oaf@mit-vax.UUCP (Oded Feingold) (09/29/86)
Before we get steamed up about outlawing pedophilia, so those hor-
rible men don't **** our little girls (or boys,) then using that chink
in the anti-anti-"pornographers'" [I punctuated correctly!] armor(?)
to harass the rest (or springboard repressive legislation, clearly the
idea uppermost in Mark Terribile's mind,) consider: Such proscriptions
are cultural peculiarities of our ``civilization.'' In many non-wes-
tern-dominated societies (e.g.; the Lepcha, either from Indonesia or
Micronesia) older men initiate young girls into sex. There's no rea-
son to assume that introduction is violent or coercive - nothing else
in their society is. In rural Egypt, eight-year-old girls are married
to teenage boys, primarily to perpetuate bonding between land-owning
families. Virginity is lost when the girl is ready, and presumably
"ready" has some commonly accepted definition. Some South American
tribes have marriages of extremely young girls to adult men, who take
responsibility for their feeding, education and survival, with sex
happening as soon as the bride reaches puberty (though one suspects an
eager pre-pubescent could have her way; I don't know, I never looked.)
These anthropological isolates don't always correspond to height-
ened oppression of women or children. Typically, these societies have
lower crime rates, staggeringly lower sexual crime rates (though in-
ter-tribe rape and abduction of women, practiced in South America and
actively abetted by the dominant culture, is a sad fact of life;
luckily no civilized armies ever commit rape as an instrument of cul-
tural oppression) and far lower rates of psychopathy or whatever cor-
responds to mental illness than we. Given the physical and economic
constraints on life in the locations presented, and presumably oth-
ers equally interesting and equally far removed from American (West-
ern?) society, who will claim <a priori> that those people's cultures
are inferior to our own? They'd outlast ours if we didn't extirpate
their ecosystem first. [See appendix.]
Diverging in time rather than space, note that classical Greece
actively promoted pedophilia as a means of socializing and educating
its young men. I have arguments with their world-view (slavery, op-
pression of women, incomprehensible language, odd clothes) but suspect
that for the enfranchised sector of their society, the quality of life
wasn't necessarily inferior to ours. We'd be hard-put to show a place
where civilization flowered as it did in Athens.
"What, your teacher is GAY? This must
stop - I won't have my boy educated by
some fruit!"
"Sorry, Socrates."
"Good-bye, Plato."
Closer to home, who is to say that the primary drawback to sexual
interaction between adults and sub-adults is necessarily an unhappy
relationship among the participants, rather than societal disapproval?
People are quite willful in defining sexual "abuse" based on external
factors of age, family ties, responsibility and power. It isn't ne-
cessarily perceived that way by those involved. But in our country,
no such relationship will be evaluated fairly for "healthiness" or
lack thereof, since the agencies doing the evaluating are by defini-
tion the (vengeful) bureaucratic and legal establishments, whose judg-
ment is foreordained. They also guarantee that adults initiating such
contacts are willing to risk extreme consequences, a positive se-
lection factor for obsessives and sociopaths.
[Is being a sociopath necessarily bad? It's antisocial by defi-
finition, but does incompatibility with society denote an evil person?
The Germans who sheltered Jews during the third Reich were sociopaths
too, as were early Christians in the Roman empire, as are anti-Apart-
heid South African whites.]
Should we take it as given that NAMBLA or similar organizations
are supporting unalloyed evil, and must be suppressed? Is it imper-
missible to question the internal consistency of laws regarding stat-
utory rape, particularly when the "age of consent" is mutable from
state to state? (For example, is it criminal for a twelve-year-old
boy to have sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, and in that case who is
committing the crime? Is it basically different if the boy or girl is
eighteen? Thirty? Sixty?)
Those people painting pedophilia as the epitome of pornographic
horror, who use it as the elision of refuge in promoting their author-
itarian world-views and suggested bans on this-n-that, are kindly re-
quested to tell (pointwise or universally) what their specific objec-
tions are, why each thing they object to is intrinsically bad (and de-
monstrate its destructive mechanism,) how to make such evaluations in
a fair and consistent manner, and what manner of sanctions fit the
"crimes" thus defined.
After that, they can try to show a causal relationship between any
type of literature and the things they've established as destructive
of humans or otherwise evil. ["Otherwise evil?" Bad for the environ-
ment, maybe bad for God. Pedophiles hurt God -- good basis for laws.
Almost forgot bad for investment climate for multinationals.] Then I
might sympathize with their censorious ambitions.
The naive social scientists of forty years[***] ago thought educa-
tion might be a cure (or prophylaxis) for authoritarianism and the de-
sire to dominate others. Let the prospective censors and forbidders
show their skill with that weapon:
+------------------------------------------------------+
| Tell us, the skeptical audience, why we should fore- |
| close people's liberty to publish pedophilia or any- |
| thing else. Be specific with regard to the criteria |
| listed above. Fair enough?? |
+------------------------------------------------------+
******************************
(Pan to oaf expounding, instead of MS, MT, that weird Ken Arndt,
and the RFAIP[****] with their shears and blowtorches.)
******************************
These discussions of nuking porn preventively, en avant of any
proof of damage to anybody, represent the height of distastefulness.
I would far rather censor the religious demagogues, those unscrupulous
creatures who delude foolish humans into contributing their money and
time to the destruction of their educational system, the oppression of
their neighbors, the re-identification of the world into confronta-
tional ingroup and outgroup divisions, and in some cases to outfitting
private armies. If it's illegitimate to want that, it's far more il-
legitimate to get after the sexually explicit types, who sell peculiar
fun rather than mass enslavement disguised as convenient, ersatz hell-
fire.
Thank you very much.
Oded A. Feingold MIT AI Lab 545 Tech Square Cambridge, Mass. 02139
{allegra|ihnp4!mit-eddie}!mit-vax!oaf OAF@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU 617-253-8598
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Disclaimer
I don't want to upset all your comfortable presuppositions. Look,
why don't you simply assume that this entire article is a deliberate
and malicious pack of lies from beginning to end, designed to rot your
mind and foster Communism among the children in your neighborhood,
that this is the greatest and most perfect society the earth can ever
produce, sound as a nut, jeweled in every facet, and the pornographers
and all their customers will only receive the eternal damnation they
so richly deserve if you personally parboil them ahead of time?
Appendix
A trivial example: Rainforest residents in South America have
maintained stable cultures, in coexistence with their environment, far
better than the Spanish- or Portuguese-influenced "civilizations" now
invading their territories. The latter desertify the forest, destroy
the food chain, wipe out any self-maintaining ecosystem, and engender
starvation or emigration for everyone. They show no ability to match
population size or growth to the land's carrying capacity, have among
the highest reported violent crime rates in the world, and each year
spread horrible diseases (malaria, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis,
others?) into new regions. In so doing they decimate any natives in
those areas and diminish their own ability to survive in the lands
they've colonized, even assuming agricultural production suffices. As
the financiers, co-exploiters (have a BigMac) and behavioral analogues
of such lethal cultures, do we really have any business supplanting
the native culture with our own? [*] [**]
(Why this appendix? Some of these tribes incorporate "pedophilia"
as listed above into their culture. We cheerfully destroy these
survival patterns and supplant them with our own preconceptions, and I
include American evangelical groups among the active destroyers.)
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[*] Caufield, Catherine "IN THE RAINFOREST"
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
[**] Kelly, Brian and London, Mark "AMAZON"
Holt Rinehart Winston 1983.
[***] Adorno et. al., "THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY"
Harper Bros. 1950.
[****] Ray Frank Artificial Idiocy Program