Support Philosophy for Children!

 

My birthday is coming up, and I'm holding a fundraiser for the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), a nonprofit that promotes and supports Philosophy for Children (p4c) programs in schools.

Over the past few decades we've increasingly seen children treated like infants, adolescents like children, and young adults like adolescents. Children are discouraged from an early age from thinking about big questions, which adults all too often deride as silly. Yet a capacity for philosophical thinking is essential for people to participate meaningfully in democracy. I am glad that my parents didn't discourage such thinking, and that there were a lot of books in the house that stimulated it. But I know many children aren't as fortunate. I hope you will join me in supporting PLATO in their work helping today's young people to develop into thoughtful citizens

https://www.facebook.com/donate/435022721901936/

Rage of Consent: How Our Love/Hate Relationship with Youth Sexuality and Abuse Hysteria Is Endangering Our Culture

Rage of Consent: How Our Love/Hate Relationship with Youth Sexuality and Abuse Hysteria Is Endangering Our Culture 

By Heather Corinna

https://web.archive.org/web/20090930044204/http://www.scarletletters.com/current/2001_rage.shtml

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Close

I'm saddened to have just learned that someone with whom I'd been mutuals on Twitter, and who actually did my portrait a few summers ago (along with others of her Twitter friends), blocked me and unsubbed me from her Substack after I'd sent her an email sharing some life experiences that didn't fit with her world view. This is someone who had once been identified with the Intellectual Dark Web, so you might have expected her to have some commitment to being open-minded. Evidently not.

All I Can Remember (Submissive Version)

The other day I published one of my song parodies on Fetlife's filking group. It's already received a positive comment (no surprise, since the ones I performed at the Erotic Literary Salon got positive responses too), but when I mentioned it in one of my support groups yesterday, a member who apparently isn't on Fetlife asked how he could see it, so I'm posting it here too.

It's a takeoff on the Seekers song "All I Can Remember," and is thematically very similar, aside from the addition of kink. I've modified the title only for the sake of clarity.

 

All I Can Remember (Submissive Version)

Happy days and happy kisses, tickles everywhere
That's all I can remember of times we used to share
Naughty nights and naughty spankings, times you made me crawl
That's all I can remember, all that I recall

I remember seasons when you weren't so far away
I still can hear your laughter when you made me obey
Sheltered from all prying eyes behind your soundproof wall
That's all I can remember, all that I recall

Standing above me
Your smiling face, your warning face fill my mind
I know you love me
And you're the one from whom I want a sore behind!

So, my love, the more I think, the more I want to say
I loved when you made my buns shine and then kissed my tears away
Under your complete control is where I loved to fall
That's all I can remember, all that I recall

Help Stop Harassment of Pro-Choice Campaigners in Michigan

Tell Google: Protect Privacy for Abortion Seekers!

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/tell-google-delete-location-data-to-protect-abortion-seekers?source=direct_link&

Philosophy for Children: Helping the Next Generation Fulfill Its Intellectual Potential

 

“It is not merely that children are capable of philosophical thought, but rather, that such thinking comes naturally to them, and it is inherent in their nature. When given the environment to pursue big ideas, and with the encouragement of adults, they revel in it. This is easily observed through the many times a child may ask ‘why?’” – Human, “The Wonderful Minds of Children”

Philosophy for Children is a program to encourage this potential.

A Love the State Couldn't Cancel

The late Mary Fualaau would have turned sixty today. Better known as Mary Kay Letourneau, her name at the time she met Vili Fualaau as his sixth-grade teacher, they subsequently became lovers and eventually were married. They spent fourteen happy years together as husband and wife, but all told their love lasted 24 years, surviving six years of separation by ageist sex laws during which she was in prison for their relationship.

Source: Un Seul Crime, l’Amour
(French: Only One Crime, Love)
by Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau
Éditions Fixot (Paris, France), 1998
www.amazon.fr/gp/product/2221088123/

 

Vili Fualaau was twelve years old when, by his own account, he seduced his 34-year-old teacher, Mary Letourneau. After she was arrested for their relationship, he waited seven years for her release from prison, then at the age of 21 he promptly petitioned the court to have her no-contact order lifted so he could see her. The following year, they were married.

In the first year of Letourneau’s imprisonment, she and Fualaau coauthored a book, which was published only in a French translation, and only in France. The book included three drawings by Fualaau, including the one below, in which Fualaau expressed his feelings about Letourneau’s prosecution. The drawing is not dated, however Fualaau was 14 when the book was published. The two paragraphs below the drawing are translated back into English from the caption of the drawing in the book.

Another drawing by Vili, reflecting his perception of the trial, and where he gives his own version of “the battle of David and Goliath.” In the background, the pillars of society: Trust, Happiness, Life, Heaven, Belief, Understanding, Love, Family, Laws, Spirit, Pride. Vili, as David, holds a sling against the giant Goliath, portrayed as fear, the media, and society (center). Several other characters are involved: left and center, the police and the psychiatrist, driven by a key like automatons, and repeating mechanically: “I’m just doing my job!” (police officer, left) and “Sex offender experiment” (psychiatrist, center). Right, a man yells rape, the prosecutor and judge are questioning, obviously without understanding. In the van, Mary is taken away, and in her hand passed between the bars, she gives Vili Kipling’s famous poem: "If."

In this drawing, Vili expresses his message: “Thankful because she gave me something to live for. [I am an] old spirit [with] true full capacity to love someone. Just read my book. I am a false victim. I am not harmed. Believe me.”

Limited excerpt reproduced under fair use doctrine for noncommercial, educational purpose.

Source: https://www.consentingjuveniles.com/Case_Narrative?case=Vili_Fualaau&lang=FR

The interview everyone seems to be talking about.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/DAU74ByibIYd/

THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE #1757 - DR. ROBERT MALONE, MD

About the guest: Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment.

The Great American Landscaping Novel

This is a review of the novel Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.

I decided to read it and judge for myself after seeing that in many locations, people were challenging its presence on the shelves of school libraries. Typically the claim was made that it "promotes pedophilia." This is the passage that was frequently quoted:

"But there's one thing I'd never tell Nick in a million years, not that it really matters: in fourth grade, at a church youth-group meeting, out in the bushes behind the parsonage, I touched Doug Goble's dick, and he touched mine. In fact, there were even some mouths involved." (p. 19)

Except -- the passage isn't quoted in its entirety. All the people objecting to the book started with the words "not that it really matters," capitalizing the N to make it look as if that's the beginning of the sentence.

See the trick here? By leaving out the first clause, these liars make it seem as if "not that it really matters" refers to what follows, which in turn would make the entire passage gratuitous. Which is what they want people to think. But it actually refers to what came before it. The protagonist, 22-year-old Mike Munoz, is claiming it doesn't really matter that he would never tell Nick about this incident. But that's only because of where he is at this point in the story. The fact he wouldn't tell Nick, his best friend, may not matter in itself, but the reason he wouldn't does, because what it means is that Nick's unabashed homophobia puts a limit on how open and frank Mike can be with him.

So, in a sense, Mike is lying to himself in saying that it doesn't matter. This becomes clear later in the story (pp. 91-93) when, increasingly frustrated by Nick's bigoted attitude about gays and others, Mike does tell him about this incident, and Nick doesn't take it well. He walks out of the restaurant in which they're meeting.

I won't say more about what follows to avoid spoilers, but this makes clear how dishonest the protesters are. They deliberately and deceptively edit a passage from the book to make it look as if it was put in there for no reason (except to "corrupt the youth" presumably) when it actually sets up something crucial to the whole story.

And, of course, it's not depicting sexual contact between a child and an adult, but between two children, such as has been quite common historically*. It's only a refusal to acknowledge this reality that drives some people to attribute such honest depictions to "pedophilic" motives.

*"As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so, immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women. [p. 197] [...] After reviewing the cross-species and cross-cultural evidence, we are convinced that tendencies toward sexual behavior before maturity and even before puberty are genetically determined in many primates, including human beings." -- Ford. C. S.. & Beach. F. A. (1951). Patterns of sexual behavior. New York: Harper & Row.

"You have learn to fight for things.”

Today is French president Emmanuel Macron’s 44^th birthday. In 2017 he told The Telegraph how confronting the challenges to his relationship with Brigitte Trogneux, now his wife, helped form his personal resolve:

“French President Emmanuel Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years his senior. They first met when he was only 15 years old and took part in drama plays at the very respectable Jesuit school of La Providence in the quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Amiens, Northern France.

“Macron tells how he fell in love with Trogneux:

“’It was at secondary school, through drama, that I met Brigitte. It was surreptitiously that things happened and that I fell in love. Through an intellectual bond, which day after day became ever closer. Then emerged a lasting passion.’

“It appears that the intellectual bond started when Macron was 15, and that the passionate relationship began when he was 16.

“Brigitte Trogneux recalls that … ‘all the teachers were buzzing about Emmanuel.’ Her own daughter, Laurence, a classmate of Macron’s, also spoke of him as ‘that amazing guy' [… …].

“’Every Friday, for several months, we spent several hours working on a play together,' Macron writes. [ … ] ‘We decided to produce it together. We chatted about everything. [ … ] I felt that we had always known each other.’ [ … ]

“At the time, Trogneux was 39 years old, married, and the mother of three children. Emmanuel was succeeding at school with disconcerting ease. Girls did not seem to be his main interest. His parents remember only one girlfriend. [ … ]

[Emmanuel’s father] “was ‘surprised’ all the same and ‘almost fell off his chair’ when he learned about his son’s relationship. His mother admits: ‘When Emmanuel met Brigitte, we certainly did not say: “how wonderful!”’ Emmanuel’s grandmother, however, was ‘very conciliatory.’

“Macron’s parents, a bit shaken, decided to meet Trogneux and ask her not to see their son until he had reached adulthood. His father, however, was not convinced this was the right response. ‘I thought it could even have an adverse effect.’ But his wife insisted, and so he told Trogneux: ‘I forbid you to see him until he turns 18.’ ‘I can’t promise you anything,' Trogneux answered tearfully. [ … ].

“As it happened, Emmanuel was due to go to Paris to complete his final year at secondary school. Was the decision motivated or accelerated by his romance with Brigitte? Did his parents see this as a way of getting him away from his beloved? Both deny it, rejecting any version of the romance in which they would have ‘kicked their son out of the house.’

[… …]

“’It is very hard,' he says. ‘An experience like that makes you think... You have to learn to fight for things, to bear the burden and have a life which does not in any way correspond to other people’s lives. That was what we went through for fifteen years. We managed to achieve the situation we’re in today, because we knew it was what we wanted. It didn’t just happen all by itself.’”

Source: Anne Fulda, “The Macron affair: How the French election winner’s parents discovered he was dating his teacher.” The Telegraph, 2017. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/macron-affair-french-presidential-candidates-parents-discovered/ Quoted in T. Rivas, Positive Memories. Still available for now from lulu.com at https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/t-rivas/positive-memories/paperback/product-24450434.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Lust for Life

 

"I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighborhood filled with gangs.... Under her guidance I became a different person.... I am eternally grateful."

Today would be screen legend Kirk Douglas's 105th birthday. As reported in the January 24, 2007, New York Post:

"Kirk Douglas is 90 years old -- but time hasn't dulled his memory when it comes to some of his more colorful sexual experiences."

"In his new memoir, Let's Face It -- 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning, due in April from Wiley, the cleft-chinned Oscar-winning star of such pictures as Spartacus and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral recalls a fling with a 'big, tall blond' German airline stewardess who liked to be disciplined in bed. During their enthusiastic sex sessions, 'she would scream, I'm a Nazi! -- which was my cue to slap her, which I did,' Douglas writes.

"He also remembers getting deflowered in high school by his English teacher.

"'I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighborhood filled with gangs.... Under her guidance I became a different person.... I am eternally grateful. By today's standards she would have gone to jail. I had no idea we were doing something wrong. Did she?'

"Douglas didn't stop at his teacher. He also wanted to bed a "beautiful young redhead" who sat in front of him, and wrote her a drippy, Shakespeare-like sonnet that ended:

"'Bewitched by a vision so fair,
I reach out and touch your hair;
Happily you turn and smile at me,
And change my humble state to ecstasy.'

"Despite his stab at 'bad poetry,' it worked, and 'I got the girl,' Douglas writes. Much as he loved sex, Douglas occasionally drew the line. One summer vacation during college when he was working in a steel mill,

"'I met a very attractive girl with rich parents.... She said her father would buy us a nice apartment in New York and take care of all of our expenses while I was in drama school.... She had a beautiful Cadillac and there was the extra dividend of good sex. What else could a poor Jewish boy want? But deep down inside I knew I would end up as a man without character. Bottom line, I just couldn't do it.'

"The Hollywood legend also recalls once being awakened by Ava Gardner, then wed to Frank Sinatra, who showed up at his door at 2 a.m. and sobbed to him:

"'Frank and I had an argument. He had a gun. He threatened to commit suicide. I don't know what to do.'

"Douglas told her, 'Ava, married people have arguments.... Frank loves you. You must go back and try to act like nothing happened.'"

Douglas has been praised for helping to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with an official on-screen credit. (ABC News, June 29, 2012 --
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/06/kirk-douglas-on-helping-to-break-blacklist)

Most of the above information is taken from Positive Memories by T. Rivas.

A Great Artist, and the Love of His Life

Born on this date: flamenco star Camarón de la Isla. As reported by T. Rivas:

"José Monge (or Monje) Cruz, known as Camarón de la Isla (1950-1992), was one of the greatest flamenco singers of the 20th century and he still has many followers today.

"What is less known about flamenco singer Camarón is that, in 1976, he married a gypsy girl, Dolores Montoya, whom he nicknamed La Chispa (The Spark). He had first met the girl about a decade before and he asked for her hand in marriage when she was only fourteen.

"Together they had four children. On a range of websites, La Chispa is mentioned as the love of his life and she is also mentioned as his viuda (widow).

"The Reportaje de TV del entierro de Camarón (TV report on Camarón's funeral)* consists of a video about Camarón, his funeral, and La Chispa. In it she says he 'was a very good person and a very good husband and artist.'

"According to other sites, the often deified Camarón turned out to be human after all, because he really smoked too much, which brought about the lung cancer he died from at a very young age. He also did some drugs. The most negative thing I read about him was that for some time he wanted to be a bullfighter, something which unfortunately is not all too uncommon in flamenco circles, for historical reasons.

"On a more neutral note, he could be quite capricious about expensive beautiful cars, while at the same time being callado (introverted) and raro (eccentric).

"I haven't found anything bad about his relationship with La Chispa (as such) though. I did find: 'La Chispa, que lo adoraba' (La Chispa who adored him).

La Chispa also used to visit (or still visits) his grave for years after his funeral. For four years she mourned for him ('ella estuvo cuatro años llorando') and she became so depressed that she did not eat enough. She simply did not know what to do without him and their children were being looked after by her father and sister. Dolores was saved from her depression when her children told her that if she stopped eating they would too.

"•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10wxc1Fou9g

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTwIWSfc5g. In this show we see Camarón, La Chispa and their children."

Unfortunately, Rivas' book Positive Memories, from which this account is taken -- and which also includes nearly two hundred other such happy "March/September" stories in all gender combinations, as recounted by the younger partner -- is no longer available from the IPCE site and soon will not be available from lulu.com either, because of worsening censorship laws in his home country of the Netherlands. But, for anyone who's interested, I'm in possession of a PDF copy.

Quote of the Month: Marxism and Enlightenment

 "In this epoch of capitalism in advanced decay, we communists who have as our aim the proletarian conquest of state power and the reconstruction of society on a new egalitarian socialist basis are at the same time the most consistent defenders of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gains of the bourgeois revolution: we are intransigent fighters for bourgeois-democratic liberties—for the right to bear arms; for the abolition of all monarchy and aristocratic privilege; for the separation of church and state; against the imposition of religious fundamentalism as a political program; for the defense of free speech and assembly against the encroachment of the bourgeois state; against barbaric “punishments” such as the death penalty; for juridical equality for women and minorities." -- Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program, International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)

The American Exchange Program

“Right now it’s far too easy for Americans to generalize about people in another state or region or walk of life. If we have each high school graduate spend time with a diverse set of graduates in different parts of the country, they would forever form a different, deeper and broader understanding of what it means to be an American. It would improve our culture and politics immeasurably over time. Plus, every 18-year old would love a road trip.” – Andrew Yang

Quote of the Day

 “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti

To be precise, the healthiest person is able to function even in a profoundly sick society, but uses that ability to try to change it.

Call for Papers: ICSA 2022 Annual Conference

Call for Papers: ICSA 2022 Annual Conference -- Submission deadline coming soon

Online Conference: June 24-26, 2022

Conference Theme: Exploring the Needs of People Who Leave Groups and Controlling Environments

The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is conducting its 2022 Annual International Conference jointly with Info-Secte/Info-Cult of Montreal. The conference will be online and will take place from June 24-26, 2022. The conference will address the needs and interests of ICSA’s four main constituencies: former group members, families, helping professionals, and researchers.

The Committee will consider proposals on the theme of the conference as well as other aspects of the cult phenomenon, including victims’ perspectives, psychological and social manipulation, coercive control, religious fanaticism, terrorism, law enforcement, treatment, prevention, and legal, social, and public policy aspects of manipulation and victimization.

Attendees and speakers at past conferences have been diverse, including academicians, researchers, helping professionals, former and current group members, families, clergy, educators, and others. Individual sessions will be 50 minutes. It is recommended that no more than three people speak on a panel.

ICSA is firmly committed to freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. Consistent with these values, ICSA’s policy with regard to conferences has been to encourage a wide range of viewpoints. Opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of ICSA's directors, staff, or supporters.

Proposal abstracts should be in English.

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2021

https://www.cultnews101.com/2021/10/call-for-papers-icsa-2022-annual.html

Quote of the Month

"How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and keep it from the rest of the world except by a punishable usurpation, since all others are being robbed, by such an act, of the place of habitation and the means of subsistence which nature gave them in common?"

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

https://constitution.org/2-Authors/jjr/socon.htm

A Once -- and Future? -- Idyll

 

Judith Levine turns 69 today. Her best-known book is Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, and the perspective she presents there is informed by an idyllic experience she had in summer camp -- an experience no longer possible because of the ever more paranoid "age apartheid" that has come into effect over the past couple generations.

This account first appeared in the July 2, 2002 edition of The Village Voice, and is republished on pages 191-95 of Positive Memories, compiled by T. Rivas for Ipce.

"Summer of Love: The Romance a Teenage Camper Couldn't Have Today" by Judith Levine

https://www.villagevoice.com/2002/07/02/summer-of-love/

“This is an innocent story. In 1967, the summer before my 15th birthday, I fell in love. It was my first intense erotic love, and its object was the photography counselor at camp – a lean, bearded, blue-eyed guy I'll call Jake. He was 26. Nothing sexual happened. Still, I think of those two months as the summer of my épanouissement, a French word meaning blossoming or opening, which also means glow. Jake took hundreds of pictures of me, and his affirmation and his camera opened me to myself. They helped me begin, sexually, to glow.

"If the same events had occurred in 2002, they would not be viewed as innocent. The adults around me would write my chaste romance as a perverse tale, casting Jake as a predator and me as his hapless, clueless prey.

"Had I started my sex education with good-touch-bad-touch lessons in kindergarten or listened for a decade to media reporting on a world allegedly crowded with sexual malefactors sniffing the world for young flesh, I might even have believed that my friend and mentor Jake was one of them. That sweet idyll would have been, instead, the summer of my victimization. And instead of opening me, Jake's attentions might have closed me down in fear and confusion.

"The photographs were another kid's idea. Jake and I and a few other campers were messing around in the dining room after supper early in the summer, and a boy named Ezra suggested I model for Jake. Judy would make a gas model, he said. Gas, in 1967, meant cool. And looking back, I have to say, I was a cool kid.

"I wrote poetry; I played guitar and piano pretty well. According to the adults who knew me then, I was precocious and perceptive. My friends remember me as witty and impassioned. I affected a late-beatnik-early-hippie look: skimpy tank tops worn without a bra (I didn't need one anyway), low-slung bellbottoms that revealed the curve of my belly where it dipped between my hipbones.

"Come to think of it, the clothes weren't so different from the ones today's parents (who wore them as kids!) condemn for prematurely ‘sexualizing’ their daughters. The clothes were sexy then; they are sexy now. And to this day I can almost taste how good I felt in them.

"Before that summer, I still considered myself a little ugly and plenty awkward. In my high school, girls like me, who didn't have pageboy haircuts and didn't wear mohair sweaters with matching knee socks – and worse, who were smart – were untouchable.

"At camp, though, I had suitors to spare. That summer several boys pursued me. One wore wire-rimmed glasses – avant-garde at the time. Another kept pleading with me to take my first acid trip with him. I was unmoved. I idolized the glamorous Jake, who had spent a year photographing guerrillas somewhere in Africa, who drove a battered Volkswagen, who meditated at an ashram. And he – miracle of miracles – liked me, a lot.

"He liked me, I felt, and he saw me – saw the person I was beginning to know as myself. I could read his recognition in the photographs. They are straightforward, not arty, not pushy. I posed as I wanted; he shot. My body in them is at that heartstopping stage between baby plump and adolescent fleshy. My face varies from picture to picture: Here I am a giggly kid, here a dreamy near-woman. One photo, which still hangs on my mother's wall, shows me holding Queen Anne's lace, gazing into the distance. It's a bit hokey: I'm working hard at looking soulful. But Jake's camera didn't mock. It's as if he believed I really was thinking deep thoughts.

"What I was thinking about was sex. I tried to seduce him. In the flowery fields where we often went, I struck what I thought were enticing poses, leaning back in the long, scratchy grass, arching my back to reveal a bit of belly, dropping a shoulder so that a strap would fall invitingly off. In the little hand mirror I kept in my bunk, I rehearsed sucking in my cheeks and pouting my lips. And in the evergreen-smelling nights, I fantasized the day Jake would ask me to take my shirt off, brush his lips over my nipples, then pull down the short zipper of my pants. I imagined the bristles of his beard as he kissed me there.

"He never did. In fact, he mentioned sex only once that I remember, as I sat on the counter in his darkroom, watching his red-lit face concentrate on the images emerging in the trays (the smell of developing fluid is still erotic to me).

"He said,

There are two things I know I can't do while I'm working here: smoke pot or make love to a woman. 

"Was that woman me? I closed my eyes for a second and imagined I was, pictured him stepping between my dangling legs, taking my face in his hands, and kissing me. I opened my eyes, unkissed. 

"Maybe Jake considered me a little girl, not a woman at all. But somehow, as he gazed at me through that lens, I began to see myself as a woman, at least a little.

"One hot sunny afternoon, shingling a roof with Jake and some other campers, I admired the muscles of his tan, bare back flexing with each hammer swing. The bitter-salty odor of his sweat drifted toward me on a breeze. 

Hmm, I said to myself, smiling as I noticed that I liked the smell. This must mean I'm growing up.

"Once, skinny-dipping, I felt my body go as liquid as the lake as I watched him climb onto the shore, the red-blond fuzz on his body beaded with water.

"Today, camp policy, like that at many schools and community centers, might forbid Jake and me to spend those hours alone in a dark little room. The camp director might pull him aside and ask pointedly what we were doing out in the fields. A counselor might interrogate me about his actions and insinuate that he was exploiting me. She might even persuade me it was true.

"Of the dozens of rolls he photographed, there are a few shots of me with my shirt off, folk-dancing in a downpour with some other girls. I remember stepping back toward him, breathless and ecstatic, my face hot in the cool rain. You're amazing, he said, and raised his camera again. Today those photographs could be called child pornography, and Jake could be arrested for taking them.

"He never touched me, except to drape an arm over my shoulder or sit close to me on a bench. He kissed me on the lips only once, mouth closed, on the last day of camp – and gave his boots to another girl, throwing me into paroxysms of jealousy. But he made me feel beautiful. He made me feel desirable.

"Recently, the publication of my book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex9 lit a conflagration among conservatives, who called for its suppression – and called me an apologist for, even an advocate of, ‘pedophilia’.

"Why? In one chapter, I suggest that statutory rape laws are often unjust and unrealistic. They not only criminalize consensual teen relationships and categorically deny teens the right to consent to sex, they erase the very possibility that young people might desire – or initiate – sex at all, especially with an older person. At the same time, the book says, we've come to suspect all adults as sexual con artists, cajoling kids through popular culture and advertising to want sex, or seducing or coercing them to have it, before their time. It's as if adults, should they find a young person sexually appealing, could never control their impulses.

"My book acknowledges that kids desire – and I know they do, because I did – and this apparently makes me a ‘pedophile's’ patsy. Writing the book, I often felt lucky that I came of age during the brief moment when young people's sexuality was considered lovely and good and when adults who appreciated it were not regarded as perverts.

"In the summer of '67, a man gave a girl the innocent gift of her emerging erotic self. I wonder if I could receive it with such happiness and grace were I a girl today.”

Criminalizing Child's Play

 "Criminalizing Child's Play," a report from SOL Research.

An incredible irony: these registry laws are passed in the name of "protecting" children from adults who want to have sex with them. Yet many of those put on the registry are themselves juveniles, and often it's for consensual sex play with other juveniles. So who actually has the most use for this information? Why, it's... adults who want to have sex with kids!

No more need to troll playgrounds or rec centers -- the government has done their work for them, providing a free online directory of juveniles with a demonstrated interest in sexual activity, complete with names, addresses, and often photographs!

https://solresearch.org/report/Criminalizing_Childs_Play