The author of this book, the french gay communist activist, Guy Hocquenghem start exposing sort of idea pretty common between those who are already familiar with Foucault theories.
The problem is not so much homosexual desire as the fear of homosexuality : why does the mere mention of the word trigger off reactions of recoil and hate ? We shall therefore be investigating the fantasies and ratiocinations of the heterosexual world on the subject of "homosexuality"
Instead of directly going to contest homosexuality as a pathology, he tries to propose an more interesting hypotheses: What if this violent repression of homosexuality manifests symptomatically as a sort of pathology too? A problem that's even more serious than the homosexual desire itself.
For Hocquenghem (as for Foucault) this manifestation it's not merely a natural response to a non reproductive, non-marital and non-heterosexual drive.
The great majority of "homosexuals" are not even conscious of being such. Homosexual desire is socially eliminated from childhood by means of a series of family and educational mechanisms. The power of oblivion generated by the social mechanisms with respect to the homosexual drive is such as to arouse the immediate answer: this problem does not concern me.
If you want a similar analogy, you could also think that your society vanishes "pedophilic desire" since young age by:
- Eliminating child love outside the family
- Endorsing age appropriate relationships and secure age-gaps since very early in life
- Reinforcing the image of the innocent child, which everyone knows is just innocent for sexuality
- People with pedophilic desires are shamed, jailed and killed
There are drives of desire which all of us have felt and which nevertheless do not affect our daily conscious existence. That is why we cannot come to terms with what we believe about our own desire. There is a social mechanism forever wiping out the constantly renewed traces of our buried desires. One simply has to think about what happens with an experience as widespread as masturbation to realize how powerful this mechanism is : everybody has masturbated, yet no one ever mentions it, not even to their closest friends.
By
Drives of desire I guess it's better to just think as desire that doesn't have a name or that's not directly identifiable as homosexual - or, in our case, minor attraction. This tends to not bother the person who feels it and then it's incapable of defining in any way his desire. This dialogues with his "The great majority of 'homosexuals' are not even conscious of being such". Pedophilic desire can be sublimated in desire to have children or taking care of them, but it's never directly desire to have sex with them. I guess the example with masturbation it's more like to say that's something pretty common, but confined to the private life (Although I can remember of a dozen of situations when was young at the school and I talked openly about masturbation with close friends)
"Homosexual desire" - the expression is meaningless. There is no subdivision of desire into homosexuality and heterosexuality. Properly speaking, desire is no more homosexual than heterosexual. Desire emerges in a multiple form, whose components are only divisible a posteriori, according to how we manipulate it. Just like heterosexual desire, homosexual desire is an arbitrarily frozen frame in an unbroken and polyvocal flux.
Again, the ones familiar with Foucault's
History of sexuality might be already familiar with such idea too. The so called homosexual desire is not something only present on homosexuals, but also exist, in some degree, in heterosexual people too. If you deep dive your own life you probably will find something similar to a desire towards a same sex person, although - if you are heterosexual - this events maybe not the most common. Generalizing this, and also echoing Freud's concept of Polymorphous perversity,
there's no such formal thing as homosexual desire, just desire.
The exclusively homosexual characterization of desire in its present form is a fallacy of the imaginary ; but homosexuality has a specially manifest imagery, and it is possible to undertake a deconstruction of such images. If the homosexual image contains a complex knot of dread and desire, if the homosexual phantasy is more obscene than any other and at the same time more exciting, if it's impossible to appear anywhere as a self-confessed homosexual without upsetting families, causing children to be dragged out of the way and arousing mixed feelings of horror and desire, then the reason must be that for us twentieth-century westerners there is a dose connection between desire and homosexuality.
So homosexual desire is common, but the negative image of the manifestation of such desire is pretty upset. If you want a parallel with minor attraction - Which is also common - Just imagine how common it's is and at the same time, every time a face of a "pedophile" appears at news program or newspaper it's impossible to not be upset even if you are a MAP. You can't barely look at the face of the guy. There's a desire floating in these moments, even if it's a desire to erase or to destroy.
Homosexuality haunts the "normal world". Even Adler could not refrain from acknowledging the fact :
"The problem of homosexuality hovers over society like a ghost or a scarecrow. In spite of all the condemnation, the number of perverts seems to be on the increase. . .Neither the harshest penalties nor the most conciliatory attitudes and most lenient sentences have any effect on the development of this abnormality."
Now compare this, with the words of Klaus Beier - A notable CSA preventionist:
https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/missbra ... d-brutaler
Images of abuse are spreading explosively across the internet and leading to more and more victims. [...] He is sounding the alarm because of the rampant consumption of abuse material online: “We are dealing with a pandemic!”[...] “We are treating increasingly younger patients,” says Beier. “Twenty years ago, the average age was in the late thirties, now it's in the mid-thirties.” In an additional program for adolescents, in which 600 patients participated, the average age was even 15. “The proportion of participants who had already abused children was much higher in this group.”[...]Another alarming trend: “The intensity of the abuse has also increased in terms of the acts themselves, for example through the combination with sadism,” says the expert. Images of abuse are also increasingly being produced using artificial intelligence.
Hocquenghem says:
In its endless struggle against homosexuality, society finds again and again that condemnation seems to breed the very curse it claims to be getting rid of. And for a very good reason. Capitalist society manufactures homosexuals just as it produces proletarians, constantly defining its own limits : homosexuality is a manufactured product of the normal world.
This echos the same socio-constructionist perspective of before. Hocquenghem also remarks:
what is manufactured is a psychologically repressive category. Most of people in jail "for pedophilia" are not even real pedos, but they still be captured by the logic and the policies that implies the existence of a categorical distinction of desire (like sex offender registries, for example). These people are victims who were captured by this system, and I also believe some of them were captured by incident and do not even conceptualize themselves as pedos. So will always be enough pedos to be putted on jail, specially when the oppressive power of the law is expanding through the area of desire, although, as Hocquenghem reminds, is always out of reach.
Nobody will ever eliminate the polyvocality of desire.
The category under discussion, as well as the term indicating it, is a fairly recent invention. [...] According to Havelock Ellis, the word "homosexual" was invented in 1869 by a German doctor. Dividing in order to rule, psychiatry's modem pseudo-scientific thought has turned barbarous intolerance into civilized intolerance.
What's valid for homosexuality is also valid for pedophilia here. Both are inventions of the late 19th-century medical body and bring with them now a widespread way to conceptualize certain social practices. This is one of the main arguments of Foucault in History of sexuality - Sexuality is a social construction.
Psychiatry has thus classified what is marginal, but in doing so has placed it in a central position. Kinsey's prodigious adventure is a lesson to us. He merely continued modem psychiatry's efforts to encompass everything by providing it with material, sociological and statistical foundations ; in a world dominated by numbers, he demonstrated that homosexuals may be relegated to a mere 4 or 5 per cent. And it was certainly not these few millions who were responsible for the storm which broke out on the publication of the Kinsey report, but a discovery which no amount of scientific naivete could hide :"Since only 50 per cent of the population is exclusively heterosexual throughout its adult life, and since only 4 per cent of the population is actively homosexual throughout its life, it appears that nearly half (46 per cent) of the population engages in both heterosexual and homosexual activities, or reacts to persons of both sexes, in the course of their adult lives."
Now compare with:
Green, R. (2002) - Is pedophilia a mental disorder?
It is no longer a matter of the little "queer" everybody knows, but of one person out of two - your neighbor, maybe even your own son[...] By constantly discriminating and "discerning", we fall into the indiscernible.
Those are old quotes you've already have heard: "A predator can be anyone"
Thus the margins close in on the norms of sexuality and gnaw at them persistently. Every effort to isolate, explain, reduce the contaminated homosexual simply helps to place him at the centre of waking dreams. Sartre is basically right here, whatever other criticisms are to be made of his psychological portrait of Genet : why does society always call on the psychiatrist to speak and never on the homosexual, except in the sad litany of clinical "cases" ?
"What matters to us is that he does not let us hear the voice of the guilty man himself, that sensual, disturbing voice which seduces the young men, that breathless voice which murmurs with pleasure, that vulgar voice which describes a night of love. The homosexual must remain an object, a flower, an insect, a dweller of ancient Sodom or the planet Uranus, an automaton that hops about in the limelight, anything you like except my fellow man, except my image, except myself. For a choice must be made : if every man is all of man, this black sheep must only be a pebble or must be me.
Confession of a pedophile (Link to FSTube)
Difference may breed security, but the mere word "pederast" turns out to be strangely seductive: "pederasque" (as in"tarasque", the medieval dragon of Provençal legends), "pederastre" (as in "Zoroastre"). These common slips of the French tongue appear in letters to newspapers, and are enough to convey what happens at the mere utterance of the word. The exceptional richness of the vocabulary indicating the male homosexual deserves at least to be mentioned : queer, fag, fairy, queen (using the masculine or feminine gender arbitrarily), etc, as if language were exhausting itself in trying to define, to name the unnameable.
And if we constantly need to repeat that there is no difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals, that both are divisible into rich and poor, male and female, good and bad, then this is precisely because there is a distance, because there is a repeatedly unsuccessful effort to draw homosexuality back into normality, an insurmountable chasm which keeps opening up. Homosexuality exists and does not exist, at one and the same time : indeed, its very mode of existence questions again and again the certainty of existence.
Again. You may have heard that predators can be anyone. You favorite singer, streamer, uncle, brother, father, etc. But they supposedly still exist, even if only at the language level which is something even Newgon wiki has noticed through many places as different Slangs.
https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Pedophobia
