The Wall Street Journal op-ed pages go lower...

[elfs]

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the unidentified editors wrote of the Sandusky scandal at Penn State:

We doubt it will happen again. It's also something of a relief that in a culture as libertine as ours at least some behavior—sexual exploitation of children — is still considered deviant.

Thor's balls, does anyone really believe this crap? How hard do you have to beat on someone's precious myths to make it clear to them that what we allow between consenting adults, and what we restrain sexual predators from inflicting on unwilling underage children, are two wholly different things with no overlap and no sane advocates for overlap? Does anyone outside the lunatic fringe right really believe that allowing two adults of any gender to be left alone in the privacy of their bedrooms, or to have their solemn twenty year relationship recognized with the same gravity and legal authority as Kim Kardashian's 72-day marriage, inevitably implies predation (of a sexual nature or, indeed, of any nature) on prepubescent kids?

The whole point of the sex-positive movement has been to dis-empower the harmful myths of sexuality, to bring it out into the open and make it easier to talk about. We have a long way to go in giving people to talk about sex, but, y'know, a lot of what we're talking about isn't about sex. It's about abuse of power. The WSJ knows all about power. Articles like this only serve to further the meme that Murdoch's newspaper is for the powerful, by the powerful, and of the powerful, and fucking, and fucking up, everyone else is, in fact, the only moral imperative.

The world will be a better place when Rupert Murdoch's little empire collapses in on itself, consumed by its own bile.

Comments

[tagryn]

I can't see there realistically being much change on the legal requirement for consent in sex, but I could see there being a redefinition in our lifetimes of what an "adult" means for age of consent, say down to 16 (or 14). Such a change would probably come about via legal challenges on non-sexual issues such as inheritance, right to work, military service, and so on, then gradually morph into testing privacy matters such as marriage and age of consent near the end of the movement. A lot would depend on whether judges could be convinced that teens today are more psychologically advanced at a particular age, and are ready to take on "adult" responsibilities at an earlier age, than when the laws were conceived. Such judgements would hopefully rely a lot on developments in child psychology research.

So, not really as impossible a change as it might seem on first glance.

Considering where sexual legislation was a hundred years ago, based on attitudes we now condemn in society as bigoted, I'd be hesitant to have much certainty as to what such laws will look like in another hundred. I can't wrap my head around what a 'society' would look like where rape and coerced sex were legalized, but then again, I suspect a lot of people in the early 1900s and earlier would view what's developed in the past half-century re: legalization and social acceptance of things like interracial and homosexual marriage as being pretty inconceivable, too. The common view today that they are entirely different things, as Elf states in his post, may turn out to be merely based in prejudices and biases inherited from living in our particular age and society, rather than in immovable social bedrock.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

I can't wrap my head around what a 'society' would look like where rape and coerced sex were legalized, but then again, I suspect a lot of people in the early 1900s and earlier would view what's developed in the past half-century re: legalization and social acceptance of things like interracial and homosexual marriage as being pretty inconceivable, too. The common view today that they are entirely different things, as Elf states in his post, may turn out to be merely based in prejudices and biases inherited from living in our particular age and society, rather than in immovable social bedrock.

Do you truly not see the difference between "acts between consenting adults" and "acts inflicted upon persons without their consent"? More to the point, do you think this difference is "merely based in prejudices and biases"? Really?

[tagryn]

A hundred years ago, most people would probably have said what you said, except it would have been about "Do you truly not see the difference between acts between men and women and acts between two members of the same sex?" if the history of sodomy laws is any indication.

If we regard our ancestors as ignorant and misguided for that, how can we be so sure that we won't be regarded in the same way by our descendents on things that we hold as self-evident today as our ancestors did the evil of homosexuality in their time?

It may not be on consent in sex - I certainly hope not, considering what the implications of that would be - but if history is any indication, we're just guessing at what sexual and social mores will look like when the 2100s and beyond will look like. And the folks then will probably shake their heads in bewilderment at how anyone could believe some of the stuff we now take for granted.