LEGENDA:

vermelho e negrito – trechos mais importantes, cerne do livro.

verde – desaprovo a idéia exposta

azul – meus comentários

PREFACE

“I am a paedophile, and in the chapters that follow it will become apparent why I have felt it necessary to crash through the barriers of societal disapproval by speaking out. The fact that I have been able to do so owes much to the work, described in Part Three, of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a group with which I have been closely connected, which has been campaigning since its inception in 1974 for the open discussion of paedophilia, and for abolition of the laws against consensual sexual acts between children and adults.

PIE’s struggle has been a tough one. There have been threats, and violence, against us. Members’ careers have been shattered following ‘exposure’ in the press, and now, thanks to charges of ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ levelled against PIE’s organisers (including myself), this struggle is about to see us into the dock at the Old Bailey. The writing of this book has been jeopardised on 2 occasions, in 1978 and 1979, when police raided my house, along with those of other PIE members, and seized a large quantity of research material. By the merest good fortune, the material seized on each occasion consisted largely of papers I had already studied and used in the draft of my book.

Such pressures are the penalty to be paid for speaking the unspeakable. And yet it is arguable that the ‘radical’ case presented here is not so radical at all. There are elements of our case on which PIE and myself no longer stand alone, and cannot easily be dismissed as a libertarian ‘lunatic fringe’: the recent report of the National Council for One Parent Families, Pregnant at School, has called for the abolition of the age of consent, for reasons which are completely in line with those advanced in relation to sex education, contraception and pregnancy in this hook, and there are other, equally ‘respectable’, bodies that now support the abolition, or lowering, of the age of consent. In the Netherlands, as readers unfamiliar with developments in Europe will discover in the coming pages, even major church organisations and political parties are coming to the conclusion that the laws designed to ‘protect’ children from sexual experiences actually do them more harm than good.”

“families which deny children their sexual life, including the possibility of sexual contact with adults, are profoundly limited, however good they may be in other respects.”

“As a lover of boys, I find myself tending to write more about relationships between boys and men than other forms of paedophilic encounters, including the apparently far more numerous contacts between girls and men. I have made a determined effort, however, to write a book on ‘paedophilia’, rather than on ‘boy-love’. There are already a number of books about the latter which strike me as far too parochial. Some boy-lovers write as though girls did not exist – especially as they fail to address themselves to the all-important question of consent, which can only be fully answered by reference to the impact that adults of either sex can have on children of either sex in sexual encounters. Unfortunately, a book on general ‘paedophilia’ runs the risk of obscuring important psychological differences, at least so far as male paedophilia is concerned, between boy-love and girl-love – differences which have major implications, especially for feminist critiques of paedophilia, which are sometimes over-reliant on a unitary view of the male sexual psyche.”

“I find it irritating to write about ‘the penis’, ‘the vagina’, ‘masturbation’ and ‘sexual intercourse’. To use the 4-letter equivalents of these words – providing it is not done in an aggressive, expletive way – enables one to de-medicalise sex, to talk about it in the enthusiastic way that healthy folk think about it.”

“Surprisingly enough, the point has been well taken by at least one group of relatively enlightened psychiatrists, Kraemer et al., in their book The Forbidden Love. Nevertheless, I have deferred to the view of my publisher, who feels that what I have to say is already controversial enough, and that any use of four-letter words could alienate otherwise sympathetic readers. I have at all points referred to ‘children’ rather than ‘kids’. Personally, I like the word ‘kids’. I find it attractive in the same way that it is pleasant to call a friend ‘Bill’ instead of ‘William’, or ‘tu’ instead of ‘vous’: it implies closeness, familiarity, friendly regard. But I also recognise that the word ‘kids’ is not a million miles from the idea of ‘mere kids’, or ‘little nuisances’. As readers will discover, this is not an idea I would wish to reinforce. Hence I have felt a formal designation to be appropriate.”

“real names have not, for obvious reasons, been used.”

1. THE SEEDS OF REBELLION

“It has always been hard for me to believe that there are children, boys or girls, who actually like erotic involvement with people much older than themselves. Harder for me, probably, than for a lot of those who so violently denounce paedophilia. So throughout my early adult years, that so many boys were on account of this was almost too good to me to be true, an impossible dream; although I learned to talk to them, shyly, tentatively, I never came even remotely close to sexual involvement.”

“As an individual, I didn’t personally feel any need for non–parental adult affection, still less adult sexuality, any expression of which would have distressed me.”

“Like many another child, when I was first told the facts of life (at school), my reaction was ‘My Mum and Dad couldn’t possibly do anything as dirty as that!’”

“There are those who will detect in all this the aetiology of my ‘perversion’. Let them. I am not interested in why I am a paedophile, any more than others are interested in why they are ‘normal’.”

“But there are also plenty of children whose parents, fortunately, have a relatively healthy, animalistic view of sex. Their children grow up curious about it, wanting to know more about what Mum and Dad get up to, wanting to join in themselves, not being terrified of it, eager to involve themselves sexually with peers and adults alike.”

“I was engaged to be married, for a while. She liked me well enough, and would have gone through with the marriage, given an ounce of encouragement. I told myself I loved her, in a Gideon,¹ cerebral way at least, and I tried to fool myself that I would come to love her body with more familiarity. Or rather I would lose my revulsion for it, just as a loathing for spiders can be mastered if one grits one’s teeth and makes a determined effort to get close to the little beasts.”

¹ Figura bíblica

“after only a few months the engagement was broken. My few belaboured, pitiful performances between the sheets, all role-playing and false passion, should have told me the inevitable fate of any future such liaisons, but that did not prevent me trying again, many times.”

“My hope was to find someone who wanted a man about the place to be a father and a breadwinner (or else house-husband to a career woman), rather than a giver of sexual love. At first I coyly described myself in the ads as ‘fond of children’, and met a number of divorcees and separated women, some of whom already had delightful children of their own.

In fact all sorts of women answered my ads, including, for no reason I could fathom, lots of nurses. One of these was a Chelsea swinger, who insisted on fellating me within an hour of meeting. It was a sort of sexual first aid, because I had told her I wasn’t very good at making love.”

“astonishingly they accepted an ad in which I described myself as ‘crazy about choirboys, cub scouts and Alice-In-Wonderland little girls’. Even more astonishingly 7 women replied to it, though not one of them had taken what I said literally. Yet again I found myself faced with a dreary round of explanation and failure.”

“If I had only lied my way out of it, all would have been well. The Head all but invited me to. ‘What’s all this about you telling a boy you love him?’ he said. ‘Surely it’s just a misunderstanding, isn’t it? You didn’t actually say that did you? Or maybe it was a joke of some sort?’”

“My suspension was to be lifted, and I was to receive sick pay for an indefinite period, under psychiatric attention, until such time as I was deemed medically fit to work again. At that point I was to be transferred to a teaching post elsewhere in the city.”

“In some ways I was lucky. Despite everything, I had the unfailing, and doubtless ill-deserved, support of my parents. I had friends: old, loyal friends from my own schooldays. My staffroom colleagues were good to me too: they still made me feel welcome of an evening, over a beer at the local teacher’s club. Even the lonely daytime hours were less barren than they might have been, for I was at least able to apply myself to writing a novel with a paedophilic theme.”

That was my nadir. My time of total despair. Against the backcloth of all that had happened to me I couldn’t be relaxed, and cheerful and spontaneous with lads, as one needs to be. Instead I made a nervous, dry-mouthed, guilty, almost totally out-of-the-blue pass at the paper boy – whose own conversation had never been at all earthy or overtly sexual. The tension in my manner transmitted itself to him. I was behaving like a classic Strange Man, the kind of guy the poor child might have expected to leave him strangled in a ditch. Not surprisingly, he was terrified, and the more I tried to sound kind and reassuring, the more inescapably I knew I was sounding – and indeed behaving – like the loony I appeared to be.”

“I had built my life on the belief that I loved boys. Yet for the sake of my lust there I was, large as life, terrifying a poor child out of his wits. There was no way in which I could fail to accept total culpability. It was different with Chris. I could blame all the trouble on the parents who were poisoning his mind, or the school who had sacked me for no more than being in love with a boy and saying so. But as I stood there face to face with Kevin, looking into those frightened eyes, I felt that every last shred of my integrity lay in tatters. I was nothing. Just a shit. Just a child molester.”

“In fact I had neither the gun nor the courage, and although I went so far as to hack away at myself somewhat ineffectually with a blunt kitchen knife, I accepted my father’s timely intrusion without demur. I felt pathetic, gutless and lost. There seemed no move to make that could possibly make things better, and existence just drifted on, from one numb day to another.”

“Why am I saying all this? What can be the point of rattling the skeletons in my own cupboard so publicly? There are several reasons, but perhaps the most important is that in doing so I will have given quite a powerful indication that it is not my intention to dodge any issues, or overlook any unpalatable truths. I know from my own life that there are problems, immense problems, in paedophilia” “People do not turn to paedophilia to avoid the responsibilities of an adult relationship, as some would have it believed – it seems to me that the responsibilities of a relationship with a child are in any case more onerous than one with an adult, not less.”

2. CHILDREN’S SEXUALITY: WHAT DO WE MEAN?

Não é o melhor caminho citar Psicanálise se se pretende um estudo sério!

“Some even hide behind Freud to do so. Mary Whitehouse, leading British campaigner for so-called ‘morality’, talks of ‘the latency period’ when she wants to convey the idea of childish innocence.”

“It is now medically recognised that masturbation, for instance, is entirely harmless, but most parents and teachers still steer children away from it and from any other expression of sexuality.”

“The orgasm in an infant or other young male is, except for the lack of ejaculation, a striking duplicate of orgasm in an older adult . . . the behaviour involves a series of gradual physiologic changes, the development of rhythmic body movements with distinct penis throbs and pelvic thrusts, an obvious change in sensory capacities, a final tension of muscles, especially of the abdomen, hips and back, a sudden release with convulsions, including rhythmic anal contractions followed by the disappearance of all symptoms.”

Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male

“In 5 cases of young pre-adolescents, observations were continued over periods of months or years, until the individuals were old enough to make it certain that true orgasm was involved; and in all of these cases the later reactions were so similar to the earlier behaviour that there could be no doubt of the orgastic nature of the first experience.” Como raios fizeram esse acompanhamento? Qual foi a metodologia ‘íntima’??

“In the volume on the female, Kinsey reports the ‘typical reactions of a small girl in orgasm, made by an intelligent mother who had frequently observed her 3-year-old in masturbation’ [!!]. The mother had reported:

Lying face down on the bed, with her knees drawn up, she started rhythmic pelvic thrusts, about one second or less apart. The thrusts were primarily pelvic, with the legs tensed in a fixed position. The forward components of the thrusts were in a smooth and perfect rhythm which was unbroken except for momentary pauses during which the genitalia were readjusted against the doll on which they were pressed; the return from each thrust was convulsive, jerky. There were 44 thrusts in unbroken rhythm, a slight momentary pause, 87 thrusts followed by a slight momentary pause, then 10 thrusts, and then a cessation of all movement.

There was marked concentration and intense breathing with abrupt jerks as orgasm approached. She was completely oblivious to everything during these later stages of the activity. Her eyes were glassy and fixed in a vacant stare. There was noticeable relief and relaxation after orgasm. A second series of reactions began 2 minutes later with series of 48, 18 and 57 thrusts, with slight momentary pauses between each series. With the mounting tensions, there were audible gasps, but immediately following the cessation of pelvic thrusts there was complete relaxation and only desultory movements thereafter.”

“Most of the activity occurred between the ages of 8 and 13, though there was some activity at every age.”

“The cessation of pre-adolescent sex play in the later pre-adolescent years was taken by Fraud and many of his followers to represent a period of sexual latency. On the contrary, it seems to be a period of inactivity which is imposed by the culture upon the socio-sexual activities of a maturing child, especially if the child is female.

Pre-adolescent masturbation is, on the other hand, usually carried over from the pre-adolescent to the adolescent and adult years, probably because it does not fall under the restraints which are imposed on a socio-sexual activity.”

“The most remarkable aspect of the pre-adolescent population is its capacity to achieve repeated orgasm in limited periods of time. This capacity definitely exceeds the capacity of teenage boys who, in turn, are much more capable than any older males.”

“His work was undertaken among a sample of the white population in the United States, and although it is remarkable that so much pre-adolescent sexual activity was found to occur in such a society, which like our own has been traditionally divided between attempts on the one hand to deny that it exists and on the other to stamp it out, it is probable that much more sexual expression would be found in a similar survey undertaken in a sexually freer culture.”

“Just as the homosexual activities of the Ancient Greeks were carefully censored from the attention of generations of schoolboys by Christian pedagogues, so there has been a similar conspiracy of silence on sexual behaviour in other cultures. Have you ever seen a TV documentary on child sex? Cameras and crews have been to all the right places, deep up the Amazon and into the Australian outback, but they never report on what the scholars know about juvenile sex.”

“In a few permissive societies adults participate actively in the sexual stimulation of infants and young children. Hopi and Siriono parents masturbate their youngsters frequently.” Clellan S. Ford & Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behaviour, 1951

“Among the Kazak, adults who are playing with small children, especially boys, excite the young one’s genitals by rubbing and playing with them. In this society autogenital stimulation on the part of young children is accepted as a normal practice. Mothers in Alorese society occasionally fondle the genitals of their infant while nursing it. During early childhood Alorese boys masturbate freely and occasionally they imitate intercourse with a little girl. As the children grow older, however, sexual activity is frowned upon and during late childhood such behaviour is forbidden to both boy and girl. Actually, however, they continue their sexual activity, but in secret.”

“Simulated coitus? At this point Ford and Beach slip into the same error as Malinowski, on whose famous study of the Trobriands they were relying. When Malinowski heard about real intercourse between quite small children, he simply couldn’t believe his ears, as might be expected in anyone with a Western background”

“Some of my informants insisted that such small female children actually have intercourse with penetration. Remembering, however, the Trobriander’s very strong tendency to exaggerate in the direction of the grotesque, a tendency not altogether devoid of a certain malicious Rabelaisian humour, [!] I am inclined to discount those statements of my authorities. If we place the beginning of real sexual life at the age of 6 to 8 in the case of girls, and 10 to 12 in the case of boys, we shall probably not be erring very greatly in either direction”

B.M., The Sexual Life of Savages in North West Melanesia

“There are, indeed, some societies in which enforcement of the prevailing incest regulations is the only major restriction on sexual activity among adolescents”

“Ford and Beach report a number of institutionalized child-adult sexual contacts:

Among the Siwans (Siwa Valley, North Africa), all men and boys engage in anal intercourse.”

“Among the Aranda aborigines (Central Australia), ‘pederasty’ is a recognised custom . . . Commonly a man, who is fully initiated but not yet married, takes a boy of 10 to 12, who lives with him as his wife for several years, until the older man marries.” Exemplo famoso.

“They are convinced that boys can become pregnant as a result of sodomy, and a lime-eating ceremony is performed periodically to prevent such conception.

Of course, boys do not become pregnant. The Keraki got it monumentally wrong, and factors such as this make it all too easy for ‘advanced’, ‘superior’ westerners to assume that the customs of ‘primitive’ peoples can teach us nothing.” Quando há relato etnográfico de ingenuidade tão tocante, é quase certo que se trata de erro do próprio antropólogo, inclusive!

“I do not feel we should ‘single out as peculiar’ men who fail to engage in anal intercourse, nor do I think fathers should push their children into unwanted sexuality, any more than they should prevent their sexual expression. Nevertheless, these accounts indisputably show us that given the opportunity children do develop a sexual life of their own, in which there is no ‘latency period’.”

AS LIMITAÇÕES DA RAÇA (CHAMADA HOMEM!): “‘it may be thought that the need for continual sexual expression is only felt compulsively from adolescence onwards (and even then perhaps more in males than females), possibly due to the biologic, hormonal changes that occur around and immediately prior to puberty. Studies have revealed many cases in which the absence of hormones, following castration in men, and the menopause in women, makes no difference, or very little difference, to the continuance of pre-existing levels of sexual activity.’ Sexual feelings and behaviour patterns appear to depend on a much wider variety of factors than hormones alone.”

“Kinsey points out that the average frequency of sexual outlet between adolescence and the age of 30 is 3 times per week. However, ‘There are a few males who have gone for long periods of years without ejaculating: there is one male who, although apparently sound physically, has ejaculated only once in 30 years. There are others who have maintained average frequencies of 10, 20, or more per week for long periods of time’”

“Perhaps the most famous study, even now, is that of 1937 by Bender and Blau, in which the authors stated:

‘This study seems to indicate that these children do not deserve completely the cloak of innocence with which they have been endowed by moralists, social reformers and legislators. The history of the relationship in our cases usually suggested at least some co-operation of the child in the activity, and in some cases the child assumed an active role in initiating the relationship.’

Interestingly, Bender and Blau’s attitude was highly traditional. They considered it their task to stop children from having an interest in sex. Their hospital ‘therapy’ was designed deliberately to crush sexual expression and to divert attention to more ‘normal’ childish interests.”

“In many of the sexually freer cultures described earlier children were allowed to watch their parents’ intercourse, or were masturbated by their parents, without any discernible adverse effects in terms of creating anxiety or emotional disturbance.” “One should also add that children who come to the attention of psychiatrists account for only a proportion of those who have sex with adults – a very tiny proportion at that. Others, with more satisfactory home backgrounds, are far more likely to have undetected relationships.”

“One wonders what ‘political’ motives J. Weiss et al. (‘A study of girl sex victims’, Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol. 29, 1955) would have come up with to explain Virginia’s sex play with a dog, without twigging the simple possibility that it turned her on!”

3. THE ‘MOLESTER’ AND HIS ‘VICTIM’

“Take, for instance, the little girl who will happily smile at and chatter to a ‘nice man’, and will sit across his knee with her legs apart. If the man is susceptible to paedophilic feelings, he may be tempted to see this as ‘seductive’ behaviour, when the child in fact may be quite unaware of the way he is interpreting events – she may be exhibiting, in the traditional sense, all the ‘innocence’ of childhood (even though, quite independently, she may also be highly sexed and know how to give herself an orgasm).”

“The various ‘participant victim’ studies reveal that children in this category are, typically, affection-seeking. In the bodily closeness of a caressing and touching relationship, it is exactly this sought-after affection that the paedophile provides.”

“That there are men – particularly men – in our society who are presumptuous in matters of sex is all too obvious: nearly every woman is familiar with having to run an uncomfortable gauntlet of male presumptions, from wolf-whistling and ‘flashing’ to bum smacking and, for an unfortunate few, rape. As feminists have pointed out, some of this behaviour may spring not just from false presumptions as to what is acceptable to women, but from utter indifference to what is acceptable, or even from outright hostility.

At any rate, the fact is that we do live in a sexist society. Men are encouraged by their social and sexual upbringing towards exactly the attitudes of arrogant, aggressive, flesh-consumerism of which they stand accused.”

“What I hope to show, however, is that there is much in consensual paedophilia, as opposed to child molesting, that presupposes a gentle, almost feminine type of sexual expression, rather than one which conforms to the masculine stereotype of dominance and aggression. Many people do not realise that there are consensual paedophilic acts, precisely because society makes no distinction between these acts and aggressively imposed ones. This absurdity is reflected in the legal phrase ‘indecent assault’, which covers not only cases of assault in the usual sense of that word, but acts which the child agreed to and perhaps, as is often the case, initiated.”

“Far from being unrestrained sex maniacs their approaches to children are almost always affectionate and gentle, and the sex acts which occur, mostly mutual display and fondling, resemble the sexual behaviour that goes on between children.”

D.J. West

“Miriam Darwin in the survey of 74 child victims in the California study was unable to show a case in which violence was used.”

“Despite half a century of Fraudian indoctrination about infantile sexuality and despite changes of attitude concerning most other sexual deviations, abhorrence and fear of paedophilia have not decreased. Through parents and schools and other community groups children are constantly warned to look out for ‘The Stranger’ and to distrust anybody they do not know. Unfortunately the picture presented usually does not fit the facts of most cases and therefore affords little protection to the child. The danger of creating paranoid and xenophobic (fear of strangers) attitudes can be more damaging to child-rearing in general than paedophilic occurrences.”

Mohr & Turner

“Although repeated researches (see Radzinowicz, 1957) have shown with great consistency that sexual offenders tend to keep to one particular type of sexual behaviour, often of a very partial kind, and very rarely gravitate to more serious types, this fact is strongly resisted by even the informed public. The rare exceptions receive great publicity, and in a population of 50 million even a rare event occurs somewhere every month or so. Such stereotypes profoundly affect the attitude of parents.”

“I feel that children are likeable to paedophiles in ways that are not purely physical; this would be consistent with the idea that the paedophilic offender may actually feel affection for his victim. Lest you feel it is self-evident that someone committing a sexual assault likes his victim, I would point out that in a previous study I found results which suggested that some rapists, for example, commit offences in states of heightened anger arousal and appear to be concerned to hurt rather than to achieve sexual gratification.”

“For a variety of good reasons, many sexual radicals completely reject medically-derived means of categorisation, which since Krafft-Ebing’s day have built up a picture of ‘the homosexual’ and ‘the paedophile’ as clinical entities”

“The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines paedophilia as ‘sexual love directed towards a child’. It is interesting that the endlessly difficult word ‘love’ should find a niche in this definition. I am glad that it has. I find it more appealing, more related to my own sentiments than the more colourless alternative ‘sexual attraction towards a child’, and the inclusion of the word ‘love’ automatically excludes the possibility of ‘paedophilia’ being used in the context of ‘sexual hate directed towards a child’, i.e. sex based on hostility, such as that involved in the sadistic rape or murder of a child.” “What is being described here is what David Swanson calls ‘the classic paedophile’, whose other predominant characteristic is that he has a consistent and often exclusive interest in children as sexual partners. What is meant by ‘co-operation’ here is that the paedophile is ‘turned on’ by situations in which the child is erotically active. As long ago as 1912 this was pointed out in an important and sometimes overlooked work by Moll, who wrote: ‘handling the child’s genitals plays the chief part, frequently because the offender can himself obtain sexual gratification only through inducing sexual excitement in the child and watching this excitement.’” “All in all, he will want to be liked by children, and is likely to regard them as what the sociologists call ‘significant others’ – ones who count.”

“In symbolic interactionist terms, some adults see children as ‘significant others’ whose judgements and appreciation are crucial for the adult’s self-concepts. Such adults would not jeopardise their self-concepts by committing acts which would detract from the child’s regard for them. We suggested, therefore, that among molesters who regard children as significant others, the offence would be of a nature not likely to alienate or harm the child.”

Charles McCaghy

“It is a view widely held and one which found favour among our police and legal witnesses, that seduction in youth is the decisive factor in the production of homosexuality as a condition, and we are aware that this view has done much to alarm parents and teachers. We have found no convincing evidence in support of this contention.”

Wolfenden Report

“Gagnon and Simon have pointed out that psychosexual orientation and responses are not learned in specifically sexual situations anyway, but rather through non-sexual interactions in early childhood. By around the age of 6, children have already developed ideas about what is ‘male’ and ‘female’ behaviour, and what is the ‘right’ behavioural pattern for them.”

“More general anxieties on behalf of ‘the victim’, particularly the question of whether she or he will suffer psychological damage as a result of the experiences in question, are at least partly derived from the imposition of the very term ‘victim’ onto all child-adult sex relations, irrespective of whether they are forceful or gentle, unacceptable or acceptable to the child. The ultimate absurdity in clinging to the false distinction between ‘molester’ and ‘victim’ is to be found in a term encountered earlier, that of the ‘participant victim’. Those researchers who adopted this curious term presumably felt they had to make some concession to orthodox thinking: society could not all at once be expected to understand the idea of child-adult sex in which there was no victimisation.

Perhaps because ‘men’ are assumed to be the victimisers, I find that women are more apt to cling to the image of the child as a victim. Yet, ironically, it is 2 women researchers who have done much to dispel this myth.

Lauretta Bender was one of them. Her description of a group of sexually active children was followed up 16 years later by a further study of the same children, which looked into the question of whether there had been any discernible psychological damage evidenced in failure to develop a satisfactory adult life, both sexually and generally. She found no problems which she felt could reasonably be attributed to the sexual experiences. Remember 7-year-old Virginia, who had sex with a janitor? The experience neither put her off sex for life, nor made a nymphomaniac of her. She became a nurse, married at 21 and, in the words of the study, ‘became a happy wife and mother’.”

“The psychological effects of sexual ‘assault’ on children have been researched on a scientifically rigorous basis (in a way which Bender’s studies never pretended to be) by Lindy Burton. Although Burton’s study included cases which could properly be called ‘assaults’, she is at pains to emphasise the consensuality often present in others.”

“‘Perhaps the most significant single characteristic of sexually assaulted children is their tendency to seek affection. The characteristic was noted by teachers (who did not know of their sexual experience) on both year’s testings. The most frequent comment regarding their behaviour was that they tended to sidle up to and hang around the teacher. In addition they were described as very anxious to bring objects to the teacher, always finding excuses for engaging him, very anxious to be in with the gang, trying to become the centre of attention, and tending to flashy dressing.’

While she suggests the possibility that the affection-seeking may represent a need to cling to familiar adults following an unsettling experience, Burton also recognises a totally different alternative (which is supported, as she says, by other studies), that children who need affection meet their sexual experiences in the course of their search for it. Burton even concedes that a further possibility cannot be ignored: ‘The affection seeking behaviour observed in this study might also indicate an attempt on the part of the child to replace the adult with whom he had a sexual relationship.’”

“Burton’s work was not designed to test the motive behind affection-seeking behaviour, however; so far as her study is concerned, the above comments are only speculations.”

“Interestingly enough, some studies have indicated that those children who appear to make the quickest ‘recovery’ from sexual ‘assault’, are not the ‘participant victims’ but the ‘accidental’ ones: the minority who are molested in the true sense, in public parks, playgrounds and so on. Yet the paradox is easily explained. The ‘accidental’ victim is likely to receive a great deal of parental sympathy and support in relation to the incident. On the other hand, the child who is ‘found out’ having a relationship with an adult is likely to be made to feel guilty about it – especially by parents struggling to repress any unwelcome thoughts that their own inadequacies (especially in failing to give their child affection) could be responsible for the relationship developing in the first place. The issue is complicated slightly by the fact that some ‘participant victims’ come from homes which show no sensitivity at all to the prevailing sexual mores of society.”

“The real disturbance may be much greater, however, in cases where the parents are very strong on ‘morals’, but not so good at being warm and loving towards their children.”

“Take the case of an 11-year-old boy whose parents overheard him tell his brother about a man who was ‘having sex’ with him. There was a family scene, mother crying, father pacing up and down and vowing he would ‘kill the bastard’. The police were called in. The boy was interrogated over and over again by both parents and police.

The boy was taken to the police station where he was told to lower his trousers. A doctor examined his penis, retracting the foreskin. The boy was made to bend down while the doctor put a lubricated rubber sheath on his finger which he inserted into the boy’s rectum. The man was charged, denied it, and the boy was examined by the magistrates. The man was remanded on bail, so in order to prevent the boy meeting him again, he was sent to stay with relatives in Ireland until the trial 3 months later.

What seems to have happened was that the boy was rather deprived of affection from his parents who were cold and undemonstrative. He had often allowed the man to cuddle him, and this sometimes led to the man feeling him inside his trousers. If one can make a strong attempt to master the disgust this might evoke, and consider the possible damage done to the boy by being starved of love at home, by enduring the anger, fearful interrogation, and most of all by submitting to the formal repetition by the doctor of the acts which were causing all the trouble, one can see that the offender was the last one from whom the boy needed protection. As a psychiatrist involved in the case put it, ‘If he hadn’t been buggered by the man, he certainly had been by the doctor.’ I think Ingram’s point is not so much that the doctor’s, ‘buggery’ was awful as an act, but that in the circumstances it was necessarily carried out formally, with cold, clinical indifference to the boy’s feelings. While anal intercourse can itself be experienced as pleasant, within a loving relationship, a doctor’s examination is scarcely likely to be so.” “Nine years later the boy is now 20, cold, repressed, afraid of sex, isolated and friendless, depending on anti-depressants to make his moods tolerable.”

“Only 3 years ago in our own country, [Holland] a 13-year-old boy was questioned from 9 A.M. until 5 P.M. in a small barred cell in a police station in order to extract evidence from him. He stubbornly maintained that nothing had happened, until the examiner said, ‘Good. If you keep on lying we will have to turn your friend loose. But your father has told me that he will waylay the fellow and kill him. Then your friend will be dead and your father will get 15 years in the clink for murder. And all because you persist in lying.’ Thereupon the young boy told everything, after which he went into a total psychological collapse.”

“Strange, isn’t it, that society professes a concern for the child and obsessively keeps her/him away from adult sexuality as an expression of this concern, yet when – for whatever reasons – sexual contacts are found to have occurred, the child’s real interests fly out of the window. She or he may then be harangued by parents and the police, subjected to medical examination, dragged through the courts and debarred from seeing the adult friend in question. Some concern!”

“‘Paederasty’, an older but not ancient word (first recorded literary usage in 17^th century), is unequivocally sexual, by virtue of incorporating the Greek ‘erastes’, meaning (sexual) lover. It has been defined, pejoratively, as ‘sodomy with a boy’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary), and thus denotes a specific act, rather than a predilection or orientation. The word is less in use now than of old, particularly in the last century, when it was virtually a synonym of ‘sodomy’, as the ‘boy’ in question could be a youth or even a young man. The first part of both words comes from ‘pais’, meaning ‘boy’, but only in the case of ‘paedophilia’ has this first part been generalised to include children of either sex.” Curiosa inversão lingüística do grego ao português, em que pais é o exato oposto!

“I am often asked what proportion of the adult population is paedophilic and whether more are attracted to boys than to girls, or vice versa. The answer to either question involves definitional problems and the practical difficulty of obtaining accurate data. Is a woman a paedophile if she gets a ‘buzz out of parenthood’? What about those mothers who report genital arousal while breast-feeding? Or fathers who think they are conventionally heterosexual, but who find to their alarm (as sometimes happens) that cuddling a young son can bring on an erection? Do people have to be exclusively attracted to children, or self-defined as paedophilic, for the label to be appropriate? And what do we mean by a ‘child’? Do we take puberty as the upper edge of childhood, or is the word ‘paedophilia’ to embrace the love of pubescent youngsters as well? Finally, in view of all these ambiguities, does the labelling process itself give a false impression of separable categories of people, when in fact the differences between them may be less important than the similarities? The problem of obtaining reliable data is even more difficult. Adults can be asked about their sexual preferences by means of a confidential questionnaire. Or inferences can be drawn about the sexual tastes of those whose behaviour leads them to court appearances for paedophilic offences. Or we can be guided by the professional experience of the psychiatrists to whom paedophiles go for ‘treatment’. None of these methods, or any others I have seen discussed, is at all satisfactory, for a variety of reasons. In particular, it cannot be over-emphasised that criminal statistics are misleading: a high percentage of those convicted of sexual offences involving children are not ‘classic’ paedophiles, i.e., they prefer an adult partner. In addition, only a small proportion of paedophiles have relationships which surface in the law courts. Of the practising paedophiles interviewed by Rossman, only 1% had ever been arrested (Parker Rossman, Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys: Exploring the Pederast Underground, p. 13). Dr. Edward Brongersma has written, ‘In a recently published French study, 129 men (average age 34 years) said they had had sexual contact with a total of 11,007 boys (an average of 85 different boys per man).[!] The laws which make such contact criminal are thus in practice ineffective. This enormously high dark number shows that the law has degenerated to pure arbitrariness against a few unlucky individuals.’”

“In response to an inquiry conducted among students at Nijmegen Catholic University in Holland, 13% of the boys and 18% of the girls reported that, as children, they had had at least one sexual contact with an adult” “Kinsey had data from 4,441 women, of whom 24% reported that they had been approached while they were pre-adolescent by adult males who appeared to be making sexual advances, or who had made sexual contacts with them. Half of these cases (52%) were of exhibitionism by the adult, and less than a quarter (22%) resulted in specifically genital contact with the child. At the University of California, 35% of the female students reported having had, as children, sexual relations with adults.”

“The criminal statistics for England and Wales (…) found that in the year under study (1973) 88% male partners/victims and about 70% of female partners/victims in cases of indecent assault were under 16. In this year, 802 persons (8 of them female) were convicted of indecent assault on a male, and 3,006 (6 of them female) were convicted of indecent assault on a female.”

“At the Old Bailey, in 1979, a defendant, Roger Moody, was acquitted of a charge of attempted buggery on a 10-year-old boy, on the directions of the judge, after it emerged that improper police questioning of the boy had yielded an unsound statement by the youngster. A further charge of indecent assault on the same boy was thrown out by the jury after only a 15-minute retirement. Both charges related to one alleged incident when the boy was sleeping on an adjacent mattress to the man during a holiday. The most important single feature of the proceedings was the testimony of the young ‘victim’ in court that he had not made a complaint against the man, but merely accepted the allegations as a possibility, when put to him by the police 18 months after the ‘offence’, and then without a parent being present, as required by the proper procedure for questioning children of that age. In other words – so the jury must have accepted – the police had got him to state that a crime with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment had been attempted, and that one carrying a maximum of 10 years’ prison had actually taken place, even though he eventually accepted in court that whatever he thought had touched him might have been a hand, and it might have been accidental, and it was as he was just waking up anyway. Interestingly, Roger Moody had freely admitted to being a paedophile and that he had a great deal of affection for the boy. The fact that, in the full knowledge of this, both judge and jury were unhesitatingly in favour of acquittal, amounts to a massive indictment of police handling of the case.”

4. PAEDOPHILIA IN ACTION

“Sometimes he had fits of being playful, or when he wanted to kiss me he liked to pull my pigtails or tickle me in the ribs or give me a big cuddle. Once I saw him looking down my blouse as I was stooping to pick strawberries, and that is quite a discovery for a rather slim lass of that age, especially when you, as I was then, are terribly proud of the little breasts already beginning to form.

I well remember that I went red but carried on as if I hadn’t noticed, but felt like undoing my blouse to let Uncle Herman see even better that I was a growing girl. First I didn’t dare, but later about midday when we were hoeing I said that the heat was stifling (it was a very hot day) and, very bravely, took off my blouse so as to be just like Uncle Herman and looked very sportsmanlike showing my naked torso. I was, of course, too young for a bra.

The way he looked at me standing there in my jeans! But, funnily enough, I wasn’t shy any more. The hoeing was soon finished and we suddenly felt like a drink of lemonade, logically because the little drawing room in the summer house that Uncle Herman had built could not be seen from the other allotments.

He was just different from other occasions and I remember that he was flattering me terribly; that I was so big and that he had no idea (as if I didn’t know better) that I already had a bust, and whether growing didn’t hurt, and whether I knew they were not often so big to start with. . . . It was just small talk, but naturally I lapped it all up.

And I didn’t mind at all him squatting in front of me, when I was sitting on a tree stump, and feeling my small breasts and rubbing his fingers over my nipples. It was not nasty, dirty or repulsive because, well, because it was Uncle Herman. This is something that can never be explained, naturally, but can only be felt if you knew him as we children did. There was no question of a schoolgirl ‘crush’.

As always, one thing led to another, as far as I can remember it was hardly 10 minutes before I was standing stark naked in front of him, but well inside the house, safely behind the curtains. And even that seemed to happen of its own accord. When I folded my arms behind my head, because I had discovered in the mirror at home that it made my breasts look bigger, Uncle Herman said that I would soon be getting hairs too under my armpits, and I proudly blurted that I had some ‘down below’. This he would not believe (or pretended not to) because my armpits were still bare and, when I insisted, he of course dared me to prove it. When I began to take off my jeans he drew me further indoors, I knew that I had not planned to undress completely but, when I had taken my jeans down far enough to show him a few blonde hairs, I suddenly became very daring and stripped them off.

Naturally I knew that my little naked body didn’t look like anything, but then I felt almost like a film star, for Uncle Herman looked at me as if I were Sophia Loren. It was, of course, a funny feeling standing there naked, but not at all nasty, as it had been shortly before at the sports examination for basketball, when I had to take my knickers down. I was quite at ease with Uncle Herman and I remember vaguely that he said that he felt it was such a pity that he hadn’t got such a nice daughter (Uncle Herman and Aunt Koosje had no children). In any case he was being paternal, but not for long, for when I sat on his knee he began to kiss me and to stroke my breasts, belly and thighs with his big hands. Very soon his fingers were busy between my legs.

I experienced this as a tremendous sensation, not so much from what I felt, but from what he did. I think that I understood that he liked young girls and had grasped his chance and I willingly allowed him to do what he wanted. He was so dear to me and said such nice loving things. I look back on it now as an odd but fine first experience; in fact I liked it so much that, when I went home, I asked if I could come and ‘play Eva’ (as he called it) again. Uncle Herman wanted that, too, and we arranged to go to the allotment on the following day after the evening meal. Uncle Herman often worked there, but now no work was going to be done.

I wanted to pull off my dress at once but he pulled me towards him and began to talk to me terribly seriously and to say that we couldn’t do it any more and that he could be put in prison for what he had already done; that my parents would never forgive him if they discovered what had happened and so on.

But when I said that I enjoyed his seeing me naked and being stroked all over, we became sort of blood brothers in order to share our secret.

Then he undressed me and laid me on the old battered sofa and kissed me all over. I found it was a wonderful sensation. Gradually this summer I was being completely initiated and ‘woken up’, and soon Uncle Herman took off his clothes too and taught me how a girl can satisfy a man. He taught me all kinds of positions and the pleasures of licking and sucking but he kept himself completely in control (that I find a real achievement) and did not have actual sexual intercourse with me.

He found it, sometimes, sufficient just to look at me, especially when I was doing naked gymnastics for him (I was and still am very supple); then I saw his member get stiff in his trousers. One day we did something really crazy and ran, stark naked except for our rubber boots, through the pouring rain, to pick berries. We had wonderful fun and there was nobody to see us and when, dripping wet, we took refuge indoors again, we dried each other and had sex.

Once again I don’t want to defend what Uncle Herman did and certainly don’t want to praise paedophilia highly, but I spent just as fine a summer as he did. It came suddenly to an end when Daddy, who is a station master, was transferred again and perhaps that was a good thing.”

“I myself have spoken to a number of prisoners and ex-prisoners who readily tell me that they can see nothing wrong with an attraction to little boys or girls, as long as any relationship is based on consent – but that they wouldn’t dream of saying the same thing to a prison psychiatrist.”

“In the same way that countless women grow up, are married and go through their whole lives without realising that the attraction they feel for other women is, in fact, sexual and that they are really gay, many women do not identify their feeling of love and attraction to children as sexual. Perhaps they don’t really enjoy sex with men, but get enormous pleasure from cuddling, caressing and bathing children. They get satisfaction from this but don’t see their natural spontaneous feelings as anything to do with paedophilia. A friend of mine, whose girlfriend had a baby, enjoyed a close loving relationship with the child and did see it as sexual – they had a lot of fun together.

In Mexico, mothers and grandmothers often lick their babies’ genitals to soothe them to sleep. The babies obviously like it. Is this a sexual assault? Should they all be arrested? It’s well known that babies and small children need to be touched and held a lot, otherwise they suffer severe emotional problems that can continue throughout their lives. So when do we define a touch as sexual? And indeed should we make that distinction at all?

Some would define the sexuality or otherwise of a touch in terms of its effect on the toucher, i.e. if the touch is accompanied by specifically genital arousal in the toucher, then it is a sexual touch. So when the correspondent talks about the ‘enormous pleasure’ women get from cuddling and caressing children, it is a moot point whether this pleasure is genital. In terms both of semantic precision and of the clarity of thought which such precision implies, the distinction as to what is, and is not, sexual pleasure is important. On the other hand, we should not lose sight of the fact that the effect on the child is the important thing in the last analysis. Does it really make any difference to the baby whether the adult who gives it delight by licking its genitals is definitely turned on sexually, or turned on from a more generalised sensuality, or even from the ‘pure’ non-sexual motive of deriving satisfaction from the pleasure given to the child? As the correspondent rightly says, should we bother to make the distinction at all?

Her comments go a long way to explaining why female paedophilia, like lesbianism, is largely invisible in our society. Women have a licence to be intimate with children, and their motives for doing so are invariably interpreted as non-sexual, in all but undeniably sexual situations, chiefly coitus. Thus occasionally a woman appears before the courts if she has allowed or encouraged boys to have intercourse with her. By contrast, in the absence of coitus as a possibility, sexual acts between women and girls are rarely proceeded against. I imagine most people think they never happen and that women just do not want them – yet I personally know women who feel that a major part of their sexual response is towards little girls.

The following account of lesbian paedophilia appeared in Body Politic, the Canadian gay magazine, and relates a story from the youngster’s point of view. As will be seen, concern over the effects of a relationship need not be all one way.

‘Donna lives in a small town in staunch Presbyterian Ontario where everyone knows everyone else, and where <it’s difficult to be unconventional and almost impossible to be lesbian.>’

Sharon was a teacher at her public school.

‘She first taught me 6^th grade. I guess I was attracted to her then though I didn’t think of it in sexual terms. But then I didn’t think of anything in sexual terms at the time.’

Sharon was a married woman – her husband was also a teacher – and she had 2 children. At the time, she was more than twice Donna’s age. The first woman Donna was actually involved with, however, was Jean.

‘I worked away from home the summer I was 14. I met Jean and was really impressed by her. But it’s hard to imagine going to bed with a schoolfriend’s mother. It was the next summer before I actually had the nerve to do it. I was 15 – she was 43. She was a beautiful woman, but our relationship was fraught with contradictions. I wanted it and initiated it, but I also felt guilty and fearful; I knew Jean’s life as a 43-year-old wife and mother of 7 children was complicated enough without the added burden of a lesbian relationship with a 15-year-old kid.’

Meanwhile, Donna had maintained a regular correspondence with Sharon.

‘It seems quite strange, looking back on it, the way we cultivated our friendship. Real child-adult friendships are probably quite rare. We wrote letters even though we only lived a few miles apart; that made it seem a bit furtive, too. I guess we had to be content with melodrama when we had so few opportunities to see each other and when there were no acceptable forms for expressing what we felt for each other. That is, until I came out for the first time.’

By the following summer, Sharon and Donna had been able to contrive some way of spending time together.

‘I had just turned 16 when I told her about Jean and me. In retrospect my big confession seems sort of unreal. We had been out canoeing and had gone ashore on a small island. It sounds very romantic, doesn’t it? I was a regular little Conspirator. Only it didn’t turn out exactly the way I had planned. I was more or less saying to Sharon <All right, if you feel the same way about me as I feel about you, don’t be afraid. You aren’t leading me astray. You aren’t taking me anywhere I haven’t already been.> Her reaction seemed mostly to be shock. I guess I wasn’t the most tactful 16-year-old.’

But Donna’s coming out about her relationship with Jean eventually did have the desired effect.

‘Sharon later told me that she felt strongly, almost magnetically drawn to me for those few minutes on the island and that her own responses were what really shocked her. Ours was her first lesbian relationship and seemed, for her, to carry all the significance of a first exploration of her sexual identity. But again I felt guilty. Partly because of society’s condemnation, should the nature of our relationship ever become known. But more because, although Sharon’s sexual orientation is to other women, she has chosen to live a heterosexual lifestyle. And I was a threat to her family – her security. Again, I wondered if maybe I wasn’t taking more from her in emotional support and understanding than I could return.’”

In many people’s eyes, it would be inappropriate to say that Donna was a ‘child’ at the time of her association with Jean and Sharon. But what about Beth Kelly, now mature in years, and a radical lesbian feminist, who, as a ‘precocious’ 8-year-old, developed a relationship with a grown woman? She writes:

‘The first woman I ever loved sexually was my great-aunt; our feelings for each other were deep strong, and full. The fact that she was more than 50 years older than I did not affect the bond that grew between us. And, yes, I knew what I was doing – every step of the way – even though I had not, at the time, learned many of the words with which to speak of these things.

Aunt Addie was a dynamic, intelligent, and creative woman – who refused, all her life, to be cowed by convention. In an extended family where women played out <traditional> housewifely roles to the hilt, she stood out, a beacon of independence and strength. She was a nurse in France during the I World War, had travelled, read books, and lived for over 20 years in a monogamous relationship with another woman. Her lover’s death pre-dated the start of our sexual relationship by about 2 years. But we had always been close and seen a great deal of each other. In the summers, which my mother, brother and I always spent at her seashore home, we were together daily. In other seasons, she would drive to visit us wherever we were living, and often stayed for a month or so at a time…

I adored her; that’s all there was to it. I had never been taught at home that heterosexual acts or other body functions were dirty or forbidden, and I’d been isolated enough from other children to manage to miss a lot of the usual sexist socialisation learned in play.

It never occurred to me that it might be considered <unnatural> or <antisocial> to kiss or touch or hold the person I loved, and I don’t think that Addie was terribly concerned by such things either. I do know that I never felt pressured or forced by any sexual aspects of the love I felt for her. I think I can safely say, some 20 years later, that I was never exploited – physically emotionally, or intellectually – in the least.’”

Eglington, Greek Love, Neville Spearman, London, 1971.

https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Love-J-Z-Eglinton/dp/1589636376

5. DO CHILDREN NEED SEX?

“The difficulty of getting love and lust together again after they have been firmly severed in childhood is at the root of almost every problem of erotic relations between 2 people.”

“James Prescott, an American neuropathologist, has gone so far as to suggest that sexual satisfaction early in life, and sensual – specifically, tactile – pleasuring in infancy, are a direct antidote to violence in adulthood. His theory is based on correlations between levels of violence in 49 pre-literate cultures for which data were available, and certain variables reflecting physical affection – such as the extent in each of the cultures to which infants were cuddled, caressed and played with, and the permitted levels of pre-marital and extramarital sex.

The method of measuring levels of ‘affection’ or ‘violence’ in any particular culture will of course always be open to dispute, but it is worthwhile pointing out that the scales used by Prescott were developed independently, by anthropologists.”

“Six societies, apparent exceptions, were characterized by both high infant affection and high violence. But in five of these cultures a high value was placed on virginity and pre-marital sexual repression was the rule. On the other hand, 7 societies were characterized by both low infant physical affection and low adult physical violence. All of these were permissive towards early sexual behaviour – which tends to confirm the therapeutic value noted by some observers of the hugging and caressing of otherwise emotionally deprived children in paedophilic relationships.”

“Prescott points to laboratory experiments with animals which are consistent with his theory. ‘A raging, violent animal,’ he says, ‘will abruptly calm down when electrodes stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain. Likewise, stimulating the violence centres of the brain can terminate the animal’s sensual pleasure and peaceful behaviour.’”

6. TOWARDS MORE SENSIBLE LAWS

“It is now over 4 years since PIE [ver a história do PIE nos capítulos finais] formulated its proposals on the age of consent, in the form of legal recommendations made to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee. At the time, the proposals were received in total silence by the press, although we understand that at least one cabinet minister was impressed.”

7. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

“The idea that children can have rights in any matter, never mind the contentious area of sexuality, is a new one, and at this stage in history it is still considered incumbent on those who talk of ‘children’s rights’ to provide some philosophical justification of their position.”

“This paternalistic conception of children’s rights represents what is now entrenched, traditional thinking, at least in the Western democracies. It is to be seen most clearly set out in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which has its origin in a League of Nations declaration of 1924.” De fato, difícil de imaginar que algo emanado da Liga das Nações, em pleno entreguerras, que só jogou mais sal na ferida, seja sensato.

“Thus in Principle 6 it is stated that ‘The child, for the full and harmonious development of his personality, needs love and understanding. He shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents.’”

“Also in Principle 7, on education, it is stated: ‘The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents.’” Só hipocrisias. Pode-se mesmo dizer de algum indivíduo até hoje que ele teve jamais pais genuinamente sábios e ponderados?

“The phrase ‘best interests of the child’ is one we shall be considering a lot during this chapter, for in it is embodied the assumption that the benevolent exercise of control of the child by its parents, or sometimes by the State, is incontestably the correct, indeed the only, way to secure the ‘best interests of the child’.”

“When intervention occurs, bureaucratic discretion takes the place of family discretion. The statutes allowing for State intervention imply that the State’s representative will know what is in the child’s ‘best interests’.”

“In addition to acts which are criminal for adults (e.g. armed robbery), children may be accused of delinquency for misbehaviour that is not criminal for adults. The so-called status offences, incorrigibility, truancy, running away, sexual precociousness, represent a confused mixture of social control and preventive care that has resulted in the confinement of thousands of children for the crime of having trouble growing up.” Rodham

“The classic case of Maria Colwell illustrates the point perfectly. 7-year-old Maria’s stepfather, William Kepple, was found guilty of beating her to death, not long after a court had decided she must leave her foster home to live with him and her natural mother, Mrs. Pauline Kepple. Her natural father died when she was a baby.

Maria had been taken into local authority care when she was 6 months old, after an NSPCC investigation had revealed neglect by her mother. In the years that followed she was fostered with relatives in what was by all accounts a good and loving home, until Mrs. Kepple exercised her parental ‘right’ to the return of the child, unopposed by the local authority social worker in charge of the case.” Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Maria_Colwell.

“The bureaucratic view, based on the dogma that every conceivable effort should be made to have the child brought up by its natural mother, was woefully doctrinaire and unsuited to the circumstances of the case. If only the law had had available some mechanism by which Maria’s own views could have been made known – she wanted to stay with her foster parents – the whole ghastly business need never have happened.

Fortunately, publicity surrounding the Colwell case, and others like it, contributed to the success of Dr. David Owen’s Parliamentary Bill which introduced provisions for children to be represented in court by advocates who would represent their interests separately from those of either the parents or the local authorities”

“Richard Farson, author of Birthrights, published in the United States in 1974, is perhaps the most famous of them. John Holt, of Escape From Childhood renown, is another, and both owe a debt to the French historian Philippe Ariés, whose book Centuries of Childhood was the first in the field with a coherent development of the idea that the whole concept of ‘childhood’ – of children as necessarily ‘innocent’ and incapable beings – is a relatively recent invention.”

“Before the 17^th century, children were not thought of as innocent. Only then did innocence become the idea of childhood. It was at that time that children were no longer given indecent books to read and life began to be hidden from them. Previously, adults in the presence of children had talked and acted openly about sex and every other ‘adult’ matter. There was considerable sexual precocity. Louis XIV was in his wife’s bed at age 14. Girls often married at 13.”

“(And one must bear in mind that the age of puberty was much higher then than now.)”

“Farson rightly points to the power politics of religion coming to take the child’s mind as a battlefield: religion as a factor in education had been a matter of earnest theorizing since Plato, but the stressing of the peculiar importance of the child’s mind, especially the young child, because of his impressionability, was the preserve of the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation. Hence their well-known saying: ‘Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.’”

“If it was felt that the child’s mind was a blank, it was at least conceded that his heart, or soul, was another matter. Those who fought for the control of the child’s mind, and through it for his heart and soul, at least began to take the child seriously as a person, even if it was only to mould and change him to a particular straight and narrow development.

Thus we have a curious, and paradoxical state of affairs in which 2 apparently mutually-exclusive views of the child develop hand in hand. One is that of the stern religionist who feels that as we are all ‘conceived in sin’, we are by nature sinful. We are imbued from the start with a devilish, lustful will, which has to be broken; hence the belief that children should be made from the earliest stages of life to feel tortured by guilt about masturbation: it had to be eliminated with the utmost ferocity. It was this doctrine which gave impetus from the 18^th century onwards to all those stories about masturbation making one go blind or insane, and which meant that any discovered transgressions would be punished by the whip, or by locking up the child’s genitalia in absurd and obscene chastity devices designed to prevent self-manipulation.

Yet this very restriction of the child, this ferocious insistence that all his sexual feelings be repressed, was – at the same time – used to reinforce the sentimental notion of childhood ‘innocence’: not only is the child forced to be unsexual, but he is then praised for the ‘innocence’ of his nature, which is totally unnatural to him.”

“Farson’s view of history, à la Ariés, is that a proper view of the child was held in former times and that we lost it. Others have found this ‘golden age’ idea rather simplistic, or at least insupportable in view of the grossness of child abuse in practically every era of history, including those eras before the ideas of ‘innocence’ and ‘protection’ took a hold.”

“in the most advanced societies, particularly in the United States, young people can spend an extended adolescence of non-paying college work, during which they are economically dependent on parental support, right into their mid-20s or beyond. And if they don’t make it, if they leave high school, or the comprehensive, at the earliest opportunity, they remain similarly alienated by joining the dole queue, or going to a low-grade, low-income job in which their alienation from full adult status is similarly complete.” Bear the criminal, bear the criminal until it’s time to shine and to avenge your offended spirit! With hate, TO Jesus!

QUANDO OS SIONISTAS ERAM COMUNISTAS ELES ERAM MELHORES

“Farson addresses his attentions to the merits of that-most-examined-of-all commune arrangement, the Israeli kibbutz. He points to a number of factors about the kibbutz which reduce parent-child conflict:

1) The child, supported by the kibbutz, is economically independent of his parents;

2) equality of the sexes eliminates the patriarchal family system;

3) the importance of the nurse allows the child to love someone other than his parents;

4) because nurses handle the primary discipline, the daily visits of parents and children can take place under ideal conditions;

5) jealousy and anger that have to be expressed in the family can be expressed in the kibbutz because the child can find more legitimate objects of aggression among peers; and

6) the collective framework shields the child from overprotective or domineering parents who might block his efforts to become independent.”

“Underlying all these questions is a yet more fundamental range of questions about society’s expectations of its children: about the implicit, or explicit, aims of child rearing and of education, about each generation’s expectations for its children as they grow up, not only as individuals, but in terms of the future nature and achievements of society as a whole – though it is even an assumption to suppose that all societies have any expectations of their offspring: there are some happy-go-lucky peoples (or irresponsible, unimaginative ones?) who do not consciously impose values or goals of any sort, beyond what can be summarized in the slogan ‘Do your own thing’ (if by sheer chance, you happen to have developed one!).” Have money, be like me! Win, you fool! Said J.

“The Israeli sense of purpose lies in fairly crude, but clearly defined, nationalism. Other examples of such a strong communal purpose can be found in a variety of religious communes, in Plato’s education of the ‘guardians’, and indeed in their ideological descendant, the English public school system (not, one would have thought, the most fruitful place at which to start the quest for children’s rights!).

But we must be careful that in any such quest we do not put the cart before the horse: we must first, like Plato, look to the nature of ‘the good’, and of a ‘just’ social order, before we can proceed to the issue of whether the idea of children’s rights is at all appropriate.”

John Rothchild & Susan Wolf , Children of the Counterculture, 1976.

“The authors, themselves high-achieving, middle-class parents, admit to having ambitions for their own children, and make no bones about it. But at the same time they point out that the social ‘education’ of the counter-culture children was not nearly as disastrous as might be supposed. Despite their immensely dangerous surroundings, and their lack of formal education, or guidance of any sort, these children seemed to be growing up to be much more pleasant and self-reliant than conventional middle-class children. There appeared to be amongst them a sort of new breed of Noble Savage, like 12-year-old Andy Peyote, whom the authors met when he was hitch-hiking, alone, on a Californian highway. The son of a famous commune pioneer from the New Mexico hills, young Peyote – courteous, clean, intelligent, competent in the practical business of looking after himself, and neither a deadbeat nor a rebel (there being no rules or rule enforcers to rebel against) – clearly struck a romantic chord in the hearts of Rothchild and Wolf.” Um Tom Sawyer do mundo real?

“I must admit it: letting children do what they want makes me nervous. I’m scared of anarchy. I used to like a reasonably orderly classroom, full of well-behaved children who put their hand up to ask questions one at a time, who paid attention to what I told them and didn’t give too much trouble. Even now, if I’m chatting to children who don’t know who I am, even if I’m being friendly and relaxed and informal, I tend to give the impression, despite myself, that I’m a schoolteacher. I don’t boss children around, but just in small things – like suggesting that they put their lollipop wrappers in a waste bin – I automatically find myself modelling their behaviour. This being the case, I find the romantic freedoms of the counter-culture completely hair-raising and devoutly to be avoided. On the other hand the freedom of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Education is a different matter.”

“However, I cannot help but agree with the view of Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up Absurd, when he asserts that Neill, in encouraging children to govern themselves, was to some extent falsely imposing adult ideas: one man one vote, the social contract, political democracy, can be taken much too seriously.”

No geral o autor começa com gás seus capítulos, mas logo se torna um debate insosso de minúcias como “hora de ir para a cama”, citando sem descanso seu material bibliográfico. Além disso, quando chega, por exemplo, a citar Rawls ou feministas, eu preferiria ter contato com estas fontes na origem primeiro, para não corer o risco de estar sendo mal-conduzido por outras lentes. Destarte, me obrigo a praticamente pular para o próximo capítulo mais ou menos na metade do anterior. Em quase todos acabei por fazê-lo, até quase o fim do livro, em que O’Carroll (pseudônimo?) retoma vários pontos interessantes do início da obra!

8. ‘CONSENT’ AND ‘WILLINGNESS’

“Basic elements constituting freedom of choice arguably include:

(i) a full knowledge of all the short- and long-term consequences to which participation in a sexual act could lead;

(ii) a developed notion of which sexual activities (and partners) are exciting and desirable;

(iii) control over the situation, so that withdrawal from it can be made at any point, if so wished.

These factors may prompt some approving nods as criteria for consent, if only because they appear to rule out most, if not all, children. Giving it a moment’s more thought, however, a problem arises: even adults, in embarking on a sexual encounter or relationship, cannot be sure ‘where it will all end’; nor do most people enter adulthood with a fixed idea as to the activities, and people, that might turn them on – the scope for experiment and discovery is a lifelong one. Only the third factor, that of control over the situation, appears to maintain its crucial importance when viewed in an adult context.

The usual mistake is to believe that sexual activity, especially for children, is so alarming and dangerous that participants need to have an absolute, total awareness of every conceivable ramification of taking part before they can be said to give valid consent. What there most definitely needs to be, is the child’s willingness to take part in the activity in question; whatever social or legal rules are operated, they must not be such as to allow unwilling children to be subjected to sexual acts. But there is no need whatever for a child to know ‘the consequences’ of engaging in harmless sex play, simply because it is exactly that: harmless.

Sex, especially the non-penetrative sex play to which child-adult activity is almost entirely confined in the case of younger children (i.e. those children of whom it can most readily be said that ‘They don’t know what they are doing’), is not in itself remotely dangerous – unlike playing in a busy road. Nor do children need firm ideas of what a particular new experience will be like, any more than do adults trying, say, ‘69’ for the first time: the activity may prove more, or less, exciting than they suppose, but as it is completely harmless there is no reason why it cannot be safely explored.

It will of course be pointed out that children who enter a sexual relationship blissfully and innocently unaware of sexual shame and guilt, could be in for a rude awakening when a relationship is discovered. This leaves a question. Should we protect children from sex (to avoid the consequences of the guilt and social retribution arising from it) or, alternatively, should we make the reduction of guilt a priority? Knowing the hideous consequences of guilt, and the harmlessness of sex per se, I myself don’t find it a particularly difficult question to answer.

In a nutshell, there is no reason why the same criteria of ‘consent’ that we would apply to a young adult signing on for a 9-year term in the Army, or for a life-long commitment in marriage, should operate at all: such criteria, which hang on mature judgement, are not necessary for the protection of the child’s best interests.” Discurso generalizado: Agora que você já é um hominho, pode morrer por nosso país; ou trabalhar no McDonald’s e ralar para sustentar novas crianças que deverão esperar 18 anos até cuidarem do próprio nariz (ou jogarem a vida no lixo)!

“A lack of ability to ‘read’ an adult’s (possibly disguised) sexual wishes and intentions, and a failure to understand that their own (merely) friendly behaviour may be interpreted as intentionally seductive, could result in children allowing things to happen ‘before they know where they are’. Eager friendliness with an adult could quickly turn to apprehension, and perhaps to passive compliance in sexual acts which were not desired. Such a situation would plainly be unsatisfactory, for although the child might theoretically be able to say ‘no’, she or he might (perhaps through sudden fear of the adult, as a result of his unexpected behaviour) find herself or himself in practice unable to do so.”

“The possibility that adults may tend to ‘engineer’ the willingness of children, that they may ‘manipulate’ their consent, gives rise to a great deal of unease, and needs to be considered at some length. It might be suggested, for instance, that no matter how precocious a young child’s sex education has been, there has to be a first time for all her/his experiences, and at this point the child is not in a position critically to evaluate whatever an adult partner says an experience will be like, or what it will lead to.” “In our culture, the words ‘disadvantage’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘vulnerability’ immediately spring to mind as concomitants of the younger partner’s lack of experience; in the pro-sexual cultures examined earlier, ideas roughly corresponding to our words ‘guidance’, ‘showing how’, or ‘initiation’, represent the prevailing way of thinking.”

“In Britain it is enshrined in the 1944 Education Act that all children in all schools shall begin the day with an act of worship – the only element in the curriculum which is insisted upon by statute. This being the case – religion being considered to be of vital importance – one might have expected that there would be an equal concern in Government, at least as great as that in relation to sex, that children should not be subjected to ‘manipulation’ by ruthless adult salesmen offering every kind of creed; that these people should not be free to exploit the vulnerable minds of children. If it is true that children are incapable of making judgements about sexual relationships, how much more adept are they likely to be at judging the rival claims of Protestant and Catholic, or Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Exclusive Brethren?” “But no. Even though this is an important issue, adults are free to fill a child’s mind with any prejudice or bigotry they like, without any danger of facing a sentence for corrupting a minor, assault on a child’s mind, or anything else. Children are seen as fair game for the imposition of any religious belief or value system that the adult, particularly the parents, cares to impose.” Uma religião falocêntrica. Que ironia!

“Why does society tolerate this? Partly, there is a vague feeling that it is better for a child to have some religion than none at all – not least because most religions emphasize a restrictive sexual ‘morality’!”

“By a draconian anti-sexual emphasis of this sort, however, society would achieve (as it in fact does) a lasting repression of sexuality in children, and destructive feelings of sexual guilt lasting throughout life – exactly the vicious circle from which I am suggesting society should try to break free. Less heavy-handed measures might include support for extended, non-nuclear family arrangements, in which the infant’s upbringing would be less monopolized by one person than at present, and thus less subject to the idiosyncratic needs and projections of any one person.”

“corporal punishment. There is no shortage of school teachers ready to beat out the fantasized ‘badness’ of their charges, largely for their own gratification. It is curious that this rates as such an unobjectionable activity in our society, especially among those who furiously oppose the sexual ‘corruption’ of children.”

“Young children above the age of infancy become susceptible to manipulation of a less direct kind, characterized by deception. When children acquire language, they can be told untruths, from the relatively (though not entirely) benign Father Christmas myth, to the pernicious threat of the ‘bogeyman’, who comes to take away naughty children. Sexual myths usually fall into the pernicious category, alas, so that the whole area of sexuality becomes poisonously invested with mystery and darkness – and the perpetrators, far from being paedophiles, are usually ordinary parents who, because of their own sexual anxieties and conflicts, are inclined to deceive children with such classics of deception as the idea that babies are brought by the stork.”

“A paedophile who concocts a non-sexual ‘reason’ for he and a small child to strip naked together, say, may succeed in arousing the child’s sexual curiosity and excitement. This would quite clearly be manipulation, based on exploiting the ignorance of the child as to the adult’s motives. Supposing, by contrast, the paedophile had been scrupulously non-manipulative. Supposing, instead of playing tricks, he had simply, and openly, invited the child to ‘play’ sexually. Both approaches would require for their success the child’s willing involvement and participation at all stages. The fact that in the more manipulative case the participation is induced by sleight of hand [destreza, astúcia] is really less important than the fact that the child is relaxed and enjoying the situation. Indeed, the sleight of hand may be an effective means of enabling the situation to occur ‘naturally’, so far as the child is concerned, without any embarrassment or uncertainty on the adult’s part.”

9. POWER AND EQUALITY

“Not all women see this power relationship as necessarily a problem though. Having researched paedophilia for a higher degree thesis, Jane Gale has written (‘Paedophilia’, MA thesis for the University of Kent, 1978):¹

‘Sexual acts between children are often considered exploratory and are consequently acceptable. Between child and adult the act is not considered exploratory, but rather a power relationship as the adult has a greater life experience and a greater propensity for evil and by his superior physical and mental strength may harm the child far more than another child could. It must be remembered that the adult, if he has a greater propensity for evil; also has a greater propensity for good.¹ If a relationship should be deemed unacceptable because of the unequal distribution of power, then most heterosexual adult relationships are unacceptable.³ The greater life experience of the adult may be more beneficial to the child than a relationship with someone of his own age.’”

¹ Essas bibliografias são impossíveis de encontrar.

² Argumento muito falacioso e conveniente, embora filosoficamente correto.

³ Correto. Aliás, maioria das homossexuais e parafílicas também.

“Another model, made much of in J.Z. Eglington’s Greek Love (op. cit.), is that of teacher-pupil – the mentor relationship.”

“The phrase ‘a woman trying to catch a man’ is much more familiar. Traditionally, it means trying to catch a man in marriage; to inveigle him into committing himself into a life-long contract, to lure him into providing her with emotional and economic security. Jill Richard¹ (‘Children’s sexuality’, Radical Therapist, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1976) and other feminists would doubtless agree that the politics of ‘catching your man’ are self-defeating, leading the woman into self-imposed bondage, dependency and inferior status. The implications for the man of the woman’s success in making her catch are also a matter of male regret: in winning a woman’s love, in winning regular sex, he pays the heavy price (usually too heavy, he feels) of being responsible or having commitments.

¹ [Da autora, um artigo mais contemporâneo – envolvendo a polêmica do retrocesso da prática do aborto legal nos EUA –: https://www.academia.edu/32396125/Pussy_Wars.]

‘Responsibility’ and ‘commitment’ are in fact distinctively key words of adult life and often relate to matters outside personal relationships (…) a priest may have a ‘great sense of commitment’ to the Church.” Compromisso e responsabilidade laboral – para o resto temos zero energia!

“Faced with a woman who uses her personal-political art to get a man to sign on the dotted line of a life-long marriage contract, a man does need such maturity (and often hasn’t got it). He needs to be able to make subtle judgements about whether he and she are going to be suited to each other even when, in years to come, they may find each other a little less physically compelling. Notoriously, when people are romantically in love they are incapable of making such decisions sensibly: they become blind to the fact that because they ‘love’ each other now, this happy state may not last indefinitely. As Denis de Rougement (Love in the Western World, Anchor, New York, 1957) has eloquently argued, marriages based on the ideal of romantic love are built on shaky foundations, and the mere fact that a couple are adult when they make their decision does not alter this.”

“Marriage is not so different from a hire-purchase contract. You don’t sign unless you can keep up the payments. And you don’t know your capacity for keeping up the payments unless you first have experience in handling money (or in marriage, the opposite sex) and your judgement is mature. Insufficiently mature judgement, it hardly needs saying, can land one with a great deal of misery and hardship.”

“In the 60s and early 70s, it was the height of fashion to be a sexual revolutionary, a ‘swinger’, a wife or husband swapper, a group-sex, happy-go-lucky all-round fun-lover. The name of the game was to have sex without guilt. To enjoy the bodies of others, and let others enjoy one’s own, without the essentially selfish aspect of trying to own the person inside the body, without trying to trap her or him into a ‘heavy’, committed relationship, which would serve only to shackle a partner in a physical and emotional chastity belt for much of the time. If only people would let their partners go when they wanted to, instead of expending a lot of emotional energy on keeping them away from rivals, then all would be OK. Everyone would have a lot of sex fun. Everyone would be spontaneously warm and loving to everyone else, not exclusively to one closely-guarded body-and-soul mate. [Bom demais para ser verdade!]

The trouble is that in an adult context the issues are not nearly as simple as many people liked to pretend they were, or really thought they were. Some genuine, truly generous-hearted people, believed that the selfish aspects of possessive love could be broken if only people would trust each other: trust the stranger as much as the known quantity: trust the wife’s newly acquired boyfriend to be as unpossessive as oneself, so that one would not be in danger of ‘losing’ her, only ‘sharing’ her. [E se o commitment fosse tão sério: e daí se a perdesse? Outras andorinhas viriam…] Some people managed to make it work. Others saw the pitfalls, the potential for betrayal, the double-dealing in sexual diplomacy. They saw the fact that smooth and cynical operators of the new freedom could get themselves a lot of sex all over the place and still keep one person as their special possession. (…) And then, what about the need for stability and commitment in bringing up a family?” Quase a mesma coisa que um burocrata liberal inserido num regime de autogestão socialista!

“The men in boy-man relationships know that most of the boys are not going to grow up gay: they are Ariel spirits, happy for the moment to give and receive affection and sex play, but soon they will fly away to girls and adulthood. One might as soon try to catch the wind as tie them down in a heavy, exclusive, jealous relationship. They’d be off and away before you could say ‘sexual politics’.” “What about the 13-year-old girl who falls desperately in love with an older man? Aren’t they all vulnerable to the adult’s sexual politics?” “Personally, I wouldn’t like to be a parent responsible for coldly squashing such a young love. I wouldn’t want to say to a 13-year-old daughter, ‘What do you see in the old goat? He’s only after one thing, and I’m not going to let you see him again!’”

“A friend of mine – we’ll call him Bill – went for a long holiday in Malta. Bill is a very likeable and perfectly ‘normal’ heterosexual, whose main passion in life is angling [fishing, no sentido social ou figurado, fisgar – aqui, me parecia o sentido mais literal e ‘inocente’ possível]. In the first week of Bill’s stay on the island, a boy of 9 or 10 came to watch him fishing. Over the next 6 weeks or so the lad was his constant companion. When the time came for Bill to return to England, the child wanted to go with him. When told this was impossible, he did everything in his power to persuade Bill to stay. There was a scene that was not merely tearful, but anguished – hysterical even – like those harrowing scenes we associate with a court that awards custody of a child to the ‘wrong’ parent. Bill was astonished and appalled. He had no idea how much the boy had fallen for him. One does not know why he felt such a bond with Bill, or what deep need inside the boy Bill was at least partly fulfilling. What is clear is that the trauma of parting cannot be attributed to the effects of sexual seduction, or to any ‘manipulation’ by the adult. There had been none of either.”

10. CHILDREN IN EROTICA AND PORNOGRAPHY

“Child pornography and child prostitution are matters which provoke an even greater sense of outrage, if that is possible, than child-adult sexual relations as such, and with some good reason.

Whereas a paedophilic relationship may depend for its existence simply on sexual and emotional ties between the child and adult involved, both pornography and prostitution appear to have their primary raison d’être in the pursuit of money. Sometimes the child makes money on his own account, sometimes it finds its way into the hands of parents, almost always porn producers are motivated by profit.”

“For most youth, it’s the only way to get exposed, the only way to get sex with men … I knew I was a homosexual at 9 years old, I knew what I wanted, but the only way I knew how to get it was to go to the theatre and ask for money. Maybe that’s hustling, but it was very fulfilling – it served its purpose.”

Richi McDougall

“Exploitation of this sort is essentially a problem associated with poverty, such as that in Victorian England and many parts of the Third World today. The answer accordingly lies more in the elimination of poverty than in law enforcement. But it should also be realized that prostitution is to a great extent rooted in sexual restriction, not in sexual freedom: as Engels said, the price paid by Victorian society for its official code of strict monogamy was that prostitution flourished alongside it.”

“It is in any case more than a little ironic that the anti-pornographers should be the ones to express anxiety on this score: the more God-fearing among them usually make no bones about beating the fear of God into their own children, and commend the use of corporal punishment in schools.”

“‘Pornography’, like ‘fornication’, is a term heavily laden with overtones of shame and degradation. There may indeed be a place for such a word, if we want to talk about depictions or descriptions of sex which is itself in some way shameful or degrading (such as the rape scene from the film Straw Dogs [Sob o Domínio do Medo, 1971],¹ or sexist representations which cast women as the mere playthings of men), but we need a positive word as well, to describe the joyous or beautiful representation of the human body and happy sexual acts – and we have such a word: ‘erotica’.

¹ [E observe: hoje um filme classificado para +16 apenas (essas classificações são sempre histéricas e reacionárias – significa: normalização do estupro)!]

The question of when a representation is degrading and when it is beautiful is of course massively subjective; but we cannot possibly move towards a society with a healthily guilt-free attitude towards sex if we continue to insist on defining all representations of sexuality as degrading rather than beautiful. Nor should the depiction of nude children, or children engaging in pleasurable sexual acts, necessarily call for the use of the word ‘pornography’ rather than ‘erotica’. We have already discussed the devastating consequences of taking a negative attitude to the sexual development of children: joyous erotica featuring children can be beneficial in contributing to a more positive, healthy attitude.

Having made this distinction, the words ‘soft core’ and ‘hard core’ become redundant. These terms are used by the police, and others whose job it is to distinguish not between ‘erotica’ and ‘pornography’, not between good and bad representations of sex, but between degrees of badness – usually between what is legally permissible (just about) and what is not.¹ This distinction – between, for instance, showing a non-erect penis (soft core) and an erect one (hard core)² – is a dimension of concern only for those who feel there is something intrinsically ‘worse’ about overtly depicted eroticism than, say, mere nudity, i.e. for those who start with a shame-faced attitude to sex.”

¹ Nos anos 90 foi vista uma revolução: a hardcore pornography se tornou mainstream.^a E há HCP em todos os espectros: dos exploiters de extrema direita à “esquerda florida do amor livre” ressuscitada: idols de Bruna Surfistinha – cujo protótipo seria Deborah Secco, que certamente não rejeitaria o rótulo de ‘feminista’ sob a égide da ‘liberdade do que fazer com meu corpo’ – aí se enquadram. Infindas discussões, mas diria que esta última vertente não entende que em seu jogo de autoliberação acaba recaindo num perde-perde, e não num ganha-ganha, da velha desigualdade de gênero… A hipocrisia nesse campo vai longe, com trocadilhos de linguagem flertando com a “barreira da legalidade”: atrizes pornô de 18 anos são chamadas de barely legal. Publicações impressas do fim dos anos 90 tinham essa alcunha!

^a Com algumas concessões da legislação: nada de sexo com animais nem coprofilia, p.ex., aspectos banidos do PornHub, a verdadeira meca virtual da “pornografia legalizada”.

² Claramente o discurso dos anos 70 sobre essa dicotomia nada tem a ver com os mesmos vocábulos… em 2023.

“Traditionally, arguments against erotica have been directed towards the effect on the consumer.¹ Only recently, with the discovery of child erotica, has emphasis shifted to the production side. As it happens, the change of emphasis is justified: undoubtedly the strongest arguments against child erotica relate to the effects on the children involved in its production. However, it is worth bearing in mind that for the most part those who in the past have been most vocal against erotica – Lord Longford² is a good example – found themselves up against all sorts of evidential difficulties in trying to work out a clear case for clamping down on erotica, purely on the basis of arguments related to the consumer; one senses that many of the ‘antis’ were all but leaping around with glee to find that the involvement of children had given them a new angle, a new set of arguments.

¹ [Mesma discussão improfícua acerca dos videogames e violência (e, finalmente, pornografia, ainda mais agora que existe o ultra-realismo gráfico).]

² [Nulidade atual, se pensarmos que o google mal reconhece sua existência.]

There is still plenty of life in consumer-based arguments, despite the fact that trying to prove whether a book, or magazine, or whatever, tends to ‘deprave and corrupt’ has become a long-running legal farce. Trial after trial of books since the passing of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 in Britain has shown that it cannot be easily established, at least to a jury’s satisfaction, what effect erotic literature is likely to have on people, in any ‘moral’ sense.” Mas os neocons nunca desistirão desse projeto político fadado ao fracasso. A não ser que igrejas comecem a lucrar com a violência ou eroticidade das mídias e obras de arte… aí talvez tenhamos uma trégua!

“A more serious argument for the intervention of the law would exist if it could be shown that exposure to sexual material tended to increase the consumer’s likelihood to commit sex crimes. Scientific approaches to the effects of erotica have been addressed both specifically to this question and to other defined behavioural effects (including measurable changes in social and moral attitudes). Much of the work has been poor in quality, including a number of the studies undertaken for the massive and much-vaunted American Presidential Commission Report of 1970 (Report on Pornography and Obscenity, American Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1970).

One recent addition to the canon, Eysenck and Nias’s Sex, Violence and the Media makes a more valuable contribution. This work has done much to clarify the issues, by making sensible distinctions regarding the type of erotica in question and the disposition of the viewer. Unlike the American Commission, which adopted a ‘permissive’ approach on the basis that they could find no proof for any dangerous effects of erotica, Eysenck and Nias adopted the firm conclusion that both violent representations and certain types of pornography (here I use the word advisedly) do have deleterious effects. But they also agree that what they call good pornography (erotica) is harmless and can even be used profitably in therapy.

Having said this, I should point out that in the one country – Denmark – where the level of sex crimes has been minutely analysed since the abolition of all censorship, there has been an actual fall in some reported sex offences, including ‘child molesting’. It is only fair to add that the figures are hotly disputed on a number of grounds, but on any interpretation of the evidence to date it is hard to believe that the Danes are being turned into a nation of sex maniacs.”

“They cite John Cleland’s Fanny Hill [Memórias de uma Mulher de Prazer, 1748¹] as their ‘good’ example:

¹ [‘it is considered <the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel>. It is one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history. § The text has no swearing or explicit scientific terms for body parts, but uses many literary devices to describe genitalia. For example, the vagina is sometimes referred to as <the nethermouth>, which is also an example of psychological displacement. § A critical edition by Peter Sabor includes a bibliography and explanatory notes. The collection Launching Fanny Hill contains several essays on the historical, social and economic themes underlying the novel.’

Leia em https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25305/pg25305-images.html.]

‘Fanny Hill is perhaps as erotic a book as one could wish to read; it contains detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse in a great variety of positions, pre- and extra-marital sex, promiscuity and ‘unnatural’ [a palavra da época para homossexualidade] sexual behaviours. Yet the tone is one of enjoyment, women are not degraded by the men they consort with, and there is no violence to destroy this sense of good humour and enjoyment.’

If the book were to be filmed, [foi, e muito] they say,

‘We know of no evidence that such a presentation would do harm, and indeed there is evidence … that the effect on attitudes towards the other sex might be positive.’

By contrast, many commercially available films are not of this wholesome type:

‘Even when they do not overtly depict scenes of violence and degradation of women at the hands of men, such as rape, beatings and subordination, the tone is consistently anti-feminist, with women only serving to act as sexual slaves to men, being made use of, and ultimately being deprived of their right to a sexual climax – in the majority of such films, the portrayal ends with the men spraying their semen over the faces and breasts of the women …. The intention would seem to be simply to degrade women, and it is noteworthy that in many cases of rape the men involved either act in the same manner, or else urinate all over the women involved ….

(…)

The amount of overt sex in such films may not differ in any way from that shown in our hypothetical Fanny Hill film; what is important in marking the difference is the context, which is pro-love, pro-sex, and pro-women, in the one case, but anti-women, anti-love, and even anti-sex [fascist] (in the sense of gentle, pleasant, co-operative sex) in the other.’”

“It is claimed that those who start out by masturbating to ‘soft’ material inevitably find after a while that their response to it diminishes, and in the search for a more effective ‘kick’ they gravitate towards something more potent. An article in The Guardian (Lynn Owen, ‘Taboo or not taboo?’, 16 September, 1977, p. 11) drew attention to this theory in 1977 and made much of its alarming implications:

‘Judith Reisman, a media researcher from Ohio, traced how saturation with straightforward female stimulus like The Sun’s page 3 leads slowly but inevitably to the need for, and acceptance of, such things as paedophilia and incest and sexual violence. An acceptance not just among minorities, but among the general population …. Judith Reisman says <media conditioning into paedophilia and incest> is now leading, according to her researches, into child sadism.’”

Fosse isso verdade o matrimônio clássico já teria sido banido como a ‘maconha’ como porta de entrada das outras drogas (sexuais) pesadas!! Imagine só o que Reisman não diria do instagram e do tiktok hoje, para ficarmos nas ‘redes sociais estritamente legais’… Tsc! Terceiro ponto: se todos são afetados, a pesquisadora deveria ter se tornado depravada para provar a própria tese… Não só eu mas o próprio autor percebeu essa contradição: “Strong stuff. As the perils of porn involve, in Ms Reisman’s view, the general population, not just those with a particular psychological disposition, no doubt everyone reading this will be asking themselves how far their own response to erotica substantiates the theory.”

Fosse essa lei verdadeira, eu não ouviria mais rock clássico: apenas metal extremo. Fosse essa lei verdadeira, eu não tiraria mais férias de 30 dias – tentaria tirar licenças remuneradas de 2 a 4 anos ou praticaria o suicídio ao não consegui-las. Fosse essa lei verdadeira, não assistiria mais séries ou animes, nem leria livros, já que já perscrutei Nietzsche, Dostoievski, Togashi, Oda, e não encontrei nada que a eles se equipare até o dia atual. Ao contrário, nossa existência funciona em ciclos, como os do corpo humano. Não há clínica de reabilitação para os inocentes e homeopáticos prazeres da vida… Talvez as academias de ginástica funcionem sob esse princípio: quem continua puxando a mesma carga de peso ou não começa a correr 15km, se satisfazendo com 10, seja tachado de um grande preguiçoso que deixou de ser fitness junkie…¹

“Firstly, the half truth. I know that my own response to erotica, and that of a numbers of paedophile acquaintances, is indeed subject to the Law of Diminishing Kicks.¹ Whereas at one time, when they first became available to me, pictures of (merely) nude boys were a powerful stimulus to masturbation, the response gradually wore off; after this, only ‘stronger’ pictures, showing boys engaged in masturbation, or fellatio with other boys, were capable of reproducing a comparably powerful masturbation stimulus to that which I had felt on my first exposure to nudes. Even the response to these stronger pictures diminished slightly with familiarity, but another new stimulus – pictures showing anal intercourse with boys – revived the response.

¹ [Me deu até saudade de ler Burroughs!]

Interestingly enough, I have never felt any urge to practise anal intercourse, actively or passively, and erotica has not turned me on to it as something to do myself. I have no idea what other new depiction, if any, would turn me on, but I am quite sure it would not involve violence. [o que seria um salto quântico ou qualitativo e não quantitativo] How can I be sure, you may ask? Well, I have seen sadomasochistic material involving adults, and I find it very much of a turn-off rather than a turn-on, compared to other types of adult erotica, some of which do produce a mild positive response in me.” A moda do ASMR no mundo erótico parece comprovar que depois de um clímax (orgasmo?) vem um declínio… Ninguém quer ver gang bangs ou bukkakes a vida inteira – há um momento em que se torna efetivamente nojento e a pessoa sente falta de relações teatralmente amorosas e “clássicas” em “vídeos pornô” (se por clássico quer-se dizer monogâmicas ou heteronormativas, não tenho a capacidade de dizer, já que sou hetero, mas certamente o monogâmico tem fetiches ficcionais, que nunca põe em prática, e mesmo assim enjoa de seus fetiches ficcionais com o tempo)…

“Homosexuals can be exposed to any amount of ‘straight’ heterosexual erotica without it having the slightest appeal to them. It certainly doesn’t turn them on to ‘straight’ sex. Similarly, ‘straights’ who are exposed to homosexual erotica have generally been left cold.” Se os teóricos da extrema direita querem convencê-lo do contrário – que ver casais gays se beijando na rua os incomoda –, o problema está estritamente na segurança e convicção da autodefinição sexual dessas pessoas, eu diria…

“To envisage erotica as a tool in the sexual revolution may seem odd to those feminists and others who see it as an agency for the reinforcement of existing social roles and states of oppression, and as a blatant expression of profiteering capitalism. It may even seem a slightly old-fashioned view, echoing the anti-censorship, liberal tide of the 1960s. Indeed, the anti-porn, and in fact anti-erotic, element in feminism is now a major component in its radical thinking.

As an antidote, it is worth noting that not all radicals, even among feminists, are anti-erotica. The following is from an interview Germaine Greer, the celebrated and controversial feminist, gave with the American magazine Evergreen in 1971:

‘Claudia Dreifus: You are an editor of the European pornzine SUCK – a rather unusual position for one of Britain’s leading feminists. In America, I couldn’t conceive of a leading Women’s Liberationist sitting on the editorial committee of a pornsheet. Do you see a conflict between your feminist ideals and your involvement with SUCK?

Germaine: I see no conflict at all. SUCK is not a pornzine in the American sense of the word. SUCK as a matter of fact is no more the equivalent of SCREW than I am the equivalent of Al Goldstein (editor of SCREW).¹ SCREW is a sadistic paper. Its emphasis is completely masculine and it treats female flesh like it was so much butcher meat. It’s completely unerotic – very American. It makes me puke. SUCK, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. The key-note of SUCK is that sexual relationships should be open and unpossessive. We are anti-possession, anti-conquest, and anti-demanding of the sexual object, be it male or female. We are pro-pleasure.’

¹ [‘Alvin Goldstein (January 10, 1936 – December 19, 2013) was an American pornographer. He is known for helping normalize hardcore pornography in the United States.’ – como eu narrei acima em nota de rodapé, fenômeno precípuo dos anos 90, que me afetou, como expectador, apenas retroativamente, já que sou de 1988.]”

“The approved sexual relationship in all Western societies is exclusive, possessive, colonizing, exploitary; sex is recognized as intimately connected with violence, for the power of the one over the other must be enforced and enforceable. Butch rules bitch, pimp rules whore, man rules wife, queer rules queen. Like the most insidious tyrannies, it is spoken of as a natural law, nature red in tooth and claw. This organization, which is as clear and universal as if it were indeed the expression of an irrefragable law, has as its central pole pain instead of pleasure. The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.”

“On the other hand, it does not follow as a matter of logical necessity that because a woman may be represented in a passive sexual role that this makes her a ‘victim’. Such a view proceeds from a fundamentally anti-sexual (or at least anti-heterosexual) outlook, in which it is assumed that a woman could not find pleasure in such a role.” “The mere image of a woman reclining passively and nakedly provides no evidence of either the intent or successful effect of ridiculing the person depicted, or her sex. In fact, all the more emotive parts of Brownmiller’s [Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Secker and Warburg, London, 1975] argument – the supposed wish to make females ‘dirty’, the alleged purpose of ridicule, the desire to see women ‘abused, broken and discarded’ – relate not to sexual representation specifically, but to the way Brownmiller believes (the ‘gut knowledge’) that men think about women. She ignores the possibility that many men may have quite different feelings than those which she infers. In other words, there is nothing intrinsic in sexual representations of women which bolsters ‘bad’ attitudes in men: no one would argue that Rubens’ classical female nudes, by depicting women as naked, and passive, were in themselves degrading to women. If they did, one could ask the further question, ‘Were Michaelangelo’s nude men degrading to the male sex?’ Presumably not.”

“The person depicted in the erotic image is not ‘real’, is seen in a sexual dimension only, and is therefore capable of being considered only as an object of sexual attraction, not as a whole person. This is not a problem one can attribute to the mind of the consumer: it is inherent in the sheer fact of encapsulating just one aspect of a person in a photographic or cinematic image.”

“When we purchase goods, we make the sales clerk into an object to satisfy our needs. … What is objectionable is not objectification itself but the power that exists in one person (the male) to determine the nature of the sexual and emotional relationship and retain control over it: in the family (husband/wife); in the advertising business (ad-man/nude women used to sell products) on the streets where men feel justified in whistling at women or even raping them …” Gregg Blachford, Gay Left (journal), ‘Looking at pornography: erotica and the socialist morality’

Sou, por exemplo, uma prostituta dos meus clientes (bolsistas, professores), etc. Caso fosse professor de filosofia, a libertadora filosofia!, seria ainda um objeto que cospe respostas aos alunos… Sou um autor, e me gratifico que me leiam, que considerem meu livro como meu eu total. Os inconvenientes e as utilidades de nossa enfermidade ‘Capital’…

“the teenager who sticks up posters of her or his favourite rock stars on the bedroom wall is to some extent objectifying them. They become at once less, and more, than their real selves. Less, in the sense that their full humanity can never be revealed by a mere poster; they are reduced, by the functional apparatus with which they are surrounded – microphones, guitars, etc. – to the level of mere symbols of a generalized notion of excitement; and yet they become more, in so far as the particular star on the wall is a glamour figure, the subject of adulation – as well as looking at his image, the youngsters who buy the posters read long articles in the pop music press giving biographical details about the particular star’s music, love life, personality.

The same applies to the boy who puts up a picture of his favourite football team. The picture thus represented is not ‘real’: all the good, or extravagant, or flamboyant – or even downright bad and nasty (as with Sid Vicious and other ‘punk’ figures) – aspects of a person are played up, at the expense of a reality which probably includes a good deal of the merely ordinary. Does this matter? Is it an indication that the youngster who owns the poster is exploiting and degrading the rock star? Or does the rock star exploit the youngster?

And what about the widower who keeps a photo of his dear, departed wife on the mantelpiece? To him the image is invested with all sorts of memories of a real, living person: one whose full personality he probably knew in intimate detail. No objectification here, one would think.”

O OÁSIS DOS NERDS ESPINHENTOS: “In addition, Brownmiller’s critique is founded on the proposition that men are always in control, and that part of this control expresses itself in a cynical and deliberate degradation of women in pornography. While this regrettably may be true to some extent, it is worth noting that the male who most needs erotica is the one who is sexually deprived, and not in control at all. It is the adolescent who is denied the opportunity for sex; it is the man who is shy and lacks an ability to form intimate personal relationships; it is the old, the ugly and the disabled. They are people who would like to know women as full human beings, but are deprived of the opportunity for the necessary contacts. They are people who yearn for personal contact: for erotic contact, certainly, but for emotional and social contact too.”

“This longing for personal contact applies perhaps even more among paedophile consumers of child erotica. Their state of deprivation from ‘real’ children is of course legally enforced, so far as the erotic element of a potential relationship is concerned. § The law-abiding teacher, or youth worker, or ‘uncle’, may be allowed to know live children up to a point – but only if his interaction with them is ‘innocent’, in a way that is just as unreal, just as denying of life and personality as any tendency erotica may have towards ‘objectification’.”

“Some high-quality child erotica has been produced, though not by those who are so vocal in their denunciation of lesser-quality material. A good example is a book published in America called Show Me! A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents [St. Martins Press, New York, 1975], described by the publishers as a picture book of sex for children and their parents. It contains a great many large photos of children and adolescents engaged in various sexual activities, supported by a text which briefly raises a variety of subjects, including anatomical variation, circumcision, masturbation, childbirth, nursing and sexual intercourse. In other words, it is a sort of sex-education primer.

Dr. Larry Constantine, an assistant professor at Tufts University, who works on attachment to Boston State Hospital as a family counsellor, wrote a serious review of the book for the journal Family Coordinator [vol. 26, 1977], expressing the view that it was ‘a beautiful book that breaks ground by its totally explicit photographs of children and adolescents in a variety of sexual activities’. The text, he felt, was less good, being characterized by out-of-date Freudian references and sexist bias. Yet on balance he still felt the book was valuable. Why? In a nutshell because it offers a warm, positive view of eroticism.”

“The reviewer’s daughter, who at the age of 6 was able to point out the flaws in the book, said ‘It turns me on!’. It is regrettable that children’s exposure to erotic love is through the distortions and deceptions of adult media.” ‘The sexual rights of children: implications of a radical perspective’, in: Larry L. Constantine and Floyd M. Martinson (eds.), Children and Sex: New Findings, New Perspectives, Little, Brown, Boston, 1980.

“The topic of child erotica is a very new one in the public consciousness. For this reason there has been inadequate time for resources to be devoted into research on it, and in any case few would think this necessary, any more than they would think it necessary to research the harm done to a victim by knife attacks. Nevertheless, one needs something more positive to go on than the notion of ‘spiritual murder’.”

“Child pornography is now said to be a multi-million dollar business in the United States. If this is true then it will inevitably have attracted the most ruthless people imaginable, who would think nothing of brutalizing and murdering children for money. Yet such studies as there have been of the business indicate that not all the material is produced by ruthless gangster types, even in the United States, where the worst abuses have been reported. Robin Lloyd reports that much of the material is produced by amateurs, who are themselves paedophiles: the photographs show their own little girl- and boy-friends, whom they may love dearly and be very proud of.”

“Magazine pictures, and films too, often feature children sexually active with each other, with no adult involved, as though the camera were merely recording spontaneous childhood sexiness which would have been going on even if no film were being made. These are children, we are invited to suppose, who are perfectly happy to fellate and masturbate each other, and to have coitus, with a carefree disregard for their being under public scrutiny. How much of this is real, how much a counterfeit designed to ease the buyer’s conscience, it is hard to say, and only by talking to the particular children involved in each case could one be sure of the truth. I should add that I have met and spoken to some children who have been featured in erotica, and have fairly detailed knowledge, from reliable sources, of the personal circumstances and dispositions of others: in these cases, the photographer has been an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ and the children have definitely enjoyed their ‘work’.”

“it is no accident that those in the forefront of the campaign against child erotica are also predominantly anti-gay, anti-heterosex-before-marriage, anti what they derisively call ‘permissive’ attitudes generally.” “They are the people who, in their anxiety to promote the ‘moral’ welfare of others, overlook the misery, the frustration, and the violence engendered by sexual ignorance and repression. For they feel that people, especially children, must be kept sexually ignorant and repressed to free them from the ‘corrupting’ effect of their own feelings.”

“Were the rights claims of children in this area vigorously defended, pornography using children would undoubtedly continue, but its production could be made more accessible to policing. Children who did not wish to participate could be better protected from exploitation at the hands of parents and other adults, just as child actors are protected by the scrutiny made possible by an open legal industry in which rights to participate are also recognized. The extremes of exploitation, kidnapping, rape and other excesses of the pornographer using children now are products of the illegality and marginality of the enterprise. True concern for children would prefer to see some children participating willingly in pornography under able-to-be-monitored conditions than to have other’s brutally exploited because of their status as runaways or mere chattels of their parents.”

Larry Constantine

“One problem of children in erotica which does affect them more than adults, arguably, is that of blackmail. The boy who is carefree enough at the age of 12 or 13 to take part in erotic films always faces the possibility that 10 years later his attitude will have changed. He may have married. The thought of his wife finding out might be enough to make him part with money to a blackmailer.” Embora não na seara “erótica”, nessas horas sempre penso no Macauley Culkin, que se afastou completamente das lentes de cinema (seu pai era nitidamente um aproveitador).

11. THE BEGINNINGS OF RADICAL PAEDOPHILIA IN BRITAIN

“The general public in the UK has long been aware of ‘child molesting’ and ‘perversion’. But only in the 1970s did it come to hear about ‘paedophilia’, a designation suddenly lifted from the obscurity of medical textbooks to become a crusading badge of identity for those whom the term had been designed to oppress.

‘Paedophilia’ became simultaneously a recognized word and a public issue in August and September 1977, when a series of connected events resulted in the activities of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) being given prominent attention in the national press. Prior to this time, most people had no idea that an organization like PIE even existed, which is perhaps not surprising considering its tiny membership – the total at that time standing around 250 – and the fact that it had only been going since October 1974. Nor, when the dust had settled on that late summer’s attention, were they any the wiser as to the reasons for its appearance, its philosophy, its proposals: the nature of the publicity had seen to that.

It was not until PIE had been going for a number of months that I myself heard about it, or about Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL), which was later merged with PIE. There had been virtually no newspaper coverage at that time, and the only people ‘in the know’ about paedophile groups were readers of gay newspapers and magazines, and others in gay circles who had heard by word of mouth.”

“beards, I recall, were no longer just hairs growing out of a man’s face, but were now pronounced, with great solemnity, to be

the last bastion of male chauvinism.”

“In the same spring, I went to several meetings of PAL, which had developed as a breakaway group from South London GLF [Gay Liberation Front]. It was at these meetings that I first met other paedophiles, and experienced the sheer exhilaration and joy of suddenly finding a whole new social world – a world in which the Great Unmentionable was all at once the thing to talk about, a source of instant, garrulous rapport, between the unlikeliest combinations of people: at my first meeting there were maybe a dozen, all male, mostly young not easily pigeon-holed ‒ by either dress, accent or manner ‒ into any obvious social class stereotypes.”

“It was not long that year before PAL proved itself slightly too garrulous, too open, too devil-may-care, for it became the subject of classic ‘exposé’ treatment in the Sunday press – a whole front page, plus centre-page spread, in the Sunday People, which resulted in local intimidation and lost jobs for some of those who were exposed. For a long time (though not ultimately), PIE was luckier, and better able to survive than the demoralized members – or embers – of the PAL conflagration.”

“PIE had been the idea of Michael Hanson, a gay student living in Edinburgh, who became the group’s first Chairperson. He wasn’t even a paedophile, though a passing relationship with a youth whom he took to be 16, but who turned out to be a year younger, provided the mental stimulus for his deliberations on paedophilia.”

“Inspired by Engels, their thinking questioned the basis of the family as an economic, social and sexual system. And well before Keith Hose’s appearance on the scene, a large contingent of GLF had favoured the abolition of the age of consent; their youth group had even staged a march in support of this.”

“If GLF gays found themselves discriminated against in a pub, they would promptly stage a mass sit-in there; action which sometimes won them the respect and support of ‘straight’ locals, rather than hostility. ‘Radical drag’ was one of their more flamboyant manifestations: gays would dress in weird combinations of clothes, such as ‘butch’ pit boots worn with a ‘femme’ feathered hat, in a graphic, art-derived and powerful visual challenge to traditional assumptions – assumptions not just about dress, but about the socio-sexual roles of the wearers.”

“In other words we have always intended to be a ‘self-help’ group. In this respect we have something in common with a ‘slimmers’ club, or Alcoholics Anonymous, though of course our philosophy of self-help has been vastly different to either. The point of paedophiles helping each other, as we have seen it, has not been to help each other to reform himself, that is, to try and modify his sexual identity to fit in with the demands of society. The point has been one of learning how to cope with the fact of living in a hostile society. How to be paedophile without being suicidal about it, without feeling guilty just because other people expect you to.” Me pergunto o que Foucault diria sobre isso.

“How have we fared in this aim? What have we done to help paedophiles themselves?” “Obviously, we have always had to be very careful in the kind of ads we have accepted. The purpose has always been to put paedophiles in touch with each other, not with children, and once in a while we have had to turn down ads which could have implied the latter. Likewise we have been careful not to allow ads for the sale or purchase of erotica. Not surprisingly, the News of the World eventually turned its attention to our ads. These are some that caught their eye:

No. 273 Energetic middle-aged male sincere and discreet lks boys 8-15 yrs and the various ways in which they dress. Int swimming. Wld lk to hear from others with similar ints.

No. 390 Male. Interested public school type boys, 12-16, either in football shorts or corduroy trousers, wd like to meet young male, 20-30, with similar interests (S W London/Surrey).

No. 379 Male Int girls 6-13 wd lk to correspond/meet others with similar interests; music, sports, fashion, Hi-Fi, photography, dance, reading, films (Blackpool).

No. 373 Doctor, male. Poet and author, interested photos little girls in white pants and little boys out of white pants. Wd like to hear from male or female with similar interests. All letters answered. Perfect discretion (Reading, Berks).

No. 401 Anglican priest, south London, anxious to meet other paeds for friendship and help.

We have never conducted a formal survey of our members’ use of the Contact Page, but I imagine the figure would be well over 80% having written or received at least one letter during their membership. I myself used the system during the early months of my membership.”

“If he were to wake up in the morning finding himself attracted to women rather than boys, would this give him joy, or distress? Would he feel still the same person essentially, or would the change have meant the death of a part of himself which he held dear, a part which was an inalienable aspect of his sense of self?” “Whether he ever took the treatment I do not know, but he did get into trouble, and is now serving a 4-year sentence. § As you may imagine, I felt dreadful about that. If I had come down firmly in favour of him doing what his doctor told him, would it have happened? I wrote, and offered to visit him in prison, but it turned out that he was being well looked after there by his family, and had a good job in the prison library – where he was able to get on with writing his novel, plus a critical edition of the works of some 18^th-century poet.”

“I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I should resign from PIE. When I joined, I saw it as an organization serving the purpose of meeting friends whose sexual orientation was similar to my own. It therefore gave me: (1) a feeling of release, in that I could safely share views normally repressed; (2) a feeling of security – in that I no longer felt isolated from the world because of my sexual outlook. Speaking purely for myself, I no longer feel a sense of (1) release – in so far as our aims seem no longer the mutual discussion of views, but rather an attempt to convince the community of the rightness of our views; (2) security – in so far as I now feel much more at risk in expressing paedophile views than I did before this year’s [1977] campaigning began. (…) That is the cardinal, indisputable tragedy of our situation. There is thus no object in my remaining a member. My decision is, however, a most reluctant one, since some of the finest people I have ever met in the gay world are PIE members. I have very much enjoyed their companionship, and no doubt in leaving PIE I shall be losing that friendship. I have no doubt that my loss will be greater than theirs …”

12. THE BIG BANG

“We hadn’t looked at history for any sense of dynamic, for any precise revolutionary dialectic. We just did what we felt it was in us to do, what we were bursting to do, which was to stand up and say loud and clear that we were pig sick of creeping in the shadows, of pretending to be something other than ourselves, of apologizing for feelings which within our deepest selves we knew were capable of a good and fine manifestation, not a wicked or perverted or ‘sick’ one.” “After all, look what Darwin managed to get away with. And dear old Karl Marx, who could calmly set the world alight from a comfortable chair in the Reading Room of the British Museum!” “To isolate ourselves as a focus for universal hostility was indeed irrational, even downright crazy, and yet we still felt we had to do it.” “Not secretly or stealthily at any rate. We were just not prepared to wait for decades or centuries before declaring ourselves. It just wasn’t in our nature. Instead, we naively supposed we could be both open and play the lobbying, public-relations game to some extent; we thought we could manipulate the Establishment and find allies within it, simultaneously with being the ogres of the popular press and the Church-based reactionaries like the Festival of Light.”

“In the days before people had become fully alert as to our radical nature, we thought it might be possible to establish ourselves as a self-help agency, to which probation officers could refer anyone convicted of a paedophilic offence, on the (correct) principle that we could befriend and ‘counsel’ those involved more effectively than a professional with no great knowledge or understanding of the personal problems involved.”

“We could see ‘the enemy’ only where it was most obviously manifest. We knew the Whitehouse lobby had a broad populist appeal among the nation’s churchgoers and was not without power and influence. We knew that most ordinary people had deep, gut feelings about the protection of children, and that many of them would see red about PIE so forcefully that they couldn’t begin to give any rational consideration to our ideas.” “Having recognized all these enemies, we mistakenly supposed that in other areas we might find, if not friends, then at least rational, liberally-minded people, who would be open to ideas. [na esquerda]”

“What we had failed to see was that normally intelligent, broad-minded people were just as capable of giving way to their initial, emotional sense of revulsion as anyone else: in making an appeal to their brains, to their education, we put too much faith in these factors. We were quite wrong in supposing that only religious maniacs and splenetic judges are ruled by factors outside the intellect. Of course, had we been preaching any one of dozens of other doctrines, our supposition would have been correct: there is no shortage of liberals who are prepared to take a sympathetic view of the Provisional IRA, despite their revulsion against the barbarity of kneecappings and the suffering of children who get in the way of the bullets and bombs and hatred. § Apparently violence, in the pursuit of a political end like nationalism, is somehow acceptable, no matter how horrific it may be. Yet for some reason that I cannot fathom, the non-violent love of children is regarded as more horrific, not less so.” Porque não se admite um ‘amor não-violento da criança’ como a priori sociobiológico. Entende-se-o como tática do patriarcado para reviver práticas antigas que ficavam “atrás das cortinas”. E, sobre o exemplo empregado, ironicamente o IRA abandonou sua condição de grupo terrorista em anos recentes (até onde eu sei).

“One of my colleagues at the Open University, who held a senior administrative position, was a classic case in point. He was a chap with a good degree from London School of Economics, a fairly left-wing Socialist, with a fine and subtle mind. One could discuss anything with him sensibly, religion, politics, even sexual ethics, up to a point. But paedophilia? Well, when he found out about my involvement with PIE his shock was so complete as to render him literally speechless.”

“We recognized that we would have to sail through stormy waters, through shock/horror headlines, perhaps through sackings of our public representatives from their jobs and other forms of intimidation. § But at the same time we would win a measure of respect for our sincerity, and with the dying down of the initial revulsion, people would ask themselves why we had put so much at risk, and would begin to consider our ideas properly. In a few years time, when the trendy liberals had caught up, the really smart thing for the fashionable Hampstead hostess would be to gently drop into the conversation some tidbit about her little Julian’s ‘sensitive’ relationship with film director X or famous artist Y!”

“It would just be a mechanical matter, I supposed, of keeping the media informed as to what we were up to – of generating newsworthy events and then plugging them by means of press releases, press conferences and so on.”

“Then, just at the critical moment, enter the deus ex machina, Mary Whitehouse.¹ A story appeared in the press in which she claimed that public funds were being used indirectly to subsidize ‘paedophile groups’. She said that the Albany Trust – partly government-grant-supported – was itself ‘supporting’ such groups.”

¹ Já citada nos capítulos iniciais. Uma espécie de Margaret Thatcher dos costumes.

“The significance of Kemp’s article, unlike any that had appeared in The Guardian, or elsewhere, was that it was noticed. The whole of Fleet Street read it, and every paper decided there was an angle they either could, or positively had to, follow up. The following day, on holiday from my job at the Open University, I spent nearly 15 hours answering calls from the national and provincial press, and almost as long the day after that.”

“The Daily Mirror ran the story as a front page lead, with the headline ‘CHILDREN IN SEX SHOCKER’, with appropriately horrified comments from the likes of Rhodes Boyson, and an editorial in which we were urged to ‘crawl back under the stone’ from which we came.”

“The pressure came not only from the press. Once the hotel had been identified, the manager had to contend with threats to smash windows and disrupt the meeting. Some even threatened to burn the place down and kill the manager if the meeting went ahead, according to hotel staff I talked to.”

“For a few days, incredibly, it looked as though we might find sanctuary in the most traditional, yet unlikely, source: the Church. For we had managed to get hold of a sympathetic vicar who was prepared to loan us his church hall. (…) unfortunately, the vicar in question took fright when, after seeking the advice of the Bishop of Truro, he was advised against giving us the hall.”

“Red Lion Square. An evocative name, which had come to be almost synonymous with political violence. It had been the scene of famous clashes between extreme right and extreme left, and in 1974 a demonstrator had died there. Would our humble little gathering be as fraught, I wondered. There was now not the remotest chance of it going ahead quietly. PIE was big news, and our new venue had already been given out in all the national newspapers. (one thing we could be sure of: in the event of violence, it wouldn’t be a contest between the big battalions, of left versus right. For who would be the heavy infantry fighting for PIE? We could expect plenty against us.” “Did we have to prove our courage when we really wanted to show that paedophiles are often kind and gentle, loving and non-violent people?”

“As the meeting began, I looked at the growing crowd (now several hundred strong) and recognized from previous demos several prominent National Front¹ thugs and sympathizers – male and female – including Dereck Day, who was featured in the Observer article on the National Front.

[¹ Eufemismo para nazis.]

In the hall we tried to listen attentively to the PIE speakers but the constant strains of ‘kill them, kill them’ from the crowd, who were beating on the door, made this difficult. I was frightened and could not concentrate properly. § The meeting ended half an hour earlier than planned in a bid to surprise the mob outside. Those who could run fast were advised to form ranks. The elderly and several disabled had to wait for further instructions. It all felt like abandoning ship into a cruel sea. § Many of us were set upon individually by the crowd. A Jewish brother, his glasses stamped on, was kicked and punched. The police, now about 30 in number, reacted lethargically. § Survival instincts are strong. I removed my gay badge and masqueraded as a het[erosexual] when challenged by a potential assailant. They seemed surprised that most of us were not old men in faded brown raincoats. We were all sorts – gay, paedophile, straight, press people, academics, coming to listen to what PIE had to say. § As I was pummelled and kicked I appealed to a policeman for help, but I was told to ‘Get the hell out of here’. Eventually 3 of us managed to stop a passing cab and escape. § To my amazement, the meeting itself went just about as well as possible in the circumstances. We had been worried about disruption inside the hall, with people storming the platform – after all, this was a public meeting, to which any of the mob outside could have come if they paid their money and showed no obvious signs of being hell-bent on disruption. But as everyone coming into the hall was being labelled by the crowd as a ‘pervert’ – including people who were trying to get into a regular Bible Class in another part of the building – there may have been an understandable reluctance to do so.”

“Now, the same thing was felt about ‘paedophiles’ – to most people it was just a new word for an old vice [‘molesters’], without any understanding having been gained. In view of the nature of the press coverage, particularly in the Daily Mirror and the other ‘populars’, this was hardly surprising: it was just a catalogue of revulsion and hate, without any discussion of ideas. Now I am not quite so naive as to suppose there would have been: I was always well aware, and so were we all in PIE, that news stories cannot he used as a means of persuasion towards accepting unfamiliar, and perhaps difficult, new concepts.”

“But we had hoped to achieve something just by getting people to realize that radical paedophiles exist, and that they have a philosophy – which the more thoughtful of them might ultimately read about in a book by Tom O’Carroll, or whoever. And this realization could only be achieved, by a tiny, limited-resources group like ours, not by careful, patient, secretive, high-level lobbying, but by speaking out loud in public and simply having to ride out the inevitable initial period of hysteria.”

“Word reached me that at least one of those [minors] who had been shown on the Tonight programme was recognized by his schoolmates. Since then, he has been persecuted at school, and both he and his parents have been taunted so much by neighbours that the family have had to move out of the district. Does that make the ‘frank and fearless’ documentary-makers happy, as they go off on their next assignment?”

13. A WIDER PERSPECTIVE

“while in the UK we have only one Mary Whitehouse, the Americans have two – Anita ‘Save Our Children’ Bryant and Judianne ‘Child Porn’ Densen-Gerber – plus a formidable supporting cast of moral crusaders, backed by mainstream news media, often as prurient and sensationalistic as the News of the World.”

“Anita Bryant is chiefly famed for her attack on legislation designed to prevent discrimination against homosexuals in employment – especially against homosexual teachers in schools – whence the slogan ‘Save Our Children’, with which in 1977 she won her most notable victory, Miami in Florida.”

“The backlash styled itself as ‘pro-family’, and at its heart was detestation of all lifestyles that refused to conform with the tradition roles of women and men in society, as well as of non-traditional erotic behaviour – it was thus anti-feminist as well as anti-gay. The easy targets, however, were those at the margin of public acceptability, particularly paedophiles, and most of all ‒ because of the dreaded homosexuality factor ‒ male boy-lovers. Boy-love came to be for Anita Bryant what communism was to Joe McCarthy. Like McCarthy, the new witch-hunters talked about a ‘national conspiracy’ and citizens were urged to be ever vigilant to track down and expose the conspirators. One organization, the Interfaith Committee against Child Molesters, is alleged to have offered a ‘Community Action Kit’. People have been urged to ‘shadow’ their neighbours, friends, and even relatives, and to ‘turn them in’ if they are suspected of sexual ‘irregularities’. Guidelines are apparently being published on what to look for in nailing a boy-lover. If a man is frequently seen with a lad not related to him, then that man is patently up to no good and has to be investigated.” “Punishment for male offenders would involve surgical removal of the nerves within the penis that control a man’s ability to have an erection, thus impeding his sexuality far more effectively than traditional castration. Women would have their ovaries removed. This would not prevent a woman from having sex, but a lack of hormones produced by the ovaries would cause her vagina to lose it’s elasticity, to ‘dry up’, making intercourse less satisfactory and possibly painful.”

“At the same time, the word ‘backlash’ is of great significance here, for there have been in the United States extensive attitudinal changes to react against – changes which made equal rights for homosexuals acceptable to some state legislatures in the first place.”

“René Guyon wrote treatises which, echoing Reich, asserted that many of the ills of civilization are products of distorted sexuality.”

John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise

“How is it they could turn the tables on a District Attorney who was bent on a witch-hunt? How did they tempt a Superior Court judge into supporting such a radical cause? How was it that even some churches offered their support? Despite the fear of persecution, how on earth was it possible to get 1,500 people to turn up at a fund-raising meeting and avoid the violence that attended PIE’s debacle at the Conway Hall?

A major part of the answer is that the Boston-Boise Committee was strictly a civil liberties group, which, although it did oppose the age of consent laws in Massachusetts, took no stand on paedophilia as such. It was also far less uncompromising than PIE in that the emphasis to its public approach was consistently on the sexuality of adolescent boys, of youths, rather than children – a fact which probably enabled it to maintain support within the gay community which might otherwise have been frightened off.”

OU SIMPLESMENTE ALABAMA VIBES: “Another element perhaps lies deeper in the nature of American society, for I suspect that despite the readily whipped-up hysteria, there is also in the USA a willingness to consider new ideas that is almost wholly lacking in Britain: even the mainstream news media allowed themselves to be influenced positively by the Boston-Boise Committee’s campaign, and began to run some open-minded articles.”

“The point is that Western society has undergone a revolution in sexual values, but it has tried to apply it exclusively to adults, and this rather arbitrary restriction is simply not working. How do we explain to our kids that while sex is natural, healthy, normal and good, they should refrain from enjoying it until they grow up and leave home? More to the point, how do we explain it to ourselves?”

Richard Currier

“Despite everything, despite the ferocity of the Bryant/Densen-Gerber phenomenon, I feel mildly encouraged by North America’s openness to ideas – and when I say that, I include Canada, where early in 1979 a major court victory was won by the gay journal Body Politic (through a prosecution appeal is pending at the time of this writing), which had faced a charge in connection with a long, serious article called ‘Men Loving Boys Loving Men’, which was said to be ‘immoral, indecent or scurrilous’. The charge was dismissed by a judge who spoke of Body Politic as ‘a serious journal of news and opinion’ and the article as ‘a plea for understanding’ which ‘forcefully argues in favour of a particular attitude of non-condemnation of paedophiles’.” Otimismo infundado para quem vive no século XXI!

“If there are small glimmers of encouragement to be detected in North America, there is by comparison a great, warm glow radiating from Holland. It has already been noted that such unlikely groups as the Netherlands Order of Attorneys and the Protestant Union for Child Protection believe that in the case of consensual child-adult sexual activity, prosecution of the adult is not justified.” Outra nação que se tornou imensuravelmente mais conservadora.

“A TV programme, watched by 2 million viewers, feature a Protestant minister with positive views on paedophilia, plus an enlightened mother and a medical student who felt he had received enormous benefit from a relationship he had had with a man from the age of 12. Feedback from the public did not indicate outrage at the programme. Dr. Brongersma, who was one of the principle contributors, told me that, on the contrary, reaction was favourable from the entire press (Communist to Roman Catholic) and from the general public.

There has even been a march through the streets, with placards, banners and, yes, children too, to protest at The Hague’s Palace of Justice, during the appeal court hearing in 1978 of a 34-year-old social worker who had been given a 3 month sentence (1 month suspended) for his 3^rd conviction on charges relating to sex with boys under 16. The sentence itself was lenient by UK standards, especially as the offence in question concerned not one, but 3 boys, aged 14 and 15.”

“Interestingly enough, the Netherlands had no age of consent laws for many years, between the Napoleonic occupation and the passing of this article in 1886, and there is no evidence whatsoever that children were exploited more in this period than afterwards, when they became officially ‘protected’.”

“After the trial signatures were collected for a petition to the Minister of Justice, calling for an end to all Dutch legislation on sexual morals. One of those gathering signatures was Gerald Zwerus, Chairperson of the National Paedophile Workgroup of the NVSH, and himself a teacher. Zwerus’ campaigning does not appear to have affected his position as a teacher, and he has even been allowed to speak at schools on the subject. Following one such talk, an initiative was taken by some pupils to collect signatures for the petition.

Since then, there has been a further petition calling for the abolition of the age of consent, presented to the Government in June 1979, and signed by the Trade Union of Teachers, the Union of Probation Officers, the Protestant Trade Union of School Teachers, and the Protestant Union for the Family; this last-mentioned group recently published a completely-positive pamphlet on paedophilia, replacing an earlier one in which the emphasis was on ‘child molesters’.

Evidently this group, concerned as it is with the family, does not see paedophilia as a threat to family life. What’s more, the largest single party in Parliament, Labour, along with smaller ones, supports abolition, and if the Liberals join them (they are presently studying the matter) there will be a Parliamentary majority.”

“A German paedophile, wracked by guilt over his attraction to little girls, knew no one in his home town in whom he could confide. Then he heard that a World Sex Fair was to be held in Rotterdam, and he thought that there he might be able to meet and talk to someone from a paedophile group. Accordingly, he went along, and discovered that there was indeed an exhibition stand run by volunteers from the local NVSH group. He approached what he took to be the 2 volunteers on duty and tentatively struck up a conversation with them. They both listened sympathetically to him, and in the relaxed atmosphere he soon found himself pouring out a great many secrets about his relationships with little girls. To his surprise and pleasure neither of his newly-found confidantes seemed in the least bit shocked, or disapproving. Then one of them had to go. ‘Sorry to leave,’ he said, ‘but I am a policeman and I have to go on duty’. It was some time before the other man, who really was an NVSH volunteer, could convince the shocked German that he was not going to be arrested, or that details of his confession would not he released to police back in his home town. What the NVSH man knew, and the German did not, was that generally speaking the police in Rotterdam do not now go out of their way to concern themselves with under-age sex. Although the age of consent is 16, for both homosexual and heterosexual acts, no action is taken unless complaint is made, when the child is a girl between 12 and 16.” “My guess is that paedophilia will never be accepted, in Holland or elsewhere, by any society in which paedophiles are singled out as a minority – a minority which, like the homosexual minority, cannot help but seem bizarre and alien to even the most understanding onlookers, when the focus of attention is on the peculiar sexual orientation of the ‘problem’ group involved.”

“Sexual liberation can only mean something valuable to most people in the context of their own lives, and the lives of their own children, not the lives of some minority group with whom they are asked to sympathize. This fact is recognized by those sexually progressive groups in America who encourage cross-generational sensuality [?] within the family, in a way that comes across as ‘natural’ and non-threatening, to average parents.”

“Will it ever be possible for a ‘civilized’ society to totally rediscover affectivity? Will we be able to recreate the best, most sexually guilt-free elements of ‘primitive’ cultures? Why were those elements lost in the first place? Is there something in advanced societies necessarily inimical to sexual shame and guilt falling below a certain irreducible plateau level? Are we doomed to a regime of more or less continuous sexual repression, punctuated by occasional, half-hearted bouts of ‘permissiveness’?” Foucault diria que sim, mas quem diabos lê Foucault em 2023!

“Are our social and sexual roles inevitably distorted, as Engels and others have suggested, by the very nature of our economic system? Or is there something about the late 20^th century – the technological revolution, which promises fundamental changes in the way we live – that suggests possibilities for a completely new beginning, for a new approach to social and sexual relations?” Haha, não é por aí!

“This wider revival of conservative values, in which there has been a central emphasis in the rhetoric of the major political parties on ‘the family’, may be seen as a reaction against the ‘Jenkinsite’ view of society that flourished in the reforming 1960s (which saw the liberalization of the abortion laws and the abolition of hanging, as well as the reform of the law against homosexuality).”

“Germany, the country which had the world’s best established sexual reform movement in the early part of this century, where the work of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld promised to lead the world to a new rationality about homosexual and other aberrant behaviour, was soon in the grip of a massive persecution of homosexuals.” “Political oppression cannot exist without sexual oppression. Or can it?”

“Until we stop alienating children from their bodies, by cruelly binding them in swaddling clothes of shame, they will be bound to grow up deformed, as surely as if, like the Chinese of old, we were to bind their feet.”

FINIS.

40 RECOMENDAÇÕES DE BIBLIOGRAFIA COMPLEMENTAR

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Bloch, I., The Sexual Life of our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization

Califa, Pat, Public Sex – essays on the culture of radical sex.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST PUBLIC MORALS, Paedophilia and Public Morals

Cook, M. & Howells, K. (eds.), Adult Sexual Interest in Children

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Frankl, G., The Failure of the Sexual Revolution

Fraser, M., The Death of Narcissus

Fraser, M., ‘Paedophilia: the eighth deadly sin?’, Forum

Friedenburg, E.Z., The Vanishing Adolescent

Geddes, D.P. (ed.), An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports

Geraci, Joseph (ed.), Dares to Speak: historical and contemporary perspectives on boy-love

Goldberg, S., The Inevitability of Patriarchy

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Hirschfield, M., Sexual Anomalies and Perversions

Jenkins, Phillip, Intimate Enemies: Moral panics in contemporary Great Britain

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Mohr, J.W. & al., Paedophilia and Exhibitionism: A Handbook

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Money, Dr. John & Lamacz, Margaret, Vandalised Lovemaps: paraphilic outcome of seven cases in pediatric sexology

Ollendorff, R., The Juvenile Homosexual Experience

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Pomeroy, W.B., Girls and Sex

Raile, A.L., The Defence of Uranian Love (3 vols.)

Randall, J.L., Childhood and Sexuality: a radical Christian approach

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Rycroft, C., Reich

Sandford, T; Brongersma, E; & van Naerssen, A. (eds.), Male Intergenerational Intimacy

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Stoller, R., Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred

Taylor, B. (ed.), Perspectives on Paedophilia

Winnicott, D.W., The Child, the Family, and the Outside World

YOUTH LIBERATION OF ANN ARBOR, Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor