Why do pedophiles even exist?
The title is the trigger warning
The title of this piece is an indication of where my brain has been. It’s also a clear signal to those who’ve experienced it, so they can steer clear if necessary. In this case, I’ll concede that a trigger warning is appropriate. People who’ve been predated by people who think sexual activity with people who can’t say no is a good idea, just want to get on with their day. A fit of the shakes, nausea, vomiting, terror, or other fun PTSD symptoms is a serious detriment to that.
There’s plenty of current-events reading to be done of late on adults having sex with minors: Un-prosecuted trafficking rings in Great Britain, P. Diddy and the Hollywood stories about satanic rituals, hundreds of thousands of missing children in the US, Muslims talking about how it’s perfectly lawful in Islam to marry a 9-year-old, and Afghanistan’s [and a number of African countries] long ‘tradition’ of bacha bazi are the most recent examples.
But this isn’t new. Abusing children goes back as long as we’ve controlled other humans. Muslims may be the most obvious offenders, but I don’t think anyone in Gen X missed the scandals around Catholic priests in the 90s and 00’s. India, with its majority Hindu culture has a reported rate of nearly one third of children having experienced sexual abuse. Jews aren’t exempt either.
Nor is it safe to assume that a society free from religion would be better in this respect. Communism [or whatever people practicing it call it] might not acknowledge abuses, but given the imprisonment, torture, and forced labor perpetrated by these societies, no one is going to convince me that child sexual abuse is a magical exemption.
I’ve been through it. I’m on the other side now and my trauma wasn’t nearly as bad the people I’ve been reading about. The effects aren’t gone. I’ve had POTS all my life and that’s now a known effect of trauma. By ‘on the other side’ I mean that panic doesn’t rule me, and I can function in the world and pass as normal on most days.
Pedophilia has been in the news a lot in the last four years. However, what prompted me to write was reading about a much older incident. This requires a bit of context. I’ve been Pagan since I was 14. That was in 1978. The year before that, I’d discovered SciFi and fantasy books and was an avid reader, going through four books a week on average. One of the authors I discovered was Marion Zimmer Bradley [MZB]. Fans of fantasy fiction might remember her Darkover series. There’s a big overlap between the scifi/fantasy fandoms and Pagans, which I discovered when I at last came across other Pagan folk in college and after graduation in the 80s.
In 1983, MZB published The Mists of Avalon, a re-write of Arthurian legend from a feminist perspective. The story framed the conflict as a fight for dominance between two religions, one ancient and matriarchal, and the other Christian and patriarchal. The story was influential among Pagans. It also had some scenes which were sketchy and disturbing, and the main characters had some unhealthy obsessions, and made uniformly bad choices.
It seemed like most every spiritual/feminist/Pagan woman I knew at the time had read it and loved it. I’m sure I was just as enchanted by Bradley’s prose, although her choice of Arthurian legend as a subject matter didn’t enthrall me. I didn’t [and don’t] like stories that lacked a positive resolution. I never re-read Mists and my memory of it now is akin to watching Game of Thrones - a rolling, predictable train wreck.
In 1993, it was revealed by MZB’s daughter Moira that the sketchy scenes were a bit to close to real life. It turns out that MZB had been married to a pedophile for 20 years and had abused both her children. MZB’s husband, Walter Breen, pled guilty in 1990 and was sentenced to 10 years. He died in prison. Moira included some of his writings in her memoir, The Last Closet: the Dark Side of Avalon.
In those writings, Breen makes arguments about why seducing children is beneficial to their well-being. He penned many essays and one book [edited by MZB] on the subject, and was a regular speaker for NAMBLA. Moira was raped by him at least once, and repeatedly sexually molested by MZB between the ages of 3 and 12.
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Periodically, Mists gets recommended as a ‘great start for Pagans.’ Then there are people who object, and then told they should be ‘separating the artist from the art.’ In this case, I can’t.
But why do people like Walter Breen, and his fans and apologists exist?
Christianity has a generalized version of evil but doesn’t explain why specific evils exist. Ancient Greek paganism didn’t have a specific concept of evil, but one about the pursuit of virtue. Sadly, male pederasty was considered a virtue. For specifics, I find evolutionary and psychological explanations more satisfying. Please note that explanations are not excuses for behavior. Being human means that just because we CAN do something, or even if it has a basis in our genes, does not mean the act is a good idea. Evolutionary or psychological explanations for behavior are completely different from morals. Understanding the source of behaviors is a step toward changing them, if not for individuals, then for the wider culture.
Perhaps the most basic explanation would be that males are horn-dogs. Men screwing everything that had a place to put a penis was the norm. [Look at chimps.] From an evolutionary standpoint, this make sense. Every species is focused on reproduction. If it wasn’t: end of species. If breeding age females aren’t available, the only thing that restrains human males are societal norms.
The ancient Jews were the first [as far as I know] to normalize monogamy, and Leviticus and Deuteronomy articulate specifics about who one may not lie down with. It’s possible that these specific laws were designed to unify what was essentially a diverse group of people and articulate how they were different from their neighbors [in case someone needs a non-religious explanation.]
Sex with various extended family members - who would have been the most available - was expressly forbidden, and this is reinforced in the Talmud. It turns out that not sleeping with family members is a better reproductive strategy than throwing all the sperm everywhere. It’s also a good social one. The Jews have persisted as unique and highly successful culture for thousands of years. Judaism places emphasis on the importance of sexual satisfaction in marriage, helping to keep horny humans safely in bonded pairs.
While female chimps will engage in socio-sexual behavior, they’re less likely to than males.[see above link] Female sexual assault is under-represented in the literature. Although there seems to be general agreement that men are more likely to aggress sexually, women can and do sexually abuse children. From an evolutionary stand-point, the urge to take advantage of a younger male could be a drive to access the genes of the most healthy individual, or possibly to monopolize the output of a single individual. I find these both unsatisfactory, and lean more toward psychological explanations. I.e., the woman was abused as a child and is passing it on.
Cultural norms must play a part. In places with limited resources, girls are married off earlier so that families don’t have to support them, or boys may be sold for sex for the same reasons. Considering that up until the industrial revolution, the majority of humans were this kind of poor, it’s a wonder any children survived without some kind of abuse. But of course, such abuses happen even in wealthy countries. Both Walter Breen and MZB were severely abused as children. MZB was repeatedly raped by her father, Breen was beaten by his mother and seduced by the priests at the school he attended. Despite having married each other and having two children, both thought of themselves as homosexual.
MZB justified her molestation of her daughter with the statement that she didn’t believe children had erogenous zones. Breen believed humans were naturally homosexual but that the prudish culture taught them to have preferences about sex. He thought that children would be better off if ‘trained’ from an early age to enjoy orgasm with anyone.
Sounds like grooming to me…
Is there a difference between the Walter Breens of the world and our ancestors? Not physiologically. We’re all still horny buggers. But there’s four thousand years of culture between a people who decided to stop having sex with relatives and now. Culture spreads faster than genes change. But there are plenty of people - mostly men - still think sex with children is a fine idea and nothing to be ashamed about. A lot of them live in the Middle East and Western Asia. Many of them also live in the Western world. Some of these are Muslims who brought their cultures with them instead of adapting to the Judeo-Christian model of morality.
However, some of them are people who have jettisoned, or not been raised with, the idea that there is something better than ourselves. For these people, logic and reason are the only thing needed to justify a behavior.
Spoiler alert: ANYTHING can be justified using reason and logic. Whether or not it works well in the embodied world.
This is what pedophiles do. Both Breen and MZB were refugees from religion. [Yes, Christian.] Both were Mensa [which is how they met.] Both were badly broken. But even worse, the people around them had the attitude that ‘quirky’ was fine and ‘we shouldn’t be judging people.’ They assumed Breen and MZB had enough moral compass to not physically and psychologically damage children.
This was the culture of Berkeley. [When I lived there in the late 80s and early 90s, it hadn’t changed.] In reading the documentation of Walter Breen’s ban from a scifi convention, the general attitude was an assumption that Breen would behave himself. I should add that in MZB’s deposition, she said that a 15 year-old boy was capable of agreeing to sex with a 50 year-old man. That was the culture in which they were immersed.
Culture matters.
The pedophiles want to create a culture in which grooming children and having sex with them is celebrated. It’s not being ‘nice.’ It’s not being ‘creative,’ or ‘letting children be their true selves.’ It’s too bad this has to be articulated. But I think it does, and I don’t want to live in a world where child sex is once a gain the norm.
So I’m going to say it louder for the people in the back: Pedophilia is bad. Pedophilia hurts people. It damages children and turns them into adults that have a hard time functioning in the world. It make those adults dependent. If we want a better world, ALL forms of pedophilia need to stop.
We can’t make that happen outside the borders of Western countries, but we can do our best to make sure it stops happening here.
Addendum: I cannot address the culture in which ostensibly Christian men victimize women
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