Re: Re: pedo in a speedo

Anna,
   
  I'm writing because I think your email exaggerates the differences in our viewpoints.  I don't think that minors are or pure or free of sexual desire.  (I do think children cannot be said to have what we call sexual desire.)  If there's anything I said that led you to the contrary, let me clarify those comments now.  And in fact I think the sexual desires of young people are not a secret.  Mass culture deals with them all the time:  thing of American Beauty.
   
  My uncomfortableness with the minors in Delany's book is, first, their unusually high propensity to act on those desires.  The kind of protagonist you see in Hogg is, I think atypical (if not unprecedented) in children-adult sex relations.  Children just don't act on their desires for adults with that much force, usually.  The idea that they do with any frequency is one that comes, I suspect, from defense attorneys.  Second, to me Delany sets the age bar too law.  Maybe I developed too late but I'm of the opinion that true sexual desire--that is, a concrete understanding and desire for sex, as opposed to ineffable stirrings--is not something 98% of 11 year-olds have.   

  I don't think anyone said or implied that sex between adults and minors is always coerced.  But it often is and children are so vulnerable to adults that they could almost always be pressured to deny a lack of consent.  Even in situations where minors initiate or accede, I'm not sure there's real consent.  Doesn't consent imply knowledge?  Does a minor fully understand AIDS, herpes, or the real pains of emotional committment?  
   
  The obvious answer to this is that there are minors who can enter into these relationships more informed than some adults.  But difficulty of administration or generalization is almost never a reason to rescind a law.  There are felons who would use guns more safely than most adults, but we still have laws precluding their ownership.  I think this is smart policy, even if, out of necessity, it snares some people unjustly (unjustly in the sense of moral culpability--they still knew what they were doing was illegal).   The question is whether we want to live in a world where children are raped on mass scales and then similarly coerced into saying they consensted or a world where some people, who knew what the laws were, are punished for having consensual sex.  Given the real and inestimable fragility of most children--which may be one issue we differ on--I, like almost everyone elser, pr
 efer the latter world.  (As an aside, I once wrote a very pissed off letter to Camille Paglia for
 treating the issue very glibly on a Salon article. No response but I still resent her for acting as though worrying about children-adult sexual relations is for bourgeoisie dolts with no sense of history.)   
   
  I think you're right to worry about the hysteria over sex offenders.  Are you aware that it is now consitutional to commit sex offenders indefinitely after they've served their criminal sentences, without violating double jeopardy or ex post facto prohibitions?  Were you aware that that's true even if the treatment facility is an open sham designed not to treat but only to cage people longer?  I worry about it, but I also believe that in this case people are (over)reacting to a real problem.
  
Speaking of unfair generalizations, I only yesterday learned the lexical root of "hysteria".
  
Anna Yudovin <[email protected]> wrote:
  Thank you Steve, for finally bringing up an
alternative point of view! I thought I was going to
have to get very indignant indeed.

I'm mainly a lurker on this list, but this time I feel
the need to say something on the topic. So far,
there's been lots of posts by (I assume) adults, all
really disturbed by the idea of pure and innocent
children having sex with dirty pedophiles. And before
I go on (and antagonize everyone), yes, I think raping
children is evil, even more evil, if that's possible,
than raping adults.

However, thankfully at least a few list members (I'm
counting myself in) still remember actually BEING
children and discovering their sexuality through both
thoughts and actions - and so realize that the
complete sexual purity of children is a myth, (one of
the favorites of the current administration, and one
often debunked by honest personal accounts, including
the one by SRD in Motion of Light in Water, and a few
other places). 

What bothers me most deeply about this discussion is
how thoroughly everyone seems to accept as a given, on
the most visceral level, that sex between a child
(defined as any person under the legal age of consent,
which is 18 in U.S.) and an adult (someone OVER the
age of consent) is always a result of coercion. Even
when mitigating circumstances are brought up (true
love, Romeo and Juliet, an 18 year old and a 16 year
old, etc), it seems no one is comfortable admitting
even the possibility of a child CHOOSING to have sex
with an adult. It occurs to me that there's a (however
slim) possibility that one of the reasons SRD keeps
revisiting this topic is to explore this denial of
agency?

Before anyone tries to ascribe my opinions to some
variation of stockholm syndrome -- I didn't have sex
with an adult while I was a child. In fact, I lost my
virginity rather late (17), to a boy almost a year my
junior, and was in no way emotionally scarred by the
experience (I also managed to refuse the very
insistent advances three years earlier by a guy in his
thirties whom I found exceedingly attractive, but a
poor choice of partner). Yes, 14 year olds can still
make choices, even when they are horny AND pressured.
Given the same situation, I could have chosen
otherwise, and the guy could have landed in jail. And
please let's not have a discussion of whether he
deserved it, I don't know and I don't care, I only
care that I had a choice and exercised it. Rape is
when you don't have a choice. 

I do think that child abuse, sexual or otherwise, is
horrific, and leaves deep scars on its victims.
However, I feel that many (most?) of the measures
directed at ameliorating this problem, in fact
exacerbate it, specifically through systematic denial
of agency to children. I guess I'm in the minority
(because not many in the 18-25 age group even bother
to vote) for not suddenly forgetting, after I turned
18, how much it sucked that practically everyone,
including my insane mother, was able to manipulate my
life on a whim, and still caring, after I turned 21
that the good ole U.S. could have happily shipped me
off to war (had I been a male, they do discriminate)
since I was 18, but a glass of wine was illegal for
three more years. Btw, does anyone know the statistics
on how many teens (under 18) get prosecuted as adults
for serious crimes like murder? I don't know the
actual numbers, but I seem to hear pretty often about
the prosecution trying to do just that. I guess the
only meaningful way children can still exercise
personal agency is through murder...

Ok, I think I've gotten pretty carried away here. I'm
just trying to turn some attention to a point of view
that didn't get brought up, and doesn't get brought up
much. It's important, even if for no other reason that
SRD is a very multiplex author (which is why I love
him so) and not many things in his books are there for
one reason only, it's usually much more complex than
that.


Anna




--- Steve M <[email protected]> wrote:

> At 10:49 PM +0000 12/30/05, Guy_Fawkes99 wrote:
> >But the theme (and its frequency) is so
> >discomfitting for me and for a lot of readers that
> I have to wonder
> >why it's so important for Delany to keep revisiting
> it.  What point
> >is he trying to make that's so imperative it's
> worth alienating and
> >risking a lot of readers over?
> 
> I was an early reader of Delany--started reading him
> in junior high 
> at about 13 years old, with Triton and Empire Star
> and Babel-17. I 
> read Dhalgren in high school (i.e., while still a
> minor--only 
> slightly younger than Denny).
> 
> I say that by way of leading up to this tentative 
> suggestion/observation: Perhaps he includes children
> being sexual and 
> having sex in order to be realistic. I think perhaps
> one of the most 
> dangerous aspects of our culture in terms of keeping
> children from 
> sexual abuse is the tendency to deny the sexuality
> of children. By 
> seeing them as innocent of sexuality and without
> sexual interests, as 
> beings who don't pursue sexual activity, we leave
> them completely 
> unarmed for the sexual predators who use and twist
> that innate 
> interest in sexuality.
> 
> I was never sexually abused and never had sex with
> an adult while I 
> was a minor. However, I recall finding opportunities
> to get naked and 
> vaguely sexual with neighborhood kids when I was as
> young as seven, 
> having mutual masturbatory sex with a cousin one
> year older than me 
> starting at 11,  and this escalated to oral sex at
> 12 and anal sex at 
> 13.
> 
> This may seem to contradict my other recent posts,
> but I think here 
> of the discussions of Delany's own youthful
> sexuality in his memoir, 
> and that of his peers, and think that perhaps this
> informs his 
> fiction about sexualized minors.
> 
> That in his pornography (Tides of Lust/Equinox and
> Hogg) this 
> involves situations that we would objectively
> consider abusive but 
> that the participants involved do not opens up a
> dialogue about 
> whether it is age itself that makes such situations
> abusive. In Hogg, 
> it seems that once our narrator starts to feel that
> the situation is 
> abusive, he leaves (and speaks for the first time).
> 
> The above are just tentative thoughts on the issue,
> which I really 
> haven't given much thought to before, because the
> sexuality of 
> children in his books really hadn't struck me as
> extraordinary, but 
> rather as a fairly realistic extensions of my own
> sexual desires when 
> I was a boy.
> 





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