The weight of inevitability
Okay, I'm usually the feminist out there saying that freedom is the key, censorship is wrong, etc.
I'm right about that.
What the fuck is this about?
My working theory is this: Since we as a society have welcomed debate about what consensual sexual behavior by adults should be legal or not, we have accepted the infantilization of adults. The longer and harder we focus on the "morality" of sexual behavior by defining it against a conservative, straight, male idea of what should happen in the bedroom and veer away from talking about sex in terms of consent and freedom, we lose sight of what's important. Discussing things like whether or not something is "perverse" is the biggest symptom of this problem.
To put it simply, since the conservatives have managed to convince a number of people that what makes a sexual act "moral" is that there is a penis and a vagina in the room, we have opened ourselves up to this. Sexualization of children is acceptable, as is rape, as long as it is hetero.
Don't believe me? Think about how the priest sex scandals. Did you know that more of the victims are female than male? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Via August Pollak.
posted by Amanda Marcotte at
22.8.04
31 Comments:
Right on Amanda,
They don't talk about the priests who molest young women because that is not as unacceptable as priests molesting young boys. I mentioned in comments earlier that I saw g-strings or thongs, whatever you call them for pre-school age females in a store in the mall and I felt a sickness come over me just as I just felt a sickness come over me when I saw pimp and ho costumes for children. Why would anyone want pre-pubescent girls to feel sexy or emulate a hooker? It's not fun or funny to be a hooker. Maybe for some hookers it is.. but they have to be rather thick skinned fully-realized females if anything. Parents would have to buy these costumes for their kids.. what the hell is going on? These are not feminist lefty moms buying this crap for their daughters and sons, that's for sure. I want my kids to be more than goddam sex objects and not parents when they are 11.
Are those moms who dress up their daughters like grown sexually satisfied women for beauty pageants in the heartland lefty feminists? bah.
What am I talking about? I don't know. I'm confused. I fight for women's rights but dammit. Women have got to get their shit together and let girls be girls. The whole damn experience of being female is not only about attracting any old man or all men. No wonder women are raped, abused, mangled, fucked up. oh buggers. you know what I mean. I'm not blaming women. I'm blaming the whole world. something is wrong.
8/22/2004
You're absolutely right on all counts about this. People who joke about Catholic priests continually talk about them molesting little *boys*--not girls--as if it's somehow worse. It reminds me of something I saw on TV about prison rape among male inmates, and all the commentators were talking in awed tones about how it was about power rather than sex--as if they were the first people to come up with that idea, and as if it only applied to male-on-male rape. There is a definite perception that a man raping a man is an atrocious violation, while a man raping a woman is not nice but the natural order of things.
8/22/2004
It occurs to me that the parents who buy these costumes for their kids think it's okay because the racist subtext of the pimps and hos costumes. That is, they are teaching their kids that black people have low sexual morals, and therefore that makes it somehow okay. Does that make any sense?
8/22/2004
Dunno if I'd call it racism, but I doubt the parents would find it funny if they thought their daughters might one day work as prostitutes. Seems more class-related, really.
You say that priests have abused more girls than boys? Where'd you get this information? -Omar
8/23/2004
It's a guesstimate I heard on the radio--there's not really a good way to measure these things, and there's reason to believe that when the victim is a teenage boy the case is more likely to be pursued than when it's a girl, elevating the number of cases involving boys that get seen by the public. Here's some info: http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/972/context/cover/
And even if I'm off on saying that girls are more frequently abused by priests, it would be accurate to point out that girls are the most frequent victims of sex abuse overall, something that the priest abuse scandals distract from.
8/23/2004
I found some statistics about child abuse by the clergy since it came up here. Seems the protestants have the catholics beat but it's more trendy to catholic bash.
See
http://www.catholicleague.org/research/abuse_in_social_context.htm
80% of Catholic priest child abuse involves teenage boys according to most studies.
8/23/2004
I am not so sure that I would take anything from the Catholic League seriously. These are roll-back-Vatican-II types. Their main bit has been protesting paintings of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung incorporated, and protesting movies that show priests having doubts about celibacy. So their motive in showing that Protestant pastors also do the nasty with juvenile jailbait of either gender is hardly pure, nor are they invested in actually solving the problem, which they perceive as the media piling on the Church and not an internal problem of lack of honesty and decency in Church diocesan governance.
NancyP
8/23/2004
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