Anarchist Discuss the mass sex abuse hysteria, Part 1

[anarchist of love]

Just re-FOUND this from a website that is no longer officially online. Slight editing by me. Pay attention, especially, to "Lev Chernyi's" responses to letter writers!! (Note that I used several phrases from this inspiring stuff to be read over a bullhorn in several large US cities, during direct actions i did in the early 1990s! Perhaps YOU TOO will wish to use them similarly? But of course, all of this was way before the Internet became popularized!)

From the site:

Letters from "Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed"

NOTE: The following compendium of letters is only a partial excerpt to the very large, long-running debate that was allowed to take place in the pages of perhaps [once was] the most important anarchist magazine in North America. I've taken care to only include, as best as I could, those letters which were made and responded to directly. There are still many within this pile itself that should be included, and may be in the future. To read all of this best, would be to print it out, if you can, or get all the issues from around #19 to around issue #44, which deal with the topic quite well, at least in the letters' section.

(Note: All of this was hand-typed! Also: Actual full copies of this magazine can be found in various archives. The magazine's own website has SOME of the issues, apparently in full: https://anarchymag.org

I am putting this online with the desire that self-educating persons (anarchists or not) may use this page as a tool to better challenge the reigning ignorance and bigotry on this topic. (note: you would do well to also investigate the role that the media and other institutions play in influencing opinion [on] a topic which these anarchists hardly seem to touch on, perhaps preferring more root arguments)

Pedophilia troubling
Anarchy,
Please enter my one year subscription (in brown envelopes). I have enclosed a check for $10 to cover the cost.

While I do not consider myself to be an anarchist--rather, I am a rabid capitalist--I do feel it is essential to explore all points of view. However, parts of your issue (#19, May-June 1989) greatly disturbed me.

As a survivor if incest, I found your seeming endorsement of pedophilia troubling.
(...)
Sincerely, D.M., Boulder, CO

A response from Lev:
Child love is troubling?
I had to re-read Laure A.'s essay on "Sexuality and the mystique of innocence" in order to try to figure out just what it was that might have bothered you so much about her specific article. However, I wasn't able to find anything that I would think of as especially "inaccurate" there. I didn't find any "rationalization(s) for the sexual abuse of chidlren," nor did I find any references implying that "children should be seen as commodities" anywhere in the issue of Anarchy in question! There seem to be a few misconceptions involved in the fears you express.

In actual fact, Laure aims her criticisms at the vast majority of adults in our society who are frantically worried about the "sexual abuse" of children by "pedophiles" at the same time that theythemselves are abusing children ina multitude of other ways which are so habitual they aren't even noticed. Instead, in the guise of "protecting" their innocence, children are sexually abused constantly by parents who are afraid of children's sexuality and punish their natural sexual explorations. Yet this type of (anti-)sexual abuse is almost never addressed, much less effectively countered. Laure's plea seems to be that claims to protecting children from certain types of sexual abuse don't excuse the practice of other types of child abuse.For Laure, the generalized climate of fear, taboos, and abuse that most children in our society are "brought up" within ought to be [a] real target for criticism.

Even more interesting to me is the rather schizophrenic view of capitalism you express. On the one hand you say you are a "rabid capitalist"--and thus must be a "rabid" defender of the transformation of human relationships into relationships of commodity-exchange. While on the other hand you are worried that "the editorial staff at Anarchy" (a journal which is explicitly opposed to capitalism and its reduction of human relationships to the exchange of commodities) thinks "children should simply be seen as commodities"! It seems obvious that nothing could be further from the truth. In this situation, your projection of the qualities usually associated with capitalism (the atomistic "notion of every man for himself at the exclusion of all else" and the treatment of people as "commodities") onto a journal which is explicitly critical of capitalism, social atomism and commodity-relationships can only appear rather strange to us. Much more remains to be said on this whole topic. And we shall return to it in future issues.

In the hands of the child
Dear C.A.L.,
Hello! Hope all is well! I'm fine...I just got your anarchistjournal (children's sexuality issue) last week....

This issue was very good in all ways except the statement you made init that there cannot be a sexual relationship between parent [and] child because it will always lead to coercion. I don't see how you can be so positive in this statement when you are an adult [and] not a child. I feel that there can be a positive experience between child/parent (...) In solidarity, D.M., MO

So what do we do?
Dear Lev,
In "Save the children" (issue #19) Richard Walters presents an ethical dilemma of what to say and do if a child approaches a parent with a request to fulfill their "erotic desires." Unfortunately, Walters doesn't explore this important issue with his readers. He sites a study where a 2 year-old girl asks "Daddy would you kiss my clitoris?"The word "clitoris" is not inmost 2 year-old's vocabularies. Perhaps the child lives in an environment where she has learned the correct anatomical names for all her body parts.She has not been punished for self-clitoral stimulation or told masturbation is ugly [and] awful. If this is the situation then it would seem natural for this child to approach a member of her support system--someone who loves and cares for her--and ask that question. Walters does not tell us the father's response which is important to know. If the father grantshis daughter's desire, then society would say this act is one of sexual child abuse. If he doesn't, the child, maybe for the first time, has learned there is something wrong and bad about "erotic desires."

I am a parent of several children.I haven't had to deal with this situation but Walters' article has made me think of what I would say if it ever does become an issue.

If any of my children were to approach me with a similar request I would have to tell them, "No, honey, I can't do this for you." My task now is to explain social alienation, custody laws [and] prison to them on their level. Hopefully, I could do this without giving them an impression that their sexual expression is nasty.

So what do we do? I know I'm not alone in this. I welcome others, especially parents, to dialogue with me in this matter of parent/child ethics.

With much love for my children,
C.K., MO.

Vexed to hell
Dear Lev, I found your issue of Anarchy on children's sexuality to be somewhat offensive in nature and to pose an ominous patronizing tendency that threatens the healthy emotional, sexual devolopment of children.
(...)

Lev answers:
Who are you to define children's sexuality?
I would speculate that the basic attitude you've expressed in your letter is fairly widespread. In fact, it seems quite typical of most "well-meaning," institutionally-educated liberals and "radicals." Unfortunately, however, it contains several unexamined assumptions which reveal the extent to which our culture's anti-sexual and anti-sensual socialization process has crippled even attempts at radical thinking and opposition.

The sexuality of almost every person in our society has been thoroughly repressed and deformed since birth. Each of us has learned to cope (however dysfunctionally) with this fact in our own ways--usually by deeply burying the feelings we experienced as our sensual/sexual desires were suppressed when we were fairly defenseless children. We have been forced to bury these feelings and rationalize this extremely repressed (and thus often explosively felt) sexuality to ourselves. Because we have had our sexuality crippled in this way it is understandably hard for us to consciously examine the effects this all-pervasive social history has had on our thoughts, feelings and impulses in this area. This is probably why even the discussion of children's sexuality raises such an emotional reaction in most people. For these people even imagining sexuality in children means that they must begin challenging their own deeply-rooted sexual repression. After all, how can we admit that children really are sexual without beginning to admit to ourselves that our own sexuality as children was stolen from us (or at least severely distorted), and that the scars of this theft are still with us. Given this highly unhealthy situation, it is not surprising that you (and most others) refuse to confront the pervasive reality of unhealthy sexual repression, preferring to focus only on the secondary (though certainly significant) problem of the adult sexual exploitation of children. In doing so, you apparently assume that because highly-repressed sexuality is the statistical norm in our society it must also be "normal" in the sense of "healthy" and thus unexceptionable. But who are you to impose your own relatively unexamined prejudices on all the rest of the children and adults of the world? Why should everyone conform to your dubiously repressive notion of "healthy" sexuality?

One need only observe the awkward, halting, and often pathetic gestures which pass for "sensual" or "sexual" expression in our communities (much less in ourselves!), to see how miserable our sexuality has become. One need only note how narrowly-defined in theory--yet ubiquitous in our personal experience--sexuality really is to see that the attempts made to squelch this fundamental animal lust have totally misconstrued its nature and limits.

Once one leaves the narrow confines demanded by your acceptance of sexual repression it no longer makes sense to oppose "the accused and the falsely accused" to the "actual victims--children." Surely even you can see that there are victims all around in our present situation. That we are siding with both non-exploitative adults and children--who are all victims of the dominant ideologies of sexual repression--ought to be equally obvious. The statistics you give are really meaningless to me, given the lack of any accompanying explanation of the definition of "sexual abuse" used, the source of the figures, or the methodology employed. Surely you ought to know as well as any other anarchist that statistics can be used to prove just about anything in the hands of ideologues--and they usually are! Sex-scared bureaucrats can make whole careers out of redefining sexual abuse in ways that include quite natural and non-exploitative touching (caressing of genitals, etc.) in order to whip up statistics about how perverted we all are and how necessary a repressive police-state is.

Your own bizarre definitions of "nurturing sensuality" and "manipulative sexuality" only show how effective your own repressive conditioning has been. Only those prudes who have a mighty fear of sexuality think that "fondling and caressing erotically" of children by adults could never be "nurturing touching"! This belief of yours shows at the very least that you're completely ignorant of cross-cultural anthropological research on this subject. And even more it demonstrates how closed-minded you are about even considering the possibility that adult-child sexuality can be a beautiful experience for both parties.

The issue of consent is always going to be tricky where the relationships of children and adults are concerned, but never moreso than in our own extremely repressive culture. Currenlty, it's quite okay in our culture for most parents to physically assault and batter "their" children (as long as no lasting scars or broken bones are created), but it's a major crime to touch a child's genitals without a convincing excuse that one didn't do it to create any good feelings (one way or the other). How could any anarchist ever defend the values of a culture with such a sick double standard: that sexuality outside of certain narrow limits is always bad regardless of circumstances, intentions, etc., while violence against relatively defenseless children is fine? Give us all a break from your moralistic whining, and try critically thinking about all this, please.
Issue #24, March-April 1990

Ever been molested?
(...){from a 17 yr old}
maybe i'm being too harsh, and there do exist some cases of parent-child sexuality which were beneficial to the child. however, i have friends who have been victims of incest as well, and none of them ever mentioned this to me. it may be natural for a parent to have lecherous feelings towards their own child (but i can't really fully see why. i'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.) nonetheless, i think that children are better off left to discover their sexuality with whoever they want to. i have never heard of a child approaching a parent and askingto play doctor, maybe this does happen. anyway, most people i know did fine by themselves. i, personally, am quite afucked up individual, due to my father, and this alleged friend of mine. the introduction i received to the wacky world of sex, courtesy of my father, did nothing to smooth out my already neurotic tendencies. anyone who claims that it was natural and that i should learnfrom it should fuck off.

ps. you don't have to print this, it was more for information purposes. i wish i felt comfortable giving you my name and establishing a correspondence...no such luck. oh well.
anonymous, Springfield, MA.

Lev responds:
Liberating sexuality doesn't mean rape!
To answer your first question, we print virtually all of the letters sent to us that are (1)readable, and (2) don't say "not for publication." (Since you didn't specifically say this, I am assuming that it is OK for us to print yours.) As to why we haven't received more letters in the same vein as yours, I can only speculate, since it would seem to me that ingeneral there are far more people (by orders of magnitude out there who have convinced themselves that they are comfortable with sexual repression than there are people who have much serious commitment to sexual freedom or liberating sexuality.I would hope that the greater number of letters we've received supporting--rather than denying--children's sexual freedom indicates that most of our readers understand the difference between (1) allowing and encouraging children's "natural" explorations of their sexuality, and (2) the obviously coercive, unhealthy, and often physically damaging practices of rape and undesired sexual "molestation."

I can understand that many people who have been the victims of rape or of other types of unwanted sexual contact often have a very emotional reaction to the advocacy of sexual freedom. Despite the fact that most sexual radicals (for that matter, all of the ones that I know of) condemn forced, non-consenting sexuality, many people insist on attempting to tar their pro-sexuality stance with baseless accusations that they support rape, child molestation, forcible incest, etc. Even you should be able to understand how this pattern of willful misrepresentation only serves the purpose of mystifying the real issues and encouraging the forces of sexual repression, compulsory sexual morality, and authoritarian conditioning.

The question of whether those supporting children's sexual freedom have been raped or molested is fundamentally irrelevant (though I can say that some of the pro-sexual-freedom letters were written by people who have been victimized at some point during their lives, as I have been). Those who have and those who haven't been victims are usually equally capable of expressing intelligent opinions on these matters, just as, for instance, both those who have and those who haven't used illegal drugs at least have the potential for understanding the complexities involved in the call for the decentralization of drugs. That those who call for drug decriminalization aren't demanding that people be forced to use currently-illegal drugs, should be as obvious as the fact that anarchists who call for children's sexual freedom aren't demanding that forced sexual relationships be legitimized! Why do you feel it is necessary to stigmatize us in this fashion?

Has your own victimization made you so bitter that you cannot see that it still remains possible for others (and yourself) to gain pleasure and life-giving experiences from the free expression of our sensuality and sexuality? Do you not understand that nursing mothers establish a profoundly sexual relationship with the infants they suckle? Is this wrong? Do you think that it makes sense that most people in our culture see violence against children like spanking or slapping as being more "natural" than giving them full-body massages? Do you find the current child-pornography and child-abuse hysteria a healthy phenomenon when it means that we must all be fearful of being nude with our own or other's children--worrying that the authoritarian prudes around us will only be able to see perversion where healthy, natural nudity is involved? I find the currently unchallenged anti-sexual hysteria around us terrifying in the extreme. I think it diminishes all our lives. And I'm afraid it will get much worse before there will be enough of us who begin taking the risk of speaking out and defending sexual freedom again.

Please understand that we wish you only the relaxing intimacy of the sexual relationships you truly desire. But rape and other forms of coercive sexuality are abhorrent to us, not because of their sexual component, but because of the element of force and the absence of consent involved.

Still Wondering
I thought your response to S.G. of Portland, Oregon,who found your special issue on children's sexuality"somewhat offensive" was good. Yet I still wonder if S.G.'s main point--that in adult-child sexual relationships the adult will always hold power over the child, due to the child's emotional vulnerability and the adult's greater experience--might not be true. It certainly merits consideration, especially by anarchists for whom questions of power and coercion are central. I notice that in "Save the children" Richard Walters says very little one way or the other about child-adult sex.You say that S.G.'s objection to adults fondling and erotically caressing children "shows at the very least that [S.G. is] completely ignorant of cross-cultural anthropological research on the subject." I'm curious: just what research are you referring to?
B.B., Numanzu-shi, Japan

Lev responds:
Not the main point
I have no disagreement that "in adult-child sexual relationships the adult will always hold power [of some sort] over the child," but I don't really think that this was S.G.'s "main point"--rather, his repressive moralism was. One can certainly acknowledge the truth of the above without calling for the absolute condemnation of every sort of child-adult "sexuality." If he were really interested in this question (without already having a preordained answer to it), he could have explored it in a more sensible and critical (and valuable!) way, and I might have been excited about what he wrote instead of mostly being annoyed by his moralism.

As far as the anthropological research is concerned, I was speaking of all the observations which indicate that in general "primitive" cultures seem to sanction a far wider variety of sensual/sexual interpersonal relations than does the Christian "mainstream" of our uptight, civilized culture--which leads to the obvious conclusion that there is no objective standard of sexual "perversity" or "normality." In practice what's taboo in one community is a well-accepted practice somewhere else. And especially where the care of infants is concerned, there is often far more acceptance of genital caresses and naked, whole-body contact in so-called "primitive" cultures, than there is in ours. Whereas Missouri law says you can get 15 years in prison if a child touches a man's penis (and they get 15 years I can assure you), in more relaxed societies the natives could care less. Which is the more healthy attitude?

(Note to Admin: is this the best place for this info? Not sure, but thought i'd try it, noting that i have not seen any censorship, yet, from the admin here!!)

[Jim Burton]

You want to summarize this, and add to wiki?

https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Communism

The above article is entitled "Communism" because we had not compiled information on Anarchism. There is another unfinished article, "The Right Wing and Minor Attraction".

[anarchist of love]

Uh, maybe i'll get to that sometime. But why not do it in full, but in portions? Does the wiki format block that sort of thing?

[Jim Burton]

You can create limitless drafts in your namespace, then merge content that can be used in the summary articles. Readers usually find material via the main articles.

[anarchist of love]

Jim, sorry, but you're going to have to give me the "Info for Dummies" version, as i don't even know what you're trying to say! Wiki i get...but the other stuff? Drafts in my namespace? As a place on the wiki?? Are you saying i can create my own wiki page (called "namespace"?) in which i can then post a lot of this stuff?

Gee, i was hoping someone else (with techie knowledge) would do that for me!

Merge content? You mean like, copying it into something? Or?

You said:
Readers usually find material via the main articles.
====
Does this mean that they don't usually stumble across them here in the forum? But only in the "main articles" on wiki??

Thanks for "taking the time"!