Lev responds to D.A. of Davis, CA
Images of self-expression
Thanks very much for writing. It's refreshing to read some comments on the notion of desire which don't immediately attack it in the name of morality, ideology, society, nature, original sin or the word of god(s)! Authoritarian notions are deeply ingrained in our culture, and it seems to be hard for most people--even for many people who would like to call themselves anarchists--to relenquish their conditioning in this regard.
Anyone who takes the time to observe the society we live inmight immediately notice that there is a huge ongoing battle over the meanings and uses of the concept of desire. The notion of desire is just one of the complex of ideas which center around the concept of anarchy. And it's fairly obvious that the meanings of any of the ideas related to anarchy are going to be hotly contested in our society. After all, it is largely organized around the maintenance of authority, hierarchies and all the forms of modern slavery. So it's unlikely that the meanings of words related to anarchy will be unreservedly allowed to express people's yearnings for free and full lives. When those who stand to gain power or profit from authoritarian institutions have the ability to mystify and confuse such matters, you can bet that plenty of their resources will be devoted to just this task.
If people were to clearly understand that there is no sensible reason for them to suppress their own lives--their own desires for living, half the battle to overthrow the modern forms of slavery would already be won. From there it would be but a small step toward formulating the strategies and tactics for over-throwing everything which stands in the way of these lives and desires. So from the perspective of authority, it is necessary not only to call in question the advisability of living our lives outside the rules and definitions of civilization, it is above all necessary to enlist people in the dirty jobs of suppressing their own lives and desires at all costs! And how better to do so than to convince everyone that their most fundamental impulses are largely anti-social or evil? Thus the dominant (authoritarian) image of desire: the most primitive, atomistic, anti-social and senseless range of impulse which can be attributed to human beings. And thus the project of civilization: to channel this rangeof primitiveimpulse into the construction and maintenance of its own projects--all the structures of repression, domination and reification.
From the perspective of anarchy there is quite another way of conceptualizing desire. This doesn't involve analyzing it in terms of partial categories of life like those of psychology, biology, sociology or philosophy. These partial categoriazations largely serve civilization's projects of manipulation--perverting or repressing desire by separating it from life, treating it as a "thing," and redirecting it to its own ends. Conceptualizing desire anarchically instead involves a loose analysis of the flow of our everyday life experience. This everyday lived experience is fundamentally unitary--i.e. as subjects we are totally engaged with the world such that it is not always easy to decide where the abstraction we call the "self" ends and the abstraction we call "the world" begins. Yet it remains convenient to speak in terms of these abstractions as though they were fairly definite ideas. But when one divides the experienced unity of our lives into these two abstract poles of self-identity and world-environment, something would be lost were they left totally separated and without connection. One important aspect of their connection can be conceptualized as desire, as the orientation and relation of our selves to our environment. In celebrating this orientation and relation to ourselves and our world in the slogan "Arm Your Desires!", we hope to encourage people to see themselves as active creators of their own lives rather than as passive consumers of the life-roles authority has allotted to us. Instead of an acceptance of the external determination of our activities by authorities of any kind, we encourage people to see their lives as first of all their own self-expression. For if we aren't ever strong enough to express our real desires, how can we ever feel that we've really lived?
(NOTE: from here to issue #30 or so, I'm only going to type up editorial responses to letters; whew, this is a lot of work, y'know? Too bad the original editor who typed all this up didn't keep it on a disk...)
Issue #25 Lev responds"[The] ultimate threat may not be explicit in moralistic approaches to social change, but it always lies implicitly below the surface. No matter how "libertarian" it might be claimed a form of morality is supposed to be, the logic behind it always leads eventually to an explicitly authoritarian direction. And this type of...vision isn't very appealing to me."--Lev, in issue #25
Desire or guilt
([NOTE: ideas that i think go further than anarchist methods are inserted in "my comments section])
As I said regarding the workshop during the Summer '88 California Earthfirst! Rendezvous, those who would like to constitute a successful movement to end the progressive degradation and destruction of nature have two basic choices for directions that may be travelled. We can attempt to base a movement to 'save the earth' on feelings of guilt that can be evoked in people--because they are a part of humanity and humanity is responsible for the ecological crisis. Or we can attempt to base a movement to liberate nature--ourselves included--on the destruction and supersession of all the respressive aparatus of civilization whicah have led to our increasing alienation from nature.
In other words, we can base this movement negatively on how horrible people are (some form of original sin), and how our appetites must be curbed even more than they already are by the constraints of "civilization", or we can base it positively on overthrowing the the constraints of civilization which has subdued our wildness and our fundamental identification with the rest of nature.[The typists] COMMENTs: OR (?) we can attempt to base a movement to liberate nature--ourselves, all of us (INCLUDING the "oppressors'" mindset)--on the roots that bring these consequences of destruction and increasing insanity upon ALL of us.
my COMMENTs: Add *desires* alongside "appetite". Replace "overthrowing the constraints of civilization" with *overthrowing the fearful mindset which produces these and many more consequences*. Add *connection* with "identification" and "with the rest of nature" add *humanity*
One road demands our submission to an ideal ([ideological rigidity])...The other road invites participation through the lure of a vision of personal and social liberation which intimately embraces the liberation of nature from the ravages of human alienation. At root the difference is between an authoritarian vision of a wild humanity that needs to be tamed, and a libertarian vision of an alienated and domesticated which still yearns for liberation.
It seems to me that morality occupies a central place within the punitive, authoritarian vision of ecological salvation. If a voracious humanity is the primary problem, the goal becomes the muzzling and suppression of humanity. Since the reified "Nature" of authoritarian ecologists is unlikely to achieve the suppression of humanity on its own, it becomes necessary for ecologists to devise ways of convincing people to suppress their own "evil" natures for the "greater good" of "Nature" understood as everything outside humanity.[Typists' comment? : ] At root the difference is between a fear-paralyzed vision, and a curious vision seeing the value of all experiences...is this different from "libertarian" or "anarchist"? Which group is to be "liberated"? What if both groups seek to be truly to be liberated?
The rationalizations will vary, but their content remains the same: people's desires are evil or destructive and violate the laws of God, or Nature, or Spirit, or Ecology, therefore people's desires must be subordinated to an idealized concept of God, or Nature, or Spirit, or Ecology. And, of course, the ultimate threat always remains: if people don't suppress their own desires, eventually an authoritarian political apparatus in the control of ecologists will have to do it for them.
If Nature doesn't take its own revenge on humanity, then eventually the custodians of morality on earth will be forced to undertake a reign of ecological terror in order to "restore the balance of Nature" themselves. This ultimate threat may not be explicit in moralistic approaches to social change, but it always lies implicitly below the surface. No matter how "libertarian" it might be claimed a form of morality is supposed to be, the logic behind it always leads eventually to an explicitly authoritarian direction. And this type of...vision isn't very appealing to me.
The alternative vision...sees that people have been forced throughout history to increasingly divide themselves, and to separate themselves from other people and from nature. [This vision] assumes...that people are "naturally" in tune with each other...
...and the rest of nature such that they had to be torn kicking and screaming all the way, from their original ways of life by the process of civilization.my COMMENTs: thus our "natural" tendency to want to get others who don't understand us to understand us, or at least understand our passion--our root desire--by any means history has allowed. As unbalanced as humanity has become, we have turned to fearing, hating and hurting and killing each other in order to get the beliefs of our needs (rooted in two basic momentums) across to the group that we believe cannot and will not understand...(do you agree?)
One has only to examine the real history of authoritarian institutions to see that they always had to be imposed through great force applied to [disinterested] communities before they were finally grudgingly accepted. Often their acceptance was only conditioned on the near genocide of their caommunities that were subjugated.my COMMENTs: so, civilization in this sense is a product of fear?
(...)[Typists' comments] COMMENTs: So also with the *new designs* of groups like the IMF, WTO, World Bank, and so on, which are really just old colonizers in new clothes.
Generally, when people use the word morality, they explicitly or implicitly [(openly or covertly)] mean to prescribe an abstract system of right and wrong values. And most any system of right and wrong values by its nature has a central value around which all the others are subordinate--usually logically so. ...But whatever the central value, the expectation is that people must uncritically subordinate their own desires and lives to it if they are going to be moral.
The assumption is always that the values of the morality are more real and true than those felt by the individual (her or himself). In other words, people must trick themselves into believing that the central value of a system of morality is really more important to them than any other desires they could possibly have.
Psychologically speaking, the primary motivation for people accepting moralities in this sense, is guilt. And those who purvey moralities of any kind automatically zero in on people's feelings of inadequacy and guilt in their attempts to convince them [to] adopt their moralities. In this sense morality is always a con-game manipulating and exploiting people's weaknesses; it's certainly not liberatory in any way.
The ....alternative...is to appeal to [people's] desires and dreams. ...it makes more sense to speak directly to people's deepest desires to live their lives freely and expansively. This means communicating our criticisms of how...destruction degrades our own lives. This means sharing our own experience of oneness with the rest of nature with those who haven't yet experienced it.
And this means encouraging people to take an active part in creating their lives according to their desires rather than continuing to allow their lives to be defined by authorities, ideologues, moralists and [so on]. Individual decisions to [do something valuable]...need not be forced by adherence to a moral creed which demands them. In fact, [these ideas] will be much more easily and naturally accepted when they are seen to express on'e actual positive desires to live mroe freely and directly.my COMMENTs: This means sharing our own experience/tendency to identify with young dudes--similar to an experience of oneness with the rest of nature (!) with those who haven't yet experienced it, forgotten about it, or can't imagine such!
Issue#26
Lev comments: (to "An incest survivor" from LA, CA)
Sex or sensuality?
Thank you for a very thoughtful letter, without the unnecessary finger-pointing and denunciations we've seen in some of the other letters critical of our stance on these issues.
I suppose the most important point that needs to be reiterated in response to your well considered questions and challenges is that as long as the concept of "sex" remains unexamined and its use remains undefined in your comments, it is hard to know exactly what you mean and where you are drawing your lines. As anarchists we wish to draw as few arbitrary distinctions as possible in order to allow our own and other's experiences to remain open and relatively free. This means that for us the usual heavily reified categories of social analysis and social control are more than just highly suspect. They are simply unacceptable when they remain unquestioned and uncriticized, because they always contain implicit value-judgments--usually repressive in character. In the case of the prevailing discourse concerning sex and sexuality there are several important streams of repressive thought and practice which seem to have come together to influence and reinforce each other at this juncture in history.
In the first case there is the obviously repressive and morbid attitude of the religious fundamentalists for whom no sex is good sex, and no sexuality is good sexuality. However, if God, the state, and certain earthly religious authorities give reluctant permission, they will tolerate a bit of this nasty stuff, within certain very narrow limits. These people are only (pathetically) “happy” when they are able to exercise enough power over themselves and others to prevent any experience of illicit pleasure.
In the second case there is the strong influence of repressive feminists(call them what you will--the feminist right, anti-sex feminists, feminist ideologues) like Andrea Dworkin. { Note: I heard more recently from a colleague that Dworkin ACTUALLY NOW SUPPORTS non-patriarchal child love!! Anyone have a SOURCE for her alleged statement?? --ed} [/b]
Repressive feminists have often begun with a legitimate concern for the effects of unequal power and patriarchal traditions in sexual relationships. However, as with the religious fundamentalists, a major thrust of their activities has been the proscription (whether legal, moralistic, or ideological) of those types of consenting sexuality which they fear, despise and/or (possibly) desire most. These are the people who brought us the vacuous, but politically explosive, distinction between pornography (mostly male-defined sex representation according to them) and erotica (the porn they like, or at least are willing to tolerate).
[/quote]
A third case is the growing industrialization of social analysis and social control techniques. An army of cops, judges, jailers, social workers, psychologists, therapists, sociologists, counselors, and other petty bureaucrats (sadly, including the “social-work left”) have swollen the payrolls of government and public institutions. In order to justify their parasitism, they have had to come up with ever newer and more threatening social pathologies from which they can claim to protect us. More and more areas of life have been criminalized at the same time as the techniques of surveillance, interrogation and repression have been extended, refined and made more powerful.
For all three of these groups the “discoveries” of child abuse and/or sexual abuse have been godsends. And each has benefitted from the others’ legitimation of an increasingly generalized attitude of repressive intolerance for any deviant (i.e. non-conservative) social groups and practices. Of course, each of these repressive groups has its own agenda, along with its own contradictions, internal conflicts and extremists. The fundamentalists tend to go off the deep end looking for Satanists, ritual child-abusers or gay molesters. The feminists tend to foam at the mouth over any evidence of male sexuality, to the extent that one of the current hot topics of debate in feminist circles is the attempt to keep infants with penises from attending women’s festivals! And the ranks of the petty bureaucrats are replete with pseudo-experts willing and able to categorize more and more areas of life as criminal, at the same time as they lay claim to the right to administer all those areas of life which are still to be tolerated--at least for now. The concept of freedom has no place in their plans.
It is in this context, of a growing consensus by repressive forces that non-conservative sexual ideas and practices must be stamped out regardless of the consequences, that questions regarding children’s sexuality must be posed. To ignore these powerful social currents shaping our current reality can only mean that one is tacitly accepting their definition of our world, giving up our powers for self-definition without a fight. Anyone serious about ending social alienation and promoting libertarian alternatives sooner or later has to confront the reification involved in all the repressive techniques currently gaining ground. The all depend upon a strategy of stigmatizing, and ultimately criminalizing, whole categories of human interaction regardless of whether they involve consent or not. There are many arguments that can be made for this type of blanket criminalization; every one of them is authoritarian.
Sure, everything people do--regardless of professed altruistic motives--is always to an important degree “for their own gratification.” In itself this is not an argument for or against anything. Sure, children and adults have unequal power. So do any one individual and any other individual, regardless of whether they are both children, both adults, or adult and child. Sure adults can be--and usually are--subtly coercive on a variety of levels when it comes to dealing with children. But this doesn’t mean that it makes any sense to criminalize all sexual contact between adults and children. Sure, children have been hurt by unwanted sexual experiences. But many more children have also been hurt by unwanted sexual repression. There is an important and subtle balance involved in allowing children the power to determine their own lives, and attempting to protect them from things they may not be sure whether or not they want.
Anyone genuinely committed to working for a “sexually free society” will have no desire to criminalize whole categories of consenting activity for reasons which at best justify intervention only in some cases. And even then, it is highly questionable whether any individual or community intervention could define such activities as “criminal” (in the usual sense of the word) and still have much claim to being a “free” society. It simply makes no sense in general to put people inprison for “sex crimes” in which both parties consent. Since there simply is no uniform age at which children suddenly become able to consent (where one day earlier they weren’t able!), age-of-consent laws should be abolished. But for the same reason, children need more power and many fewer restrictions on their lives in general--and they especially need the power to live wherever and with whomever they wish in order to be more easily able to escape situations of abuse or molestation.
While I am very sympathetic with many of your comments, your seeming confusion over the meaning of sex and sexuality bothers me. Like the bogus distinctions between erotica and pornography, arguments which automatically equate all sexuality with genital sexuality (or even more narrowly with genital intercourse) deny the reality of our experience which doesn’t come neatly packaged in discrete categories. Thus your remark (in response to my own comments regarding intergenerational “sexual contact” in primitive societies) about the supposed “taboo against intergenerational sex” being “the oldest taboo to develop” seems to assume among other things that “sex” is always equivalent to genital intercourse, when this is not at all what I was speaking of. It is just this type of reification, which treats the distinction between sex and sensuality (or sexual and non- sexual experience)as one of black and white, that threatens to submerge any possibility of ever freeing our sexuality under the rising tide of authoritarian administration and overt criminalization. Freeing our sexuality is not an easy task, precisely because it requires the acceptance of a certain level of risk for its possibility. But failure to accept this level of necessary risk means reversion to authoritarian “solutions.”
Issue #30
"...those genuinely concerned with freedom are more inclined to look at things sympathetically from the points of view of the victims of psycho-cops and moralists, rather than from the points of view of the enforcers of authoritarian norms."--from issue #30
Lev responds to a writer:
Moralism has absolutely nothing to do with freedom
As an anarchist, an advocate of children's freedom (in my opinion 'rights' are mystifications designed to fool those who also believe in laws), and a survivor of the myriad abuses one is typically exposed to in childhood, the suppression of children's freedom, including their sexual freedom, is of special concern for me.
Certainly, in any society there is a need to balance children's powers "to determine their own lives, including their own sex lives," with the desirability of providing some sort of real protection from unwanted exploitation,including sexual exploitation. However, the blanket prohibition of all child-adult "sexual contact" serves neither of these purposes. Instead, it primarily serves to help isolate and regiment adults' and children's lives in general, while at the same time suppressing any spontaneous and free bodily expression between children and adults in particular.
You can cite whatever scientific or moral "point of view" you wish to help justify the suppression of freedom. Obviously, the points of view of psycho-cops and moralists will always remain violently opposed to the expression of individual and social freedom. But please don't fool yourself that you're doing anything but arguing the the suppression of freedom by any such citations. On the other hand, the value of having cops and moralists on your side evaporates when your goal has nothing to do with repression. And those genuinely concerned with freedom are more inclined to look at things sympathetically from the points of view of the victims of psycho-cops and moralists, rather than from the points of view of the enforcers of authoritarian norms.
It's revealing to see that from your new found "psychological/socialogical" and moral points of view children are not only completely and absolutely incapable of consent, but that "adults always engage insex with children exclusively for their own pleasure" (my emphasis). I'll disregard this time around the questions of what it is that for you makes a person unable to consent to sex until s/he reaches the magical age of majority (18 in most states) and in what it is that 'sex' consists of for you. But I can't help but comment on how reassuring it must be to see the entire world so neatly divided up in moralistic blacks and whites! On the one side, adults can consent but children can never consent. While on the other side, adults must invariably exploit children if they are in any sense 'sexual' with them, while adults who aren't sexual with children are somehow immune to this "categorical imperative" of exploitation. In re-reading your own words I can only hope you begin to appreciate how bizarre they must appear to those not incapacitated by your moralism.
I usually don't like to engage in name-calling, but it should be quite obvious to any thinking person that your quote from David Finkelhor exhibits the mentality of a fascist. For him it apparently doesn't matter in the least what a child (or an adult) feels, experiences, or desires. Patriarchy knows best. What has this got to do with children's freedom, or even the muddled concept of "children's rights" you advocate? Nothing. But, it is completely useful as a tool for the suppression of children. This is blatant authoritarianism. No one with the slightest commitment to the actual freedom of children could possibly condone this sort of illogical 'argument'.
There also remains the unspoken question of how you think such a blanket ban is to be enforced in this society (or in an anarchist society) against the wishes of both parties to freely chosen relationships. Are you advocating that people be ostracized? That people lose their means of livelihood? That people go to prison? Does this mean that for you the state is a necessity? What are you arguing for? Who is supposed to prevent children and adults from interacting in ways that could be perceived as sexual when there is apparent consent? What will be done with those 'caught' kissing children? Or being naked with them? Or even taking photos with them? What will you say to the children when you separate them from their friends or parents?
What is your position concerning all the other things that children are forced into in childhood? What about the forced submission to religious brainwashing, forced imprisonment in schools, and all the repressive laws against nudity, sexuality and play? Are you concerned about forced submission to the arbitrary authority of prudish, authoritarian, and usually petty whims of parents and teachers, social workers and cops?
Why not accept the actual implications of the only valuable thing you have to say on the subject ("We have no right to impose our values on anyone")? This means you and others who wish to suppress children's freedom have no 'right' to do so! This means that whatever specious arguments you can come up with for the suppression of their freedom, those arguments will mean nothing to anyone who actually values freedom! Please take your own advice and stop meddling in children's lives, as long as you feel compelled to impose your morality on them and their friends.
Issue #33
p.80
RESPONSE ANNOYING
Hello Lev!
I'm not a regular reader of Anarchy, but I thought it to be necessary to react to your response to H.M.'s (from London) letter in Anarchy #30. I found this response to be annoying.
I judged H.M.'s letter to be an honest attempt explaining her/his ideas on child abuse/sexuality. (And it could easily be a painful subject, being a rape victim; one of the worser forms of contempt for children.)
There are things which make you go out of your mind, but I don't see any reason for this in H.M.'s letter. Labelling someone's ideas to be moralistic or fascistic is such an easy way to dismiss what somebody is saying. This is a very common way of responding, but to me this doesn't broaden the discussion. Amongst anarchists there's quite a lot of disagreement. We'll never get to agreement, when nobody listens and tries to understand the ideas other anarchists have.
Come on Lev, don't be so quick to take offense. (And: what's moralism? [I thought your response to be an example.])
And about children's sexuality: why are only grown-ups talking so much about this? What about the ideas of children themselves? I think these are the most important! P., Utrecht, Netherlands
Lev replies: Anarchy is offensive
I'm glad to hear my words in favor of free sexuality are annoying to those who want to control the sexuality of others, whether they be adults or children. Too often, people think that a major goal of anarchists should be to avoid 'unnecessary' controversy, to avoid offending the mythical 'average' person (or 'average' anarchist), and to avoid confronting other 'anarchists' who spout off about how their pet 'vices' should be forbidden and suppressed in one way or another, in order that we can all get on with the more important business of smashing the state, or abolishing capital, etc.
As I see it, a saving grace of the anarchist movement or milieu (depending upon one's point of view) is that party lines are not usually tolerated, that everything which can be questioned sooner or later will be questioned, and that while controversy may not be well-liked in most anarchist circles, there is no easy way for it to be suppressed without those doing the suppressing having their commitment to anarchy severely questioned. For us involved in the production of Anarchy magazine, this means that we rarely have any problem with speaking our minds and pointing out that not only the emperor, but also most of his subjects, have no clothes! Just because a person purports to be an anarchist does not make any of her or his opinions any less subject to critical review than those of others. In fact, those identifying themselves as anarchists will in these pages be expected to hold to a much more consistent level of free thought and activity, than those who make no such pretensions.
That H.M.'s letter falls far short of being consistent with any genuinely libertarian perspective on sexuality should be obvious to anyone who reads it. That H.M. wants to legitimate his authoritarian attitudes regarding sexuality by associating them with his alleged commitment to 'anarchy' involves a debasement of anarchist theory and practice that is not excusable by reference to his 'honesty' or the 'painfulness' of the subject. There are no rules that say those with authoritarian attitudes are not honest, nor that anarchists should be excused if they have authoritarian attitudes concerning subjects they find painful!
H.M. wants to deny the ability to consent to an entire class of human beings (children), effectively denying their very subjectivity, solely in order to convince himself and others that his own disgust at and/or fear of children's free exercise of their sexuality is really a universal law. But, in the first place, there simply are not universal moral laws, only humanly-created, inconsistently held moral beliefs. And in the second place, even if there were such idealized universals outside the perverse minds of moralists, those genuinely interested in freedom would pay them no mind, anyway.
H.M. quotes a passage from David Finkelhor that "The wrongness [of child-adult sex] is not contingent upon proof of a harmful outcome" as a further justification for the suppression of children's powers to choose their own activities. As I stated in my original response to H.M., this quote "exhibits the mentality of a fascist." I say this because the idea that any entire class of consenting activities should be suppressed even if the activities show no "harmful outcome" has absolutely nothing in common with a commitment to freedom of any sort. Instead it has everything to do with justifying an extreme authoritarianism like that exhibited by the paternalistic fascist state. If the 'wrongness' of any activity is purely in the mind of the person, or class of persons who conceive that 'wrong', bearing no relationship to whether people actually engaged in the activity enjoy it, or even thrive with it, on what possible grounds do the perceivers of the 'wrongness' enforce their perceptions on others who may see only joy in their own activities? I await your answer to this question.
RIGHT TO RAPE
by M.M. Yo folks,
The one and only Freddie B sent me a copy of your latest issue, #32, which I read with interest. Liked some of it a lot. (...)
What makes me put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, really) was your letters from folks in the groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association, admitting that they aren't anarchists, but that they're nonetheless freedom-fighters, and fighting for pride in their community, and so on and so on and so on.
The sexual freedom of youth is something worth fighting for, I think. It's an important aspect of the fight to overcome the current realm of unfreedom, and it's one that liberates enormous revolutionary energies. If you printed letters from members of groups with names like--and here I'll make some up: Young, Sexually Active, and Proud; Youth League for Sexual Freedom; Smashing the Nuclear Family System that Tried to Smash Us--well, then I'd be very interested. People freeing themselves, now that's great!
But
(...)
Yours for dream and wonder, M.M., Seattle, WA.
A Reply to M.M.'s "Right to Rape" letter [from a reader]
Dear Friends, I picked up your magazine at a local comic book store for the first time yesterday and read all of it last night. (...) I have been an anarchist for many years. (...)
One item in your agenda surprised me, albeit pleasantly so. That is your frank discussion of transgenerational relationships. The "politically correct" stance is that any sexual contact across generations is abusive and there are few forums where alternative ideas can be discussed. I am glad that there is some forum which will allow this discussion on an intelligent level.
I direct my comments to the letter written by M.M. of Seattle who took NAMBLA to task for its support for transgenerational sex.
I was a member of NAMBLA for several years. I am a man who loves children, and I am sexually attracted to boys. I have a childhood which relates to my membership which I shall describe shortly. First, though, I would like to challenge some of the assumptions M.M. makes about NAMBLA and boys who might be involved with the members of NAMBLA.
M.M. seems to be in favor of sexual freedom for children, but while s/he does not openly say so, this freedom seems to be limited to having sex with people of one's own generation. No, there are not groups known as "Young, Sexually Active and Proud." Take a good look at our society, M.M., how long could such a group exist? There are, however, young members of NAMBLA (Bill Andriette was a 'minor'[age 15--ed] when he first began his involvement.) Some of the special friends of members attended meetings when I was a member years ago. And, no, we did not pass them around and have sex with them. What we did was listen to them and change our views of the world because of them.
M.M. makes the unwarranted assumption that boys who are involved with men are mostly street kids, hustlers and the like. This is far from the truth. Certaintly many children are beaten and abused by their parents. Many of these kids end up on the streets in dismal lives. But most abused kids stay at home, enduring the abuse they receive. A substantial number of kids who are in a transgenerational relationship are from homes where they were abused or emotionally neglected. The relationships they develop with their friends are often one of the few bright spots in their lives. These relationships are a far cry from the predatory ones implied by the phrase "chicken hawk." I know, because I was just such a kid.
I grew up in a family with an alcoholic father who was away from the family months at a time, who never slapped or spanked me but who never seemed like he cared enough to do so.
My mother, also an alcoholic, went to great pains to make sure that my father's neglect of my discipline did not result in my going without any. Unfortunately, the great pains she went to were usually mine. I can easily remember many years later the whippings with the belt that I recieved. The whippings were not as bad as the humiliation. One time when I was eight, she caught me masturbating in the bath tub. She pulled me out by my hair and made me stand dripping and nude, in the living room. I had to continue masturbating in front of her while she ridiculed me, sometimes for being a little masturbator, sometimes for the tiny size of my penis, sometimes for being a sissy (which I was). Regardless, though, I had to stand their and fiddle with myself for at least a half hour. If I lost the erection, I was slapped.
Another time, when I was ten, I was sent to bed right after dinner for some reason (or maybe for none at all--there did not always have to be a reason for my being punished). I had to go directly to bed. No TV, no dessert, no trip to the bathroom. I got locked in my room which was not uncommon.
I wet the bed that night. I can remember the panic I felt when my mother came into my room to awaken me and I felt the dampness in my pajamas as I awoke. I was not a bedwetter, but I knew mommy would be mad. And mad she was. She slapped me several times and then told me that she would make sure I never wet my bed again. She fashioned a diaper out of an old sheet and put it on me like I was a baby. She pinned it, but to assure that it remained on me all day, she sewed it together and sewed it to my undershirt. I got sent to school like that. There was no way I could use the restroom. My kidneys ached from my bladder being so full during much of the day. Worse, though, is I had not had a bowel movement since early the previous day and my mother had not let me use the toilet before putting the diaper on. I left school with the worst stomach ache I had ever had and rushed home as quickly as I could.
I begged my mother to take the diaper off and let me use the toilet. She made me promise never to wet my bed again. Of course I promised. She had me take my pants off, as if to undo the diaper, kissed me tenderly and then sent me outside of our hose clad in nothing but diaper and T-shirt. I sat on the steps in tears. I knew neighbors were watching. I knew some of the kids on the block were having a real laughfest on my account. And I could not help myself. I soaked the diapers and then filled them.
That was the state I was found in when a police car drove up and took me away from my mother. I was gone only a few days and was returned to her after a meeting with a bunch of people I did not know. One of the people was a quiet man I will call Carl. From that moment on, my life was changed.
Carl was my case worker from a private agency which was doing some of the social work for our county. He was the only person in that room who seemed to be talking for me and not about me. My mother, all tears and remorse, pleaded to have me back, explaining that it was hard raising a boy without a husband to help. She explained that she had done what she did out of frustration because I was a chronic bed wetter. I wanted to shout that this was a lie, I had not wet my bed in years until the other night, but instead I dropped my head and cried. Carl put an arm around me as I wept. He tried to console me by telling me that many boys my age still wet their beds. I just shook my head.
Carl spent more time with me than his job required. He would stop by after work and check in to see how I was doing. His official contact with me was short term. Not soon after the meeting where we met, the agency for whom he worked was no longer needed for intervention. The social worker my mother was seeing determined that everything was hunky dory in the family. Sure. Society abandoned me, but Carl did not. He took me places like the zoo or the local amusement park. He cared about me and I knew it.
I would often go to sleep imagining myself in Carl's arms. I loved him. I prayed that he loved me. Frequently, I would fall asleep with his image in my mind and my penis in my hand. I would drift off to my rest masturbating, to his name and imagined kisses. And more.
Carl and I got closer. He could tell that I loved him. I hoped that his interest in me was love, but my experience with love was so limited that I could not be sure. I wanted him so badly. I wanted him and his love.
He often acted as a sitter for me. One time we went to a baseball game and afterward, we stopped off at his apartment. We had done this often in recent weeks. I curled up on the couch, my hand in his lap, watching TV. He was stroking my hair lightly, as he was wont to do at times. Often when I was with Carl I got an erection. I had one that afternoon. I also had a plan.
I seduced Carl that day. I rubbed him through his pants and he rubbed me, and we spent a great deal of time kissing. It was a gentle time and the start of many years of love which M.M. might call abusive or rape but which for me signalled my becoming a more full human being. I experienced a lot with Carl, but never was I coerced or forced. I gave him my anal virginity for my twelfth birthday present to him. After all, he was the only one who bothered to do anything for me that day. He experienced my first ejaculation with me several months later, coaxed from me by his loving mouth.
If I have spent over long on these reminiscences, it is to give M.M. and others a flavor of how I felt in those confusing days and how Carl helped me with his love and care. Sex was a very important part of our relationship, certainly not the most important part. I know that if at any time I had wanted to stop, Carl would have done so without question and I would never have felt he was pulling away.
When I was seventeen, Carl was killed in an automobile accident. There was not much to keep me at home after that, so I came west to California after graduating from high school. I went to college, became a teacher, married and am raising two children. I love children; their pain frightens me. As I have said, I am sexually attracted to boys (as well as to women). Some may argue that Carl is responsible for that attraction to boys. I doubt it. Prior to knowing him, I would stare at younger boys, fantasizing about them sexually. The surprising thing to me in retrospect is my bisexuality. Somewhere I learned to love people, regardless of their gender. I thank Carl for that lesson.
When I have told other people about my experiences, particularly those in NAMBLA, often they have asked me if Carl were still alive if I would feel comfortable with him being around my young son. Of course I would. Carl would not have done anything to hurt my son, as he had done nothing to hurt me. I would not have encouraged or discourage anything. My children will be free to make whatever decisions they want to make on their own in this regard. (Parenthetically, that is why I would never, never consider a sexual liason with one of my children. In this case, the power relationship makes informed consent very difficult if not impossible for the child.)
Love and attention is the currency of pedophilia and kids know when one is broke in the currency and when one is flush.
My experience is not terribly different from many of the men who are members of NAMBLA, though many of them had never had sexual experiences with men when they were boys, but often they looked up to a man in their lives. Many had no fathers or minimal contact with a father figure. Most have never had a sexual experience with a child as an adult. But also, most of the men (and the few women) I knew at NAMBLA were loving people, above average intelligence with a strong regard for the rights of children, sexual and otherwise.
M.M. says that "maybe somewhere there are 'underage' youth who are, even under capitalism, freely choosing sex with 'older' men or women. Maybe this happens a lot. Me. I'll only defend the struggles of such youth to defend this freedom but never the authoritarian privileges of 'older' men or women to freely use the power of money to open the hairless crotches of street kids." S/he seems ready to defend freedom, but also s/he seems uneasy that this freedom might be real, that there are kids, street kids and otherwise, who may actually choose to love and live with someone of another generation. Come on, M.M., although I have never had sex with a young person since I have reached my majority, I have had several boys (at least ten) who were blatantly coming onto me sexually over the past years. Money had nothing to do with it. Most of these boys were from affluent families. Many of them had more money in their wallets or pockets than I do. Money meant nothing. Love and attention is the currency of pedophilia and kids know when one is broke in the currency and when one is flush.
on pornography
I read the periodical Gauntlet which bills itself as "exploring the limits of free expression" below its masthead. I enjoy this periodical, but I was not surprised that in the first issue it stated several times something to the effect that all means of expression should be allowed except, of course, child pornography. Why the "of course?" The "of course" is there because child pornography is perceived as arising from situations wherein the child has not consented, therefore can only be a visual expression of child abuse. This attitude extends to the belief that not child has sufficient strength to be able to disagree or agree to a sexual relationship with an adult.
"...children are not allowed to consent to any aspect of their lives, sexual or otherwise."
Both of these beliefs arise from the widely held concept that children are not strong enough, wise enough, experienced enough or capable enough to consent to most events in their lives. We have compulsory education in this country, not because we want kids to learn. If we did, then we would have better schools. We have compulsory education to acculturate children to being led, to being compliant. I am a teacher (and that is why I cannot sign this letter), and I know that if the schools were safe, interesting, loving places to attend where real learning took place, then children would not have to be coerced into attending.
We have child labor laws to protect children from exploitation and dangerous conditions or so the current fantasy goes. If this were true, why then are so many children exploited by their parents, beaten or robbed? If this were true, why does not this country have universal health care or child care?
No, the laws of this country which are on the surface to protect children are more often than not ways of denying them full access to and participation in this society. Thus children are not allowed to consent to any aspect of their lives, sexual or otherwise. childe pornography laws as well as child sex laws are more restrictive of those they are presumed to defend. No person, regardless of her age, should be sexually abused. There should be no need for a law which mandates special circumstances for age or gender. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse. If someone does not consent to sex wholly and without coercion and sex occurs, then what occurs it rape.
People should benefit from their labors. If a child chooses to be filmed in sexual circumstances, then the child should be able to benefit from the sale and distribution of the films and pictures. The key is choice. In this country, because a child is presumed not to be able to consent, a child can never choose to have a sexual relationship or can never choose to be filmed in sexual acts.
"The laws which are in place to protect me when I was young, prevented me from profiting from my labors."
I was amused several years ago when a friend who shares my passion for boys invited me to see a video of some old "kiddie porn" he had acquired. Most of the films were of such poor quality that it would have been difficult to recognize most of the kdis. A common thread seemed to be that the kids involved, whether individually or in twos or groups, appeared to be enjoying themselves. What amused me was one clip of a young boy, twelve and a half, who was masturbating himself with a vibrator. It was a very explicit film. One in which the boy looked like he was enjoying himself. I know the boy was, even though the film was almost twenty years old. I know because the boy was me.
My relationship with Carl was extralegal. There are those who would argue that it damaged me in some way. I do not think it did. I consented wholly to what we did. I consented, also, to the photographs he took of me and the films he made. He paid me for them, although I tried to refuse. He paid me well and when he asked if he could share the photographs and movies with others, I consented. He paid me again. It felt a little bit strange when I saw myself on film again twenty years later to realize that a great many men probably masturbated to my masturbation. I hope they enjoyed themselves.
I know a lot of money probably crossed hands after the movies left Carl's possession. Had "kiddie porn" been legal, I might have received residuals. I might be rich right now. The laws which are in place to protect me when I was young, prevented me from profiting from my labors. Someone else sure as hell did. (In fact, I would rather have had my films given away, that the only profit be made from my sexual activities were enjoyment and sexual pleasure.)
Child pornography has existed for a long time. Caravaggio was a purveyor of very expensive "kiddie porn." His clients were mostly members of the church, but one wonders what he could have accomplished with photo lithos and video tape. Botticelli's 'David' is one of the most erotic pieces of sculpture I have ever seen. But I cannot help but see love in the eyes of the model of this statue, love for the sculptor. That same emotion cries from the canvasses of Caravaggio.
"The slogan is "Just Say No," not "Decide for Yourself Based on Information."
Child pornography has existed for a long time. What has not changed, is that those who are the subjects of the works, the children, are unable to benefit from their participation in the production of the works.
M.M. makes the point that NAMBLA is not an anarchist group. This is true. Neither is PETA or many other special interest groups. Many of the members of NAMBLA whom I knew were anarchists, though. The reason is that transgenerational sex, childhood sexuality, child pornography and consent are all issues which seem to boil down to two key issues in the anarchist agenda: profit and power.
Managed capitalist control of the people is necessary for profit. The people are best controlled if they learn control at an early age. Young people learn to sit straight, to listen, to produce the product that the boss (the administration) demands. If they do well, they are paid (grades). If they do not do what the school demands, they, not the school system, fail. Profit, loss, Capitalism [?--ed]. Bank failure, bankruptcy, failure.
"Do you trust our government to be any more honest in this circumstance than they have been in any other?"
Schools, television, all of the icons of our society teach children that they are less than competent, that they have no right to consent. The slogan is "Just Say No," not "Decide for Yourself Based on Information." Nowhere are kids today taught that they really have a right to choose in meaningful ways. Yes, they can choose between "Married With Children" and "The Saturday Night Movie." Great choice. Those in power wield all the power. Children have none. Allowing them to make uncoerced, fully informed decisions in all aspects of their lives would upset the applecart to such an extent that our managed capitalistic society would fall apart.
Believe it or not, M.M., the issues which NAMBLA addresses are at the core of anarchist thought. I reiterate: there are no groups called "Young, Sexually Active and Proud." Our society would never allow such a group to last long. Like it or not, NAMBLA is one of the few groups which is looking at this critical issue. I have a lot of respect fro the people who are active, visible members of this group. Quite a few have gone to jail for what they believe. I have known some of those men. I know they were set up. Do you trust our government to be any more honest in this circumstance than they have been in any other? I recommend that if you are truly interested in issues of freedom and liberation, you get to know the issues and the facts more fully than you did when you wrote your letter.
I am sorry I cannot sign this letter. My livelihood and my freedom depends on my anonymity. I hope that as long as it is, you will be able to print all or part of it. Respectfully yours,
An unrepentant pedophile