests about sexual and romantic education: balance the subjective experience and the rights of young people against the responsibility and prerogative of adults to look after their best interests, to ‘know better.'”
Source: http://pedophileophobia.com/hysteria.htm
See also http://www.ageofconsent.com/netherlands.htmJohn Holt (1923 – 1985), an American teacher who authored Escape from Childhood – The Needs and Rights of Children, stated that “all people, including young people, should have the right to control their own private sex lives and acts”.[citation needed] He considers that “it is not the proper business of the state or government to pry into such matters”. Holt refutes the concept of child innocence and opposes laws on age of consent as unfair and morally wrong.
Judith Levine, an American journalist and author of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, is against the legal regulation of children’s involvement in sexual activities. Levine suggests that, if such laws are to exist, an appropriate model would be the legal framework that existed in the Netherlands during the 1990s, now abolished, which required a complaint from a parent or other authority to pursue a prosecution where 12-15 year olds were involved.
British journalist Miranda Sawyer maintains that the age of consent should be lowered to 12 in the United Kingdom, arguing that the criminalization of all sexual activity for ages under 16 is “laughably unrealistic”.
Is child molestation a sickness or a crime?
Thomas Szasz from the August/September 2002 issue
Medical Penal Establishment
Today virtually any unwanted behavior, from shopaholism and kleptomania to sexaholism and pedophilia, may be defined as a disease whose diagnosis and treatment belong in the province of the medical system. Disease-making thus has become similar to lawmaking. Politicians, responsive to tradition and popular opinion, can define any act, from teaching slaves to read to the cold-blooded murder of a bank guard, as a crime whose control belongs in the province of the criminal justice system.
Applied to behavior, especially sexual behavior, the disease label combines a description with a covert value judgment. Masturbation, homosexuality, and the use of nongenital body parts (especially the mouth and anus) for sexual gratification have, at one time or place, all been considered sins, crimes, diseases, normal behaviors, and even therapeutic measures. For many years psychiatrists imprisoned homosexuals and tried to “cure” them; now they self-righteously proclaim that homosexuality is normal and diagnose people who oppose that view as “homophobic.” Psychiatrists diagnose the person who eats too much as suffering from “bulimia” and the person who eats too little as suffering from “anorexia nervosa.” Similarly, the person who has too much sex suffers from “sex addiction,” while the person who shows too little interest in sex suffers from “sexual aversion disorder.” Yet psychiatrists do not consider celibacy a form of mental illness; celibate persons are not said to suffer from “anerotica nervosa.”
Why not? Because psychiatrists, politicians, and the media respect the Roman Catholic Church’s definition of celibacy as a virtue, a “gift from God,” even though celibacy is at least as “abnormal” as homosexuality, which the church continues to define as a grievous sin — an “intrinsic evil,” in the words of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua. Regardless of how unnatural or socially destructive a pattern of sexual behavior might be, if the church declares it to be virtuous — as with celibacy or abstinence from nonprocreative sexual acts — psychiatrists do not classify it as a disease. Thus a religion’s moral teachings shape what is ostensibly a scientific judgment.
Sources:
http://reason.com/archives/2002/08/01/sins-of-the-fathers http://www.staff.uwp.edu/academic/criminal.justice/chldabuse01bk.htm
Kinsey’s interest in boys
Reisman contends that Alfred Kinsey was the father not only of the revolution that spawned the current permissive sexual climate, but also of the movement gaining ground among some scholars to legitimize sex between adults and children.
In her book “Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences,” Reisman presents evidence that Kinsey was a pedophile. She points out that “anywhere from 317 boy infants and children to 2,035 total children” were subjected to sex experiments for the Kinsey data in Chapter 5 of the Male and Female volumes of his reports.”
In 1948, Kinsey published “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and in 1953 “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.”
Reisman wrote that “the truly amazing fact is that at the time the activities required to perform the ‘research’ on children to obtain data on their ‘sexuality’ would have involved actions that were clearly criminal in all 50 states of the USA and that these criminal activities were being committed under the protection and with knowledge of the Indiana University. ”
Reisman noted that in an essay, Albert Jonson and J. Mann reported that Kinsey “included observational reports on the speed of reaching orgasm in 1,888 boys, aged 5 months to adolescence who were timed with a stopwatch” and “147 preadolescent” girls. Jonson and Mann cite their “personal communication” with Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey’s co-author, who validated the 1,888 boys in the Kinsey Reports, Reisman wrote.
Reisman’s work on Kinsey gained attention in the UK in 1998 when Yorkshire television aired a documentary by Tim Tate called “Kinsey’s Paedophiles.” Tate said, based on extensive research, that the data was used by Kinsey to suggest that children can enjoy their abuse. The program has never been aired in the U.S.
Howard Ruppel, chancellor and academic dean of the graduate school that arose from the Kinsey Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, told WorldNetDaily he has no comment regarding allegations that Kinsey was a pedophile
Source: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27104.
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