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.

"DREAM CHASERS OF THE WEST: A Homestead Family of Glacier Park" by B.L. Wettstein

http://www.riverbendpublishing.com

What a fool I am!  The author of “Dream Chasers of the West: A Homestead Family of Glacier Park”, namely Betty L. Wettstein, gave a reading and presentation about her book here in Valier -- but I missed it!   Partly I didn’t realize it was about a woman I’d known about who  was an eccentric who lived with chickens in a building I know very well, and partly I didn’t realize that in her early years she had been a clerk at the Browning Mercantile, Bob Scriver’s family’s business.  Those are two strong connections I would have liked to explore.  

Clara Augusta Miller Smiley was not unique and yet she was.  Big strong women who strike out on their own, team up with a man who dies or leaves, and somehow make it through to old age in spite of huge economic difficulties, still live around here.  Women who keep boxes of unpublishable stories they wrote, as Clara Smiley did, are also common among us.  The genre of books about homesteaders, particularly the solo women, is a popular one among accomplished women of our time.  Partly a certification of moral value, partly inspirational tracts, and partly sources of comfortable pleasure while reading about extreme circumstances, these books are a female form of domestic adventure parallel to the male genres of traveling exotic lands with hostile tribes.

East Glacier, once known as Midvale, is an ambiguous place -- not quite Glacier Park, not quite Blackfeet Reservation, totally different between seasons (a blissful short summer and winter so severe that no winter sports lodges have developed and people go a little crazy).  It's served by generations of families who started hospitality businesses when homesteads failed.  It’s the location of one of the Great Northern’s huge elegant log hotels on the railroad (America’s Switzerland) and the winter home of rangers and biologists who are happiest when the snow is up to their eaves.  It’s story-spawning country.

The Big Hotel

Bob Scriver (b. 1914) knew the place well, partly because of the band at Mike’s Place and partly because of the Carberry family, whose fabulous collection of Blackfeet artifacts was spread on tables as a summer pop-up museum in Mike's Place, though they lived in Blackfoot, a railroad town that has since faded away.   (The collection went to the Field Museum in Chicago.)   Charlie Beil, an outstanding “cowboy sculptor” who finally settled in Banff, was part of the street performance of a gang of robbers, supposedly using blanks, though at least once there was a real bullet hole in his tapadero (the cover over his stirrup) which harmed neither he nor his horse.  The stories of that area can be sliced six ways to Sunday but they aren’t even close to exhausted by books so far.

Among my favs are “A Woman’s Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park from 1925 to 1990” by John Fraley, “Growing up in Glacier Park” by Floyd W. “Bud” Lutz, Jr., and the old classic “Through Glacier Park in 1915,” by Mary Roberts Rinehart.  No one has yet written the story of the Blackfeet families there except for Andrew Graybill’s account of “The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West”, which is crucial to the story of this Blackfeet tribe and others. The Malcolm Clarke family’s Dawes allotment is the land where the town and the hotel were built.  Helen Clarke lived behind the hotel and John Clarke’s wood-carving studio was just up the way.

B.L. Wettstein

Betty Wettstein is an elementary school teacher who was close to the family of Clara Smiley back in Minnesota, where they had accumulated boxes of letters and stories meant to be published that never were.  English was her second language (she grew up speaking German) and in later years cataracts destroyed her vision, so that her handwriting went off the page, overlapped, and wandered so that it was very difficult to read.  It is a salute to Betty Wettstein’s persistence and ingenuity that she managed to get sense out of them, helped by the oral tradition of the family.

Homesteading in general, and the stories of specific people and places in particular, break open artesian springs of memory, speculation, fabulous tales, and all sorts of opinion and inspiration.  My own father’s family homesteaded in Faulkton, SD, but they were Scots.  Their journals read like bookkeeping.  Clara, who didn’t look so much the fair maiden, had the heart of a Victorian sweetheart, bursting with romance and undergirded with steel determination.  A farm girl, she declared she was happiest with a hoe in her hands -- lucky, since she did one heckuva lot of hoeing.  

Her chronicler, Betty Wettstein, has a German love of the mystical landscape and embroiders the simple acts of maintenance in a harsh place (quicksand, blizzards, fires of both prairie and forest, bears and cougars) with dramatic descriptions even of the tough places.  Here’s Clara stepping off the train in Rudyard:  “Small businesses with dusty windows peered into the deepening twilight as the wind whipped across the platform and dust devils twirled like dervishes, howling and whining, disappearing into the distance as replacements chased behind in an endless game of tag through the stories before churning out over the prairie.”  The style is not contemporary.  It uses personification, lots of adjectives, flights of fancy, complex sentences full of dramatic verbs.  The middle class feels this is the way writing ought to be.  (Ernest Hemingway was a naughty boy.  Nothing to do with us.)  The fact that a book is about "real" people is important to the bourgeois.

Lake Lubec

Here’s a description of Clara’s first night at Lake Lubec, which is just a few miles beyond East Glacier along the highway paralleling the railroad through Marias Pass.  (One of the reasons for the existence of East Glacier was that to cross the mountains in the early days, one loaded the automobile onto a flatbed car for the transit.  Today people whiz past Lake Lubec with barely a glance at the remaining log structure.)  “Darkness had enveloped the alpine valley when they ventured outside.  Crossing the meadow to the edge of the lake, they stood hand in hand beneath the glittering pavilion of stars and studied the heavens searching for Orion, the North Star, the Big Dipper.  Across the breathless stillness, the haunting question of a great horned owl drifted from the forest and lingered on the air, meadow mice scuttled beneath the grass, the mournful howl of a wolf echoed from the hills.”  It’s romance novel writing.  Like “Outlander” -- which my Scots cousins love. 

Along the highway through Marias Pass

Both writers and readers can sink into the spell of imagining such a scene, esp. the part about hand-in-hand.  The writing is a kind much admired in certain circles: embroidered, conventional, inspiring.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  When I called the author and also the present occupants of the Brown House, I was almost blown away by the instant response of story, opinion, revelations, little known facts, and personal experience.  It’s a layer of shared sentiment, something like patriotism, and the core that powers people through very tough times.  Close to religious faith.  Tourists have no idea.  Neither do academics.

The Brown House

The Brown House is relevant because it was where Clara Smiley lived an impoverished old age, happy to be with story-telling friends in what was close to a classic campfire setting around a stove.  They had witnessed -- now they testified.  A humble but classic little building, it was reinvigorated when Terry and Susie McMasters, made it a pottery shop and studio.  Terry creates classic bowl shapes in soft colors and Susie presents them in vignettes among the tableau of the original Smiley “Glacier Cash Grocery” arranged with small proud remnants brought in by locals.  

Back pavilion of the Brown House

My own checkered past has not been so desperate as Clara’s but when I was in need of a place to park my van for the summer, I imposed myself on Susie’s delphinium and daisy borders.  Over the years -- because of Terry’s vision and woodworking skills and Susie’s taste and housekeeping -- the Brown House has become a popular summer refuge for tourists to rent rooms.  But I doubt that many of them have slept on the foldout sofa where Gulley Jimson, the big gentle husky mix, guarded my day-clothes but not well enough to keep a packrat from stealing my underwear.  (A sample of MY endless story supply.)

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g45152-d615664-Reviews-The_Brown_House-East_Glacier_Park_Montana.html

Ms. Wettstein included none of the violence, arson, erotics, and drunkenness of the reality, but most of us are not in need of more of those elements.  Rather, this is the Great Dream of the American Middle Class that fancies itself as virtuous and deserving because of overcoming hardship.  And it is -- mostly.  Here and there.  (No Indians appear in this story.)

A NOT SO WAY-BACK SET OF GENEALOGIES

Among my papers I found this handful of genealogy exercises from Browning High School, probably in the early Seventies.  They are old enough that the worksheets were printed in that wretched purple alcohol-based stuff.  You could get drunk running off stuff in the mornings.  "Ditto", I think.

I'll just post these without much comment.  Some of the names draw a blank, while others are still part of my life.  I evidently hand-copied these from their originals which I presume went home with the students.  I'll put their names on in case you can't read them.  I have no idea who was enrolled and who was not.  I couldn't find a photo of Cecil Crawford in the 1972 Etakaisi, which is the only yearbook for that group that I have.  They were sophomores.

Boyd Evans

Lila Walter

Boyd and Lila married and are grandparents.

Here's Lila now.

John Babcock

Cecil Crawford

(no photo)

Diana Kennedy

Peggy Knudsen

Raymond Cobell

Robin Patterson

Rhonda Patterson

Terry Moore

Lynette Bouma

There were no charts for the following students, but they were in the same year of school.

Craig Wellman

Gail Hoyt

Forrestina (Frosty) Little Dog

Here she is now:

MARRIAGE IS A STRING OF PEARLS

Marriage is a like a string of pearls, matched or graduated, real or cultivated or imitation, in various shades, some more baroque than round.   And now the string has broken and the pearls are rolling every which way.  This is such a “twee” metaphor that I hesitate to work from it, but there have been worse, so I’ll keep going.  The thing to remember is that the elements (pearls) of this category are complex and the string is not the same from one example to another.

Let’s name the pearls -- try anyway:

• True love  (whatever that is)
• Sexual access
•  The conception of children
•  A cultural institution for raising children
•  A family contract made on behalf of children
•  An economic deal to support the family as defined by the culture
• A complex of conventions about what a family is

• A unique arrangement of persons living together that is called a family for lack of a better name

• A religious concept (meaning a culturally endorsed and imaged idea) that might require: 

• Two different genders (leaving ambiguous or mixed genders unaddressed)

• Or “races” (again leaving mixtures out and not defining “race” except for being people who are different)

• Or requiring fertility (sterility can be a deal-breaker)

• Or allowing delegation of  sexual or reproductive obligations to someone else (slave, servant, harem, temple whore) 

• Or might specify how many wives or husbands can be allowed 

freshwater baroque pearls

• Or might defend the right of any person to transcend convention 

• Or might even allow the marriage of people who have been dead for a long time

•   A way of continuing a generation-to-generation sequence of relationships that preserves those relationships.

•   A way of keeping together wealth and land occupation

•  Mutual protection: a small version of tribe which may have been the precipitating group that gathered around a major figure.  A tribe must contend with these marriage/genetic families as divisions within.

•  A governmental category given some privileges like tax breaks and recorded in a central registry for reference and identity purposes.

cultured pearls

•  A legal category imposing restrictions, obligations, privileges.

•  A medical category implying genetic derivations and granting consent for procedures and responsibility for care.

•   An indicator of status

Just married

A lot of other stuff that is too unique to describe and probably not stable enough to stay put as a category anyway.

In response to that -- or maybe in confirmation of that -- is a whole book:

“Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage.

“In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change “drifters” into “planners.” In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts “planners,” who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with “drifters,” who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States.”

So basically the idea is that there is not enough socially accepted definitions for people to maintain marriage or even practice it in some stable way.  This is partly because of the breaking up of binary definitions of sex -- it is now possible to “be” something besides a husband/wife -- mommie/daddy.  “Career,” “adventure,” “success” interfere with the formation of the bonded family that will support children.  Bonding = bondage.  Now no one has your back -- if you didn’t have parents who did that, you won’t even know it’s possible.  

The economic situation is quite comparable to the bait-and-switch story of the vulnerable state of individuals who are not coping.  We shut down the warehouses for the crazy by promising small neighborhood imitation families who would shelter those people -- but they didn’t.  The money wasn’t there.  The warehouses were reinstituted in the jails.  Likewise, the idea was that a woman would have the same income as a man and therefore would not need to depend upon a spouse.  Instead women are still paid two-thirds of male wages, still shut out of really lucrative jobs, and yet are still stuck with the kids.  The idea that the pill would mean only wanted children was about as effective as the idea that pills would mean no more crazy people.

I wondered when we’d get around to defining marriage through the perspective of children instead of just sex or bonding desire (which is NOT the same as sex, though it can start out that way).  Margaret Mead always says our marriage licensing should have two steps:  one a renewable contract between consenting adults that defined their economic and other obligations to each other, esp. concerning property ownership.  If that went well and the couple (ignoring gender but not accommodating threesomes) wished to make the twenty-year commitment to a child, then a new license would be necessary.  It would only be revocable by the state on grounds of incompetence, unfitness, and the like -- whatever endangered the child.  

BUT such a double-decker system would only work if there were a decent way of caring for children who were outside families, either because the government removed them or because they just got thrown out.  The trouble is that people go right on making babies and the babies go right on loving their caregivers, no matter how unfit or ill-equipped they might be.  And institutional child-raising has always been a rotten idea.  

pearl divers

The first problem has always been economic.  In times and societies where resources are scarce and what is thought to be necessities cost dearly, the nations contract into tribes, the tribes contract into defensive families, and the families fail to form or break up under the weight.  Kids must shift for themselves however they can.  Like every other natural spectrum, some of them will be able to manage and a high proportion will simply die, but there will be a middle category of “bent” kids, like grass grown under a board where it survives by sacrificing sunlight.  

Eugene O'Neill

Very soon damaged kids grow into damaged adults -- not necessarily predators but unable to respond in ways that don’t damage themselves, others, or the system that the government is trying to enforce.  Sentimentality (which passes for religion in some circles) holds up the ideal of family in the way it has been defined in the past: Norman Rockwell -- not Eugene O’Neill.  So what was it that held together the Eugene O’Neill aggregations of drunks, addicts, violent people, full of pride and blame?  Was it that a known evil is always better than an unknown evil?  Is it that they knew that without the minimal shelter of the house, they would die in the brush or the alleys?  Was it Irish pride in defying the neighbors?  

I don’t know.  I’m a solitary.  No leftovers, no hitch-hikers.  A small town is my loose family.  I follow along at the edge of the Blackfeet tribe.  But I live an examined life and that is much of what sustains me.  I avoid alcohol, drugs, careless relationships because they keep me from thinking.  (Reading and writing are only expressions of thinking.)  It's not a virtue: it's a coping mechanism.  Writing and only writing would be a mistake if I didn’t have such a huge cache of experience behind me, though the part that was “family” was never sustained.  That is, I have dived for pearls, but then I gave them away.  No regrets.  No strings.  Stories.