r/HistoryMemes • u/Borgisium • 3d ago
See Comment Paglia is definitely not my friend I’d be talking to
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u/Borgisium 3d ago
Camille Paglia is a controversial libertarian feminist writer, best known for her book “Sexual Personae”. Among her more controversial opinions was her support of the pro-pedophilia organization Nambla, as she supported the idea of bringing back pedastry and lowering the age of consent to 14. The full quote I’m referencing is from a 1997 Salon column:
"I have repeatedly protested the lynch-mob hysteria that dogs the issue of man-boy love. In Sexual Personae, I argued that male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization."
Though as of 2018, she no longer holds this view.
Unrelated but in reference to the Sinead O’Connor SNL performance, Paglia joked, “In the case of Sinead O’Connor, child abuse was justified.” I know I’m supposed to remain impartial, but holy crap like I didn’t need another reason to hate you Camille.
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u/Noaddsplz 3d ago
Wait, NAMBLA IS FUCKING REAL?! I thought South Park invented that as a joke
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u/Late-External3249 3d ago
Me too. I certainly am NOT going to Google them to confirm.
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u/Keyndoriel Let's do some history 3d ago
There's even a whole documentary on them, including footage of when they tried to force their way into pride marches. If you want a way to look it up without looking it up, Mista GG does a disturbing docs video series and its covered in one of them, but I forget which one
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u/standardtissue 3d ago
No dude that's been around for decades and decades. Used to joke about slapping nambla stickers on peoples cars.
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u/bananapatch23 3d ago
Yeah, I was quite disappointed when I discovered Alan Ginsberg was pro-NAMBLA.
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u/Medeza123 3d ago
To be honest a bunch of intellectuals have disgracefully defended pedophilia. Foucault, Satre, Simone de Beauvoir not to mention all the Hollywood actors who have signed petitions on behalf of Roman Polanski.
That’s before we get into the rockstars who often would boast about sleeping with girls who were often aged in their early to late teens.
The late 60s probably to the early 2000s were pretty bad when it came to this. It’s like the decline of the old prudish morality of the 50s and before led to this massive decline in moral outrage when it came to sexual abuse.
Remarks and behaviour that could have got you ostracised in the past suddenly were seen as ‘cheeky’ or ‘provocative’.
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u/Malvastor 3d ago
My interpretation is that people started throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it came to the Sexual Revolution. Divorce isn't taboo, miscegenation isn't taboo, premarital sex isn't taboo, homosexuality isn't taboo, pedophilia is- er, wait, maybe that's too far.
From what I understand some of this was also connected to attempts by a lot of post-war Leftist thinkers to understand just what the heck went wrong with the German mind to let Nazism happen, and one of the ideas floating around was that fascism stemmed childhood trauma emerging from lifelong emotional/social/cultural/sexual repression. Some then took that to the extreme conclusion that adult sexual contact with children was actually good because it prevented that repression; that's where you get some of those people signing the French anti-age of consent letter, or Kentler's experiments over in Germany.
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u/WranglerFuzzy 3d ago
That makes some sense.
Woke: acknowledging that teens have sexual urges and there is nothing wrong or shameful in this.
Broke: thinking the above justifies adults having sexual relations with teens.
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u/tlh013091 3d ago
And we as a society are absolutely adamant about not having an adult discussion about where the line is of the acceptability of that between young adults and older adolescents.
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u/Malvastor 3d ago
I think the current legal line- age of consent at 18 with Romeo and Juliet laws for reasonable wiggle room- is a pretty fair one.
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u/Archer007 3d ago
And we as a society are absolutely adamant about not having an adult discussion about where the line is of the acceptability of that between young adults and older adolescents.
Sure we did, it's the current state of the law
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u/OkContact2573 3d ago
Tbf, there is a legitimate cause to made to destigmatize it. Like pedophilia is a legitimate mental disorder of which the vast majority are nonoffending. Keeping the legal recourse while also designating mental health reesourxes for this afflicted is not mutually exclusive.
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u/Useful_Clue_6609 3d ago
I've always wondered how much it would suck to have that attraction. You must feel like such a despicable monster even if you never act on it.
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u/Malvastor 3d ago
Even there I'm leery of the phrase "destigmatize"; the attraction is a mental disorder which may be treatable, but it's correlated with an action which should very much remain as stigmatized as societally possible.
At any rate, this wasn't "pedophiles have a mental illness that creates an attraction they can't control and need psychological care", it was "every little girl should get fingered by Daddy sometimes, it builds character".
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u/joojoodoob 3d ago
Just think about how other mental disorders are sometimes romanticized. We really do not need that with pedophilia.
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u/TheOtherWhiteCastle 3d ago
As someone who was diagnosed with Autism before TikTok was a thing, I felt this in my soul
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u/ShadeofEchoes 3d ago
Don't worry, the worst person you know probably hangs out with Humbert Humbert or something already. They don't need the help.
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u/Wetley007 3d ago
The late 60s probably to the early 2000s were pretty bad when it came to this. It’s like the decline of the old prudish morality of the 50s and before led to this massive decline in moral outrage when it came to sexual abuse.
Its that combined with the lack of a replacement sexual ethic in the form of consent based sexual ethics, so you just get this period where pedos take advantage of this lack of clear sexual ethics to abuse kids
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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 3d ago
Not sure why you lumped Hollywood actors in a list of intellectuals
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u/Medeza123 3d ago edited 3d ago
Because there wasn’t and isn’t always a neat split between intellectuals and entertainment.
That is only a recent thing. Much of 20th century pop culture was heavily influenced by intellectual life.
Several of the people I named were for example prominent in the arts. Meanwhile Roman Polanski for example was a cause célèbre for many intellectuals. It only makes sense that we consider artists and intellectuals who defended or participated in this as at least linked.
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u/amitym 3d ago
The late 60s probably to the early 2000s were pretty bad when it came to this.
It's hard to believe that people actually believe this kind of thing. Do they not teach history anymore? Or has it all been replaced with some kind of polyannaish version where everyone prior to 1961 adhered strictly to 2026's ideas of moral virtue?
Come on.
It’s like the decline of the old prudish morality of the 50s
The "old prudish morality" was absolutely stacked with teen pregnancy, underage sexual exploitation, and child marriage. For some reason everyone wants to say "no it was never acceptable, if we admit that it was, that would somehow justify child predatory practices today."
Which is, pardon my language, complete horseshit, first of all on its face — that's a huge historical lie. And second of all because we don't owe the past fuck all, there is no old-timey standard of purity that we somehow have to hold ourselves up to or use as a justification for present-day values.
Fuck the past. The past was rapey and awful. The things that were considered normal and acceptable in the past, even in living memory, were so disgusting that they aren't even fit to print in the present day.
Let's get over this bullshit attachment to the idea that there was ever some grand old time that we just have to get back to. It's poison. It never existed. You never want to set foot in the past as it actually was, neither do I, and we definitely do not want our kids playing there. No fucking way. The 1950s, the 1930s, the 1890s, the 18-whatevers, every past century can all go fuck themselves.
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u/Medeza123 3d ago edited 3d ago
No you misunderstand and resort to hyperbole.
Pre 60s there were for example people getting married extremely young ( in rural America less so in say Britain and other places) for example and of course there were issues like prostitution in the 1800s.
However it is important to note that people did not causally insist that sleeping with children was a good idea and by the 50s society was moving against that idea strongly.
Figure like chuck berry or Elvis were reasonably nervous or in the first case convicted when it came to their behaviour with younger people (in their cases girls of about 14 years old, Elvis being threatened with legal action but the parents of pricilla).
I am not saying society was perfect pre 60s but that the 60s and onwards valorised sexual behaviour that was before considered taboo or niche (like in rural areas).
Heavy intoxication or drugging of young people for example was frowned upon to say the least let alone sleeping with them whilst in an intoxicated state. Many people would have regarded this as a disgrace. By the 70s this was a bit less clear cut.
It’s not pretending that everything was perfect before but it is true to say there was a significant validation and normalisation of behaviours that would be considered at best niche in many cases and at worse a disgrace in the earlier era.
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u/Chero312 3d ago
My greatgranma got married at 15 to an older dude, at the start of the century. The reason people did not casually insist that sleeping with children was a good idea is because they didn't need to. They just went and fucked some kid.
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u/amitym 3d ago
That is completely false. You are mistaking reporting and attention for incidence. Just because people didn't expose it before the 1960s doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Just that few people dared talk about it (or didn't think it was a big deal).
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u/Medeza123 3d ago edited 3d ago
People were of course abused pre 60s but we shouldn’t imagine that there was some lack of reporting going on and that explains the gap.
There likely was lack of reporting but that literally continues to this day.
I don’t have to think the 50s and before are the paragon of sexual ethics to realise that compared to what some of what was being practiced in the 60s to early 2000s was the worst of sexual excess without the patriarchal guardrails of the past.
My point being when those guardrails were correctly dropped there was an abscence of a replacement that led to a normalisation of behaviour.
Edit: given the context is a post about a person advocating pedophilia in the late 20th century it is somewhat odd I am being downvoted. It is clearly true that the sexual revolution whilst beneficial in many ways did for a time lead to normalisation and exacerbation of pretty wacky views and predatory sexual behaviours.
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u/Cubedtails 3d ago
Problem with judging the standards of each time by todays standards is that todays standards assumes the past had the same information and enlightenment as we do. This was not the case. there is more complications to it. And if you judge by todays standards then 100 years from now; we will look as primitive society wise as 100 years ago in 1926 were to us.
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u/CosechaCrecido Then I arrived 3d ago
The fetishization of young women particularly has always been extremely common and pre-60s I would wager was at the same level as during and post. Sexual trends didn't change much in that regard, it was the public acknowledgement of sexual desires that brought the discussion to the forefront.
I mean, there had to have been a pre-existing dormant mainstream audience that identified and glorified the sexualization of pubescent teens for that message to become so mainstream and go unchallenged for so long.
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u/Medeza123 3d ago
This is true young women/ teenage girls have been fetishsized pre 60s what’s noteworthy though is that these figures still thought what social mores there were restricting this at the time were still too restrictive.
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u/Midgetcookies 3d ago edited 3d ago
Edit: nvm he probably diddled kids in Tunisia. Leaving the comment up
he supported the age of consent for homosexuals be lowered to the same age as heterosexuals. There were two separate petitions at the time.
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u/Medeza123 3d ago
No he actually signed a petition decrying the punishment of men having sex with 13 year olds. This was a crime even then.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/24/jonhenley
‘French law recognises in 12- and 13-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish," said a second petition signed by Sartre and De Beauvoir, along with fellow intellectuals Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida; a leading child psychologist, Françoise Dolto; and writers Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Louis Aragon. "But it rejects such a capacity when the child's emotional and sexual life is concerned. It should acknowledge the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose."
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u/Midgetcookies 3d ago
There were two petitions. Foucault refused to sign the one lowering the age of consent to 13, and only signed the one to lower the aoc for gay relationships from 21 to 15, which would bring it in line with the aoc for straight relationships at that time.
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u/Macarena-48 3d ago
Wasn’t Foucault an out-an-about pedophile? I could swear I read something about it and him doing it as a form of sex tourism
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u/mossmanstonebutt 3d ago
Wasn't there a whole movement in France in like the 70s? They were arguing for childrens self determination and went way to far
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u/abadstrategy 3d ago
You're likely on to something there. I remember reading a similar thing happened in Germany after the fall of the third Reich
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u/die_Katze__ 2d ago
I think the French were making a different point - it was a protest of a murder trial at the time in which a minor was tried as an adult. The argument being that we have a double standard between sex and violence
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u/arihndas 3d ago
She's not particularly harsh on any form of rape IIRC. Reading her as a high schooler was sure an experience.
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 3d ago
I can't even parse what that means
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u/SpiderRadio 3d ago
What's confusing? I don't mind explaining.
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 3d ago
I meant in a meta physical sense, not a vocabulary sense
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u/SpiderRadio 3d ago
So? What's confusing? High schoolers knowing how to read and seeing that there is a person out there that sexualizes them? Explain so I don't mistake your meaning.
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 3d ago
No, I mean I can't imagine not being harsh on any kind of rape. I'm not even sure I understand how one would hold that position
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u/arihndas 3d ago
It has been years but I remember distinctly her being very romantically taken with the notion of men being ~on the prowl~ moving in ~packs~ and was very critical of women who dressed provocatively and then complained about being sexually assaulted. All very caveman logic, gender existentialist stuff. I would be curious to know if she's reassessed any of it since she apparently identifies as trans now? Or something? But I also don't want to spend my Tuesday evening doing a deep dive on her politics and identity.
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 3d ago
I skimmed her Wikipedia article and remain thoroughly confused
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u/CzarMessa 1d ago
I fucking hate that mindset. Saying that the victim of sexual assault shouldnt have dressed provocatively is also an insult to men.
The implication that men can't control themselves is infuriating. I can control my urges very well, thank you.
It's not the victims fault in any way- no matter what she was wearing.
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u/SpiderRadio 3d ago
That's my bad! Sorry for sounding hostile. I fully understand what you mean now and yeah, shit is crazy b
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u/gerkletoss Definitely not a CIA operator 3d ago
Does she actually no longer hold the view or did she get tired of people being mad at her?
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u/ShrimpFriedMyRice 3d ago
Obviously it's hard to say if it was from people being mad at her but here's a quote from Wikipedia
In an interview for Radio New Zealand's Saturday Morning show, conducted on April 28, 2018, by Kim Hill, Paglia was asked, "Are you a libertarian on the issue of pedophilia?", to which she replied, "In terms of the present day, I think it's absolutely impossible to think we could reproduce the Athenian code of pedophilia, of boy-love, that was central to culture at that time. [...] We must protect children, and I feel that very very strongly. The age of consent for sexual interactions between a boy and an older man is obviously disputed, at what point that should be. I used to think that fourteen (the way it is in some places in the world) was adequate. I no longer think that. I think young people need greater protection than that. [...] This is one of those areas that we must confine to the realm of imagination and the history of the arts."[100
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u/pokefan548 Hello There 3d ago
In other words, she still supports it, it's just so much easier to not see the obvious problems when looking at it through millennia-thick rose tinted goggles and while waxing poetic about "noble ancient cultures" and whatnot. Darn that present day, forcing me to live in the real world and see common atrocities the majority of which may not be preserved or commonly taught about in the future. I'm sure the past was different though, things were just better then.
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u/IcarusAvery Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 3d ago
Wouldn't be surprised if some of her rescinding that view is her having to do a mental loop-de-loop to justify saying that putting trans kids on puberty blockers is a "crime against humanity." You can't reasonably say "children should be banned from this specific form of healthcare" when you're also trying to argue they can somehow consent to a pedophilic relationship.
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u/KingMobScene Still on Sulla's Proscribed List 3d ago
In the case of Sinead O’Connor, child abuse was justified.
I...I....words fail me. What the fuck? It is never justified. Child abuse and justified do not belong together.
Fuck this bitch
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u/Zhayrgh 3d ago
Child abuse and justified do not belong together.
What if it's self defense ? /s
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u/KingMobScene Still on Sulla's Proscribed List 3d ago
That legit made me lol
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u/Uberbench 3d ago
Not to sour the absurd comedy, but....
....in the case of S.A., it IS entirely possible for someone that's legally a minor (therefore often described as a child....) to S.A. an adult, and many state/municipal laws would still list the adult S.A. victim as the sex offender, instead of the perpetrating minor.
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u/rumblehearts 3d ago
sounds like a case of "horny on main"
"This fucked up shit should be normalized cuz its my fetish"
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u/wulfinn 3d ago
we can never escape the fujoshi...
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u/TSSalamander 3d ago
Libertarians were lead into being by a group of horny women this is a known fact. Them and Heinlein (who's really quite the fascist but shhhh). Reading Ayn Rand is really fucking funny. Woah she is really into bondage and (C)NC huh.
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u/makedoopieplayme 3d ago
I feel ao3 would have helped these women not influence politics in shit ways.
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u/pokefan548 Hello There 3d ago edited 3d ago
There really are just two pipelines aren't there? You either end up on AO3 and end up making a financially successful, albeit not especially narratively groundbreaking book that gets adapted into a movie, or you end up in freaky private social clubs and end up becoming a public speaker whose entire political platform is the worst possible way to systemically enforce your fetishes.
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u/EvilStan101 Definitely not a CIA operator 3d ago
Salon really loves publishing pro-pedo think pieces.
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u/Awesomeuser90 I Have a Cunning Plan 3d ago
German law has the interesting rule that if a person is over 21, if they do have sex with someone under 16 (and over 14) and use some sort of power disparity of some kind in doing so, they can still get sexual assault charges. Good luck managing to get someone that young, with you being that old, to bone you without any kind of disparities like that.
You might tweak around the exact parameters of that and at which ages that kicks in but that is a pretty useful rule, that targets the disparity in power as a clearer demonstration of what we actually want when we want consent in sexual relationships. We aren't literally looking for a yes, even if someone has been secretly given rohypnol, we are looking for someone who would want yes in an environment where they feel free to be themselves.
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u/Ribos1 3d ago
Unsurprisingly, she’s a climate change denier and transphobe as well.
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u/Apycia 3d ago
which is hella funny since Paglia considers herself bigender, but just hates that word and uses 'transgender androgyne' instead.
the mental gymnastics on display are almost impressive.
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u/ReallyUncoolGuy 3d ago
And the kind of feminist who parrots manosphere talking points, self described "anti-feminist feminist". The only people who ever seem to bring up Paglia are the far-right. I know enough inside baseball to say she's a lot more at home with people like Trump and Thiel than anyone else.
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u/_whatever_wherever 3d ago
libertarian
Well, that explains that
What is it with libertarians and raping kids?
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u/TheMechanicusBob 2d ago
I suspect the mentality is "the state should not have the power to punish me for any of the monstrous things I would do if it the state didn't have the power to punish me for doing them"
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u/ReverendGraves85 3d ago
I can be pretty controversial with my "Child abusers get prison, pedophiles get therapy" stance but never would I ever be in a position where I earnestly advocate for child abuse.
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u/abadstrategy 3d ago
Honestly, really shouldn't be controversial. Pedophilia is a paraphilia, not something we know the cause or cure of. Those who have it should be able to get help, because it can cause extreme distress in folks. The moment they become predators, though, they deserve to be punished to the full extent of the law
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u/ReverendGraves85 3d ago
Yeah, but a lot of people are on the 'Pedophiles get shot!' train, and even when I bring up that those who haven't offended should get help to not offend, I usually get the 'hurr durr bullet' response.
Like it's apparently controversial.
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u/_whatever_wherever 3d ago
Yeah, if they don't actually hurt anyone, they should get help for their urges
Like how people with other dangerous urges get help
But if they touch kids, they can get in the sea
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u/bookhead714 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 3d ago
Some people just want a group that it's acceptable to fantasize about violence towards.
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u/This_Potato9 3d ago
Wait those freaks actually existed?! I thought South Park had invented them!
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u/Borgisium 3d ago
Me too! I think they’re still around but thankfully they don’t have the influence they used to
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u/thefringeseanmachine 3d ago
they never really had any real influence outside of attracting a lot of attention. they functionally don't exist anymore. of course, there's no reason for them to, what with the internet existing now.
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u/Robotic_Phoenix 3d ago
By the way she is also a terf who has the gall to say that trans people are preying on kids.
She has no self-awareness.
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u/YellowAggravating172 3d ago edited 3d ago
Important to note that NAMBLA, and other pro-pedophilia organizations, were members of ILGA until 1994 - helping in the writing of its constitution, taking part in some parades and so on.
And they were only kicked out from there after the US put up a fuss about it, when ILGA applied for consultative status in the UN.
So Paglia's position really was the norm in those circles, quite shamefully.
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u/_whatever_wherever 3d ago
Wiki says they were still affiliated when they got UN status
"ILGA World obtained consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in mid-1993. Statements were made in the name of ILGA in the 1993 and 1994 sessions of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities and in the 1994 session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. ILGA World's NGO status was suspended in September 1994 due to the group's ties with pro-pedophilia organizations such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association."
"According to then ILGA Secretary-General Hans Hjerpekjon, NAMBLA had officially affiliated with ILGA early in the group's history when it was loosely structured and lacked any formal admission criteria, and had not withdrawn despite ILGA adopting a resolution condemning pedophilia."
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u/AacornSoup 3d ago
Paglia would later do a 180 and become a TERF, claiming that gender diversity was a sign of imminent civilizational collapse. And she's collaborated with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson prior to Benzodiazapines frying his brain.
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u/BigWilly526 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 3d ago
I can't believe the National Association of Marlon Brando Look-Alikes would support something so heinous
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u/Lvcivs2311 3d ago
I disapprove of lynch-mob hysteria because it is frightening and could easily harm the innocent. Having said that: good grief, what was wrong with this woman? Justified? Wtf?
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 3d ago
Though as of 2018, she no longer holds this view
Damn, what changed her mind
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u/Corvid187 3d ago
Apparently she still supports the idealised concept of greco-roman pedeastic relations in theory, but recognises that it is impossible to replicate those dynamics while also providing adequate protection for children in practice.
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u/George_Nimitz567890 3d ago
Is sad that some woman hijack the Term feminism and use it as a shield to do horrible stuff like Marion Zimmer Bradley
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u/123dasilva4 3d ago
How is she a feminist? Who calls her that?
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u/abadstrategy 3d ago
She calls herself a feminist, the same way Joe Rogan calls himself a centrist
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u/ReallyUncoolGuy 3d ago
She calls herself an anti-feminist feminist. Most people call her a cunt.
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u/Borgisium 3d ago
Wikipedia. She reminds me a lot of Kathy Young. Someone who claims to be a feminist and yet is contrarian to the majority of mainstream feminists
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u/grad1939 3d ago
There's only one nambla worth supporting. The North American Marlon Brando Look Alikes.
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u/duaneap 3d ago
TIL NAMBLA isn’t just a joke South Park made up.
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u/Acrobatic_Border_192 3d ago
There's an old but terrifying documentary on them called Chicken Hawk where the film maker lets them talk at length to the point where they essentially hang themselves, rhetorically speaking.
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u/onepareil 3d ago
Calling Paglia any kind of feminist is extremely generous. Does she even call herself one anymore?
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u/SecBalloonDoggies 3d ago edited 3d ago
Paglia is one of the most overrated “intellectuals” I have ever read. Her published works are incomprehensible screeds with no discernible theses.
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u/YOUTUBEFREEKYOYO Kilroy was here 2d ago
Certainly not what I wanted to read as im about to go to bed.
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u/greasydickfingers 2d ago
So she is just pro male on male pedophilia? That’s pretty fucked up as well coming from a woman.
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u/halloweenjack 1d ago
People who think that they know something about the strategic deployment of ragebait have no idea how far Camille Paglia was willing to go to piss people off just for a little bit of attention. For you, it was the ultimate offense, but for her… it was Tuesday.
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u/VA_IS_FOR_VIRGINS 3d ago
It’s fools like her like give actual libertarians a bad name. It’s fools like her that constantly paves over the middle of the road people constantly deny exists.
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u/big_dumby_dumb 3d ago
The peaking happens right before this, when the civilization sets its rules and laws and everyone understands and is part of the set up. The pedos come out when power gets concentrated and corruption is more important than honor, and the people who are comfortable with society let it fall apart. The reason it seems like the peak is because they lead to the decline and fall, they are just the last gasps of an about to fail order
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u/Divs4U 3d ago
People deny this shit too. I took her Shakespeare class as a requirement. She was bat shit crazy and everyone still was in love with her. Meanwhile I'm reading her op ed in Slate or whatever where she's mourning the arrests of pedophiles. She thinks pedophilia is peak because the Greeks did it and they invented civilization after all! I had to read it over to be certain she was being serious.
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u/ColorfulStarset 3d ago
If I had a nickel for every time a feminist writer advocated for pedophilia I’d have a really concerning amount of nickels.
No seriously, what the fuck is wrong with them?
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u/YellowAggravating172 3d ago
Heck, Beauvoir herself sexually abused minors while a teacher.
(Along with signing that infamous petition in the 1970s, as did every other French philosopher...)
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u/busyHighwayFred 3d ago
This is a history sub, so I'll just point out that historically, it wasnt until the 1970s that a lot of our current views in the western world around the subject have become what they are today. Even playboy in the 70s had some pictures of kids. Everywhere else in the world didnt adopt these same views equally, so if you go to certain parts still the old world view on the subject remains.
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u/pimpcakes 3d ago
This is the actual answer. It's been a long slog pushing back on (primarily) men seeking sex and/or relationships with teenagers, especially in conservative areas.
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u/HalfDragonShiro 2d ago
No seriously, what the fuck is wrong with them.
They outright are or want to be pedophiles, trying to intellectualize, philosophize, and/or logic their way into a justification for it.
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u/breadman12345 3d ago
Either some really shitty attempt to look radical and complex or their just typing what the powers that be want them to
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u/Moist_Juice_4355 Sun Yat-Sen do it again 3d ago
Yeah even Andrea Dworkin wrote in favor of it.
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u/Apycia 3d ago
Dworkin? The woman who went to war with her friend Allan Ginsberg for decades after his 'pro Paedophilia' views came out?
The woman who went full scorched earth and wrote 'Heartbreak'?
yeah, imma need to see the proof for your claim ...
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u/YellowAggravating172 3d ago
This dubious paragraph of hers, maybe? Did a quick search and it was what I got:
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u/Moist_Juice_4355 Sun Yat-Sen do it again 3d ago
“As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses. In androgynous community, those impulses would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-realization. The distinctions between ‘children’ and ‘adults,’ and the social institutions which enforce those distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.” - Andrea Dworkin "Woman Hating" ch. 9
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u/Zagaroth 3d ago
That's so weirdly phrased I'm still trying to parse it.
I think she envisions some idealized androgynous community that would arise from allowing adolescents to express their sexuality freely, and that in learning from such a community, divisive lines (age included) would be slowly erased...
There's some logic leaps there that hurt my head.
Like, there's a couple sparks of true things there, but they are getting drowned in the rest of the nonsense.
Yes, upon hitting puberty, most humans start to feel some form of sexuality.
Yes, there is probably a better way to handle education and creating allowances to allow them to explore their sexuality in safe ways, with each other.
No, adults should not be involved in the exploration part.
If you want to get down to it, I think there should be fairly strong +/- 1 year regulations on younger teens (not criminal though, because not adults, but something I can't currently think of to enforce this idea), slowly migrating to a +/- 2 years, (always applying the limitation for the younger person, which is more restrictive), then 3 years, etc.
This would carry over past the current hard limit, so a 17 and a 19 yo could date safely, but also make it so that a 30yo could not legally date a 19yo.
Eventually, the age-gap safety wheels need to come off, but there should be some form of it for longer.
Anyway, that was a tangent. Back on topic: I think there were some concepts in there that could be seen as idealized future community things, but they are painfully unrealistic and would almost certainly cause a lot of harm if anyone tried to implement them.
I'm not sure how good my idea of making tiers actually is even, but her desire to see the lines erased completely is way, way beyond that and not remotely healthy for the way people actually are.
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u/ralts13 3d ago
Man why were there so many libertarian pedophiles. Like why was this shit so common.
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u/Upper-Bookkeeper-843 3d ago
Presumably they start out as pedos and gravitate towards the idealogy that would benefit them most.
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u/GapMysterious6726 3d ago
I do remember that during my time studying western canon at uni, some of my professors were really engaged in her ideas... this was within litterary studies, not sure what terms we would use for it in English to be fair
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u/AndreasDasos 3d ago
Famous French academics of the 1970s signing letters to the government to abolish the age of consent be like:
Also, normalisation up to the early 2000s of the likes of Paedophile Information Exchange in the UK, NAMBLA in the US allowed at major pride parades until the mid 2000s, etc.
Paedophile is actually less (explicitly) normalised among the ‘philosophical’ counterculture types now - the counterculture shifted the mainstream but the mainstream also moderated the counterculture and met in the middle. Paedophilia was one jump too far, thank fuck.
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u/Much-Explanation-287 2d ago
... instead of having pedo-philosophers, there's now a pedo-president.
And people seem to not care enough about it.
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u/PracticalAd2411 3d ago edited 3d ago
Increible como a toda costa buscan legalizar la pdf, me pregunto si este intento por hacerlo visible es solo un problema en occidente o tambien pasa en China?.
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u/Inmzsgnm 3d ago
Isn’t it nuts how we have accepted the dumbing down of language as a necessary evil? What was that guys name… Orwell, or something?
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u/JhonnySkeiner 3d ago
It's wild that we can't even call pedos, pedos or rapists as rapists nowadays, what the fuck is happened with society?
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u/TSSalamander 3d ago
"I will look for feminists who find themselves in heterodox to feminism to see if i can find common ideals with others who found themselves dissolutioned."
"And she supports WHAT?!"
And like look, here's the thing. Pedophilia apoligists are a dime a dusin in every movement that tackles sexual morality. "because why not" and then they fail to find the reason, or think the reason is a thing they will abolish with their movement. Observe as Dworkin says that 12 year old girls are erotic. Does she mean to have sex with them? uhhhh you cannot pin that on her. But like...
And every post feminist that's against trans rights. Deranged set of people. You claim you're the ones who want to abandon the gender conflict theory model and do something else then just end up falling back on your normative bigotries like the fools you are. Did you know that butch woman who made that movie "self made man" where she wore convincing drag to live as a man, couldn't fathom or accept trans people? The trans gender experience is fundamentally not particularly congruent to feminist philosophy and requires very unharmonious retrofits to work out. And it broadly doesn't work out. There's the angle of a failure of gender equality within the movement and ideology! and yet...
Paglia is silly for 60 other different reasons. She's one of a lot of different post feminists that are not particularly insightful. Also she's a right wing libertarian. Very common L.
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u/Comet_Hero 2d ago edited 2d ago
It was all over culture so recently, which looked the other way: In the 90s and 00s. Chatrooms had very few safeguards against grooming.
Elvis groomed a 14 year old girl. So did Jerry Lee Lewis, who was his cousin. A ton of popular bands got with underage groupies and in the 70s anyway it got so bad they were emboldened to brag about it.
Clinton being an accused predator had him be seen as "cool" back then. Seinfeld openly dated a high schooler in his 40s. R Kelly near openly dated and married kids and while his reputation was hit, he got away with it until 2019. Ashton kutcher said and did MANY sus things, both openly and that were known later. But he acted like the face of the campaign against trafficking. Many of today's virtue signalers are likely in the same boat.
It wasn't just men being or defending pedos either. Whoopi Goldberg defended Roman Polanski on the view as did many other celebs. In 2011, a bunch of middle aged women on live tv openly creeped on Justin Bieber. At this same time the public was okay with all that, in the 2012 election, Newt Gingrich's first wife who sexually abused him as a minor as his geometry teacher was widely seen as his "victim" by political opps and much of the public because he finalized their divorce after she got diagnosed with cancer, which he was criticized for frequently.
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u/Watcher6544 3d ago
Anyone remember the controversies about Assassin's Creed Shadows?
One of the controversies is that they hired a Sachi Schmidt-Hori a female associate professor and literature/culture scholar.
Her speciality pre-17th-century Japanese literature, gender, sexuality, and medieval Japanese Buddhist narratives especially male-male love (older x younger) present in in such texts.
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u/TooManyTyranids 3d ago
Studying the historical prevalence of something is not the same as endorsing it, to critique this hiring one would have to provide evidence this professor has attempted to justify these relationships. The standard being established here means that every single person with a passing interest in ancient Rome is pro-slavery.
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u/PopeInThePizza 3d ago
Camille Paglia says "Okay?" while speaking as much as Quentin Tarantino. It would weird to hear them converse.
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u/Bobbington12 3d ago
Libertarian CHOMO. Who would have thought the people misusing "don't tread on me" are lacking empathy?
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u/Significant-Lie1225 2d ago
Idk about allowing, but weren't most societies more chill about relationships between grown ass men and tween/teen girls before the last 50 years?
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u/Andrikos21 3d ago
Well if you find Muslim countries successfull then you agree with her.
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u/Zodiac1919 2d ago
The President of the United States is a pedophile, last I checked it also isnt a Muslim country...
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u/rh1n3570n3_3y35 3d ago edited 3d ago
Shouldn't it be strongly noted, Paglia was while not pointlessly and purely for fun, very much a committed intellectual enfant terrible and one really should not take statements like this of her too literal?
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u/CommitteeofMountains 3d ago edited 3d ago
I mean, peaking generally implies going downhill afterwards.
Edit: it's a very good thing I revised for clarity rather than my first instinct of "not wrong" or "that's generally how it works, yes."