This will be about the dark side of sex, so get braced. Sex is a biological feature/asset that gets pulled in many directions by “love,” attachment, fertility, gender roles, economics, war, catastrophes, religion, and a lot of other stuff like TV series. It’s powerful enough to persist through all variations and influences. It's a good example of how a concept forms and changes.
I’m bouncing off a book called “Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self” by Joseph E. Davis which is from a field of thought we might call “a history of concepts.” Davis accumulated a huge archive of samples from newspapers, books, clinical materials and experience. The idea is that a sexual offense affecting the vulnerable category of children is shaped by the idea of what a child “is” typically; what role the parents have; what the larger culture thinks -- depending on forces like economics and social stigma; and other slippery grasps of changing reality. Organizations, books, authorities, and insights have impacts.
At first children were productions of their parents and therefore involve the question of ownership. If a person “grew them” from their own bodies like a crop, didn’t the children belong to the grower? Sex with wives and children were entitlements. The point of wives was to produce children to be assets. “Lesser” use as labor or comforts or home maintenance seemed legitimate, even if the children were barely old enough to work..
The invention of x-rays made it possible to detect the abuse of infants and toddlers that had broken bones. This was realized and opposed by doctors and so the first “take” on sex mixed with violence, including rape, was medical. The expert doctors at that point had status that could demonize abusers.
The American Humane Society was able to link animal abuse — which was a live topic in a world that depended on horses and other livestock — to child abuse. The focus was on the physical safety of the child. The earliest example presented to the court was a mistreated little girl wrapped in a horse blanket and the plea was, “Isn’t this child as deserving as any other animal?”
The subset of medical that addressed psychiatric “sickness” shifted the focus to the transgressor, a supposed madman who had an obsession with the innocent child. The abuser/rapist was defined as a criminal and punished or imprisoned. Today we put them on public lists and impose restrictions.
Then came the family therapy movement that recorded abuse from relatives and changed the focus to treating the whole webwork of families and what afflicted them to the point of hurting their own. The idea formed that sexual abusers were acting out what had happened to them as children and the emphasis turned to defining that and understanding how to overcome a damaging past.
Now the focus was on the experience and testifying. This led to a wave of memories that weren’t real and anguish over how to find the truth and what to do about it. The legal system was involved and with it came political interventions that had been protected by status, like the notorious priests who were pederasts but shielded by their superiors. Also, along in here the definition of victims became sexual gender-inclusive so that boys were seen to be used as victims even as they might pursue other victims. The sexual offender was assumed to be male.
Use of paid sex is an open secret with various responses around the world. That brings us to Epstein and the systematic use of sexual abuse of children in an economic way. Instead of the individual young person becoming a commodity as a provider of sex for the profit of the self or for pimps, Epstein was able to use a stream of kids to entice important and wealthy people and then weaponize the results of that for blackmail.
There have always been sexual stereotypes about stock characters: the blonde angel who is innocent; the exotic woman who knows secret techniques; the troubled man who can be healed by a good woman. (Focus on social roles.)
People have such strongly conditioned emotional responses to all this that they stay riveted by video tales that explore the subject. What kind of people do such a thing as impose sex on a child? (Focus on the offender.)
Does abuse always mean something evil and distorting? Can’t it be sought as a warm love that redeems a relationship? Can a child in a culture that doesn’t make a big deal of it survive without damage? How can the traumatized be helped? (Focus on the child.)
What does accumulated numerous cases (one third, one fourth, half, are the data percentages in our culture) say about a culture and should it be changed? If so, how? (Focus on the community and culture.)
The movement of female condemnation and definition of rape as demonic, broadly defined, and uniquely contemptuous of women, had a major influence on the way children were seen when they were abused. (Focus on the anti-rape movement.)
Are children the same kind of targets for power-based SM sex as those who are vulnerable adults like gays, immigrants, small weak people, mentally challenged people? We hear about cases of comatose patients being invaded by those meant to protect them.
In terms of the virtuous reformers, are they entitled to moral ownership of perps in order to correct them or victims in order to heal them? What about the Supreme Court candidate who feels she has moral entitlement to supervise conception? How do fertility and enforced abstinence fit into sex between two individuals? What IS marriage if it is removed from being a sacred and supernatural union? Isn’t it just data collection for the purpose of establishing economic ownership of resulting goods and children? (Focus on government as keeping order.)
I’m intrigued by a relationship that I run into in various contexts: stories about Progressive Feminists, the rise of the middle-class and then the broadening of public paid work to include women. Somehow white, educated and wealthy women have become a political bloc. Courted by politicians, they are also the target for writers about vulnerable and distressed people. That's who buys and reads the books. Their presumed virtue and actual power become an entitlement to dictate what is right and good.
They have provided financial and social support on reservations, pushing aside the missionaries who previously controlled the do-goodery. In fact, some of the idealization of “Indians” comes from individual historic women who took on educating, fund-raising, and translating from tribal languages, some of them deliberately conscious of countering male ideas of “Indians” as warriors, devils, worthy military opponents. These women are still the primary audience for books about “the rez,” especially if they are written by authentic autochthonous people. These readers value peace, love, and nonviolence.
To be frank, women young and old come to the rez looking for sex, encouraged by the best-selling mythology of connecting to the innocent primal. Some guys will do something similar. Males come seeking, maybe PTSD victims trying to escape from war, or maybe “artist fellers” looking for a friendly culture. Is it abuse? Not if they bring money.
A 19th century man from a tribe in some other country was rebuked for sharing his wife with male guests. “She’s not made of soap,” he said, "She won't wear away from use," betraying that he considered her an object. Moderns might say she was made of flesh and identity, relationships and self-management. She might say it was just generosity and obedience.
What kind of culture defends the innocent and vulnerable from trauma and distortion? How do we create the people who create and are created by the culture? How do we deal with inevitable bad consequences and achieve a new balance? Some of it is the business of doctors trying to curb disease. Some of it is a desired economic order that never forces anyone to fuck for money. Some of it is everyone always having food. Some of it is finding better things to do than obsess over sex.
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