Beatrice Faust

Today would have been the 84th birthday of Beatrice Faust, Australian author, civil libertarian, and campaigner for women's rights, who died in 2019.

In 1966 she was president of the Victorian Abortion Law Repeal Association and co-founder of the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties. She was also a co-founder of the Women's Electoral Lobby in 1972.

She attended Melbourne University in the 1950s, where she became acquainted with Germaine Greer and they extended their feminist inclinations through various cogitations, earning her bachelor's degree in English and subsequently her master's degree. Much later in her life, the

higher degrees of PhD and LLD were conferred upon her, the former for her 1991 book Apprenticeship in Liberty and the latter for her life's work in general, as a social reformist and researcher.

In 2001 Faust was awarded the Centenary Medal. In the same year, she was inductted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. In 2004 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.

Among her early writings, she contributed to the Australian edition of The Little Red Schoolbook, a book written by two Danish schoolteachers in 1969 which encouraged and instructed young people to question social norms. Translated into many languages in the early 1970s, the book aroused much controversy, moral panic, and even censorship via successful prosecution under the UK's Obscene Publications Act for a British edition.

I read her book Women, Sex, and Pornography in the mid-'80s and was struck by how free it was of the erotophobia and misandry characterizing so much of the writing by feminists on this subject. Her early positive relationship with an older man may be partly responsible for this difference. As reported in Uncommon Desires Newsletter, 6, 1992:

“Australian author and women's rights activist Beatrice Faust recalls the tender and consensual love relationship she had as a young girl with her adult friend Ritchie. He always concentrated on making her feel good. She fully trusted him and he sometimes made her orgasm four to five times in a row. She still remembers those days with gratitude.” (Quoted in Positive Memories by T. Rivas, Edition 4, edited by Ipce, 2020, p. 151.)

In The Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People, edited by Warren Middleton, is a chapter contributed by Faust titled “The Pedophiles” which reviews the research presented in two books on the subject. Here she writes:

“Pedophile sexuality is not predatory; it is not wholly or even mainly genital, and child-lovers reveal at least as much agape as eros. It has some characteristics of the masculine erotic style, for many pedophiles enjoy visual stimuli and a variety of partners. But many also prefer couple-bonding and tactile stimuli that are more common in the feminine style.

“Overwhelmingly, their love is process orientated (feminine) rather than performance orientated (masculine). All of us share both feminine and masculine components of sexual style in varying degrees, but the most dominant characteristic of pedophilic love is the epimeletic – nurturant – response to children found in both sexes among chimps and some human cultures, but mainly among women in the industrial West.”

[…]

“Orthodoxy teaches that children are, or should be, sexless, equating innocence with ignorance and immaturity. Suffragettes in all countries initiated ages of consent and incest laws to protect children from sexual exploitation – which was a real hazard – and premature sexual awakening – which was a Victorian middle-class phobia. “Even now, in the 1980s, the problems continue. Despite much extensive research, children are still regarded as sexless and a concerned minority are still trying to enforce unenforceable laws that define any sexual contact between children and their elders as molestation.”

[…]

“There is no point in retaining laws that fail to prevent or punish; that cannot be enforced with equity; and which often cause harm to the children they were supposedly designed to protect.”