DECIPHERING POLITICAL SEX-ASSAULT

Two short articles appeared today: both in the same edition of ‘The Boston Globe’.

In the first , a brief piece notes that on Monday Joe Biden will speak just up the road at the University of New Hampshire (the states are small in that part of the country). In company with the Education Secretary, his purpose will be “to introduce new guidance to help schools, colleges, and universities understand their civil rights obligations to better prevent and respond to sexual assault”.

Politicians’ public comments about these matters should always be a matter of some judicious Tire-Kicking; it also helps to deploy the old Soviet citizen’s trusty divining rods to get to what might really be going on.

Political ‘appealing to the base’ is always a consideration in an American polity now fractalized by decades of Identity-Politics. Which has reduced politicians to ‘deal-closers’ – no longer looking to consider the long-term consequences of legislation upon the entire polity and citizenry, but simply looking to ‘close the deal’ with the bunch whose agitations have gotten them to make you sit around this table in this room and demand this and that. Biden – former used-car salesman who professed himself “bored” with the things on the syllabus at law school – has become a past master at this, smiling that smiley, toothy grin while eyeing the clock on the wall to close the deal before the end of the day.

The article notes that “he was the author of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994” and “worked as a US senator to change the way domestic violence is handled”. Nothing else in the way of commentary or reporting about those two huge bits.

Speaking of journalism’s role, this is a four-paragraph article, and each paragraph consists of one sentence, giving you the idea it’s really just a press-release from Biden’s office transposed by the ‘reporter’ – or perhaps transcribed.

Yet the VAWA ran into constitutional problems (Joe was telling the truth: he hadn’t really cared for the ‘technicalities’ in law school). And “to change the way domestic violence is handled” is a nice way of not-mentioning what that has entailed: a ‘deconstruction’ of the sanctity of the hearth and home which was one of the vital mainstays of Family and the raising of children, which was the dense societal matrix that the Constitution was originally envisioned to protect. And a stunning expansion of the police-power into the home, as well as the introduction of police, prosecutorial, and jurisprudential tactics last seen in police-states modeled on a certain 12-year regime in mid-20th century Germany and Stalin’s trusty USSR. But this frakkulent dynamic served the purposes of several bases with whom a ‘deal’ needed to be made, and as is said at Santa Anita, they were off! The Family and the home, after all, had been suddenly discovered to be the largest on-going crime scene in American history. It was an emergency.

The guidelines he will unveil are supposedly designed to cover “schools” as well as “colleges and universities” so you can imagine that children rather young are included here. That is understandable since kids in even the pre-teen years now are having a go at sex (see my recent Post on this site about Statutory Rape prosecutions and the travails of one “Bernardo B.”).

This disturbing dynamic cannot be unconnected to a whole mess of ‘demands’ made by assorted ‘bases’ in various other ‘deals’ that have been made in the Mad Hatter’s Beltway: with the weakening of the Family and even Marriage and the concept of a two-parent, mother-father dyad overseeing the development of the energies and character of their children (the entire concept and structure now to be considered ‘oppressive’ and ‘victimizing’), young humans receive almost no help in mastering some of the most powerful – and potentially life-wrecking – of human urges, which if not handled properly will, like a fire in the boilers that has been allowed to leap out of its usefully structured space, spread to the entire vessel and consume and destroy it.

But ‘sex’ itself has been ‘valorized’, seen – in that witless Boomery way – merely and fundamentally as one of life’s great entertainments and recreations (and since Evolution is concerned merely with the reproduction of the species generally, and not with the maturing of its individual members, then there is a lot of natural impetus built into the human being to support such a lethal delusion).

Except that now huge numbers of young kids are setting forth into ‘school’ without any preparatory guidance from parents (such as the term is defined), among scads of peers equally bereft, and figuring that if this is what grown-ups do, and if the alternative is homework, then let’s have a go.

So, weirdly but then again not so irrationally, the deconstruction both of the containment concept that might help youth master the sexual urges, and of the societal and cultural support for undertaking that vital task, and the 'devalorization' of the persons (the parents) who are most strategically well-placed to start this process during the development window of those crucial early-years … all that deconstruction has resulted only in the unleashing of hordes of youth who really don’t have any ability or perhaps even motivation to refrain or to master themselves, for the sake of society, future, and their own families and offspring that might dwell further along in their increasingly fragile future.

And after all this deconstruction, the only thing that has been constructed to replace that profound societal, cultural, and human loss is … the Mania Regime and all its pomps and all its works.

By the time the government’s guidance – including whatever will be unveiled on Monday – comes into play, the crucial developmental window has irretrievably passed. Even if there are intelligent programs, they are now being installed – to the extent they will be successful at all – on human platforms already insufficiently framed and developed in the shipyard of the Family and the Home.

But perhaps there will simply be a call for more government-backed punishment and criminal laws; perhaps if the kids in ‘school’ are made aware of the threat of the criminal law they will Just Say No on their own.

The other alternative is (or was) to develop the moral (not necessarily ‘religious’, although it would have helped) chops and skills to undertake a certain ‘character development’ whereby an individual stands up against the urges and conducts a bit of a moral deliberation him or herself: if I do this, even if it’s fun, what effect will it have on me as a person, on the other individual here as a person, on society and culture in general (for we are all members of a living polity)?

This entire approach was deconstructed and ‘de-valorized’ decades ago as being oppressive and victimizing. As a result of incoherent and mutually contradictory agendas and demands and the 'deals' that pandered to them, the 'individual' has 'total autonomy' but the Self of any individual or the Nature of human beings ... that cannot be discussed because it could be anything, could be whatever whoever wants it to be at the moment, and to impose any prior definition on that play-dough allegedly at the core of the human being is merely an 'oppression' and interferes with a 'right'. So there is the individual, but there is no Self and no Shape and no essential anything to the human being - this is a recipe for lethal confusion, catastrophic human confusion. For individuals and for society and for culture and for any efficacious civilization.

And the government made a deal to agree.

Additionally, ‘sex’ is now apparently a ‘civil right’ – but in an oddly skewed and selective way: you have the right to do it whenever you want because you have ‘total choice’ (see, if you wish, my Post on my other site about Montaigne here, yet you shouldn’t be trying to ‘think’ too much about your choices because that will merely lead you to repress yourself. Go for it!

Except if you are a male (whom Evolution has saddled with a particularly robust urge to reproduce, for which reason civilizations and religions developed in great part to help harness that urge and energy, among all the other human urges, desires, and energies).

And given that males are growing up from the get-go with so little parental guidance and familial example and modeling of a mature and fully human way to Shape a Self and conduct a life, then you don’t need to be a math-professor to realize that by the time kids grow into college-age they are going to be in a heepa trubble, being at the mercy of all those un-boundaried urges and energies, so easily deployed but so ultimately corrosive when they wind up being the primary recreation and the primary source of Meaning in a life.

And of course once a female reaches the magic age (legally 18 but the law is woefully behind the developmental schedule) of ‘total freedom and choice’ then she must be allowed to seek sex whenever and however she wishes (which isn’t going to do the female any good either in the long run). EXCEPT when she doesn’t like it anymore, and then the government will step in with some newly ratcheted regulations and laws – against males who have suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn in the sand somewhere during the process.

This entire matter of ‘rights’ – expanded now as it has been into areas of sex (I can do it whenever I want but I have a right not to be ‘victimized’ or ‘oppressed’ if I feel I have been) – has simply muddied the waters lethally.

Recall FDR’s ominous expansion of the concepts of ‘rights’ in his Four Freedoms formulation during World War 2: every human has the right to Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Religion. But when he got into the second two Freedoms they were Freedoms-From: Freedom FROM Want and Freedom FROM Fear.

The role of government in ensuring the first two Freedoms is to keep the path clear and let humans as individuals and as societies pursue those two higher-order goals of mature expression and the mature search for Meaning in their lives. But then the next two Freedoms require government to get very intrusive, re-arranging society and culture to prevent two general realities that have been a part of the human experience from Day One. And who is to define what “fear” is? Because if it is – as it has become among Us now – the individual who can report that she is ‘fearful’, then any individual can summon the awesome Leviathan’s power at any time. Thus the Mania Regimes.

Nobody looked too carefully when FDR rattled off his Four Freedoms; he was a nice guy and you felt you could trust him. But then he died and others took his place and took their places in government.

So at this point, as part of the ‘deal’, a female can have all the sex whenever and however she chooses, except that when she doesn’t want to play anymore then the criminal law is at her beck and call.

This is supported by the last paragraph of the article (which was no doubt part of the text of press release from Biden’s people): “Nonetheless, the statement said, young women aged 16-24 experience the highest rates of rape and sexual assault, while one-in-five will be a victim of sexual assault during college”.

I say this again and again and again: I hold no brief for the forcible and unwanted imposition of sexual activity by one human being (male or female) on any other human being (ditto).

But at this point no discerning reader and citizen can be genuinely certain just what ‘rape’ now entails, let alone the ‘sexual assault’ that includes the hugely inchoate ‘date rape’. And the fact that the ‘privileged party’ – i.e. the female – legally gets to say what rape is and when it occurred simply muddies the poisoned waters beyond any possibility of comprehension.

It can be no wonder that given a) the weakening of familial and parental training in the vital developmental window of the early years, and b) the societal ‘valorization’ of ‘sexual freedom’ especially if it’s ‘total’, and c) the hugely increased aggressivity or enterprising-spirit among young females now ‘liberated’ to be as sexually antic as males, and d) the intensifying incompetence of young males to master their powerful sexual urges, all in the context of e) a life that has by Correct definition no reliable larger Meaning or Purpose that any other human being is bound to recognize or respect …. In the light of all those factors, now in play thanks to many many ‘deals’, government guidance to educators in the matter of somehow getting the genie back into the bottle (without oppressing or restricting the genie) is a fatal cultural case of Too little, Too late.

But then there is this second article.

Yesterday, during a public hearing, a female Boston City Councilor announced that “she was raped as a college student at Boston University”.

Given that she is 37, this would have happened during the maturity (as it were) of the Mania Regime and not in the putatively dark ages before 1990 or 1980. You may recall the (interestingly now defunct) Antioch College’s campus sexual code of 1991, and you can refresh your memory here.

We recently saw Senator Scott Brown’s ‘revelation’ about being groped at summer camp decades ago come and almost immediately go. Brown is a US Senator from Massachusetts and the Councilor holds office in that State’s capital city, just down the road from New Hampshire where Biden will be speaking on Monday. The timing and even the simple geography are curious; a short drive up the interstate might well put the Councilor at the meeting on Monday, and perhaps on the dais with Hizzoner the Veep of Deals.

April, and this was the last Council meeting before that month begins tomorrow, is – if your calendar isn’t already marked – Sexual Assault Awareness Month in this country. So score a second quizzical mark under Timing.

She describes herself both as being a victim of “sexual assault” and a “survivor of rape” – neatly mixing the two already vaporously-defined categories. Is rape a sub-category of ‘sexual assault’? Or is ‘sexual assault’ a separate and lesser category? In law? In public usage? In the specific codes deployed by the assorted persons who toss the terms around in public comments?

But – in an eerie similarity (and, I would say, give-away) to Scott Brown’s revelations – she is not mad at the universities and colleges and she doesn’t wish to “demonize” them. (Shrewd, since Academia is one of the last true-believer bastions of Correctness and all its pomps and all its works.)

And in an equally amazing coincidence, she gives no further indication or information: did she report it? Who was the alleged perpetrator? Has or will legal action be initiated against him (or – it has to be said – her)? We don’t know. Again, as so often in this type of case, and especially in the case of politicians who suddenly ‘reveal’ this sort of thing, the public is left with nothing to go on.

But then, has the public ever really been given enough accurate information to give this sort of thing serious thought? Stampede, rather than deliberation, is the goal here.

In fact, she pointedly refused to discuss the details any further even when asked, although she piously declaimed that she revealed it because “it’s important to always put a face to issues”. But then – wouldn’t you want to “put a face to” the perp? Might he/she not still be loose out there in the world, continuing his/her depredations? Isn’t there some sort of responsibility, according to logical – and not simply Mania – thought?

But ‘putting a face to the issue’ is actually code. In advocacy-speak it means putting a victim up front to engage the visceral and primal public emotions of shock and outrage (and thereby weaken the desire for actual information – the Stampede gambit). Goebbels, in the run-up to the take-over of the Sudetenland and the outright invasion of Poland did not make vivid newsreels of government officials explaining things; he got actors – women and children – to stand in village-type surroundings, artfully made up to look like they had been beaten and kicked … by the evil, subhuman Poles of course.

And in the current situation here, politicians don’t want to put a ‘face’ on the perp because that would immediately require a public examination into the charge that they have ‘revealed’ – which could go wrong in any number of ways.

“This is a crime of silence”, she asserts, following the Correct Speaking-Points script. “It is a crime because it is underreported”. But how do We know that? How can anyone ever know that? If it is underreported, then on what basis can you make the claim that it is underreported – since it is by your own definition an unknown quantum? And it appears that she herself committed such a ‘crime of silence’ and may be the only instance of an under-reported incident of which we can be certain.

I would say that if after decades of the Mania Regime(s) and the college codes, this sort of thing is still under-reported, a major element in that is that increasing numbers of kids – victims most truly of the frakkulent deconstruction of the most vital child-raising institutions and beliefs that American culture had at its command – are reaching ‘college’ with no ability to master themselves, and indeed with the sure and certain assumption that ‘sex’ is what grown-ups do, that it is the most defining and ‘liberating’ human experience a person can have, and that it is a ‘right’ that nobody can take away from them.

We have simultaneously been reduced as a society, a culture, and a civilization to ‘sex’, and to the government imposition of police-state ‘sex laws’ designed precisely – but selectively – to try to control what has been by other government deals so awfully unleashed.

This cannot end well.

So much remains to be done. To be reconstructed.

THE NANNY STATE’S LIBERATING TEETH

An article in ‘The Nation’ – trusty supporter of all things progressive – worriedly and apparently with some surprise notes that a number of women within Obama’s circle pushed for war with Libya.

Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice – “all three are liberal interventionists” – are apparently convinced that “when the United States exercise military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it”.

I mention this not to politicize this blog but to note what has long seemed to me to be a powerful but little-noted dynamic in national politics: the National Nanny State and the National Security State are “sisters under their skins” (from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ladies” here).

They both seek government-heavy intrusion using its police (domestic) or military (foreign affairs) powers.

This was – it has always seemed to me – a significant element in the ‘justification’ for the Mania Regime. Building upon the legitimate international Victimology insight that an awful lot of human beings are somehow receiving less than a decent shake in life, the American variant – adopted and mutated by the feminist and victimist advocacies – incorporated this element into the ongoing political scrum of American Identity-Politics gender wars starting in the later 1970s.

As the article notes, “all three are liberal interventionists, and all three seem to believe that when the United States exercises military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it”. In the case of authoritarian regimes (which the US had previously supported or at least tolerated) the old neocon bit about ‘democracy’ has been joined now by a New Left and ‘liberal’ and bipartisan support for ‘democracy’.

But as so often nowadays – as was true in the days of the USSR and its official statements – it’s all in how you define ‘democracy’. Recall that long roster of People’s Democratic Republics that the USSR and its eager imitators erected after World War 2; you would have thought the world was overflowing with ‘democracy’ and ‘democracies’.

In the present case, ‘democracy’ as it actually operates in the Beltway now includes (although nobody would prefer to mention it) the entire panoply of feminist ‘reforms’ which have worked so well over here. Thus, bringing ‘democracy’ to any country is going to include the assorted ‘liberations’ that not only insist that the Beyond has no relevance to modern political discussion (or even the living out of one’s life) but also that women must have full economic and political participation and they must have it now. Thus the old American dampdream of liberating folks from the tyranny of absolute monarchs or totalitarian governments now includes liberating some of them from the tyranny of patriarchy and ‘men’ generally.

This is going to be a tall order. While all countries want to modernize and achieve the fabled Western economic abundance (at least for their elites), few of them want to secularize and Flatten their lives into the monodimensional prison of Postmodern American Correctness and all its pomps and all its works. And all its ‘reforms’ and ‘liberations’.

While Americans have managed to not-think about it too much, then, there are few countries that want to introduce the American government-heavy reforms. Which may well include sex-offender registries and the panoply of the Mania Regime. Indeed, if recently liberated from police-heavy government, what new democracy is going to want to impose upon its people – and what citizenry will lightly accept – the maintenance of huge police files, the replacement of government-friendly, prosecution-rigged courts, and skewed laws and jurisprudence with ‘victim-friendly’ courts and jurisprudence, and the police-heavy intervention into the very domestic hearths of the Citizenry – so eerily similar to the old ‘midnight knock on the door’?

And I’m going to imagine this is true for many women in those countries as well – although the American media prefer to accentuate the positive and the Correct by focusing on those few Westernized local females who Tweet and very much would like to see themselves among any new elite that is installed.

Having achieved some critical mass in the present American political establishment there is a strong push for well-situated women to push their agenda overseas in order to keep the ball rolling. And that objective feeds directly into support for military intervention (since, it would appear, political agitation isn’t working – perhaps because folks ‘over there’ still know a bad Tire when they kick one).

And what government in its right mind wants to start a culture-and-gender war? It worked over here only with the most active and intrusionist thumb of central government placed onto the scales of the political process and the suppression of any deliberation that looked like it would lead to public doubt and disagreement with the agenda. No genuine new democratic government is going to want to try and unleash that – and if it tried, then it would take more American money (in short supply) and even troops (ditto) to impose it, and probably incite a civil war.

(That the gender and culture wars here did not result in an actual shooting war is a compliment to the general peaceableness and maturity of the American domestic democratic ethos - despite the shrill assertions that almost half the population are by their very nature vile aggressive violent and sex-drenched maniacs. And if you want to say that all that was just part of the bumptious ‘start-up’ phase of radical feminisim beyond which it has now ‘matured’, then are we to imagine that a democracy somewhere ‘over there’, imposed by military intervention, is going to spring into existence fully-matured, replete with a passive Citizenry from the get-go?)

The Mania Regime(s), I hope it is clear, are an essential part of the gender-war. And even though the Beltway is trying to get beyond all that (by hoping that enough people now accept ‘the new normal’ in these matters as they are hopefully going to accept the diminished ‘new normal’ in economic affairs) yet these laws remain on the books and there is still lots of behind-the-scenes agitation for funding and increased power.

And in most countries in the Developing World (i.e. still small enough to pick on from a military point of view) the culture and people are still deeply religious. Will they want to welcome the assault on religion that is part of the necessary operational strategy of the secularizing elites? They can see what has happened to the Catholic Church over here as the eerily-undying ‘priest abuse’ program enters its 3rd decade.

So it seems to me that what is happening now has to be seen for what it is: a ‘deal’ whereby the New Left can make common cause with the neocon Right in this continuing effort to impose agendas by force.

This is what the SO community has been seeing for decades now domestically. And while the Beltway has been able to control the spin on the domestic results, it will have no such ability to do so – except perhaps within mainstream American media, which are only a small part of the world and foreign media – in other countries where folks are also able to form their own impressions and act vigorously on them.

For every ‘terrorist’ in Afghanistan, I imagine, there are a hundred folks who have simply decided that they don’t like what they are seeing and don’t want the entire American agenda foisted on them and their culture. They don’t like ‘missionaries’ and they most certainly don’t like – to use Napoleon’s acute phrase – “missionaries with bayonets” (or drones or any other whizzbang improvements on the theme).

And I think that this ‘Napoleon’ complex is precisely what is being fed – now not only by the Divine-Deputy neocon Rightists but now as well by the ‘liberate-from-oppression’ New Leftists. Just as Napoleon sought to impose the French Revolution (not ‘democracy’ in the sense of the American Revolution) throughout Europe back in the day.

So, after long decades, the SO community is seeing the Mania now spread – as perhaps it always had to – into an intensifying derangement of foreign policy as it earlier deranged the domestic ethos.

This will not end well.

Much remains to be done.

SO VICTIMISM 9

We continue reviewing the 1986 book entitled “The Politics of Victimization” by Robert Elias, then of Tufts University.*

Elias now turns to the analysis of Victimizing in terms of Gender and Age. (p.57)

“Sexually and chronologically” he says, young men “break the law much more” than older men, and more than all women, “in virtually every setting, including both violent and property crimes”. (p.57) (He supports this with many footnotes, although all of them are from publications and papers generated by a few specific writers within the international Victimology group itself, a dynamic – and I would say a gambit – that I have noted in previous Posts in this mini-series.)

Ominously reflecting a trend that was probably inevitable (given the simultaneous cultural changes of increasing female ‘empowerment’ and decreasing reliance on general codes of conduct and even of philosophical or religious belief that any such codes can be imposed on anybody else, or even oneself) he observes without lingering that “women have shown increasing criminal patterns”.

Yet, he quickly continues, “men, including many juveniles, commit the most serious crimes”. (p.57) This statement reflects a bit of conceptual confusion, given the thrust of his immediately previous section (see my immediately previous Post) where he asserted that broader patterns of corporate and economic and “white-collar” crimes actually create more harm, and socially un-noticed crime (the Wall Street wreck of 2008 was two decades in the future when he wrote this book) causes more long-term damage. But he is trying, in this book, to balance the insights of international Victimology – which retains much of the long-established Western concern with social and economic consequences of large economic systems – with the agenda of the burgeoning (and politically enabled) American and feminist preoccupation with vivid violent, and increasingly sexual, crime and its victims.

And he presses on, refining his targets of concern: “While nonwhite men seem more inclined toward street violence, white men, from all classes, seem equally inclined toward violence toward women, especially in the home”. (p.57) You can start to see here the refining of targeting-focus on white males generally, and also the ominous bit about so much of this newly-valorized and newly-noticed crime taking place “in the home”.

That dynamic continues in his next sentence: “Rape studies” (the Note, Number 307 on p.280, references a single article from the Victimology journal) have shown that this violence emerges rather uniformly throughout the population, and does not confine itself to ‘subcultures of violence’, or to psychotic minds”. (p.57) Again, you see here that there is a clear effort to remove possible causal or explanatory factors that might detract from the momentum of a full-blown gender war based on these “findings”: this is a crisis that is spread throughout all males in the population (but – in a neat politically strategic and Correct twist – not among what might be called ‘minority’ males but rather white males of all classes … the historic Enemy of so many advocacies of the era).

Further, this is a crisis that is not caused by psychiatric problems (thus clearing the way for the assertion that the crisis is primarily – perhaps purely – a result of gender itself, specifically the male gender).

“Rapists”, he continues, "share the same sexist beliefs prevailing throughout the population; they differ only in how they act out their attitudes”. (p.57) (The supporting Note, 308 on p.280, references a single article in a Victimology journal.) He is speaking of “rapists” here, although it is unclear just what his definition of that act entails; I would imagine that at this early period it does indeed refer to rape in the older, clear, pre-Mania sense rather than to the vastly-expanded elastic definitions that came into major use once the Mania was up and running.

Immediately, he goes on “While spouse abusers’ other characteristics” … and here there is a sudden elision of ‘rapists’ and ‘spouse abusers’. The second term, ominously, not only reinforces the developing assault on the family and its ‘hearth’ setting, but also quietly conflates ‘rape’ and that now-trusty suitcase-term, ‘abuse’. And then he simply puts it out there: although there are factors such as alcoholism, prior abuse and “feelings of oppression” among the rapists, yet “the underlying force of such violence seems to have more to do with culturally legitimated male dominance than particular offender traits”. (both quotes in this paragraph, p.57) (And the Note supporting this assertion, 309 on p.280, references several authors, including Susan Brownmiller, at the time a noted radical feminist.)

So, in other words, the focus – in best gender war agenda fashion – must not be on the characteristics and problems of the perpetrator, but rather on the whole ‘male’ thing throughout the culture. This, neatly, removes the clinical and rehabilitative focus, which itself would detract from the focus on the Victim by implying that the perpetrators too were somehow ‘deep victims’ (my term). You can’t have, in agitprop ops, a situation of ‘duelling victims’ where both parties are somehow victims; you must have a Victim and a Perp (and the more monstrous the Perp the better). That’s Propaganda 101.

Again, complexity and careful assessment of the problem is sacrificed to quick-burning, melodramatic, and almost cartoonish Good-Evil characterizations. And this, as I have been saying, lends itself not to careful scholarly study with an eye to accurate informing of the deliberations of public opinion nor even with an eye to the transmission of efficacious policy-proposals to deliberating legislators. No, this is the purposeful and deliberate building up of a sharp, vivid full-court propaganda press toward the ramrod achievement of a particular political agenda regardless of any complexities or nuances abiding within the identified problem itself.

A single example is included: the sale of baseball bats with “wife-beater” inscribed upon them. (p.57) I’ve never seen such a bat, although – along with a million other distasteful bits of flotsam and jetsam – I can imagine that here and there in pockets among this huge and complex aggregation of sub-cultures in the country there are stores that sell such things, and perhaps among a certain type of clientele sell enough of them to break even or make a small profit. But to create the Mania as we now know it, and the gender war that I am convinced plays a great part in sustaining it, on the basis of such things is a lethal stretch indeed.

He immediately moves forward with another shrewd gambit: The existence of “things like this” (referring to the baseball bats) “might also make women, usually less inclined toward violence, change their behavior for the worse, such as in child abuse where the women who commit such violence usually have been battered by their husbands”. (p.57) (The Note, 311 on p.280) references a single 1977 article in the journal “Victimology” entitled ‘Significant Findings in Child Abuse Research’. I point out that ‘battering’ is now and perhaps was then a rather elastic term, and further that there would have to be a method built into whatever research was conducted to factor-out women who were caught child abusing and then sought to escape the consequences by surfing the cultural waves and blaming the husband for wife-battering – a distasteful but hardly improbable possibility.) And tactically, this assertion clears the way of accusing the male not only of his own purported abusing of the female but also of the abuse perpetrated by the female upon the child (his abuse ‘made’ her do it).

If you build up enough of this type of assertion, based on these type of ‘studies’, you create a venerable tissue or web of ‘knowledge’ with which to overwhelm the public’s ability and the legislators’ ability to deliberate.

And, of course, if politically and vote-minded legislators are already eager to please a large new ‘demographic’ – or at least its self-declared advocates – then the pols might even be uninterested in accuracy so long as such a compendium and web – perhaps not read but simply measured in pounds of paper or feet of shelf space – gave them ‘rational basis’ for whatever ‘Findings’ they would claim when passing ‘friendly’ legislation.

This, I would say, is a major element in the ‘success’ of getting the Mania going and of sustaining it. It is also, from a larger point of view, a profoundly lethal derangement and corruption of the integrity of the legislative process, and – I would say – one so broad, deep, and so long entrenched that it has quite probably contributed to the derangement of the functional deliberative integrity of almost the entire sitting political class.** This web of facts simply becomes one more un-read bit of ‘proof’ that helps legislators to close the ‘deal’ with the advocacies.

And then, of course, such a thick tome as Elias’s, perhaps accompanied by boxes and boxes of photocopied ‘studies’ such as those referred to in his Notes, give courts the ostensible ‘reason’ for declaring the legislators’ productions ‘reasonable’.

And the beat goes on.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.

**And such derangement and corruption being a dynamic sort of thing, it has probably not remained limited to the pols’ performance in Matters Mania but rather has moved on to infect their official performance along a wide spectrum of national and international issues.

ADDENDUM


The male is endowed with greater physical strength and greater and more highly reactive aggressive potential, and that deep urge to maximize successful contributions of his genes to the pool. Defense and gene propagation seem the overall evolutionary tasks for which males have been prepared. Add to that the evolutionary provision for the human infant to be born relatively immature (so that the head that will house that big brain will fit through the birth canal) and the female consequently provided with specially-evolved advantages for nurture, and you can see how any human society that develops is going to have to take these basic evolutionary realities into account.

The male, possessed of so much potential for aggression and reactivity, as well as so much strength, must – it seems to me – be especially provided for such that he can be educated into the mature and socially constructive and beneficial use of the powers with which he has been endowed by evolution. This would have to be a vital task of a culture and a civilization.

What has happened in this country seems to me very much not the way to proceed. The attack on the integrity of the family (fathers abuse everybody) and even the very need for the family (‘children are the State’s problem, as Christina Hoff Sommers quoted one radical feminist) as well as the Mania assault on males as parents and as youth … none of these contribute to the successful and effective training of males.

In regard to genuine sex-offenses perpetrated by males, and eliminating the numbers (whatever they may be) of genuinely mentally-ill perpetrators of such offenses, then we are left with what I would say are an awful lot of males not trained and not-matured in the use of their powers for the common weal.

What would be needed is a program to ensure that young males are responsibly trained – preferably by their own successfully matured fathers – in that vital window of opportunity in the early years of life. This would certainly be a legitimate government interest, even if that interest were more prudently to be serviced by intermediary organizations and communities rather than by central-government law and regulation.

To address the matter of males’ energies being ‘civilized’ by teaching and modeling a certain mature mastery of their powers in the vital window of youth … this would have been a vital need best met by a government information program – possibly with some economic incentives – to help the vital parents and mediating institutions and communities in actually fulfilling this task.

Instead, for what I think are largely political reasons that do not justify what has been done, the government opted for supporting a literal gender-based war on males, on the basis of accurate observations that male energies must be matured and mastered but also on the basis of grossly distorted and often inaccurate and skewed conclusions that would fuel not a concern for educating males but a fearful reaction aimed at imprisoning them and tagging them.

And given the simultaneous government support for programs designed to weaken the family and to often create social space for weak parenting and fatherless settings in the matter of child-rearing, you wind up with a self-licking ice cream cone from Hell: young males are not being trained by mature male parents, they fall afoul of increasingly draconian criminal laws (and ‘administrative’ registries) that expand not only according to the iron laws of well-funded government programs (which will never commission a study that will ‘find’ that the program is no longer necessary or hugely mistaken) but also according to the automatically intensifying dynamic whereby some government-supported initiatives create the problem and another initiative (the Mania Regime) must intensify to solve the problem that the other programs are greatly helping to create. And within the space of a decade or two, cohorts of children thus under-prepared are creating and raising (or not) children themselves.

Think of a fire department where half the engines are on one side of the building pouring water onto the flames, while the other half are on the other side of the building pumping gasoline onto the flames. Maybe even a quarter of the engines pumping water and … do the math.

The idea that ‘kids are the State’s problem’ is hugely wrong-headed. Even if you had a program of State-run orphanages to capture that vital character-building and maturity-grounding ‘window’ in a child’s early years (and who wants to see THAT kind of institution develop?), you still couldn’t replicate what a decently functioning family presided over by competent parents living in coherent and cohesive communities could accomplish.

Young males are increasingly liable to be raised with little help for mastering their male energies (and I am not simply referring to sexual energies or ‘sex education’). And in a national culture where ‘character’ and ‘maturity’ and ‘mastery’ are no longer considered valid or ‘real’ requirements for adulthood, the State’s sovereign power will have to rely increasingly on the bald force of the criminal law to maintain social order.

This is not only a catastrophe for young males but also for American society and culture.

ASSANGE CONTINUES

This will be a short Post. I simply want to add this recent article that outlines in more detail the antics and devious doings of the Swedish allegants and the Swedish law enforcement types in regard to the case from the very beginning.

The SO community won’t be surprised by all this hugely dubious maneuvering between allegants, their attorneys, police and prosecutors, and even the media. But it’s interesting to see an example of how this whole frakkulent scheme plays out, especially under the pressure of (multiple instances of) political and electoral maneuvering.

I do, however, want to point out just one quotation in the article. Marianne Ny, the sorta prosecutor of gender-crimes who issued the arrest-warrant says that “it is a good idea to have the man detained, because it is not until he is arrested that the woman has time to think of her life in peace and realize how she has been treated”. [italics mine]

THIS is a prime example of the presumptions – not widely publicized, although I imagine cheeribly received among klatsches of the cadres and true believers and advocates – that underlie the SO Mania Regime. And, by the way, clearly reflect what they are teaching now in law-schools all over the Western world.

Why, especially in a case like this, is it so necessary to have ‘the man’ (i.e. the accused alleged perpetrator) not only arrested (bad enough) but also ‘detained’ (which in Sweden means held incommunicado with no possibility of bail)?

The reason put forth is that somehow the allegant (the woman) won’t be able to think things through until he is locked away. Why would that be? How could it be? The presumption seems to be that in any ‘sex’ matter the female is so fragile in her ability to process thought that she is unable to concentrate or think things through. This is a key and classic trope of victimist thought, but a) I can’t see how it works psychologically; and b) it seems to paint females as rather fragile and emotional creatures who can’t concentrate in a challenging situation; and c) the most relevant immediate challenge in this type of situation is NOT that the female be comfortably situated to undertake a major life-and-self review and analysis, but rather that the female as formal legal allegant be able to come up with the relevant (and theoretically necessary) statements of fact necessary to justify police and criminal-law action against the male whom she has now formally accused and embroiled in the sovereign toils of the Law.

(I won’t even get into the conceptual incoherence that this presumption creates in a comprehensive cultural agenda that more generally insists upon the complete reliability of the female to participate in authoritative positions (executive, professional, political) of great responsibility, requiring clear-headedness and the ability to focus no matter what personal distractions might also press upon her. And of course, if I may, this goes even more so for such positions as military duties, especially in any sort of command position.)

And even if one wishes to point out that in genuine rape cases this just might be applicable, such is not the case here. Although, in its eagerness and calculations to ‘keep up the numbers’ by casting the widest possible net and creating ‘trip-wire’ law enforcement responses, the SO initiative crosses the line into a Mania Regime.

I wonder too just how much such an arrest (with its inevitable detention) simply feeds on revenge of some sort.

And on a more tactical level, as I have pointed out in prior Posts on this subject, how much this gambit pretty much ensures that the now-detained male’s side of the story is greatly and effectively stamped out. Leaving, by amazing coincidence, the public-relations field to the advocates so-called and to the allegant, and their friends and useful idiots or outright collaborators in the media.

Looking back on things over the past few decades, it seems to me that there has been a step-by-step progression.

First there was a certainly legitimate effort to ‘raise public awareness’ about an issue. This is what I call the first level of ‘advocacy’ and it’s a perfectly acceptable one: bring a new point of view to a previously established consensus (or just a habit within the culture that had formed long before and hadn’t been looked at recently). In this vision, the public would now be provided with another point-of-view when it came to forming an opinion about how this type of incident (sexual assaults) should be looked at when they arose. This would then filter along in due course to affect how the tried-and-true public machinery of legislation and law-enforcement and government action would handle such matters.

But this apparently wasn’t enough for the advocates. It was too slow, perhaps, and too unpredictable (public opinion might not widely accept the new point-of-view, at least to the liking of the advocates).

So now instead of merely informing public opinion, advocates tried to manipulate it – and more specifically to stampede it. With help from the media (which might have already felt through its tingling whiskers that some political weight was behind the gambit) instances are selectively reported, given lurid play, perhaps even inaccurate assertions. Simultaneously, ‘friendly scholars’ (perhaps realizing that grant money was going to start flowing in this new channel) and assorted non-accredited ‘authors’ start putting it out there that there is wide ‘proof’, adducing the bottom-line statistics of this or that ‘study’ or –even worse – ‘survey’ (where you simply ask folks and they can pretty much respond with whatever they’d like to say). The media amplifies it relentlessly.

On the basis of the ‘studies’ and all the ‘new knowledge’ the advocates can then move to the next level, and start arm-twisting the politicians (who may have their doubts, or may be perfectly willing to be given a pretext to claim they are merely being ‘responsive’). By this time the politicians’ whiskers are also tingling as they realize there are votes to be won or lost, perhaps in large numbers, depending on how they roll on this thing.

Law-enforcement and prosecutors – also bewhiskered and perhaps ‘educated’ into the new approach – now start coming up with any evidence they can; like bird-dogs that sorta just know in their depths when master wants them to come back out of the swamp tail-wagging and with a bird-body between the eager jaws.

So now at this third level of advocacy, the actual official organs of government in its Branches are starting to become deformed in the service of the agenda.

And as certainly happened here, the public then winds up being side-stepped rather completely, having been a) stampeded by the deformed information, and b) shocked by the media ‘reports’ and all the ‘studies’, and c) increasingly cowed by the draconian application of the police power which – many realize – is either only going to be aimed at somebody else (the targeted males, in this case) or else may somehow be aimed at them if they stand up and say something (e.g., if you don’t agree with us and what we’re doing then you’re obviously in favor of rape and ‘sex offenders’).

And THEN it proceeds to a point where not only is the application of the laws deformed, but the actual structure of the laws is deformed (“victim-friendly courts” being the most pithy official description of it, including as it does all sorts of dismantling of ancient Western protections against the misapplication of the sovereign police power of the state).

AND in support of that – which is necessary in a still-functioning democracy the way it wasn’t in dictatorships and tyrannies of which Stalin’s and Hitler’s are only the most well-known – philosophical assertions are made that have the necessary and intended effect of undermining the entire foundations upon which the already-deforming laws were originally built. Thus: all Law is merely an opportunity for oppression; there is no objective truth that can be claimed to stand in the way of what we want to do; rights don’t apply to ‘evil’ persons even if they are formally Citizens; ‘all men are rapists and all sex is rape’ anyway, so this is just a ‘reform’ to even the score. And etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.

Worse, that this crime is so egregious and constitutes such an ‘emergency’ and outrage that public deliberation can’t be allowed to interfere, nor public opinion if it is against what we want to do; that to provide Constitutional process is to re-victimize the (as yet unproven) victim; that this crime is so outrageous that it doesn’t deserve to be defended in public discourse and our agenda should never be discussed.*

But then came 1970 and it was all about gender, not so much race, and the whole national discussion was faced with a far more subtle and hardly-clear challenge involving gender.

And eventually, within 15 or 20 years, came the Mania where NO-body dared to ‘speak up’ unless it was to say that the SO Mania was a good idea and – anyway – it wasn’t a Mania, only a little tweaking that was, somehow also, a revolutionary reform (which is almost a contradiction in terms).

So from informing the public, the advocacy mutates into an active force for undermining the very foundations of the national ethos and polity.

Because I would say that you can HAVE they type of government the Mania Regime requires for its agenda to ‘work’, but then you WON’T HAVE a Constitutional, limited democracy such as the Framers envisioned. You will have something else.

Pasternak, in ‘Doctor Zhivago’, described the early revolutionary warlord Strelnikov, bloody and robust dispenser of bullet-ridden revolutionary justice: “Disappointment embittered him; the revolution armed him”. This is a consequence of the American mutation of Victimology that hasn't been sufficiently considered.

Stalin, Pasternak noted, realized that the secret to dispensing revolutionary justice and law was not – as Lenin had imagined – to be predictable (if you oppose us you will surely be shot or sent to Siberia), but rather to be capricious (if you oppose us, no matter how secretly, we may show up on your doorstep any day any night any time and that will be the end of you and maybe your family and your little dog too).

Only a very foolish or courageous citizen would not say: maybe best if I just keep my mouth shut, and even better not to even think about it.

Now, with declining government funds and the public so wrapped up with genuinely monstrous national problems like an economy that is never coming back to pre-2008 levels for most people, the advocacy approach is to hide behind ‘the children’ and what are made out to be little volunteer groups of ‘concerned citizens’ who would like (and are vigorously but surreptitiously angling for) lotsa money and the power to conduct their own law-enforcement, since the official agencies are starting to realize they have more genuinely dangerous threats to deal with in the matter of public order and the commission of crimes.

And politicians who have already gone wayyyyy too far out on the limb to now try to admit it, and anyway figure that they need the support of whatever ‘base’ they can manage to keep happy.

Perhaps the government will quietly walk away – sort of like it did in Vietnam – and declare victory and go home: leaving the wrack and ruin ‘back there’ for ‘them’ to deal with now. To see that happen in the SO Mania might seem at least a better outcome than the still-frakking Mania Regime that’s still in business (with government money).**

But I am worried that the government will back away while leaving the Regime’s enabling legislation still intact. And given the tremendous insult and assault that such legislation presents to Constitutional praxis and ethos, it will remain a submerged or buried mine waiting for another chance to blow a hole in what is left of the America bequeathed to Us in that amazing Moment 235 years ago).

NOTES

*This was Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 assertion, looking back from the vantage point of an American university gig to the Nazi era he had lived through: he reasoned that the ideas Hitler spewed about German race superiority and the evils of weakling democracy and that the foolish limits imposed by constitutions on governments should not be allowed to interfere with what he wanted to do for Germany. Looking back, Marcuse thought that if somehow Hitler had been prevented through government authority from proposing these ideas in public, then Germans might never have supported him and he never would have gotten to power.

Interesting thought. Although how the Weimar government could do that and still remain a constitutionally-limited democratic government is something Marcuse doesn’t care to think about.

Worse, he was wondering if the same type of dynamic wasn’t usefully applicable to the United States of 1965. Suppose, say, that Jim Crow supporters weren’t allowed to spew their noxious race-subjugation or race-separation ideas publicly. And then came the 'culture and gender wars'. Political Correctness as We know it begins here.

**I wonder if it wouldn’t be a sound economic plan, and would also serve to demonstrate just how much public support really exists (or doesn’t), for the assorted Mania-related organizations to rely on private donations? I seem to recall a year or two ago that one of the marquis priest-abuse organizations was thinking of shutting its doors due to lack of funds (after, interestingly enough, the lawsuits had died down).

STATUTORY RAPE LAW

A recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Opinion offers a look into how juveniles are charged in statutory rape cases and reflects some interesting and sober judicial thinking.

The case is Commonwealth v. Bernardo B, 453 Mass. 158, 169 (2009).

A 14 year-old boy was charged with several counts of statutory rape and assorted other charges for sexual acts involving three 12 year-old girls. All were friends. On assorted occasions, sometimes in the presence of other members of this foursome, the boy requested to have his privates touched, and the involved girl in the particular instance did so; it is interesting to note that under the Mania Regime this qualifies as a “manual sex act”.

In October of 2007 the father of the boy (the Bernardo B. of the case title) was checking his son’s cellphone text messages and discovered a series referring to one of the girls telling the boy that she would have given him an “HJ” (hand-job) if (another of the girls in the group) hadn’t been there. (Note, please, that in current youthy argot “HJ” describes the act of putting your hand on the sex-organ of a male and holding it there for a second or two. Similarly a “BJ” (blow-job) refers to the act of placing one’s mouth on a male sex-organ and holding it there for a second or two.)

The father, already impressive for keeping tabs on the son’s cell-phone messages, contacted the mother of the third girl. That woman spoke with her daughter and the mothers of the other two girls, which is also nice to see.

The result was that within a few days of the father’s first contact the police were called and it was claimed that the boy had sexually assaulted the girls. And, as is famously announced at Santa Anita, they were off.

As the Court itself notes, “the record in this case, as we elaborate below, suggests among other things that the sexual activity in question was nonforcible, that all of the children mutually agreed to it, and that all were under the age of consent”.

Under questioning (and one can only imagine, although at least in this case all interviews were taped and supervised) at least one of the girls admitted to feeling “pressured”, to wit: the boy said he’d tell another girl she had said bad things about her, but that she never felt fearful or in danger. You can only imagine how much ‘forcible sex’ the enterprising Mania cadre could make out of any school where youngsters threatened to ‘tell other kids’ anything; the Court here soberly refuses to consider it ‘force’ and accepts the ‘pressure’ as a much lesser dynamic.

The girls all reported that the foursome remained “friends” throughout.

In several instances where the boy was asking for ‘sex’ he showed the girl(s) a computer video clip of a woman performing fellatio on a man. I can’t help but think that the computer angle might have made the case a bit more attractive to the DA, since Obama, seeking to back away from AWA, has instead backed a ‘computer sex offense’ initiative.

The boy was arrested in the middle of October 2007 and charged with several counts of statutory rape and assorted other charges (among them, Indecent Assault and Battery on a Child Under Fourteen). On several occasions his attorney contacted the DA to ask to have the girls similarly charged, since there was no evidence of force and every evidence that the whole thing was mutually consensual.

The DA’s office, initially putting her off with the claim that it was reviewing its charging-policy in statutory rape cases (a policy that was subsequently discovered never to have existed, let alone been reviewed), told her in Spring 2008 that it would only prosecute the boy. The statutory rape charge as it existed in Regime law was and is a ‘strict-liability’ felony, meaning that one only had to establish that the act had been performed to legally prove the charge; intention and extenuation are not required. Nor can a defendant plead that no force was used or plead ignorance or mistake as to the age of the child (who, by the law’s definition, is therefore the victim, regardless of being the active performer of the act).

It is also interesting that the acts described suffice, apparently, to meet the legal elements of “sexual intercourse or unnatural sexual intercourse”. Once again, to use an image from previous Posts, in the Mania Regime the battleship of the criminal law is brought right in close to the village in order to awe with its big guns (despite the fact that when those monsters are fired from so close a distance the mere force of the muzzle blast may well ignite or level the whole village and all its huts – to say nothing, as Scripture saith, of the inhabitants and the animals).

This led directly to the present case when the boy’s attorney then filed a motion for Discovery, asking the DA to provide statistics as to how many boys – as opposed to girls – were prosecuted for statutory rape in that jurisdiction; the intent here was to establish that the boy was being selectively prosecuted, discriminated against because of his gender.

The Commonwealth (i.e. the DA’s office) claimed it had “prosecutorial discretion” as to how to enforce the laws. The Court respectfully acknowledged that right, but then immediately went on to note that “prosecutorial discretion, however, is not unbounded. See id. at 608. The Federal and Massachusetts Constitutions guarantee individuals that the government will not proceed against them in a manner that is arbitrary or based on ‘an unjustifiable standard’, such as membership in a protected class”.

Let us pass over in silence the whole fraught matter of erecting “protected classes” in a nation that guarantees equal protection under impartial laws.

The Court observes: “The district attorney reasons that, because ‘there exists a link between violation of sexual assault laws and gender [and] [p]erpetrators of sexual assaults are overwhelmingly male’" then it’s not going to be possible for anybody to determine if there is any gender bias in the enforcement of the law. The DA reflects here both the Mania Regime’s conceptual assumption that males are sexual aggressors by nature and thus constitute the predominant ‘sex offender’ threat, and the Mania Regime’s general practice that males are thus – naturally, as it were – the ones most frequently prosecuted.

But it seems to me that especially with the definitions of ‘rape’ and ‘abuse’ so elastic and widely-stretched, there is probably a great deal more female-perpetrated activity than anyone cares to prosecute (or ‘study’, for that matter – you’re not going to get a lot of grant money from the government or concerned grantor-sources if you are planning to study females in terms of the commission of sex-offenses).

I cannot stop being impressed by this basic gambit of the Mania Regime: since males are biologically primed (if Evolution be any guide) to want to propagate as widely as possible, then a profound and broad political effort to wrest societal and cultural power from them could not fail if you could somehow criminalize ‘sex’ as much as possible. In the huge ‘war’ for political and civilizational clout, you pretty much guarantee yourself a self-licking ice cream cone if you can somehow criminalize the entire gender (by criminalizing the tendency Evolution has sort of saddled them with).

This is NOT to support or approve witless macho posturing, since ‘macho’ is not – in my view – a sufficient mode of expressing genuine masculinity or even adulthood.

Impressively, the Court is not distracted by the DA’s argument: the sex-offense laws are supposed to be gender-nonspecific, as well as impartially applied, so the defense has a right to see if in cases where all parties are equally consenting and “similarly situated”,  females are prosecuted in some roughly equal proportion to males.

Nicely, the Court takes the time to review the history of the charge of statutory rape. It was first codified into English law in 1275 (curious when one has been soused for decades with the shrill claim that ‘patriarchy’ had had its way throughout Western and world history right up until on or about January 1, 1970).

Granted, that first law was to prevent females “under the age of twelve” from being violated, since in those days a marriageable female was a father’s “property” and her marriageability provided a vital asset to the family as well as a security for her own future. (This may not seem the most ‘Correct’ reason to afford legal protection to the female, but for the day and age it may have been the most workable legal mechanism to do so; recall that before the child-labor laws came into general acceptance in this country, enterprising citizens tried – successfully – to protect children through the laws that prohibited cruelty to animals … it was simply, at the moment and for its era, the most immediately workable means of using the law to improve the situation and provide protection).*

The American colonies absorbed the English common law, although the age of consent was ten (although the life expectancy in the 17th century New World was only about half of what it is nowadays); in the Massachusetts Colony the punishment, by the way, for “carnal copulation” (i.e. actual sex) with a female under ten was death. In the late 19th century, “in response to widespread sexual exploitation of young girls in factories and urban centers” the age of consent was progressively raised: between 1886 and 1898 the age was raised from ten to thirteen to fourteen and then sixteen, all for the purpose of protecting them.

It was not until 1974 that the law was applied to males.

The Court notes that according to the Commonwealth’s defense of its refusal to turn over its records to the Defendant in order to establish whether there exists a pattern of gender-discrimination in prosecution, a Defendant would have to produce statistical evidence that he could not access unless he could demonstrate the gender-discrimination in prosecution that he was seeking the information in order to demonstrate in the first place. A Catch-22 with almost cynically awful consequences

So, the Court holds, boys and girls should be treated equally in matters that the Court – rightly, I think – terms “underage sexual exploration”, rather than engaging in “the historical stereotype that boys are the aggressors and that girls are exploited”.

Which is refreshing. I mentioned in my immediately prior Post that there is a serious problem in trying to apply inappropriate templates (‘stereotypes’ is the word used here) to a situation, no matter how conventionally Correct they are from an ideological point of view.

I also note that ‘exploitation’ is a refreshing change from ‘victimization’ and opens the matter up conceptually, sidestepping the now-established tripwire and, frankly, knee-jerk responses that ‘victim’ sets off in the mind of a public soused with Victimology in its crime-happy American variant.

Certainly, in matters of female sexual assertiveness – which has increased exponentially due to the cultural changes of the past 25 or 30 years – there is now a much greater possibility that the female is going to be an active and perhaps initiating element in a given encounter. The success of this aspect of the feminist agenda has – for better or worse – undermined the original stereotype of the female as always the passive, unsuspecting victim in any sexual encounter. And the Mania Regime was erected on that stereotype.

And certainly, the imposition of the innocent victim/evil aggressor onto childhood sexual antics is also inappropriate, counterproductive in so many ways, and will ultimately work deleterious consequences for law-enforcement and the legitimacy of the Law as well as for the youth caught up in the toils of the process.

I agree with the Court, of course, when it goes out of its way to say that it is “not un-troubled by” the behavior of these youth in the first place. But again, it is a direct result of the cultural loosening up strictures against sexual-activity – indeed the ‘valorization’ (as they like to say in certain circles) of sexual activity as a primary means of human ‘fulfillment’ and ‘happiness’ (as in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of”), while simultaneously what kept intensifying was the multi-sourced reduction of parental influence and even of familial bonds, to say nothing of the ‘de-valorizing’ of such oppressive and fuddy-duddy concepts as Character, Self-Control and even of Maturity itself.

In such a cultural situation, the possibility of untoward and harmful sexual activity among all age-groups, but certainly the young, is pretty much guaranteed now. And I don’t relish the possibility or probability of society simply accepting this state of affairs as ‘the new normal’. To be against ‘smoking’ and ‘fat’ but be all for ‘sex’ is incoherent and dangerous as cultural and societal policy.

But to try to stamp out that problem that you have caused by then trying to deploy the force and majesty of the sovereign criminal law is a surefire recipe of requiring the government almost literally to wage war against sizable – and increasingly sizable – chunks of its own citizenry.

In fact, it seems to me that one strand of the impetus behind the Mania Regime was that it would be necessary to compensate for the increasing failures in raising kids well by having the State try to keep behavior in line with its police authority. But ‘character’ and self-control and a well-grounded competence in genuine human sociability need to be instilled long long before a child is in middle-school or beyond. As it stands now, the plan seems to be to replace child-rearing and ‘character’ with fear of increasingly draconian legal consequences.

Which can only lead to very bad things all around.

NOTES


*I would add here that the fact that children were originally helped under the rubric of the cruelty-to-animals statutes does NOT demonstrate irrefutably that, say, ‘children were thought of as no more than animals’. It was simply that for the time and place those statutes, already on the books, were the most readily available means of helping them. This tendency, seen here in the past decades, of automatically making the worst-case inference from a historical fact (e.g., that, say, the early English laws about statutory-rape decisively ‘prove’ that women were thought of as mere property and nothing else) is neither good historical and conceptual form nor is it guaranteed to be an accurate inference as to the attitudes of those who put the law on the books.

This may seem obvious but it was precisely the effect (and I think the intent) of Political Correctness over here in the past few decades to ‘capture the spin’ and ‘capture the story’ and prevent public and widespread deliberation about alternative (and quite legitimate) inferences about past eras of human beings, such as the one I propose in the preceding paragraph.