HEBE, THE BEST LITTLE PARLOR MAID ON OLYMPUS

Hebe, the Cup Bearer

Hebe was the cup-bearer of the Greek gods, daughter of the Lord and Lady of the Manor (Zeus and Hera), and all-around helpful little girl representing youth -- useful youth.  She’s a little older than the “straight-sided” androgynous children -- when with the right haircut and trousers you can’t tell girls from boys -- and a little younger than a voluptuous child-bearing mother-figure.  Think junior high.  (11 to 14) The sexual desire for children who are at this stage is called “hebephilia.” 

Ganymede:  The homophilic version of Leda and the swan?

Boys might be represented by Hebe’s successor cup-bearer, Ganymede, but no one talks of ganymedophilia, which is too hard to pronounce even for the Latin word-inventors.  Nevertheless, there can be sexual desire for the gangly boy with the tender mouth and big feet.  The shared characteristic of the age-group might be their transitional physical and emotional state, moving from vulnerable child to sultry adolescent, from gender-specific gangs to pair-bonds.

Recently one of the constant DSM battles was whether to include hebephilia.  Finally it was left out.  Part of the argument was that it’s natural to desire a budding person and part of it was that by this age, some of the children are themselves predators of younger children -- sexual desire is no longer a one-way street.  So therefore it may be useful to think about this age group separately.

Because so many children molested by priests fall into the category of the hebephilia, there have been people wondering whether there is something about celibacy or homosexuality that predicts or causes a priest to be hebephiliac.  Dr. Cantor is of the opinion that it’s mostly a matter of altar boys and schools:  persons with that predeliction would find they had opportunity, authority, and privacy -- as well as exposure to the charms of kids.  In short, kids that age are molested by priests because they are there and because the priests can.  It’s possible -- maybe likely -- that persons with that dynamic in their makeup would seek those roles.  Athletic coaching in schools is another platform, quite parallel.  The unstable emotional storms of an early adolescent find expression in competition, winning, belonging.

Laocoon entwinde.

Several concepts impinge on hebephilia:  care-giving, celibacy, homosexuality, spiritual formation, authoritarianism, and media concept-mongering.  We have a Laocoonian tangle of serpents here, always remembering that the healing rod of Asclepius has a serpent twined around it (not the staff of Hermes, the caduceus which has two snakes),  Those are sorted snakes.  Leaving classic mythology, we have a can of worms, including step-fathers and families that throw out atypical kids at about this age.

There’s enough material here for a book, but basically the problems of Hebe and Ganymede are due to them trying their powers, unfolding into the world, searching to find their place, accepting leaders and role-model adults, and so on.  If you have investigated their songs, movies, assumptions about life, video games, willingness to risk the streets despite drugs, violence, starvation and disease, you will know that it is one satanic dark world.  The main trouble with trying to “save” them is that you’ll have to enter their world to do it.  That means a certain experience and willingness to walk on the dark side.  Some priests enjoy their Luciferean capes.  Do-gooders prefer haloes.

The Crow

When I was in the seventh grade, our teacher was Mr. Jones, a young man who caused a certain restlessness among us.  He sponsored a photography club which was less about going out into the neighborhood to take photos and more about using the cold, damp, dark projection booth of the auditorium to learn to develop photos.  The club didn’t persist.  Nothing happened in that red-light setting of that dark room, at least not to me, but I still find the vinegar smells of the developing trays rather erotic and I don’t think I’m alone.  Maybe it’s the constantly splashing water for rinsing prints.

Anyway, Mr. Jones promoted the diagramming of sentences and I was good at it, so in my dumpling Hebe state, I was oblivious.  Other girls were not.  They complained that he looked down their bodices, which in those days were quite modest.  Then once a girl was trying to get something from a high shelf and he lifted her by her waist, but his hands slipped upwards.  Pretty soon Mr. Jones lost his job, married the kindergarten teacher, and went through dental college on her dime.  All of this was sort of “sub-social” if that can be used as a parallel concept to “sub-conscious.”  One felt the vibes, but it was discussed secretly -- which is more intense than privately.

In that same time period the local Presbyterian minister was intent on getting us into religious conformity.  Since this was an issue in my family (Presbyterian mother, atheist father), I recognized the limbless reptile and resisted.  There WAS something sexual about his insistence that he control us, forcing us into his system of virtue, though there was never anything physical.  That I knew of.

There are other factors, some of them addressed by our computer ability to investigate things statistically.  Dr. Ray Blanchard is at the University of Toronto with Cantor, but he's more controversial.  He wanted to put hebephilia in the DSM on grounds that same-sex hebephilia is a different subset of pedophilia.  “ Using an extraordinary compilation of data from thousands of men, Blanchard has convincingly shown that hebephiles consist of a sort of "missing link" between pedophiles (those attracted to pre-pubescent children) and teleiophiles (those of us attracted to sexually mature people). Blanchard's data clearly indicate that the sexual orientation of males (at least) isn't just composed of the sex of their partners, it's also composed of the age of their partners.”  But he did NOT want homosexuality to go back into the DSM though the church tries to link hebephilia with homosexuality, esp. male.  These kinds of distinctions are pretty tough for the public to follow. 

http://individual.utoronto.ca/ray_blanchard/index_files/fert_hebeph.pdf  

A Russian man

It's tough to know how to interpret even plain facts.  Among the fact-findings of the incessant surveyors is the startling conclusion that the average penis size of males (presumably world-wide, but I doubt that any Sub-Saharan or Amazonian tribes were included) is several centimeters shorter (no specifics about erectile state) than it used to be and that females are becoming fertile earlier and earlier.  Russia is depopulating, they say, with the raw numbers declining, the rate of abortions rising, and the lifetimes of males shorter by 7 years on average.  Much of this is speculation since Russia doesn’t like criticism and prevents it by not knowing.  But one suggestion is that processed foods, insecticides, antiseptics, and even cleaning formulas contain estrogens that are distorting male sexuality.  Another Twinkie defense.  Mr. Clean made me do it.

In the US we want to know stuff; particularly we want to know what will make people buy things.  This penetrates (sorry) into sexual concepts.  Evidently, as Valier and Kalispell recently discovered, men will pay for hebephilic opportunities of the female kind.  The entrappers didn’t use any Ganymedian bait.  They don’t seem to have the same ferocious ownership issues with boys that they have with girls.

Dr. Ray Blanchard, a little farther out than the angels.

Blanchard also emphasized only female hebephilia, suggesting that sex with young girls (which is an accepted part of some cultures, especially the male-dominated ones) is evolutionarily adaptive, which is how he links fertility to the issue.  But he doesn’t consider the medical danger of pregnancy and birth for girls who are not grown, esp. in places with no medical support.  Still, fertility as an issue is interesting in same-sex relations because the latter removes the obligation and burden of caring for the ensuing children, doing the work of maintaining family.  The church has accepted this responsibility for family maintenance only with great reluctance, except for a few popes who secretly sent child support to their bastards.

At this point in the research it’s clear that all is still beginning and that the answers, in particular those involving institutions that allow access to early adolescent children and those that ENCOURAGE the sexualizing of young people or offer opportunities to act on the impulse, need to be considered alongside one-on-one sexual events.  Much more is involved than morality. 

Donatello's David

NEW THINKING ABOUT PEDOPHILIA

Kinds of capture

Pedophilia has turned into a big monster blob on both sides: the victim and the perp.  We need to do a lot of sorting.  Imposing destructive sexual practices on people who are still developing (which takes us up to the early twenty-year-old) is probably the result of different motives and opportunities.

Human developmental phases

It’s fairly well accepted that childhood is divided into developmental phases, that they are not the same from person to person, from culture to culture, and so on and that even a child with deficits can compensate (esp. with help) and function happily.

Why do these girls have only hairdos as age indicators?

Prenatal:  growth and development in the womb, responding to the mother’s body as its environment.

Birth to walking: includes the acquisition of beginning language.

Walking and talking to maybe six years old: basic motor skills.

Forming identity that is self-aware:  six to nine or ten when adrenarche ends long bone growth and begins puberty.

Puberty from first signs of secondary sex characteristics to full reproductive capacity.

Full reproductive capacity to full ability to manage physical and emotional life.

From demi-adulthood to true maturity at maybe 25 or later.

_____________

For purposes of sorting what our culture calls pedophilia, I think of three categories:  1) babies and infants; 2) adrenarche children; 3) adolescents.  We do not criminalize the sexual abuse of young adults, either male or female, short of rape.  (If we did, we would have to criminalize the military.)

The most convincing possible explanation for attempting sexual relations of any kind with babies and toddlers might indeed be the cross-firing of adjacent neuron matrixes: the confusion of nurturing with sex.  Kissing and caressing an infant is continuous with cleaning and feeding (nursing) but it can get too intense.  On the other hand, lack of proper care is a form of physical abuse.  Babies who fail to respond with pleasure, who fail to settle and be comforted after distress, or who cannot perform as expected, can trigger abuse, even from a loving mother.  

Abuse of animals is closely related to abuse of children.

This is not the same as the sexual use of babies.  There exists a sexual cruelty that gets focused on this age group and on their sexual organs.  This seems to me to be very like the abuse of some animals, esp. pets that are small and “child-like” or “baby-like”.  Puppies and kittens.  Chicks.  It’s as though the impulse to nurture and cuddle can be cross-wired with destruction and suffering.  I've seen toddlers go back and forth over this threshold, seeming to cradle a small pet or toy but suddenly throwing or squeezing it.

Screenwriters and novelists seem to think of pedophilia as mostly addressing children from six to twelve -- elementary school children for whom the technical term, as I understand it, is “adrenarche” because it is ended by the adrenal glands maturing enough to trigger puberty.  This is the age of many storybook heroes from the Little Prince, to Christopher Robin, to Pippi Long Stocking, but in reality we actually know least about these age groups.  They’re cute, they’re verbal, they’re individuals, but they change daily and no one seems to study them as a formal category.  They are marginally old enough to manage themselves and maybe to be babysitters. With inadequate parents, they can become surrogates.

A bloody sock that was a clue.

It seems as though these kids are often sexually abused for the satisfaction of their awareness of danger, their vulnerability, their total terror response, and the soft tenderness we associate with females.  They might be able to bargain, to argue, to respond in ways that can be overcome, with the “overcoming” providing satisfaction to the abuser.  Also, they are useful for labor-based domination, ag work, carpet-making.  They can learn basic skills, including sexual ones.  Everything can become “normal” to them, so therefore the potential for distortion of personality and development is high.

The vulnerability of adolescents is in part their belief that they know what they’re doing, that they are adult, that they are “complete” and can’t be changed, and therefore that they are up for adventure.  Their physical bodies are close to complete but their emotional component is unformed and vulnerable.  Their thinking is confined to the world they know, which may be very confined, particularly when it comes to their sense of self.  They are low-hanging fruit for flattering predators.

_________________

With this very sketchy sorting of victims, let’s add what scientific knowledge has recently suggested about the person with sexual desire for contact with them.  I doubt that any of the predators moves outside one of the specific categories above, which suggests that the abuse of toddlers is quite different from the abuse of teenagers.  I suspect that the ones who abuse infants are the hardest to understand.  

Adolescents are in some circles sexually active.

Abuse of adolescents is nearly a mainstream cultural norm, esp. in high poverty, low education, drug-dependent, relatively isolated circles.  My suggested evidence is that persons whose offenses are against this age group are often ignored by police and courts, esp. in minority contexts -- even if the laws are on the books, which means secrecy to avoid public outcry or embarrassing powerful people.  English upper class boarding schools are notorious but have in the past been exempted from criticism or intervention.

http://www.sexologytoday.org/2012/04/pedophilia-brain-and-cause-and-effect.html#more

http://www.sexologytoday.org/search/label/Pedophilia

Scientific research into what drives pedophilia is very dangerous -- not to children, but to innocent people who fit imaginary criteria suggested by incomplete studies.  The tendency to want to prevent abuse can mean prosecution without evidence of crime and then an impulse to extinguish, to punish, to sequester, and so on until pretty soon we’ve got concentration camps for fancied pedophiles.  We’re close to that now, except that the maintenance of lists and monitored reports doesn’t function.  Abusing pedophiles is just more abuse, creating more victims.  It doesn’t help offenders and doesn’t prevent abuse.  The only ones who benefit are those who enable child abuse as a money-making privilege, since their commodity will be more precious.

Dr. James Cantor

Dr. James Cantor has been researching the accessible and measurable particulars of the brains of what we call “pedophiles” for fifteen years.  The studies I’ve read about so far do not define the ages of the children involved.  My own suspicion is that some offenses, esp at the infant level -- as suggested by research -- may be organic disturbances in the brain, wiring mistakes at the deep levels of instinct, maybe even pre-mammal.  I’m not sophisticated enough to suggest which brain structures, but Dr. Cantor’s research has recently noted the difference that is in the amount of white matter of the brain, which is composed of the connections among neuron bodies (white because they are insulated with fat).  The connectome is faulty or at least different.  

We know that some people have conditions that cause them to see numbers as colors or sounds, metaphors made palpable.  This is thought to be because the parts of the brain that keeps track of such things are so close to each other that they have cross-wired.  The electro-chemical reports of color leak over onto numbers and become blended.  Cantor’s suggestion is that something like this might happen in a person who responds inappropriately to a baby.

Not far from here on the East Slope of the Rockies where once there were many lagoons of an inland sea, one can discover the nests of the maiasaurus, the “good mother” dinosaur, long before mammals.  Nevertheless, her brain instructed her to mate, to give birth (via eggs), to bring food to her hatched babies, to defend them possessively, to eat and defecate for herself, to clean the nest.  These instincts are still embedded in the human brain, at the deep center where they are close together.

At the mammal level there are impulses to destroy babies.  Mink are notorious for killing their kits if things are noisy or otherwise scary.  The defense mechanism crosses over to kit murder.  Ordinary house cats will eat kittens who die, recycling nutrition, cleaning the nest.  I’m saying that the deeply unconscious coded instructions and the triggers for such mechanisms might have some part in the formation of an abuser.  They aren’t moral deficits but mechanism malfunctions.  Not that they shouldn’t be prevented vigilantly, addressed vigorously, and compensated for in terms of damage.  But that it’s a different kind of problem than one handled by moral means.

Cross-wiring can work both ways.

In fact, another recent development is that of the “virtuous pedophile,” which is someone who has the impulse to act out inappropriately but who is also acutely aware that it is wrong and has the moral capacity to prevent any kind of harm to a child.  Offering themselves for study is so helpful that one must call them a “God send.”  These people prove that we are not dinosaurs after all.