Pedophilia takes a cautious step forward toward respectability
by Michael Cook, MercatorNet:
[…] Another technological hazard is the morally devastating rubbish dished up to high school kids on mobile phones and the internet.
Not that things were all that innocent in my day, mind you. The dirty book du jour was Lolita, a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It is still kicking around. A memoir of Iranian repression called Reading Lolita in Teheran even spent 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
Looking back, the popularity of Lolita was and is shocking. For it is a novel about paedophilia in which a middle-aged literature professor strikes up a relationship with a 12-year-old girl. Stanley Kubrick turned it into a prize-winning film.
With all the fully justifiable outrage over sex abuse by scout masters and priests and swimming coaches, how was it possible for Time magazine to praise it not long ago as a “tragic, twisted epic”? The subsequent success of Reading Lolita in Teheran suggests that Lolita has become a symbol of intellectual freedom in some quarters.
There’s a sick contradiction in attitudes to perverse sexuality in today’s culture: the public believes that practice is repugnant, but academics are hard-pressed to explain why.
Let me explain. The principle by which the New York Times, CNN and Twitter make decisions on sexual morality is autonomy – do whatever you like as long as you do no harm.
The chattering classes agree that there is nothing wrong with sex between consenting adults. Marriage vows are no longer a boundary. But paedophilia (which, for the sake of argument, includes hebephilia or sex with young teens) is deemed wrong because children cannot give informed consent.
However – depending on the jurisdiction – children do give their consent to contraception, abortion, transgender medication, double mastectomies, and so on. In Belgium and the Netherlands, they can even consent to euthanasia.
So — what if a 12-year-old clearly gives informed consent to have sex? Wouldn’t that legitimate paedophilia? I won’t press the argument any further, as it makes me nauseous, but there it is. Boundary-less autonomy has already normalised homosexuality, same-sex marriage, assisted suicide, and the ghastly therapies of transgender medicine.
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